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| does expressivism have subjectivist consequences? | |
| Συγγραφέας: Mark Schroeder Mark Schroeder: does expressivism have subjectivist consequences? (pdf, 15 pages) Metaethical expressivists claim that we can explain what moral words like ‘wrong’ mean without having to know what they are about – but rather by saying what it is to think that something is wrong – namely, to disapprove of it.  Given the close connection between expressivists’ theory of the meaning of moral words and our attitudes of approval and disapproval, expressivists have had a hard time shaking the intuitive charge that  theirs  is  an  objectionably  subjectivist  or  mind-dependent  view  of  morality.    Expressivism,  critics  have charged  over  and  again,  is  committed  to  the  view  that  what  is  wrong  somehow  depends  on  or  at  least correlates with the attitudes that we have toward it.   Arguments to this  effect are sometimes subtle, and sometimes  rely  on  fancy  machinery,  but  they  all  share  a  common  flaw.    They  all  fail  to  respect  the fundamental idea of expressivism: that ‘stealing is wrong’ bears exactly the same relationship to disapproval of stealing as ‘grass is green’ bears to the belief that grass is green. In this paper I rehearse the motivations for the fundamental idea of expressivism and show how the arguments of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit [1998], Russ Shafer-Landau [2003], Jussi Suikkanen [2009], and  Christopher  Peacocke  [2004]  all  fail  on  this  same  rock.    In  part  1  I’ll  rehearse  the  motivation  for expressivism – a motivation which directly explains why it does not have subjectivist consequences.  Then in  each  of  parts  2-5  I’ll  illustrate  how  each  of  Jackson  and  Pettit’s,  Peacocke’s,  Shafer-Landau’s,  and Suikkanen’s arguments work, respectively, and why each of them fails to respect the fundamental parity at the heart of expressivism. Though others have tried before me to explain why expressivism is not committed to any kind of subjectivism  or  mind-dependence  –  prominently  including  Blackburn  [1973],  [1998],  Horgan  and Timmons [2006], and, in response to Pettit and Jackson, Dreier [2004] and Smith and Stoljar [2003], the explanation  offered  in  this  article  is  distinguished  by  its  scope  and  generality... | |
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