Philosophers' Imprint 14:1-12 (2014)
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Abstract |
Expressivists explain the expression relation which obtains between sincere moral assertion and the conative or affective attitude thereby expressed by appeal to the relation which obtains between sincere assertion and belief. In fact, they often explicitly take the relation between moral assertion and their favored conative or affective attitude to be exactly the same as the relation between assertion and the belief thereby expressed. If this is correct, then we can use the identity of the expression relation in the two cases to test the expressivist account as a descriptive or hermeneutic account of moral discourse. I formulate one such test, drawing on a standard explanation of Moore's paradox. I show that if expressivism is correct as a descriptive account of moral discourse, then we should expect versions of Moore's paradox where we explicitly deny that we possess certain affective or conative attitudes. I then argue that the constructions that mirror Moore's paradox are not incoherent. It follows that expressivism is either incorrect as a hermeneutic account of moral discourse or that the expression relation which holds between sincere moral assertion and affective or conative attitudes is not identical to the relation which holds between sincere non-moral assertion and belief. A number of objections are canvassed and rejected.
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Keywords | Moore's Paradox Expressivism Moral Assertion |
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References found in this work BETA
Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language.Simon Blackburn - 1984 - Clarendon Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
How Expressivists Can and Should Explain Inconsistency.Derek Clayton Baker & Jack Woods - 2015 - Ethics 125 (2):391-424.
Protest and Speech Act Theory.Matthew Chrisman & Graham Hubbs - 2021 - In Rachel Katharine Sterken & Justin Khoo (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language. New York: Routledge. pp. 179-192.
The Abductive Case for Humeanism Over Quasi-Perceptual Theories of Desire.Derek Clayton Baker - 2014 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 8 (2):1-29.
Does Expressivism Have Subjectivist Consequences?Mark Schroeder - 2014 - Philosophical Perspectives 28 (1):278-290.
View all 14 citations / Add more citations
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2013-09-11
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127 ( #5,348 of 2,506,040 )
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