James Lenman

This chapter examines various considerations from experimental philosophy supposed to cast doubt on the credibility of moral intuitions and the method of reflective equilibrium that relies upon them. The chapter also considers the attack on intuition-driven moral theorizing by the jurist Richard Posner. The method of reflective equilibrium and the role in it of intuition can, properly understood, this chapter argues, survives these doubts and criticisms. A more general concern that the operation of moral intuition may seem suspiciously mysterious can be tamed by an expressivist understanding of it. But such an understanding might raise a new concern of its own which is briefly discussed in concluding.

Lenman's chapter, after some taxonomical preliminaries, turns to a critical examination of Sharon Street's views. He notes the obvious affinity with expressivism in her strategy for understanding normative language by seeking to make sense of facts about reasons in terms of facts about what we judge to be reasons. He goes on to argue that shifting her view in the direction of expressivism would promise to avoid various difficulties that beset it. He then considers Nadeem Hussain and Nishi Shah's objection to Christine Korsgaard's constructivism that it fails to offer a distinctive position in metaethics. Certainly it is true, he notes, that Korsgaard offers little illumination of normative semantics. However an expressivist understanding of the latter might fruitfully be married to constructivist ideas in ways that might promise to supply the deficiencies of both views. Finally Lenman proposes an account of moral reasons. He offers a constructivist and contractualist understanding of the justification of moral judgements, or, more precisely of what such justification might amount to given the extreme metaphysical sparseness of the expressivism he favours. Such an understanding, he argues, can be combined with an expressivist understanding of the semantics of such judgements to shed light on the role and status of intuitions in moral argument.

Moral Expressivists typically concede that, in some minimal sense, moral sentences are truth‐apt but claim that in some more robust sense they are not. The Immodest Disciplined Syntacticist, a species of minimalist about truth, raises a doubt as to whether this contrast can be made out. I here address this challenge by motivating and describing a distinction between reducibly and irreducibly truth‐apt sentences. In the light of this distinction the Disciplined Syntacticist must either adopt a more modest version of his theory, friendlier to Expressivism, or substantially modify it, abandoning one of its central conditions on truth‐aptness. One natural and promising such modification, the Pure Discipline View, is described and its implications for an understanding of Expressivism briefly discussed.

The strength of the motivation it is rational to have in the light of an evaluative judgement covaries independently with both certitude and importance in ways which, Smith argues, his own cognitivist theory of evaluative judgement is well placed to explain. Not so for noncognitivism which identifies evaluations with desires (very broadly construed). Desires can vary in strength both relative to each other and over time: this does not seem like enough structure to accommodate all three structural features that evaluative judgements have. Suppose more structure is imported by saying that valuing something is a matter of desiring to desire it. We might then identify certitude with the strength of the second order desire and importance with the strength of the desired first-order desire. But this assignment seems arbitrary. Why is it superior to the converse assignment? There seems to be no reason. Moreover this picture contradicts commonsense. For strong second-order desires are apt always to defeat weak second-order desires whatever the relative strength of the desired desires (desired desires as such are just intentional objects and pull no motivational weight). Whereas commonsense informs us that, where our motivation is concerned, sometimes great confidence of minor importance trumps faint confidence of great importance and sometimes faint confidence of great importance trumps great confidence of minor importance. Noncognitivism is thus, Smith concludes, ill-suited to capture both the structure evaluative judgements enjoy and the motivational significance of this structure.

Ridge defends a form of hybrid expressivism where normative judgements are constituted by two elements, normative perspectives and representational beliefs that invoke standards our normative perspectives determine. He thinks this view will enable him to ‘offload logical complexity’ onto the latter, representational components of our judgements, thereby taming the Frege-Geach Problem and conferring a dialectical advantage over non-hybrid, ‘pure’ forms of expressivism. But this will only work if our normative perspectives are themselves consistent in ways that are resistant to such offloading. There are, moreover, serious problems with building normative perspectives into what we understand by moral judgement that appear best tamed by thinning out our understanding of them in ways that effectively collapse the ecumenical form of expressivism back into its purer cousin. The supposed dialectical advantage proves, I argue, chimerical.

At least since the late Early Modern period, the Holy Grail of ethics, for many philosophers, has been to say how ethical values could have a kind of protagorean objectivity: values are to be both fully objective as values and yet depend on us by their very nature. More than any other contemporary foundational approach it is “constructivist” theories, such as those due to Rawls, Scanlon, and Korsgaard, which have consciously sought to explain how protagorean objectivity is a real possibility. Yet there remains considerable uncertainty about what the various versions of constructivism have in common, what, if anything, “constructivism” as a general approach is supposed to accomplish, and whether, if it is a general approach, it amounts to a distinctive foundational view.

While "moral naturalism" is sometimes used to refer to any approach to metaethics intended to cohere with naturalism in metaphysics more generally, the label is more usually reserved for naturalistic forms of moral realism according to which there are objective moral facts and properties and these moral facts and properties are natural facts and properties. Views of this kind appeal to many as combining the advantages of naturalism and realism but have seemed to many others to do inadequate justice to central dimensions of our practice with our moral concepts. This entry examines some of these concerns and some ways in which moral naturalists have responded to them. It also profiles central aspects of the more particular views of some leading contemporary advocates of moral naturalism.

Value is not perceived as the empirical world is but is constituted by the order and structure reflection and deliberation impose upon desires—the passions in our souls—that furnish the basic currency of evaluative and normative thought. Perception, like our other cognitive resources, is nonetheless shaped and informed by our passions as they in turn shape and inform it. Evaluative reason and justification is driven by our passions and ultimately grounded in them. While locally we generally desire things because they are valuable, globally, in the last analysis, they are valuable because we (at our best) desire them. Here the role of desire is grounding and global but it is still not Archimedean: it is not a matter of raw, brute desire but of evaluation informed by all the substantive ideals from which the whole complex web of our evaluative and normative thought itself is woven.