Nothing New in Ecumenia? Hare, Hybrid Expressivism and de dicto Beliefs

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (4):831-847 (2016)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

One important trend in the debate over expressivism and cognitivism is the emergence of ‘hybrid’ or ‘ecumenical’ theories. According to such theories, moral sentences express both beliefs, as cognitivism has it, and desire-like states, as expressivism has it. One may wonder, though, whether the hybrid move is as novel as its advocates seem to take it to be—or whether it simply leads us back to the conceptions of early expressivists, such as Charles Stevenson or Richard Hare. Michael Ridge has recently argued that we ought not to see Hare as a hybrid expressivist because Hare’s approach allows for moral sentences that do not express any descriptive beliefs at all. Yet, Ridge’s reading has been challenged by John Eriksson, who even goes as far as to claim that modern hybrid expressivists should follow in Hare’s footsteps because it is Hare’s framework that actually provides a solution to the so-called ‘Frege-Geach problem’. In the present paper, I first want to show that we can defend Eriksson’s reading with regard to the official version of Hare’s theory. I will, secondly, argue that, in line with what we may take to be Ridge’s critical perspective on Hare, this official version faces serious difficulties, resulting from the possibility of unknown speaker standards. Thirdly, I will demonstrate that a modern reconstruction of Hare in terms of what I will refer to as ‘de dicto beliefs’, though in principle possible, will not allow us to solve the ‘Frege-Geach problem’

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 98,418

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Hybridizing Moral Expressivism and Moral Error Theory.Toby Svoboda - 2011 - Journal of Value Inquiry 45 (1):37-48.
Options for Hybrid Expressivism.Caj Strandberg - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (1):91-111.
Ecumenical expressivism and the Frege-Geach problem.Alexander Miller & Kirk Surgener - 2019 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 32 (32):7-25.
Are expressivists guilty of wishful thinking?Robert Mabrito - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (3):1069-1081.
Explaining Disagreement: A Problem for (Some) Hybrid Expressivists.John Eriksson - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (1):39-53.
Recent work in expressivism.Neil Sinclair - 2009 - Analysis 69 (1):136-147.
Ecumenical Expressivism Ecumenicized.Jennifer Carr - 2015 - Analysis 75 (3):442-450.

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-12-31

Downloads
74 (#236,616)

6 months
8 (#462,840)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Language of Morals.Richard Mervyn Hare - 1952 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
The language of morals.Richard Mervyn Hare - 1963 - Oxford,: Clarendon Press.
Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics.David Owen Brink - 1989 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Freedom and reason.Richard Mervyn Hare - 1963 - Oxford,: Clarendon Press.
Moral thinking: its levels, method, and point.R. M. Hare (ed.) - 1981 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.

View all 33 references / Add more references