Donald Davidson and Moral Realism Committee

Philosophical Perspectives, 2004

This is a paper about the problem of realism in meta-ethics (and, I hope, also in other areas, but that hope is so far pretty speculative). But it is not about the problem of whether realism is true. It is about the problem of what realism is. More specifically, it is about the question of what divides meta-ethical realists from irrealists. I start with a potted history of the Good Old Days. I. The Good Old Days It used to be easy to tell a moral realist from a moral irrealist. You could just ask, ''Is there really such a thing as moral wrongness?'' Realists of all stripes, from Bentham to Moore to Warnock, would all say, ''Of course there is,'' while irrealists (as we now call them retrospectively) from Mackie to Ayer say not. In the Good Old Days, there were two kinds of irrealists. Non-factualists like Ayer denied that moral judgments express any sort of proposition at all, while Error Theorists like Mackie insisted that they do express propositions, only uniformly false ones. 1 Ayer's radicalism was at the level of language, denying that simple declarative sentences play the linguistic role of stating facts or expressing our beliefs, and instead construing them as ''simply evincing'' our feelings, which, he famously stressed, ''is not at all the same as saying that [we] have them'' (Ayer 1971, p. 109). Mackie's radicalism, by contrast, was at the level of ontology. The semantics of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong is essentially the same as the semantics of Principia Ethica. The difference is that Mackie doesn't believe in that simple, non-natural quality that Moore (thought he had) put at the center of his metaphysics of morals. This distinction, between Mackie's sort of irrealism and Ayer's, is familiar and meta-ethicists have been fairly comfortable with it. Ayer said repeatedly that moral judgments cannot be true or false. When he said so, he had apparently forgotten his own view about truth, and later emotivists (or as we now generally call them, and as I will be calling them hereafter, expressivists) have tried to detach that part of the Philosophical Perspectives, 18, Ethics, 2004 theory. Here is what Ayer said about truth, in Chapter Five of Language, Truth, and Logic: Reverting to the analysis of truth, we find that in all sentences of the form ''p is true,'' the phrase ''is true'' is logically superfluous. When, for example, one says that the proposition ''Queen Anne is dead'' is true, all that one is saying is that Queen Anne is dead. And similarly, when one says that the proposition ''Oxford is the capital of England'' is false, all that one is saying is that Oxford is not the capital of England. Thus, to say that a proposition is true is just to assert it, and to say that it is false is just to assert its contradictory. And this indicates that the terms ''true'' and ''false'' connote nothing, but function in the sentence simply as marks of assertion and denial. And in that case there can be no sense in asking us to analyse the concept of ''truth''. (Ayer 1971, pp. 88-9) We conclude, then, that there is no problem of truth as it is ordinarily conceived. The traditional conception of truth as a ''real quality'' or ''real relation'' is due, like most philosophical mistakes, to a failure to analyse sentences correctly. There are sentences, such as the two we have just analysed, in which the word ''truth'' seems to stand for something real; and this leads the speculative philosopher to enquire what this ''something'' is. Naturally he fails to obtain a satisfactory answer, since his question is illegitimate. For our analysis has shown that the word ''truth'' does not stand for anything, in the way such a question requires. (89)

Taking Morality Seriously is David Enoch’s book-length defense of meta-ethical and meta-normative non-naturalist realism. After describing Enoch’s position and outlining the argumentative strategy of the book, we engage in a critical discussion of what we take to be particularly problematic central passages. We focus on Enoch’s two original positive arguments for non-naturalist realism: one argument building on first order moral implications of different meta-ethical positions, the other attending to the rational commitment to normative facts inherent in practical deliberation. We also pay special attention to Enoch’s handling of two types of objections to non-naturalist realism, objections having to do with the possibility of moral knowledge and with moral disagreement.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 2020

Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. My suggestion is that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed out moral epistemology will simultaneously rebut metasemantic objections to non-naturalism. Thus, the the metasemantic and more widely discussed epistemological challenges in effect amount to one. Before setting out my positive view, I consider why all of the traditional metasemantic theories cause trouble for the non-naturalist. This includes discussions of teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, as well as Schroeter & Schroeter's 'connectedness' model.

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2014

Pending, 2024

The 'prescriptivist' metaethical theory argued here makes the claim that moral assertions are neither true nor false; and thus, they are not knowable. The name 'prescriptivism' is not associated with Hare's (1952, 1963) theory. This theory hypothesizes that ethical assertions and value affirmations are 'prescriptions.' 'Descriptions' are assertions that are literally true or false, and 'prescriptions' are assertions intended to be agreed-upon (but not literally true or false). The 'correctness' of any ethical assertion (or value affirmation) is dependent upon what persons accept, tolerate, or agree-to, and does not refer to an objective moral reality.

Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality, 2018

2004

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2003

In recent times, comments have been made and arguments advanced in support of metaethical positions based on the 'phenomenology' of ethical experiencein other words, the 'feel' that accompanies our ethical experiences. In this paper I cast doubt on whether ethical phenomenology supports metaethical positions to any great extent and try to tease out what is involved in giving a 'phenomenological argument'. I consider three such positions: 'independent' moral realism (IMR), another type of moral realism-sensibility theory-and noncognitivism. Phenomenological arguments have been used in support of the first two positions, but my general claim is that ethical phenomenology supports no metaethical position over any other. I discuss two types of phenomenological argument that might be offered in support of different types of moral realism, although I couch my debate in terms of IMR. The first argument asserts that ethical properties are not experienced in the way that rivals to IMR say we experience them. Against this I claim that it is odd to think that one could experience ethical properties as any metaethical theory characterizes them. The second argument is more complicated: the general thought is that an adequate metaethical theory should not distort our ethical experience unduly. I consider one aspect of our ethical experience-that there is some 'ethical authority' to which our judgements answer-in order to illustrate this idea. I discuss why IMRealists might think that this phenomenon supports their position. Against them I claim that other metaethical positions might be able to accommodate the phenomenon of ethical authority. Even if they cannot, then, secondly, I argue that there are other aspects of our ethical experience that sit more naturally with other metaethical positions. Hence, one cannot argue that ethical phenomenology as a whole supports one theory over any others.