The Problem of Ethical Vagueness for Expressivism

Abstract

Ethical vagueness has garnered little attention. This is rather surprising since many philosophers have remarked that the science of ethics lacks the precision that other fields of inquiry have. 1 Of the few philosophers who have discussed ethical vagueness the majority have focused on the implications of vagueness for moral realism. 2 The relevance of ethical vagueness for other metaethical positions has been underexplored, my aim in this paper is to investigate the ramifications of ethical vagueness for expressivism. 3 Ultimately, I shall argue that expressivism does not have the resources to adequately account for ethical vagueness, while cognitivism does. This demonstrates an advantage that cognitivism holds over expressivism. 1) Expressivism Before I offer my argument showing that ethical vagueness raises problems for expressivism, it will be helpful to briefly review the central tenets of expressivism, and to provide a basic overview of the phenomenon of ethical vagueness. Expressivists maintain that there is a sharp distinction between descriptive claims and normative judgments. On one hand, descriptive claims express factual beliefs about the world, in contrast, normative 1 See especially Aristotle EN 1094b, 12-18. 2 See Constantinescu (Forthcoming); Schiffer (2003); Shafer-Landau (1995); Shafer-Landau (1994). 3 In this paper I am solely concerned with full non-cognitive versions of expressivism. Thus, I will not be considering hybrid theories of expressivism. (e.g. moral, epistemic, practical) judgments express a distinctive non-cognitive mental state with a conative structure. This difference can be explained in terms of the "direction of fit". Cognitivists maintain that normative judgments attempt to represent or fit the world. For example, to hold that 'murder is wrong' is to believe that the world is such a way that it is wrong to murder. In contrast, non-cognitivists hold that normative judgments attempt to direct action and change the world such that the world fits one's normative judgments. For example, to judge that "murder is wrong" is to take a specific attitude towards murder. This attitude expresses the norms concerning murder which one has adopted or hopes to adopt. This feature of expressivism is purported to offer two advantages over other metaethical theories. It clearly demonstrates why normative judgments are motivational-they are conative states rather than belief states. Additionally, since there are no (robust) moral properties, expressivism accords with metaphysical naturalism in a simple way. Expressivism advances upon its predecessor emotivism in two main ways. 4 First, expressivists hold that the current emotional state an agent is in can come apart from the norms she is expressing when she makes a normative judgment. Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson refer to this as the "response dependency thesis" (RDT hereafter).5 A noncognitive formulation of RDT is as follows: RDT: To judge that X has some evaluative property P is to approve of feeling F in response to X.

Anti-luminosity and anti-realism in metaethics

“…26 above) and for the same reasons. Sometimes it is argued that making sense of uncertainty in the borderline cases is a problem for the expressivists (Baima, 2014;Dougherty, 2018, pp. 191-192).…”