Benjamin Moshe Eneman

On occasion, we are morally called to bear witness—often to atrocities, tragedies, and suffering, but also to the good, the beautiful, and the admirable, to the reality of rich and flourishing human living. Bearing witness and its attendant speech acts play integral roles in our moral practices. But importantly, the moral value in bearing witness and its attendant speech acts is not exhausted by the value in changing others’ minds. This poses a problem for certain interpretations of moral language deployed in deflationist, quasi-realist accounts of metaethics, and particularly in Karl Schafer’s (2012) picture of assessor-relative perspectivalism. Schafer responds to an objection from disagreement with a broadly functionalist framework: moral language is valuable because it can lead to the coordination of our moral perspectives. I challenge Schafer’s account of moral language by looking at paradigm speech acts of bearing witness whose full value, I maintain, cannot be illuminated by a purely functionalist view. Bearing witness is just a particularly clear counterexample to the functionalist account—it is by no means the only one. Our moral language in general is shot through with a similar structure. This problem generalizes to any account that cashes out the value of moral disagreement purely in perspectival coordination or grounds moral language on assertion. I therefore pose an important challenge to functionalism about moral language by building an account of bearing witness and working towards a theory of moral perception and moral language more generally.