Elliot Salinger

This essay develops a constitutive account of disagreement in terms of subject matter, or questions, and explores its implications. Whenever A and B agree or disagree, there is some question S that their agreement or disagreement is about. A and B agree about S when they accept the same answer to S; they disagree about S when they accept different answers to S. To accept an answer is to take up a committing attitude to a content. This account allows both doxastic and practical disagreement: if A believes that p and B believes that ~p, they accept incompatible answers to the question whetherp; if A plans for A and B to φ and B plans for A and B not to φ, they accept incompatible answers to the question whetherto φ. My question-relative account of disagreement can screen off spurious cases that make trouble for similar accounts, including cases where plans are jointly unsatisfiable but where no disagreement seems to obtain. Next, I discuss the account’s implications for disagreement involving preferences and credences. Finally, I discuss the account’s implications for the metaethical problem of normative disagreement. Distinguishing genuine from superficial disagreement, I conclude that the expressivist has available an account on which moral disagreement is genuine. (The contextualist might also have such an account, but the relativist probably does not.) If a domain is objective just in case it admits of genuine disagreement, we can therefore say that the expressivist has an objective theory of moral thought and language.

Metaethical expressivism faces the perennial objection that its commitment to non‐cognitivism about moral judgment renders the view revisionary of our ordinary moral thought. The standard response to this objection is to say that since the expressivist's theoretical commitments about the nature of moral judgment are independent of normative ethics, the view cannot be revisionary of normative ethics. This essay seeks to evaluate the standard response by exploring several senses of independence that expressivism might enjoy from normative ethics. I develop a taxonomy on which, at least by the expressivist's own lights, normative ethics is not dependent on non‐cognitivism about moral judgment in a way that might render that claim itself normative ethical. The argument will require us to formulate a theory of moral subject matter according to the expressivist, a matter of independent interest. Although this discussion will essentially vindicate the standard response to the perennial objection, it will also highlight a major limitation thereof. This is that even for the expressivist, the taxonomic independence of non‐cognitivism about moral judgment from normative ethics does not guarantee its moral independence from normative ethics; that is, showing that non‐cognitivism about moral judgment is not a moral claim is not itself to show that it is not a morally relevant claim. I conclude by arguing that the question of moral dependence, usually discussed under the heading of objectivity, is ultimately first‐order moral rather than taxonomic, and so can only be resolved on first‐order moral grounds.

This paper provides a new solution to the problem of moral permissions for the moral error theory. The problem is that the error theorist seems committed to the claim that all actions are morally permitted, as well as to the contradictory claim that no action is morally permitted. My solution understands the moral error theory as the view that folk moral discourse is systematically in error by virtue of suffering from semantic presupposition failure, which I show is consistent with a Kratzerian semantics for deontic modals in natural language. Formally, the solution is to treat the ordering source parameter within Kratzer’s semantics as undefined in the case of folk moral discourse. The paper concludes with thoughts about the import of the solution proffered for the alleged independence of the moral error theory from normative ethics.

This essay concerns two forms of moral non-naturalism according to which general moral principles or laws enter into the grounding explanations of particular moral facts. According to bridge-law non-naturalism, the laws are themselves partial grounds of the moral facts; whereas according to grounding-law non-naturalism, the laws explain the grounding connections that obtain between particular natural facts and particular moral facts. I pose and develop an objection to BLNN concerning moral worth: as compared to GLNN, BLNN has trouble accommodating the common intuition that actions performed out of motivation for rightness de dicto are, at least in paradigm cases, deficient in their moral worth as compared to those performed out of motivation for rightness de re. After presenting the moral worth objection to BLNN, I respond to a possible defense of the view and explain why GLNN is not itself imperiled by an analogous objection. I finally argue that in light of the moral worth objection, a purported analogy between the law and morality fails to give us any reason to prefer BLNN to GLNN. I conclude that non-naturalists who accept the existence of general and explanatory moral principles should adopt GLNN rather than BLNN.