John Eriksson

In The Moral Problem, Smith defended an analysis of moral judgments based on a number of platitudes about morality. The platitudes are supposed to constitute conceptual constraints which an analysis of moral terms must capture “on pain of not being an analysis of moral terms at all”. This paper discusses this philosophical methodology in light of the fact that the propositions identified as platitudes are not obvious truths – they are propositions we can be uncertain about. This, we argue, is a kind of fundamental philosophical uncertainty, and we develop an account of fundamental uncertainty (for both philosophical and other issues). The key to understand such uncertainty, on our view, is conceptual opacity – i.e., that the content and reference of concepts is not necessarily transparent to competent concept users. We argue that Smith’s own view of conceptual analysis in TMP provides one plausible explanation of fundamental uncertainty. However, we also argue that another potential explanation is conceptual indeterminacy. If some fundamental philosophical uncertainties are best explained in this way, the implication is that there is no determinately correct analysis of the target terms and concepts.

This chapter defends a particular way of understanding moral thought and talk. Drawing on the work of R. M. Hare, it argues that moral sentences have both descriptive and nondescriptive meaning where this should be understood within an expressivist framework. Meaning is, in other words, determined by the state of mind that a sentence expresses. However, the descriptive and nondescriptive meaning of moral sentences should not be explained in terms of beliefs and (dis)approval but in terms of cognitively and noncognitively more basic states of mind. This is how expressivists should think about meaning. The chapter also explains why the view advanced is a form of expressivism rather than a form of subjectivism or contextualism.

Several philosophers have recently challenged cognitivism, i.e., the view that moral judgments are beliefs, by arguing that moral judgments are evidence non-responsive in a way that beliefs are not. If you believe that P, but acquire (sufficiently strong) evidence against P, you will give up your belief that P. This does not seem true for moral judgments. Some subjects maintain their moral judgments despite believing that there is (sufficiently strong) evidence against the moral judgments. This suggests that there is a mismatch between moral judgments and beliefs. This is an interesting argument. In particular, it forces the cognitivist to be more explicit about the nature of belief and the sense in which moral judgments are responsive to evidence. This paper has two aims. First, it aims to systematically examine different versions of the argument from evidence non-responsiveness. Second, it aims to outline a more nuanced understanding of the sense in which beliefs are evidence responsive that explains why the extant versions of the argument do not constitute a challenge to cognitivism.

What makes two sentences inconsistent? Expressivists understand the meaning of a sentence in terms of the mental state it expresses. In order to explain the inconsistency between two sentences, the expressivist must appeal to some inconsistency feature of the mental states expressed. A simple explanation is that two sentences, e.g., “murder is wrong” and “murder is not wrong” are inconsistent by virtue of expressing mental states that disagree. Schroeder argues that the expressivist lacks a plausible explanation of the disagreement. Baker & Woods argue that Schroeder is wrong. With these authors, I agree that expressivists have an explanation of disagreement, but this does not adequately explain why two sentences are inconsistent. The reason is that two intuitively inconsistent sentences do not necessarily express mental states that disagree. Moreover, assuming that the expressivist gives a structurally identical explanation for moral and non-moral language, the problem generalizes to non-moral language. It is also argued that the problem extends to thought. How expressivists can and should conceive of inconsistency thus remains a challenge.

A well-known challenge for contextualists is to account for disagreement. Focusing on moral contextualism, this paper examines recent attempts to address this challenge by using the standard expressivist explanation, i.e., explaining disagreement in terms of disagreement in attitude rather than disagreement in belief. Assuming that the moral disagreements can be explained in terms of disagreement in attitude, this may seem as a simple solution for contextualists. However, it turns out to be easier said than done. This paper examines a number of different ways in which disagreement in attitude can be incorporated into a contextualist framework and argues that each suggestion is problematic. In particular, the purported explanations of disagreement fail to adequately explain intuitive occurrences of disagreement, the robustness of disagreement intuitions and/or locate the disagreement in the intuitively right place.

Richard Rowland has recently argued that considerations based on moral disagreement between epistemic peers give us reason to think that cognitivism about moral judgments, i.e., the thesis that moral judgments are beliefs, is false. The novelty of Rowland’s argument is to tweak the problem descriptively, i.e., not focusing on what one ought to do, but on what disputants actually do in the light of peer disagreement. The basic idea is that moral peer disagreement is intelligible. However, if moral judgments were beliefs, and beliefs track perceived evidence, then moral peer disagreement would not be intelligible. Hence, moral judgments are not beliefs. The argument is both novel and interesting, but this paper argues that it fails to establish the conclusion. Beliefs are plausibly analyzed as constituted by dispositions to respond to what is perceived as evidence, but dispositions can always be interfered with. Provided a background explanation of why the disposition is not manifested, peer intransigence is quite intelligible.

