Neo-pragmatism, morality, and the specification problem

Abstract

A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the use of that term. This paper explains how neo-pragmatism deals with this issue while avoiding problems that arise with existing expressivist and cognitivist solutions.

keywords:

• Neo-pragmatism
• morality
• expressivism
• cognitivism
• metaethics
• disagreement

Acknowledgement

For helpful discussion and written comments on earlier versions of this paper, many thanks to Matt Bedke, Jamie Dreier, Diana Heney, Tristram McPherson, François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter, and Stefan Sciaraffa.

Notes

1. For a philosophically useful presentation of the origin of actual human disgust, see Kelly (2011). I am simplifying and therefore distorting the facts somewhat, but not in ways that have any dialectical importance.

2. See Sepielli (2016, 286) for a nice implicit argument that this is going to be the least controversial strategy.

3. This is not an a priori constraint. Rather, it is the result of the application of neo-pragmatist techniques to these notions.

4. Wittgenstein (1953, §12), quoted in Price (2008, 132).

5. This issue is the focus of an exchange between Blackburn (1991a, 1991b) and Sturgeon (1991).

6. Compare the discussion of Laura and François Schroeter below, and see Schroeter and Schroeter (2014, 7, 11).

7. See Gert (2002) for more discussion of this fact as part of an argument against moral expressivism.

8. Compare Schroeter (2012, 189) and Schroeter and Schroeter (2014, 7–8). I’ll consider the Schroeters’ own cognitive-realist-friendly solution to this difficulty in the next section.

9. This point has some similarity to Laura Schroeter’s (2012) claims about the appearance of de jure sameness of topic, though, as I discuss below, the neo-pragmatist will re-cast talk of such appearances into talk of competence with a linguistic item.

10. For obvious reasons, the neo-pragmatist is likely to prefer the phrase ‘assertoric tradition’. I suspect the Schroeters also ought to use this phrase, given that they explicitly hold that the correct interpretation of a representational tradition might in some cases not involve representation.

11. Schroeter and Schroeter (2014, 7, 11). It is true that the Schroeters claim that their view privileges the level of thought rather than linguistic communication (2014, 8). But I think that careful attention to their solution to the specification problem falsifies this claim.