Practical Expressivism, Expression, and Quasi-Realism

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Moral Attitudes

According to practical expressivism, moral judgements express moral attitude types insofar as they advertise a claim of objective authority for them, where this involves a preparedness to defend them and to insist upon their acceptance by others. Such insistence is sincere when it coheres with one’s higher-order views about the proper ways of forming moral attitudes. Practical expressivism also embraces the quasi-realist programme of seeking to show how the forms and assumptions of moral practice can be vindicated on these expressivist grounds—a project best described as ‘weaving the propositional clothing’ for moral discourse.

Moral Disagreement and Reason-Giving

2021 ◽  
pp. 82-105
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
General Pattern ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Moral Claim ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Constitutive Function ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Attitudes

According to practical expressivism, moral disagreement is a species of disagreement in attitude whereby agents have moral commitments that advocate incompatible policies of action and reaction. This follows from a unified general account of disagreement as involving mental states that cannot collectively fulfil their constitutive functions, and the practical expressivist hypothesis that the constitutive function of moral attitudes is to advocate and reinforce collective patterns of action and reaction. To reason in favour of a moral claim is to cite a feature of the world to which the related moral attitude is a response, typically in order to alter the attitudes of others. Further, the constraint of ascriptive supervenience and a standing preference for ‘guiding’ over ‘goading’ in moral discussion make sense in light of the practical function that practical expressivism attributes to moral practice. A general pattern for some aspects of moral discourse can be discerned, and this pattern can be applied to the phenomenon of moral avoidability.

Practical Expressivism, Morality’s Function, and Moral Attitudes

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-60
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Interpersonal Coordination ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Moral Attitudes ◽  
Linguistic Means

Practical expressivism is the view that moral judgements do not offer moral descriptions or express moral beliefs but do express moral attitudes. The conventionally-enshrined purpose of this expression is the interpersonal coordination of attitudes and action. More generally the function of moral practice is to produce, test, refine, and sustain mutually beneficial patterns of coordination through a distinctive, linguistic, means of collective problem-solving, viz. moral discussion. This purpose suggests that moral attitudes are typically stable, reflectively endorsed, general attitudinally ascended states of approval and/or disapproval.

Emotions and Incommensurable Moral Concepts

Philosophy ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Randel Koons
Keyword(s):  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Moral Concept ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Moral Realist ◽  
Epistemic Role

Many authors have argued that emotions serve an epistemic role in our moral practice. Some argue that this epistemic connection is so strong that creatures who do not share our affective nature will be unable to grasp our moral concepts. I argue that even if this sort of incommensurability does result from the role of affect in morality, incommensurability does not in itself entail relativism. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that one must share our emotions and concerns to be able to apply our moral concept successfully. Finally, I briefly investigate whether the moral realist can seek aid and comfort from Davidsonian arguments to the effect that incommensurability in ethics is in principle impossible, and decide that these arguments are not successful. I conclude that the epistemic role our emotions play in moral discourse does not relativize morality.

Beyond Respect and Beneficence

Respect ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
Moral Attitudes ◽  
Recent Tendency

Thomas E. Hill, Jr. breaks with two conventional approaches in moral philosophy. Hill eschews the recent tendency to focus either on duties or on virtues, and instead emphasizes the importance of moral attitudes. And Hill specifically steps outside the usual framework of Kantian ethics by developing and defending the importance of a moral attitude besides respect and beneficence, namely the attitude of appreciation. To appreciate something is to recognize and respond appropriately to its value as something worth attending to, observing, admiring, cherishing, or the like, for its own sake. The attitude of appreciation is especially important in personal relationships, although it includes recognizing and responding positively to the distinctive features possessed by many sorts of things, not just persons.

Prudential Normativity, Moral Scepticisms, and Metaethics

Dear Prudence ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Guy Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Error Theory ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Moral Error Theory ◽  
Thick Concepts ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Moral Debate ◽  
Companions In Guilt ◽  
Moral Scepticism

In earlier chapters it was argued that prudential value gives agents normative, prudential reasons and that prudential judgements are normative judgements on a par with moral judgements. This chapter spells out some ramifications of these theses by examining four different areas of inquiry about morality and moral discourse, showing how the theses hitherto defended in this book affect them. It begins with the form of moral scepticism found within the ‘why be moral?’ debate. It then examines hermeneutic moral error theory and proposes a companions-in-guilt argument based on the normativity of prudential discourse. Third, it examines arguments given within the literature on revisionary metaethical views, pointing out and questioning their commitment to prudential justifications. Finally, it is shown how the normativity of prudential properties applies to a central debate about thick concepts, that between reductionists and non-reductionists about such concepts.