This paper examines some aspects of Mitchell Green’s account of self-expression. I argue that Green fails to address the distinction between success and evidential notions of expression properly, which prevents him from adequately discussing the relation between these notions. I then consider Green’s explanation of how a speech act shows what is within, i.e., because of the liabilities one incurs and argue that this is false. Rather, the norms governing speech acts and liabilities incurred give us reason to think that the speaker is in a particular state of mind. It thus supports an evidential rather than success notion. Finally, I suggest that it is because of the sincerity of what is said, rather than the liabilities incurred, that you show what is within.

What is it for a speech act to be sincere? The most common answer amongst philosophers is that a speech act is sincere if and only if the speaker is in the state of mind that the speech act functions to express. However, a number of philosophers have advanced counterexamples purporting to demonstrate that having the expressed state of mind is neither necessary nor sufficient for speaking sincerely. One may nevertheless doubt whether these considerations refute the orthodox conception. Instead, it may be argued, they expose other ways of elucidating sincerity in speech. “Sincerity in speech” is ambivalent between a number of different conceptions. Against this background this paper presents two alternative conceptions, viz., Sincerity as Spontaneity and Sincerity as Presenting Oneself as one takes Oneself to be and develops a third conception which we may call Sincerity as a Communicative Virtue. This conception emphasizes the speaker’s intention in communicating her attitudes and the need to be properly justified in saying what one does

In some cases of disagreement it seems that neither party is at fault or making a mistake. This phenomenon, so-called faultless disagreement, has recently been invoked as a key motivation for relativist treatments of domains prone to such disagreements. The conceivability of faultless disagreement therefore appears incompatible with traditional realists semantics. This paper examines recent attempts to accommodate faultless disagreement without giving up on realism. We argue that the accommodation is unsatisfactory. However, the examination highlights that “faultless” is multiply ambiguous. The more overarching purpose is to examine the consequences of this—more generally, how to think about faultless disagreement.

Hybrid expressivists depart from pure expressivists by claiming that moral sentences express beliefs and desires. Daniel Boisvert and Michael Ridge, two prominent defenders of hybrid views, also depart from pure expressivists by claiming that moral sentences express general attitudes rather than an attitude towards the subject of the sentence. This article argues that even if the shift to general attitudes helps solve some of the traditional problems associated with pure expressivism, a view like Ridge's, according to which the descriptive meaning is speaker relative, turns out to have problems explaining moral disagreement

It is part of our everyday experience that there is a reliable connection between moral opinions and motivation. Thinking that an act is right (wrong) tends to be accompanied by motivation to (avoid to) perform the act in question. This is mirrored in moral talk. We tend to think that someone who says that he thinks that it is right (wrong) to act in a certain way without being motivated, to some extent, will most likely be speaking insincerely. Moveover, moral utterances have a dynamic function to exhort and guide conduct. This suggests that moral utterances involve a kind of attitudinal expressiveness that makes them very different from prosaically factual utterances. These commonsensical features of our moral practice represent the practicality of moral thought and talk. The main purpose of this essay is to investigate how the practicality of moral thought and talk is best represented and whether it supports either a cognitivist or noncognitivist analysis of moral judgments. I argue that sophisticated versions of internalism and externalism, the main competing explanations of the connection between moral judgments and motivation, represent the reliable connection equally good and that the relevant kind of attitudinal expression can be accomodated by both cognitivists and noncognitivists. The upshot is that considerations based on the practicality of moral thought and talk does not cut much philosophical ice. Hence, the rivalry between cognitivists and noncognitivists analyses must be settled beyond considerations based on practicality. Maybe the belief-like features of moral thought and talk can tilt things in favor of cognitivism. However, noncognitivists have different ways of accommodating the belief-like features. In fact, in the wake of different accommodation projects one wonders what remains of the traditional debate between cognitivist and noncognitivist analyses, a debate that shaped metaethics as we know it.

According to expressivism, moral judgments are desire-like states of mind. It is often argued that this view is made implausible because it isn’t consistent with the conceivability of amoralists, i.e., agents who make moral judgments yet lack motivation. In response, expressivists can invoke the distinction between dispositional and occurrent desires. Strandberg (Am Philos Quart 49:81–91, 2012) has recently argued that this distinction does not save expressivism. Indeed, it can be used to argue that expressivism is false. In this paper I argue that expressivism is a much more complex thesis than Strandberg assumes. Once these complexities are acknowledged, Strandberg’s arguments are rendered ineffective and expressivism rendered more plausible

Motivational internalism postulates a necessary connection between moral judgments and motivation. In arguing for and against internalism, metaethicists traditionally appeal to intuitions about cases, but crucial cases often yield conflicting intuitions. One way to try to make progress, possibly uncovering theoretical bias and revealing whether people have conceptions of moral judgments required for noncognitivist accounts of moral disagreement, is to investigate non-philosophers' willingness to attribute moral judgments. A pioneering study by Shaun Nichols seemed to undermine internalism, as a large majority of subjects were willing to attribute moral understanding to an agent lacking moral motivation. However, our attempts to replicate this study yielded quite different results, and we identified a number of problems with Nichols' experimental paradigm. The results from a series of surveys designed to rule out these problems show that people are more willing to attribute moral understanding than mor..

