The Metaethics of Gender

This chapter argues that some of the traditional arguments for expressivism in metaethics carry over to the case of gender ascriptions. Descriptivist views about the semantics of gender ascriptions fall short in explaining certain kinds of disagreement in ways that are similar to the ways in which descriptivist views about normative terms fall short. This suggests an argument for expressivism about gender ascriptions. to The chapter explores the idea that if gender ascriptions are normative, we might understand gender terms on the model of ethically thick terms. One way of avoiding the conclusion that gender ascriptions are expressive and/or normative is to argue that the relevant kinds of disagreement are instances of metalinguistic negotiation. After presenting some concerns associated with this explanation, the chapter closes with a discussion of some of the reasons for thinking that the realist might get back in the game.

Evaluation Turned on Itself

This chapter clarifies and addresses a deep challenge to the conceptual ethics of normativity. The challenge arises from the fact that we need to use some of our own normative concepts in order to evaluate our normative concepts. This might seem objectionably circular, akin to trying to verify the accuracy of a ruler by checking it against itself. We dub this the vindicatory circularity challenge. If the challenge cannot be met, it would suggest that all normative inquiry (not just the conceptual ethics of normativity) rests on worryingly arbitrary foundations. We defend a way of answering the challenge that adapts anti-skeptical resources from epistemology. Along the way, we reject several alternative replies to the challenge. These include dismissing the challenge because it cannot be formulated with our concepts, answering it by appeal to a distinctive normative concept, and answers that appeal to certain metaphysical or metasemantic resources.

The Modal Status of Moral Principles

Conventional wisdom holds that pure moral principles hold of metaphysical necessity, from which it follows that it is metaphysically impossible for the moral facts to vary independently of the descriptive facts. Moral contingentists deny this, holding that the moral laws are in some cases like the laws of nature: metaphysically contingent, but necessary in a weaker sense. The present chapter makes a preliminary case for moral contingentism and defends the view against recent objections due to Lange (2018) and Dreier (2019).

The Ontic Cosmic Coincidence Problem for Non-Naturalism about Morality

The combination of non-naturalism and standard morality generates an ontic cosmic coincidence problem different from the epistemic and semantic coincidence problems already facing non-naturalism. In the normative realm, morality has a very special status. In turn morality gives a central role to persons both as agents and patients. Only some humans are persons; even very intelligent creatures such as chimpanzees and dolphins are not regarded as persons. The existence of humans, however, is highly contingent. The coincidence is that precisely the kind of very distinctive creatures needed for moral principles to apply just happen to exist. It is a coincidence because for non-naturalists moral principles do not explain events in the natural world and natural facts do not explain moral principles: the non-natural moral facts cannot explain why there are humans, and the existence of humans, or facts about their nature, cannot explain why the moral principles focus on persons.

Metasemantics for the Relaxed

This chapter discusses how to meet the ‘generalized integration challenge’ as a relaxed moral realist by providing a metasemantics of moral vocabulary which is compatible with relaxing about moral metaphysics and epistemology. Employing normative inferentialism and focussing on evaluative moral terms in particular, it is suggested that evaluative moral terms function to explain proprieties of language exit transitions, where having this function amounts to systematizing language exit transitions through a process of reflective equilibrium. Crucially, this inferentialist take on explanatory function does not engender any substantive metaphysical commitments about moral properties. Moreover, the systematization process on which it is based is undertaken from within moral discourse. As such, understanding evaluative terms as tools that systematize language exits fits perfectly with the relaxed take on moral discourse.

Reasons, Competition, and Latitude

The overall moral status of an option—whether it is required, permissible, forbidden, or something we really should do—is explained by competition between the contributory reasons bearing on that option and the alternatives. A familiar challenge for accounts of this competition is to explain the existence of latitude: there are usually multiple permissible options, rather than a single required option. One strategy is to appeal to distinctions between reasons that compete in different ways. Philosophers have introduced various kinds of non-requiring reasons that do not generate requirements, even if they win the competition. This chapter rejects two familiar versions of this strategy, one appealing to merely justifying reasons and one appealing to merely commendatory reasons. It offers a new account of how reasons compete that instead appeals to a sharp distinction between the reasons against an option and the reasons for the alternatives to that option.

The Goals of Moral Worth

While it is tempting to suppose that an act has moral worth just when and because it is motivated by sufficient moral reasons, philosophers have, largely, come to doubt this analysis. Doubt is rooted in two claims. The first is that some facts can motivate a given act in multiple ways, not all of which are consistent with moral worth. The second is the orthodox view that normative reasons are facts. I defend the tempting analysis by proposing and defending a heterodox account of both normative and motivating reasons that is inspired by Donald Davidson’s primary reasons. We should adopt the heterodox view, the chapter argues, because it addresses an overlooked but fatal defect in the orthodox conception of reasons, of which challenges to the tempting analysis are a special case.

Explaining our Knowledge of Normative Supervenience

It is commonly assumed that if normative terms are analyzable in descriptive terms, as claimed by analytic reductionists, this provides an easy explanation why normative supervenience would be a conceptual truth. This chapter argues that our knowledge of normative supervenience has two important features this explanation fails to account for: first, the idea that normative properties supervene on descriptive properties seems obvious to us and, secondly, we don’t come to accept this thesis distributively by finding it plausible in each of its particular instances but rather by seeing a pattern that all normative properties must conform to. An alternative is suggested, an expressivist account of normative supervenience that allows us to explain both of these features. The chapter closes by arguing that they require explanation even on the assumption that normative supervenience is not a conceptual truth. This makes the explanation problem concerning our knowledge of normative supervenience more general than previously thought.

If You’re Quasi-Explaining, You’re Quasi-Losing

Normative discourse frequently involves explanation. For example, we tell children that hitting is wrong because it hurts people. In a recent paper, Selim Berker argues that to account for this kind of explanation, expressivists need an account of normative grounding. Against this, I argue that expressivists should eschew grounding and stick to a more pragmatic picture of explanation, one that focuses on how we use explanatory speech acts to communicate information. This chapter proposes that the standard form of a normative explanation is a generalizing explanation, one which shows a particular moral injunction to follow from a more general injunction. An additional upshot of the resulting view is that it paves the way for a purely metaphysical solution to the problem of creeping minimalism. Quasi-real properties are those that, unlike real properties, stand outside of the metaphysical hierarchy of grounding relations.

Inferential Expressivism and the Negation Problem

This chapter develops a novel solution to the negation version of the Frege–Geach problem by taking up recent insights from the bilateral programme in logic. Bilateralists explain the meaning of negation in terms of a primitive B-type inconsistency involving the attitudes of assent and dissent. Some may demand an explanation of this inconsistency in simpler terms, but here it is argued that bilateralism’s assumptions are no less explanatory than those of A-type semantics that only require a single primitive attitude, but must stipulate inconsistency elsewhere. A version of B-type expressivism called inferential expressivism—a novel semantic framework that characterizes meanings by inferential roles that define which attitudes one can infer from the use of terms—is developed. This framework is applied to normative vocabulary, thereby solving the Frege–Geach problem generally and comprehensively. The chapter includes a semantics for epistemic modals, thereby also explaining normative terms under epistemic modals.