Mental Agency and Metaethics

Expressivism and the Normativity of Attitudes

“…This might seem to make expressivism self‐defeating or worrisomely circular, or to frustrate the explanatory ambitions central to the view. I argue that such objections to combining expressivism with (NA), as they have been recently sharpened by James Dreier (), Crispin Wright (), Russ Shafer‐Landau (), Nick Zangwill (), and Matt Evans and Nishi Shah (), are not successful . For all that these worries suggest, expressivism may be true, and its potential explanatory payoffs need not be compromised in any damaging way, even if (NA) is correct.…”

“…Some find it plausible, for instance, that ‘when we say that someone desires to drink, we imply (analytically) that insofar as he believes that the only way he can drink is by pouring water into the cup before him, he ought to pour the water’ (Dreier, , p. 137). Others are attracted by something like the thought that it is contained in our concept of a desire that desiring to perform some action, φ , is correct only if φ ‐ing is desirable, or in our concept of a belief that believing that p is correct only if it is true that p (Evans and Shah, , p. 82).…”

“…Evans and Shah offer two (NA)‐based objections to expressivism. One of these goes as follows (Evans and Shah, , pp. 87–89, 93–94): Expressivists are committed to there being no normative facts. Expressivists are committed to explaining our practice of normative judgment, and so to there being ‘norm‐judgmental facts’ – facts about which normative judgments are made by whom. (NA), that is: norm‐judgmental facts are normative facts.…”

“…Evans and Shah (, pp. 93–94) put their second worry succinctly:

One problem is that [the claim that attributions of normative judgments are non‐cognitive] seems to conflict with [the non‐cognitivist's] view that normative judgments are intrinsically motivating […] [which] seems to entail that normative judgments have causal powers.

…”

“…See, e.g., Zangwill, , 2005, 2010; Wedgwood, , , ; Evans and Shah, ; and Gibbard, . I should note, perhaps, that Zangwill's and Wedgwood's claims are primarily metaphysical claims about the normativity of the relevant properties (e.g., the property of having a certain belief), and not claims about judgments concerning propositional attitudes.…”