Abstract
Metaethics is traditionally understood as a non-moral discipline that examines moral judgements from a standpoint outside of ethics. This orthodox understanding has recently come under pressure from anti-Archimedeans, such as Ronald Dworkin and Matthew Kramer, who proclaim that rather than assessing morality from an external perspective, metaethical theses are themselves substantive moral claims. In this paper, I scrutinise this anti-Archimedean challenge as applied to the metaethical position of expressivism. More precisely, I examine the claim that expressivists do not avoid moral commitments when accounting for moral thought, but instead presuppose them; they do not look at ethics from the outside, but operate from within ethics. This paper defends the non-moral status of expressivism against anti-Archimedeanism by rejecting a new anti-Archimedean challenge which, on the basis of Hume’s Law, aims to exploit expressivist explanations of supervenience in order to show that expressivism is a substantive moral position.
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Notes
Compare Kramer (2009, p. 6). This test obviously presupposes agreement on what counts as a substantive, first-order moral view. Instead of attempting to give a definition of ‘moral’ here, I appeal to paradigm cases of substantive moral judgements which explicitly attribute thin or thick moral predicates to acts, characters or states of affairs.
Contrary to Kramer, who fully embraces minimalism, Dworkin (2011, p. 173) maintains that minimalism is ‘correct, but wholly unhelpful’. Without arguing this point here, I believe that Dworkin’s reservations about minimalism are misplaced and will, therefore, assume that the adoption of minimalism is highly advantageous for anti-Archimedeanism. See also Kramer (2013).
See Dreier (2002, pp. 244–248) for an argument against the useful employment of Hume’s Law in this context.
This moral classification does not rule out that the supervenience thesis is also conceptual (see Kramer 2009, p. 304, fn.1).
‘Ironically’, because Blackburn wants to contrast the supervenience thesis as a conceptual constraint with substantive moral truths. I will return to his conceptual approach when discussing possible expressivist responses to the anti-Archimedean challenge.
I will return to further reasons for the limitation thesis when appealing to the practical function of moral vocabulary within my solution to the anti-Archimedean challenge.
Kramer (2009) also presents cases of asceticism and caprice as arguments for (P2). Yet, I believe that neither argument succeeds, since the former can be interpreted as pertaining to existential commitments which do not conflict with supervenience (see Gibbard 1990: 168), whereas reference to caprice can be dropped by expressivists without greater loss. Concentrating on the case of the moral (ir)relevance of spatio-temporal properties and minimalism’s alleged impact on the status of supervenience has, therefore, the best chance to support (P2).
The nature of the necessity under discussion here will be clarified later in this article.
In this section, I rely heavily on Gibbard (2003, pp. 92–98): ‘We end up, then, with a strong result: anyone who thinks and plans is thereby committed to the supervenience of being [permitted] on [non-moral] fact. I myself am a thinker and planner, and so are you. I therefore invite you to join me in accepting and asserting something to which we are both committed: being [permitted] supervenes on [non-moral] fact. This is an invitation, if I’m right, that you cannot consistently reject. … There’s no question whether the Claim of (Supervenience) is true apart from the question of whether to live in accord with it—and no possible way to live fails to satisfy it.’
If Gibbard’s plan-based model is taken as the reference point for expressivism, a further move could be to transform the entailment of supervenience in such a way as to establish, not that being permitted, say, supervenes on the non-moral, but that being p-permitted supervenes on the non-moral, where p-permitted is a non-normative concept that means ‘permitted relative to a given plan’ (Gibbard 2003, p. 89).
Consequently, the parallel to the expressivist treatment of other first-order moral judgements breaks down. Whilst it might be granted that expressivism can stay silent on the question of whether or not a moral judgement such as ‘Helping children flourish is good’ is true, it is committed to the truth of the supervenience thesis.
Similarly, Gibbard (2003, p. 93) states that the thesis of supervenience ‘must not be confused with the claim … that being p-(permitted) supervenes on [non-moral] properties. The claim of supervenience is plan-laden, whereas the other claim, that being p-(permitted) supervenes on [non-moral] properties, is not’.
Whether or not supervenience is a normative, albeit non-moral, thesis is a further question which I will not address here.
This is, of course, Blackburn’s (1998, p. 61) dictum.
For more details, see Gibbard (2003, pp. 11–17).
Specifying the particular kind of conceptual dependence is necessary because there might be other conceptual relations which belong to the moral realm. For instance, verdicts about equality and liberty may be conceptually interlinked, yet they should fall within the ambit of the Moral Doctrine Test. The Moral Doctrine Test is barred from application only if the conceptual dependence is one pertaining to the framework principles of moral discourse.
For instance, see Pigden (1991, pp. 421–431).
Matthew Kramer has suggested in private correspondence that my considerations do not so much show that the anti-Archimedean challenge to expressivism collapses, but that there is no genuine conflict between anti-Archimedeanism and expressivism. In response to my argument, he now holds that expressivists and anti-Archimedeans aim to account for different phenomena of supervenience, with the former giving a philosophical account of supervenience as a relation between judgements about moral properties and judgements about non-moral properties, and the latter providing a moral account of supervenience as a relationship between moral and non-moral properties. It is beyond the scope of this paper to respond to Kramer’s argument in full, so let me just make a brief comment on the impact of my argument here. On the one hand, it could be doubted that the difference in supervenience relations that Kramer seeks to draw can be upheld when minimalism is assumed. If such doubts were to materialise, Kramer’s position would have to be rejected and the conclusions reached in this paper would stand unchanged. On the other hand, Kramer might be right in that the suggested distinction can be maintained. In this case, his new position would entail an important limitation in the scope of anti-Archimedeanism as anti-Archimedeans would now agree that there can be non-moral—i.e. Archimedean—accounts of supervenience and moral discourse more generally. Either way, then, the considerations presented in this paper have significant consequences for our understanding and assessment of anti-Archimedeanism.
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Tiefensee, C. Expressivism, Anti-Archimedeanism and Supervenience. Res Publica 20, 163–181 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-014-9239-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-014-9239-9