Abstract
Over the years, we have witnessed the rise of a metaethical cottage industry devoted to claiming that expressivist analyses cannot capture some allegedly important feature of moral language. In this paper, I show how Simon Blackburn's pragmatist method enables him to respond decisively to many of these objections. In doing so, I hope to call into question some prevailing assumptions about the linguistic phenomena that a metaethical theory should be expected to capture.
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Notes
Brink (1989)
Rosen (1998).
To take just one example, Matthew Chrisman has written that “In order to be an ethical expressivist, it’s not enough to hold that ethical sentences are used to express some conative attitude in some sense. One has to hold that this attitude is part of the semantic content of the sentence; the attitude is not merely something that is conveyed pragmatically.” (Chrisman 2011, p. 34). This portrayal contrasts sharply with Blackburn’s repeated emphasis on what is done with moral sentences. More basically, we should recognize that no linguistic pragmatist can accept a distinction between semantics and “mere” pragmatics.
For an overview of modern pragmatism, see Misak (2007).
See also Burge (2010), p. 13. This central idea grounds the traditional pragmatist opposition to subjectivism (the view that words stand for ideas) and realism (the view that words stand for non-linguistic objects). Rorty (1980) is probably the most influential opponent of representationalism, which, he thinks, goes along with a picture of the mind as a “mirror” or “glassy essence.” Blackburn, in contrast, only opposes representationalism in ethical discourse.
This generally pragmatist project is often adopted by other expressivists. Mark Timmons, for example, recommends “that we focus on the primary point or purpose of the discourse to gain illumination of its semantical workings.” (Timmons 1999, p. 6)
Blackburn 2007, p. 6. Elsewhere he says, “We try to explain the emergence of the propositions that serve as the counters of thought, out of the necessary conditions for this practice to take place. It is only a twentieth-century prejudice that took the whole task of philosophy to be ‘analysis’, or the generally unsuccessful search for metaphysical or normative ‘facts’ making true our sayings.” Blackburn (2009), p.208.
Macarthur and Price helpfully describe what they call the “guiding intuition” of pragmatism: “if we can explain how natural creatures in our circumstances naturally come to speak in these ways, there is no further puzzle about the place of the topics concerned” (2007, p. 3–4).
Blackburn (1984), ch. 6
Stevenson (1937), p. 20
Blackburn (1998), p.48.
See also Gibbard (1990)
One reason that the Frege-Geach problem (as originally formulated) has persistently nipped at the expressivist’s heels is that it passes this particular test with flying colors. People regularly draw on something like the modus ponens inference in ordinary moral discourse, and a quasi-realist theory must explain why people feel rational pressure to accept the consequents of the relevant moral conditionals.
Egan (2007), p. 208
As Blackburn later insisted, this would simply render the view a form of subjectivism, whereby the truth-conditions for moral utterances can be located in the speaker’s attitude. See Blackburn (2009).
Blackburn (1998, 318).
Egan (2007), p. 212.
“If the quasi-realist says that there can be moral disagreement without moral error, then they force a major revision of our ordinary ways of thinking about morality.” (209).
Egan (2007), p. 211.
A reader might wonder why I use the first-personal here. As a matter of fact, this is the only way to properly analyze the implications of Blackburn’s theory. On his view, you are either doing meta-ethical theory or you are moralizing, and moralizing is necessarily a first-personal activity, done from a perspective that is comprised of one’s own attitudes and no-one else’s. Thus, it would be inappropriate to try to answer this question in terms of principles or attitudes that “we” share.
This, of course, is largely due to the fact that it is an extremely weak principle: (E) is compatible with the belief that causing human suffering is always the best thing to do, all-things-considered. The reader is free to think that I am mistaken about this, that there might be things I could learn or attitudes I now have which are in tension with (E). So much the worse for Egan: his notion of a “stable” moral belief becomes all the more mysterious.
Another possibility is that Egan has misdescribed commonsense morality on the question of disagreement and error. Josh Knobe et. al. (2011) have produced studies that show that what has been called a “relativism of distance” may actually be built into ordinary moral thinking, at least in the West. The data shows, roughly, that people are more likely to say that there is no fact of the matter about a disagreement when the disagreeing parties are significantly different from one another in certain ways; when they are from radically different cultures or from different planets.
It might be objected that, in the case of this particular moral disagreement, it is not the stability of (E) which drives us to ignore the possibility that we are wrong, but rather our strong emotional commitment to the principle. Ultimately, this possibility doesn’t affect my main argument, which concerns Egan’s questionable claim that we never smugly assign ourselves a default, first-personal moral authority. Nonetheless, it seems perfectly possible, perhaps even common, for a person to simply “write off” a sociopath on principle without getting particularly worked up about it. In such a case, the stability of the attitude (E), and not emotional fervor, will explain the response.
We may focus these doubts by asking: what role could thoughts like “I might be fundamentally morally mistaken” play in any co-operative social venture? Ex hypothesi, fundamental moral disagreements cannot be resolved via discussion: there is no point at which the two disputants can come to agree on the attitude in question, unless co-operation is abandoned.
