The Moral Belief Problem

Abstract

The moral belief problem is that of reconciling expressivism in ethics with both minimalism in the philosophy of language and the syntactic discipline of moral sentences. It is argued that the problem can be solved by distinguishing minimal and robust senses of belief, where a minimal belief is any state of mind expressed by sincere assertoric use of a syntactically disciplined sentence and a robust belief is a minimal belief with some additional property R. Two attempts to specify R are discussed, both based on the thought that beliefs are states that aim at truth. According to the first, robust beliefs are criticisable to the extent that their content fails to match the state of the world. This sense fails to distinguish robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. According to the second, robust beliefs function to have their content match the state of the world. This sense succeeds in distinguishing robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. The conclusion is that the debate concerning the cognitive status of moral convictions needs to address the issue of the function of moral convictions. Evolutionary theorising may be relevant, but will not be decisive, to answering this question.-The Moral Belief Problem‖ by Neil Sinclair 2 An inconsistent triadThe following three propositions are apparently mutually inconsistent:(1) Moral sentences are syntactically disciplined. This claim has two components: (1a) Moral sentences are syntactically sophisticated, that is, they are capable of significant embedding in negations, conditionals, propositional attitude operators and other subsentential constructions.(1b) Moral sentences are disciplined, that is, they are subject to clear standards of appropriate and inappropriate usage.(2) There is a conceptually necessary connection between a sentence being syntactically disciplined and sincere assertoric use of that sentence serving to express a belief (whose content is captured by such usage). This claim has two components:(2a) There is a conceptually necessary connection between a sentence being syntactically disciplined and that sentence being truth-apt.(2b) There is a conceptually necessary connection between a sentence being truth-apt and sincere assertoric use of that sentence serving to express a belief (whose content is captured by such usage).(3) Moral sentences in their sincere assertoric uses do not serve to express beliefs (whose content is captured by such usage). Rather, they serve to express some affective attitude of the agent, such as an emotion, preference or practical stance.-The Moral Belief Problem‖ by Neil Sinclair 3The first claim -moral syntacticism -is supported by simple reflection on our actual use of moral sentences, which readily feature in negations, conditionals and other such constructions (syntactic sophistication) and are subject to clear standards of appropriate usage (discipline). In this, moral sentences contrast with sentences such as 'Ouch!', which are not syntactically sophisticated and sentences of a private language, which (if Wittgenstein...

Expressivism and realist explanations

“…35-8. See O'Leary-Hawthorne and Price (1996) and Sinclair (2006) for arguments to the effect that this negative functional thesis is the best way to articulate the core negative insight of expressivism in a minimalist framework.…”

Aesthetic Testimony and the Test of Time

“…In order to understand NT (and, indeed, TT discussed above) we must ask what is meant by the notoriously promiscuous phrase ‘aesthetic judgement’. I intend ‘judgement’ here to be taken in the sense in which it is often used in contemporary debates in metaethics, such that a judgement is the mental correlate of a declarative sentence and is expressed ‘by sincere assertoric use of [such] a sentence’ (Sinclair : 253) . Understanding ‘judgement’ in this way will doubtless raise immediate concerns for some readers, and I will endeavour to address these in the next section.…”

Recent Work in Expressivism

“…This approach is consistent with minimalism about belief so long as the expressivist can distinguish a minimal sense of belief in which moral judgements express moral beliefs from a robust sense in which they do not. This is the approach preferred by Blackburn (1998aBlackburn ( , 1998b, Ridge (2006b, forthcoming,) and myself (Sinclair 2006(Sinclair , 2007. Related views are given by Horgan and Timmons (2006) and Lenman (2003a).…”