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Expressivism and Moral Dilemmas: A Response to Marino

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Abstract

Simon Blackburn’s expressivist logic of attitudes aims to explain how we can use non-assertoric moral judgements in logically valid arguments. Patricia Marino has recently argued that Blackburn’s logic faces a dilemma: either it cannot account for the place of moral dilemmas in moral reasoning or, if it can, it makes an illicit distinction between two different kinds of moral dilemma. Her target is the logic’s definition of validity as satisfiability, according to which validity requires an avoidance of attitudinal inconsistency. Against Marino’s arguments, I contend that expressivists following Blackburn are able to show how we appreciate the validity of arguments found in dilemma-contexts, and that Marino’s argument concerning the distinction between contingent moral dilemmas and logical moral dilemmas rests on a mistake concerning the logical representation of a contingent dilemma.

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Notes

  1. See Geach (1960, 1965).

  2. Blackburn’s expressivist system is one among several extant accounts. Notable alternatives have been developed by Gibbard (2003), Horgan and Timmons (2006) and Schroeder (2008), among others. Blackburn’s account has been subject to much critical attention—for instance, van Roojen (1996) presents influential arguments against Blackburn which are in some ways related to the issues discussed in this paper. Nevertheless, Blackburn’s account remains highly influential on current debates surrounding expressivism. In this paper I focus entirely on the problems Blackburn’s account faces with respect to moral dilemmas, and put other objections to one side.

  3. While Marino’s paper also attacks Gibbard’s response to the problem, I will focus exclusively on her arguments against Blackburn’s approach.

  4. More will be said about LA and the notion of validity as satisfiability as we proceed through Marino’s arguments.

  5. Another notable critic of this point is van Roojen (1996).

  6. That is, (pq) entails (¬p v q).

  7. In section 3 I will explore the Hintikka-inspired semantics surrounding this account of validity in more detail, but for the moment I will leave matters at this informal level.

  8. See Gowans (1987) for one overview of matters concerning moral dilemmas.

  9. In his (2008), Mark Schroeder considers the question of whether we should think of expressivism as genuinely endorsing the possibility of moral dilemmas. I will assume for argument here that Marino’s cases should be thought of as genuine dilemmas.

  10. Marino uses the more familiar case of lying to one’s little brother—but the differing case does not affect the argument. Both examples are, of course, fairly contrived and uninteresting compared to actual cases of moral dilemmas. Nevertheless, their simplicity aids us in understanding the arguments at hand.

  11. In more recent work, Blackburn presents further distinct support for the ‘inconsistency’ principle, as follows. Recall that assenting to H!(p)→H!(q) commits me to the disjunction of ¬H!(p) and H!(q). If I am also subject to a moral dilemma involving p and ¬q—that is, I endorse both H!(p) and H!(¬q)—then I am also, by implication, claiming not to be committed to the tree of disjunction involving ¬H!(p) and H!(q). In such a case, as Blackburn says, “we can make no intelligible interpretation of [my state of mind].” (Blackburn 1998, p.72).

  12. That is: in a contingent dilemma, I want p and also want q, where p and q exclude one another contingently; in a logical dilemma, on the other hand, I want p and also want ¬p.

  13. Ibid. Blackburn admits that rule 4 requires revision (p.514) but for the purposes of this discussion we will consider it in its original form.

  14. As an unendorsed fact about the world, (¬p v q) drops away at the next level of approximation, which means there is no way to reach a contradiction in the idealisation process. This follows from rules 1–4 as outlined above.

  15. Again, Marino gives her example in terms of the ‘little brother’ case, but the point stands.

  16. This notion of practical necessity is an alethic modality, and is not to be confused with the deontic modality called “practical necessity” in Williams (1981).

  17. Introducing a practical necessity operator here does not undermine the status of the dilemma as contingent. It is still contingent in that it is neither physically nor logically necessary that ¬(p & q).

  18. If this isn’t true, then there is no genuine dilemma—in that case, I should simply aim to bring about a world in which I give Timothy money and he spends it on something other than drugs.

  19. Although recall that Blackburn’s rules (cf. section 1) do require that any unendorsed statements which make it through to the first approximation should then be carried through to subsequent levels of approximation. (Blackburn 1988, p.513–514).

  20. A corollary of this seems to be that similar rules must hold for stronger senses of necessity, e.g. physical necessity. This result seems independently plausible.

  21. But what about cases where I desire that some practically necessary fact p not be practically necessary—that is, cases where I have the set of attitudes {□p(p); H!(¬□p(p))}? The consistency of this state of mind according to LA depends on the status of two logical principles concerning the ‘□p’ operator. The first approximation to the ideal will, on idealisation rules 1–5, be {p; ¬□p(p); H!(¬□p(p))}. This will come out as consistent only if we reject two principles: firstly, the iteration of □p, i.e. ‘(□p(p))⇒(□pp(p))’; secondly, a further idealisation rule that where a set of sentences L contains ‘□p(p)’, each further approximation to the ideal must also contain ‘□p(p)’. If you accept one of these principles about the ‘□p’ operator then you must also hold that it is inconsistent to express a positive attitude towards the negation of a practically necessary fact. I thank Jon Robson for pointing out these implications to me and for helpful discussion of logical issues surrounding the practical necessity operator.

  22. Note that we could, on the grounds I have provided here, devise an alternative ‘closure principle’. On the account I have given here, ‘□p(pq)⇒(H!(p)→H!(q))’ comes out as valid; so perhaps we should interpret the principle of closure in this way instead.

  23. I thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this similarity.

  24. I make no comment on the success (or otherwise) of this expressivist account of mixed conditionals here. As Hale points out, at best there are serious problems with the approach.

  25. If I am mistaken here, and Blackburn’s work commits him to the weaker ‘logical possibility’ claim, then my argument should be read as providing a revision to LA rather than defending Blackburn’s original form of LA. It seems clear to me that logical possibility is far too liberal a notion to guide our imagining. To repeat examples in the above style: it is logically possible for me to be in both Yorkshire and Norfolk at the same time, but it’s clear that allowing such possibilities into my imagining of the ideal cannot be action-guiding, and thus fails to hold to the spirit of LA.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jon Robson, Daniel Elstein, Aaron Meskin, Peter Simons and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on my arguments in this paper.

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Correspondence to Carl Baker.

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Baker, C. Expressivism and Moral Dilemmas: A Response to Marino. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 445–455 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9255-6

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