The Frege–Geach Problem

To be complete, practical expressivism needs to provide explanations of the meaning of complex sentences that meet the Fregean, Semantic, Generality, and Comprehensive Conditions. Compositional Commitment Metasemantics (CCM) claims that whenever an intelligibly embeddable sentence is used, it propounds a commitment. A commitment can be propounded by being expressed, by being the functional part of a complex commitment that is expressed or by being otherwise propounded (e.g. by having its appropriateness interrogated). Commitments can be beliefs, attitudes, or their combinations. This view explains sentential inconsistency in terms of the inconsistency of the commitments that sentences express and explains the latter in terms of a concatenation of the commitments frustrating the constitutive function of one or more of their number.

Moral Disagreement and Reason-Giving

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.

Truth, Truth-aptness, and Belief

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.

The Subject Matter of Metaethics

Moral practice is picked out by a distinctive moral terminology as used in discourse, thought, and action-guidance. One mark of this use is that it serves to give recommendations for action whose force is independent of the desires of both judger and subject. The task of metaethics is to provide a systematic account of the metasemantics, psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral practice. This will involve, at least, an account of those facts about our uses of moral expressions in virtue of which they have the meanings they do. Metaethical theories are to be judged by their ability to accommodate (that is, make purpose-relative sense of) the important forms and assumptions of moral practice, within the terms of our wider understanding of the world and our place in it. I take this understanding to be provided by naturalism, although this is a working assumption rather than an indubitable axiom.

Mind-Independent Moral Truths and Categorical Moral Reasons

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.

Conclusion

This appendix compares the theory of practical expressivism developed in this book with two recent developments of expressivism: those developed by Schroeder in his book Being For, and by Ridge in his book Impassioned Belief. Practical expressivism rejects what Schroeder labels ‘The Basic Expressivist Maneuver’ and ‘Mentalism’. It also rejects the hybrid expressivist idea that all moral judgements express both beliefs and desire-like states. Other authors have raised problems for both these alternatives; the purpose of this appendix is simply to show that practical expressivism is a distinct alternative (and therefore avoids the known difficulties of the alternative views).

Subsentential Metasemantics

A subsentential metasemantics provides an explanation of the meaning of subsentential parts. Practical expressivism holds that moral predicates’ contribution to the explanation of meaning is a function from the subject of a sentence to a moral attitude directed at that subject. Similarly, non-moral or descriptive predicates contribute a function from the subject of a sentence to a descriptive representation (a belief) that attributes a property to that subject. These claims are consistent with standard views of quantifiers as allowing us to make claims about the scope of the correct application of the predicates they govern, and tenses as delineating the range of subjects to which those predicates apply. The explanation of meaning provided by practical expressivism is potentially compatible with truth-conditional semantic theories so long as practical expressivists can claim that moral sentences are truth-apt.

Practical Expressivist Strategies and Presumptive Arguments for Realism

There are several general ‘domesticating’ strategies that quasi-realists can employ to vindicate the important features of moral practice. These include the ancestral strategy (which subsumes an expressivist account of the feature in question under a more general account that also applies to non-expressive discourses), the immanent strategy (which elucidates a role for the relevant feature within the first-order debates of the discourse), and the standards strategy (which understands the relevant feature in terms of standards governing the correct application of predicates). Furthermore, common objections to the quasi-realist project can be rebutted: it is not committed to vindicating ‘second-rate’ versions of the important features of moral practice, nor to a problematic revision of our philosophical understanding, nor to an unhappily disjunctive account of our discursive practices. These points also suffice to undermine many ‘presumptive’ arguments for moral realism (and descriptivism).

Practical Expressivism, Expression, and Quasi-Realism

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.

Practical Expressivism, Morality’s Function, and Moral Attitudes

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.