Truth, Truth-aptness, and Belief

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Moral Practice ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Correct Account

Three of the forms and assumptions of moral practice are that moral judgements are truth-apt, sometimes true, and that they express moral beliefs. Vindicating these assumptions seems inconsistent with expressivism as traditionally conceived. However, minimalist accounts of truth-aptness, truth, and belief may help the expressivist. Minimalism says that the correct account of a notion is revealed by all and only those platitudes surrounding it. Practical expressivists accept that moral sentences satisfy truth-aptness, and they also accept that moral sentences are truth-apt. This helps expressivism secure truth-aptness, but also encourages the thought that there is nothing distinctive in the expressivist position. But creeping minimalism can be resisted since there is a robust sense of belief that resists minimalism. It is in this robust sense that expressivists will deny (and descriptivists accept) that the meaning of moral judgements is to be explained in terms of their expressing moral beliefs.

If a Self Is a Narrative: Social Constructionism in the Clinic

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Clinical Psychology ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
The Self ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Moral Practice

Abstract The articles in this special issue indicate that the self is best understood not as an empirical and transhistorical entity, but as a narrative, inextricable from its location in history and culture. This view has significant implications for psy-chotherapy. It suggests that therapy is a moral discourse, that its claim to authority is better understood as ideological than as scientific. But because it generally takes a reificationist stance on such matters as emotions, therapy is currently ill-equipped to take account of the self as a social construction and of itself as a moral practice. (Clinical Psychology)

Mind-Independent Moral Truths and Categorical Moral Reasons

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-217
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Moral Attitudes ◽  
Target Agent

Moral practice embodies the assumptions that moral truths are mind-independent and moral reasons are categorical. According to the practical expressivist account, both assumptions can be understood as claims about the application conditions of moral terms. In both cases, the practical expressivist goes on to understand these claims to voice positions about which moral sensibilities agents ought to adopt. The former voices the claim that agents ought not form their moral attitudes on the basis of their own endorsement of those attitudes; the latter that agents ought not form their structured-approvals purely on the basis of the existing desires of the target agent. In both cases, these substantive moral positions are also constitutive of competence with moral concepts, since agents who generally denied them would not be able to use those concepts to coordinate in the ways distinctive of morality.

scholarly journals Religiosity differently influences moral attitude for robots in the US and Japan

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shogo Ikari ◽  
Kosuke Sato ◽  
Emily Burdett ◽  
Hiroshi Ishiguro ◽  
Jonathan Jong ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Consideration ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Us ◽  
Moral Attitudes

Researchers have speculated that religious traditions influence an individual's moral attitude and care toward robots. They propose that differences in moral care could be explained by values motivated by religion, anthropocentrism and animism. Here, we empirically examined how moral care for robots is influenced by religious belief and attendance with US and Japanese samples, cultures that are Abrahamic and Shinto-Buddhist traditions respectively (N = 3781). Moral care was higher in Japan and participants with higher religious beliefs had less moral care for robots only in the US. Further, participants who scored low on anthropocentrism and high on animism were more likely to attribute moral care for robots. Anthropocentrism in the US and Animism in Japan had a larger effect compared to the other country. The finding demonstrates how religion could influence moral attitudes for robots, and might suggest the realm of moral consideration could be shaped by cultural traditions.

The Role Played by the ‘Sense of Justice’ in Legal Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 444-468
Author(s):  
Alf Ross
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rational Argumentation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Attitudes ◽  
Sense Of Justice

This chapter discusses the legitimate role played by the sense of justice in scientific legal politics. It begins by introducing a distinction between ‘interests’ (attitudes based upon needs) and ‘moral attitudes’ as a contrasting pair. The standpoint based on interest is always conditioned by certain beliefs, and is thus the subject of justification in a rational argumentation. The moral attitude (the moral sense), on the other hand, is a direct and unconditioned attitude towards a norm of action or a social order. It is irrational in the sense that it is a direct expression of an emotion and inaccessible to justification and argumentation. These considerations concerning interest and moral attitude apply mutatis mutandis to policy considerations and the sense of justice as factors in scientific legal politics. Policy considerations express the evaluation of legal rules on the basis of rational arguments concerning the rules’ actual relevance in relation to presupposed interests. The sense of justice, on the other hand, is a disinterested and inculcated, immediate attitude of approval or disapproval towards a legal norm of action directed toward the social order.

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