See Schroeder (2008); “… not just any old kind of mental incoherence or rational tension between two mental states will suffice in order to explain inconsistency between the sentences that express them. The way that beliefs with inconsistent contents clash with one another is fine, but the way that having an attitude and disapproving of oneself for having that attitude clash is not fine” (pp. 710–711). And again, Crispin Wright (1995): “A striking effect of… Blackburn’s construal of the content of the two premises is that there will be at the worst a moral failing on the part of one who accepts them but fails to possess the attitude which would be expressed by the conclusion… that is a lapse, but it is not the grotesque lapse of rationality that ought to be involved in a failure to accept the stated conclusion” (p. 4). See also Hale (1986).
Schueler (1988); Blackburn (1988) responded by correctly noting that there is no generally accepted account of the inconsistency involved in a failed modus ponens. He notes that philosophers themselves are split on truth-functional and probabilistic interpretations of conditionals, and, anticipating the resolute response, he noted that ordinary English is not obviously committed to one interpretation or the other. Indeed, we could spend a great deal of time expanding on this thought: English speakers, for example, are ordinarily quite shocked to learn that one can validly infer the existence of Santa Claus from a contradiction.
Schroeder (2008), p. 709
The reference is to sentences like “It is raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining” which greatly puzzled Moore.
Van Roojen (1996), p. 311. Van Roojen offers another illustration of his argument against Blackburn, but the complaint is essentially the same in both cases.
Aristotle, Metaphysics; “It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect” (1005b19–22).
Though, in fairness to Van Roojen, he now describes the move he made in his original paper as “probably too quick”. Van Roojen (2005). I do not mean to suggest that my criticisms of Van Roojen are necessarily directed at his current position. However, the move is widely made and cited, and I don’t think anyone has explicitly called attention to the ways in which it begs the question against the pragmatist.
“… might not Blackburn (or Gibbard) resist the criticism offered by claiming that the arguments in the examples do in fact have contradictory premises, first appearances to the contrary notwithstanding? ‘Of course,’ Blackburn might say, ‘the premises are logically inconsistent whenever there is a pragmatic incoherence in accepting them. That goes with the strategy. So the premises here are logically inconsistent’” [Van Roojen (1996), p. 331].
Van Roojen (1996), p. 328.
Blackburn (2009)
Van Roojen (1996), p. 331–332. In a footnote to a later essay, van Roojen qualifies these claims: “Perhaps both sorts of inconsistency are logical in some good sense, and perhaps ‘pragmatic’ is a bad term for the contrast class. The point is just that we can draw a contrast and then recognize instances of each sort in both the normative and the nonnormative domains”. Once again, however, the resolute quasi-realist will ask: why does the fact that philosophers can draw a particular contrast tell us anything about whether the contrast is actually operative in first-order practise?
Moral discourse seems to contain what we might call presumptive motivational internalism: for an ordinary unembedded assertion like “X is wrong,” the speaker is (defeasibly) assumed to possess a negative attitude towards X. This does not, of course, entail the truth of motivational internalism as a conceptual thesis.
While we might associate revisionism with error theory, I think that an error theory is best described as an extremely revisionist theory, one which denies some thesis which is central to competent participation in moral discourse; see Joyce (2007). While Egan comes close to making this suggestion, I do not think that Van Roojen has attempted to show that Quasi-Realism is revisionist in this respect, so I have avoided using the term “error theory” in this paper.
Blackburn (1998), “we call ‘values’ just those desires and attitudes that stand fast when we contemplate others and try to alter them. Even self-criticism has to stand somewhere, and what it stands upon most firmly we call… our values” (p. 90).
Van Roojen’s case is more interesting. It’s pretty clear that ordinary moralizers would think that there is a difference between uttering (VR1) and (VR2), and the fact that most of us seriously disapprove of hypocrisy shows that we think that we take so-called ‘pragmatic contradictions’ like (VR2) very seriously. The question is whether we make a categorical distinction between the two utterances based on their respective truth-values, and I want to suggest that imaginative reflection reveals that we do not. That is to say, actual responses to both of the utterances in question will likely contain a mixture of confusion and the sense that certain conventions of speech have been violated, not thoughts which concern the comparative truth-values of such sentences. This is, of course, mere speculation on my part, but if it is correct, then Van Roojen is trying to force a distinction into moral practise which is not ordinarily in operation.
There is an obvious strategy that a realist can take, here: he can say that ordinary moral discourse is, in this respect, confused. However, this opens him up to precisely the charge of revisionism that realists are so fond of aiming at anti-realists.
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Acknowledgments
For support and helpful comments, the author wishes to thank Jamie Dreier, Christian Miller, Sebastian Koehler, Pekka Väyrynen, Aaron Ancell, Susanne Martel, Michael Lacewing, Richard Stillman, Lauren Kopajtic, Miquel Miralbes del Pino and the organizers of the 2013 British Society for Ethical Theory conference.
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Smyth, N. Resolute Expressivism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 607–618 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9495-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9495-y