Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

Abstract

Explaining genuine moral disagreement is a challenge for metaethical theories. For expressivists, this challenge comes from the plausibility of agents making seemingly univocal claims while expressing incongruent conative attitudes. I argue that metaethical inferentialism – a deflationary cousin to expressivism, which locates meaning in the inferential import of our moral assertions rather than the attitudes they express – offers a unique solution to this problem. Because inferentialism doesn’t locate the source of moral disagreements in a clash between attitudes, but instead in conflicts between the inferential import of ethical assertions, the traditional problem for expressivism can be avoided. After considering two forms of inferentialism that lead to revenge versions of the problem, I conclude by recommending that we understand the semantics of moral disagreements pragmatically: the source of univocity does not come from moral or semantic facts waiting to be described, but instead from the needs that ethical and semantic discourses answer – a solution to the problems of what we are to do and how we are to talk about it.

Keywords:

• Metaethics
• expressivism
• inferentialism
• deflationism
• normativism
• univocity
• genuine disagreement

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Ryan Lake, Ben Yelle, Nick Wiltsher, Thomas Brouwer, Lionel Shapiro, Joseph Rouse and Amie Thomasson for a number of helpful discussions of the issues covered in this paper.

Notes

1. I will treat these two problems – explaining sameness of meaning and explaining genuine disagreement – interchangeably. For an alternate approach, see Plunkett and Sundell (2013).

2. See Merli (2007a).

3. Cf. Price (2011).

4. See Chrisman (2011) and Field (2009).

5. See Thomasson (2007).

6. See Horwich (1999).

7. See Bar-Bar-On and Chrisman (2009), Chrisman (2010).

8. See for example Schroeder (2008), Dreier (2009).

9. Of course, not all moral disagreements directly settle questions about what to do. Disagreements in such cases may not be about what we should do immediately, but might instead be about the principles that inform what we would do. See Warren (2013, ch. 5) for an inferential account of disagreement in such situations.

10. Accounting for the incompatibility between Adam’s judgement that eating meat is forbidden and Amy’s judgement that it is permissible is a noted difficulty for expressivists. See Warren (2015, especially pp. 2877–2879) for an argument that inferentialism is well-situated to solve this problem.

11. Brandom (1994) uses the terms ‘regularist’ and ‘regulist’ for these conceptions, respectively.

12. Here I repurpose David Merli’s (2009, 540–545) arguments against Ralph Wedgwood’s Conceptual Role Semantics. Though Wedgwood’s metaethics is explicitly inflationary, Merli’s arguments have equal force for a deflationary, dispositional version of metaethical inferentialism.

13. See Sturgeon (1986, 115–142).

14. This is a nice potential upshot of the inferential approach: a rather tidy resolution of the internalism/externalism debate about moral motivation. See Chrisman (2010, esp. 118–119).

15. See Lance and Hawthorne (2008, 186–187).

16. See Lance and Hawthorne (2008, 218), Thomasson (2015a, 250–251).

17. Similar points are made by Tersman (2006, Ch. 6) and Bjornsson and McPherson (2014), who argue that it makes good evolutionary sense that we allow for a lot of latitude between divergent interlocutors in our judgments of moral univocity.

18. Cf. Bjornsson and McPherson (2014, 9–10).

19. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.

20. In the conclusion of his (2007b), Merli gestures at a possible avenue to solve the MAP:

We might try to preserve our intuitive ascriptions [of moral univocity] by rejecting views that make participation in moral discourse hinge on any one member of the cluster of features that affect the attribution of moral concepts … According to one way of developing a view of this sort, facts about whether speakers share meanings are constituted, not tracked, by our best interpretations. In other words, our interpretive norms are fundamental. Hence there is no possibility of a gap between facts about what speakers mean and how they are best interpreted. (Merli 2007b, 54)

Setting aside the worry that Merli is calling for our best interpretations to be taken as truthmakers for moral claims, I believe much of what I argue for here is consistent with this approach.