Abstract
The goal of this paper is to show that a cognitivist–externalist view about moral judgment is compatible with a key intuition that motivates non-cognitivist expressivism. This is the intuition that normative judgments have a close connection to action that ordinary “descriptive factual beliefs” do not have, or, as James Dreier has suggested, that part of the fundamental role of normative judgment is to motivate. One might think that cognitivist–externalist positions about normative judgment are committed to viewing normative judgments as having the same role in our psychology as ordinary descriptive factual beliefs. This paper argues to the contrary. It restricts attention to moral judgments. It develops an account of moral belief according to which, first, moral beliefs are representational cognitive states that have the same basic nature as ordinary descriptive factual beliefs. Yet, second, their fundamental role is such that, when all goes well, moral beliefs mesh with our moral policies to motivate action. The paper draws on a society-centered account of the grounding of morality, a distinction between “basic” and “internal” ways of thinking of the moral properties, and a hybrid account of the “meaning” of moral predicates, called “realist-expressivism.”
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Notes
See Copp (2007b). I here use “meaning” in a broad sense to include both the truth-conditional semantic content of a term and other properties a term may have due to linguistic conventions governing the conditions under which it can felicitously be used in assertions.
I proposed some of these ideas in Copp (2017).
For the idea of a policy as a kind of general intention, see Bratman (2007: 167). Taking this idea on board, I could reformulate the sentence in the text to say that simple assertions using moral terms typically felicity-express a relevant general intention.
In Kent Bach’s (1999) view, to implicate something is to mean to convey it. Since I do not think that a person making a moral assertion typically means to convey that she has a specific conative attitude, I introduced the idea of simplicature, where, roughly, a simplicature would qualify as an implicature if it were intended (Copp 2009a, 182–185). Here I set aside this complication.
A version of the objection was raised by Kent Bach, in conversation, as an objection to the hybrid account of pejorative terms that I have proposed (Copp 2007b, 2009a, 2014). But since I offered this account as an analogue of RE, there is an analogous objection to RE, as I see things. Stephen Finlay raised a related objection (2005).
I assume that the essential properties of something are the properties, if any, that the thing has in every possible world where it exists.
I thank Ali Kazmi for very helpful discussions of the ideas in this section.
I am here thinking of reference broadly so that, for example, we can say that predicates “refer” to properties. I am grateful to Andrew Alwood for pointing out the need to relativize to times.
I take the term “coloring” from Frege, but I do not intend to be using it in the way that Frege did. For Frege, color seems to be a property of certain words, such as, perhaps, pejorative terms. For me, in this paper, “coloring” refers to a psychological and phenomenological property of certain beliefs. A person’s ways of thinking have a psychological effect on the quality of relevant beliefs, a quality I refer to as the “coloring” of the beliefs. Of course this effect can vary in degree. I apologize for any confusion, but the term “coloring” is better for my purposes than any alternative I have found. See Frege (1979: 140–141, 197–198; 1984: 161, 185, 357).
I was helped here by Speaks (2014).
The kind of normative naturalism that I defend is committed to there being a naturalistic WOT of wrongness as well as the basic and the internal normative WOTs.
I am grateful to participants in the 2015 Rio Metaethics Conference for pressing this objection.
I thank Andrew Alwood for pressing this objection.
Julia Telles de Menezes reminded me (in discussion) that Michael Smith views a desire to do what one believes to be right as fetishistic (Smith 1994: 75). It might seem that he would also view a policy of avoiding wrongdoing as fetishistic. I think not, but a discussion of this worry would take me too far afield. See Zangwill (2003).
Yet the agent need not know this about herself. Bratman suggests the possibility of having a policy without knowing this about oneself (2007: 191–194). I here set aside this complication.
A WOT of wrongness is a WOT of a property that actions have if and only if they are cases of wrongdoing. For simplicity, I will often blur the distinction between a WOT of wrongness and a WOT of wrongdoing.
I am grateful to Peter Railton for helping me to think about how best to characterize the internal normative WOTs.
First, there could be cases in which different moral codes would do roughly equally well at enabling people to cope with the problem of sociality. I ignore this issue here (see Copp 1995: 198–199, 2007a: 17, 243). Second, a problem arises if everyone else is complying with a moral code that is not the ideal (see Copp 1995: 199–200). Here I am simplifying by supposing that the properties of the ideal moral code(s) determine the answer to relevant moral questions.
Dreier seems uncertain that it is a failure of rationality. He says, it’s “maybe a rational mistake” (2015: 163).
I am grateful Jordan Bell and the other members of my 2016 graduate seminar to for helpful discussion of the example.
I owe this objection to an anonymous referee.
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Acknowledgements
Some of the ideas developed in this essay were presented to the Tenth Symposium on Ethics and Political Philosophy, Center for Ethics and Philosophy of Mind, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March, 2014, to the Rio-2015 Metaethics Conference, January, 2015 and to the Departments of Philosophy at York University and the University of Calgary in December, 2014 and 2015, respectively. I am grateful to members of these audiences for helpful discussion and especially to Andrew Alwood, Ali Kazmi, Adam Sennet and Teemu Toppinen for their detailed comments. In addition, I would like to thank Christian Coons, Simon Kirchin, Nicholas Laskowski, David McNaughton, Wilson Mendonca, Claudia Passos, Peter Railton, Fabio Shecaira, Paul Teller, Julia Telles de Menezes, two anonymous referees, and the members of the Davis discussion group in ethics and related subjects.
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Copp, D. Realist-expressivism and the fundamental role of normative belief. Philos Stud 175, 1333–1356 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0913-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0913-6