Rodrigo Valencia Pacheco

Quasi-realists hold that although moral thought and talk have practical rather than representational functions, we can nonetheless vindicate many of the realist-seeming platitudes about our moral practices. Some have argued that one piece missing from the quasi-realist program is an account of moral reliability (e.g., Dreier, 2012; Golub, 2017; Cuneo, 2022: 237-239). If moral judgments do not function by reliably tracking moral truths, quasi-realists seem unable to explain why we non-accidentally get moral judgments right. In this paper, I argue that our ordinary concept of reliability is broader than tracking facts. In full generality, reliability concerns the systematic attainment of certain ends. Where reliability applies to judgments and beliefs, it concerns the attainment of specifically epistemic ends, such as forming true instances of those states. I show that this is consistent with denying that moral judgments track moral truths: our moral judgment-forming mechanisms are reliable insofar as they are effective means of producing the best possible moral judgments.

Brown (2022) has recently argued that metaethical expressivists should adopt an interpretationist account of propositional attitudes. Expressivism has traditionally been the view that moral judgments are best understood as desire-like states with a primarily practical function of guiding and producing actions. Most problems for expressivists, however, come from the fact that moral judgments have many belief-like properties: being truth evaluable, epistemically evaluable, embeddable in complex truth-functional constructions, etc. By adopting Brown’s proposal, expressivists would avoid several of these problems since they could claim that moral judgments are just beliefs but of a non-representational variety. In this article, I argue that, while promising, this view has a substantial problem. A crucial element of the rationalising interpretation is that beliefs are governed by a norm of aiming at truth. But contrary to what Brown suggests, deflationist accounts of truth cannot help expressivists explain why moral judgments are also subject to this norm.

We ordinarily use epistemic concepts to evaluate our moral views. We know certain things are wrong, we are sometimes uncertain about the morally best thing to do, we think there are rational and irrational ways of reaching moral conclusions, etc. Like most meta ethicists, expressivists aim to explain this; they want to offer accounts of our moral thought, talk, and practice. However, most expressivists think moral thought and talk are fundamentally non-representational or desire-like. Critics have argued that this makes the view incompatible with central aspects of our epistemic evaluations. In this paper, I survey the main epistemic challenges for expressivism, highlight their interconnections, and discuss the most promising responses.