Howard Simmons

This book defends expressivism: the view that normative statements express the speaker's attitudes rather than describe the world. I defend what I call the 'Redundancy Thesis', according to which normative terms can always be replaced in our discourse by neutral wording with the loss of only surface features such as succinctness and rhetorical force. Moral statements, on my view, are hybrid — both expressing an attitude and asserting that the attitude is of a specific kind (kindness, compassion, honesty, and so on). A central concern is the Frege-Geach problem, for which the book develops an inferentialist solution. Normative statements are argued to be truth-apt in a broad sense, but not (or not always) in the narrower sense involving mind-to-world fit. Rival metaethical theories are considered and rejected, and the book asks what becomes of moral theorizing once expressivism is accepted. A concluding chapter addresses normative disagreement, rationality, the subjective character of doxastic judgement, and the bearing of subjectivism on belief in God.

My subject is the theory of blame recently propounded by George Sher in his book, In Praise of Blame. I argue that although Sher has succeeded in capturing a number of genuine features of the concept of blame, there is an important element that he has omitted, which is the fact that necessarily, when A blames B for something and expresses this to B, A will realise that B is likely to find this unpleasant. The inclusion of the latter element renders the question of whether any agent ever deserves blame a more open one than Sher allows.