I sent my paper in on Monday after rewriting the ending a few times. However, I think it was not properly submitted, because I could not find the e-mail address (I was not at school where the flyer was). I sent the paper to the department e-mail address on the website of the hosting university, but this was not the correct address for paper submissions. Oh, well.
I am writing a paper this week (and probably next week too) on methodological considerations in metaethics. This will basically serve as an introductory chapter in which I set up to argue against metaethical theories that inadequately accomodate truth in moral discourse. I will argue that cognitivist expressivism is interesting because it agrees with me that a good theory will accomodate truth in moral discourse, and then proceed in the rest of the thesis to argue that cognitivist expressivism fails to make that acccomodation. If I have space and time enough, I will probably conclude the thesis by talking about a way or some ways to accomodate truth in moral discourse.
Here is a quote I found highly amusing in my reading today:
If meanings are given by objective truth conditions there is a question how we can know that the conditions are satisifed, for this would appear to require a confrontation between what we believe and reality; and the idea of such a confrontation is absurd (Davidson, "A Cohrence Theory of Truth and Knowledge").I rather thought that notion of confronting reality (or purporting to) was analytically contained in the concept of belief.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)
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2 comments:
Would expressivists say that a moral claim has a truth value, or that the statement "It is true that X is right" is not false or deceitful? I'm not terribly read up on the discussion; I think I read a few essays from the past century in my ethics course, but I can't remember the details. Also, would any claim about "truth conditions" make sense on an expressivist account, or is that slipping descriptivism back in? If the latter, than what would nonrelativism/relativism need to look like in order to fit the expressivist?
I'm currently leaning more toward a (rather moderate) divine command ethic, so I am wondering how a divine expressivist theory would go? That is, moral commands are God's expressions of what God would like, which for one reason or another has purchase on us above and beyond anyone else's claims. Moral laws thus can't be reduced just to facts about the non-voluntaristic way the universe is. I would also tie this into a picture of the universe with final causes, which I think can provide some unification of facts and values as well as grounding for a divine command ethic. Not that this really gets into the view, but would how would this fit into the contemporary debates?
Expressivists eschew truth conditions, at least for moral judgments. I suppose an expressivist could utter relativistic or non-relativistic sounding statements while engaged in first-order moral discourse: for example, "They are permitted to do anything that is accepted by their cultural norms", or the denial of this statement. Expressivists are not, however, relativists on the second-order, metaethical level in the sense that they deny there are any truth conditions whatsoever for moral judgments, so moral judgments cannot have relative truth conditions. I think I already said something here about how I want to define relativism such that it applies to the expressivist categorically, at the metaethical level.
With respect to DCT, again, I don't see how the expressivist could object (on metaethical grounds) to someone's uttering a statement in moral discourse that expressed a commitment to DCT, for example: "Everyone ought to do what God expects of them", or "Everything is permissible since there is no God." But these are still evaluative expressions on the expressivist analysis of first-order moral discourse, and as such do not have truth conditions.
God could be a player in moral discourse and express his own moral judgments along with everyone else. God might be more persuasive than other participants in the discourse. But according to expressivism's metaethical commitments, God's evaluative assertions have no truth conditions, just like mine and yours do not. They aren't true because God affirms them.
DCT can be cast in constructivist forms (what Korsgaard calls procedural realism), where God's command or will or character or preferences are at the root of the constructive function which yields the normative facts. I think it would be difficult to distinguish between a constructivist and (substantive) realist interpretation of DCT if one maintains that ALL reality is constructed of divine command, will, etc. But perhaps a distinction could still be made between God's descriptive psychological attitudes that are creative of FACTS and God's evaluative psychological attitudes that are creative of VALUES. Constructivists, I think, tend to see evaluative or normative facts as significantly different from ordinary descriptive or "natural" facts anyway, so this would not be a problem for them.
I recommend Thomas Carson's "Value and the Good Life" for easy to follow current writing on moral theory and metaethics that is compatible with DCT (broadly construed). Carson defends a divine-preference theory of rationality together with a rational-preference theory of the correctness of value judgments. He's a rationalist/constructivist/theist. His view is interesting, and his discussion of others is very helpful.
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