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The promise and perils of hybrid moral semantics for naturalistic moral realism

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Abstract

In recent years, several philosophers have recommended to moral realists that they adopt a hybrid cognitivist–expressivist moral semantics. Adopting a hybrid semantics enables the realist to account for the action-guiding character of moral discourse, and to account for the possibility of moral (dis)agreement between speakers whose moral sentences express different cognitive contents. I argue that realists should resist the temptation to embrace a hybrid moral semantics. In granting that moral judgments are partly constituted by conative attitudes, the realist concedes too much to her anti-realist opponents: she concedes that, at its most fundamental level, moral disagreement is disagreement in attitude, and the resolution of deep moral disagreement is best guided by non-epistemic norms of inquiry. Furthermore, on a hybrid semantics, moral thought and truth ascriptions turn out to be more responsive to the conative contents of moral judgments than to the supposed propositional contents. Finally, a hybrid semantics makes it difficult to preserve the realist’s claim that moral truths are in a certain sense independent of appraisers’ attitudes.

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Notes

  1. But see Schroeder (2009) for a critique of the hybrid solution.

  2. The concern that something like stance independence might have these implications is raised by Railton (1995).

  3. The argument sketched in this section can be found in Smart (1981, p. 458), Dreier (1990, p. 7f), Blackburn (1998, pp. 59–68), Lenman (1999, p. 445f), and Henning (2011, p. 721). The example of ‘doog’ in Hare (1952, p. 116f) also deserves mention.

  4. For those readers who do not find this obvious, try replacing ‘wrong’A with a predicate that is neither orthographically nor phonologically similar to ‘wrong’E.

  5. The objection canvassed in this section receives its best-known articulation in Horgan and Timmons (1991). See also Hare (1952, pp. 49, 148ff).

  6. Several writers have taken this tack. Among the earliest are Laurence et al. (1999, pp. 153–163).

  7. Brink (1989, pp. 83–87) and Sturgeon (1986, pp. 120–122) say things that suggest that they might respond in this fashion.

  8. The hybrid solution explored here is not the only defense that aims to do this. Some realists respond by advancing a novel (though purely cognitivist) moral meta-semantics. See, e.g., Brink (2001), Copp (2007, Chap. 7), and Henning (2011). I think there is reason for realists to be dissatisfied with their responses, but, again, there is not the space here to make that case.

  9. Although, in his earlier (2001), he proposes a full hybrid semantics that incorporates the particular moral truth conditions that he defends in his (1995).

  10. See Finlay (2005). Copp (2009) offers a response.

  11. For further discussion about attitude ascriptions, see Boisvert (2008, p. 195f), and Schroeder (2009, pp. 287–292).

  12. What follows owes a debt to the discussion of the moral reformer in Hare (1981, p. 69), cf. Hare (1952, p. 119).

  13. For a view along these lines, see Kalderon (2005).

  14. A reformer who followed the second tack could be seen as using moral sentences to assert what Stevenson called “persuasive definitions” of moral terms Stevenson (1944, Chap. 9, especially p. 210).

  15. For a discussion of semantic deference with respect to natural kind terms, see Putnam (1975).

  16. For a discussion of this phenomenon from the realist side, see McGrath (2011).

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  1. The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

    Michael Rubin

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Rubin, M. The promise and perils of hybrid moral semantics for naturalistic moral realism. Philos Stud 172, 691–710 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0329-5

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