ABSTRACTIt has been objected to moral non-cognitivism that it cannot account for fundamental moral uncertainty. A person is derivatively uncertain about whether an act is, say, morally wrong, when her certainty is at bottom due to uncertainty about whether the act has certain non-moral, descriptive, properties, which she takes to be wrong-making. She is fundamentally morally uncertain when her uncertainty directly concerns whether the properties of the act are wrong-making. In this paper we advance a new reply to the objection to non-cognitivism, immune to the problems afflicting earlier replies. First, we argue that fundamental moral uncertainty is best understood as classificatory uncertainty, since the psychological factors behind fundamental moral uncertainty are analogous to the factors behind fundamental uncertainty regarding descriptive, non-moral, matters, and fundamental descriptive uncertainty is naturally understood as classificatory uncertainty. We call this the classification account...

The Frege‐Geach problem is probably the most serious worry for the prospects of any kind of metaethical expressivism. In a recent article, Ridge suggests that a new version of expressivism, a view he calls ecumenical expressivism, can avoid the Frege‐Geach problem.1 In contrast to pure expressivism, ecumenical expressivism is the view that moral utterances function to express not only desire‐like states of mind but also beliefs with propositional content. Whereas pure expressivists’ solutions to the Frege‐Geach problem usually have rested on some kind of “logic of attitudes,” Ridge argues that it is the expressed belief in the ecumenical machinery that holds the key. Although Ridge’s ecumenical expressivism is promising, this essay argues that his solution is flawed. However, this does not mean that every form of ecumenical expressivism is a failure. Ridge briefly contrasts his view with the kind of view Hare advanced but argues that Hare cannot make use of the ecumenical machinery.2 I argue that this is incorrect. Not only is an ecumenical reading of Hare very plausible and something that establishes him as an important forerunner of today’s ecumenical trend in metaethics, but, more important, it offers guidance where Ridge goes wrong. It solves the Frege‐Geach problem in a way that meets the criticism of more standard solutions head‐on, and it seems to be able to handle the most pressing problems for ecumenical theories. The ecumenical theory that emerges is therefore powerful enough to establish itself as one of the most (if not the most) plausible form of ecumenism on the market. The first part of this article is largely concerned with advancing an ecumenical reading of Hare’s The Language of Morals and the kind of solution it offers in response to the Frege‐Geach problem. Some of the problems such a reading encounters will be addressed as we outline the theory. The most serious worries, however, are addressed in the final part of the essay.

Motivational internalism—the thesis that there is an intrinsic or necessary connection between moral judgment and moral motivation—is a central thesis in a number of metaethical debates. In conjunction with a Humean picture of motivation, it has provided a challenge for cognitivist theories that take moral judgments to concern objective aspects of reality, and versions of internalism have been seen as having implications for moral absolutism, realism, non-naturalism, and rationalism. Being a constraint on theories of moral motivation and moral judgment, it is also directly relevant to wider issues in moral psychology. But internalism is a controversial thesis, and the apparent possibility of amoralists and the rejection of strong forms of internalism have also been seen as a problem for non-cognitivists. This volume is meant to help people appreciate the state of the art of research on internalism, to see connections between various aspects of the debate, and to deepen the discussion of a number of central aspects. The introductory chapter provides a structured overview of the debate with a focus on the last two decades or so, distinguishing several important threads and trends in recent developments. The 13 chapters of original research are divided into three parts. The essays in the first part focus on what evidence there is for or against various versions of internalism, those in the second on the relevance of versions of internalism for wider metaethical issues, and those in the third develop different ways of accommodating both internalist and externalist aspects of moral practice.

It has recently become popular to apply expressivism outside the moral domain, e.g., to truth and epistemic justification. This paper examines the prospects of generalizing expressivism to taste. This application has much initial plausibility. Many of the standard arguments used in favor of moral expressivism seem to apply to taste. For example, it seems conceivable that you and I disagree about whether chocolate is delicious although we don’t disagree about the facts, which suggests that taste judgments are noncognitive attitudes rather than beliefs. However, there is also a striking difference between moral disagreements and disagreements about taste. Faced with a moral disagreement, we intuit that either party is at fault. Disagreements about taste, by contrast, are occurrences where neither party intuitively is at fault. This leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, if a disagreement in attitude is not intuited as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to taste. If, on the other hand, a disagreement in attitude is a disagreement that we intuit as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to the moral domain. The aim of this paper is to examine how an expressivist can avoid this dilemma.