Fallibility for Expressivists

Abstract

Quasi-realists face the challenge of providing a plausible analysis of acknowledgments of moral fallibility (e.g., I believe that lying is wrong, but I might be mistaken). This paper develops a new analysis of these acknowledgments, according to which they express moral uncertainty. After advertising the advantages of this analysis, I take up the question of how to understand moral uncertainty in expressivist terms. 1 The Challenge According to moral expressivism, the function of moral discourse is not to describe the world. Rather, it's to express desire-like attitudes. The main challenge for expressivism comes from the fact that moral discourse behaves much like descriptive discourse. Expressivists in the quasi-realist tradition seek to meet this challenge: they aim to reconcile expressivism with the realist trappings of moral language. Can this goal be achieved? In recent years, some authors have claimed that quasirealists are unable to account for acknowledgments of moral fallibility (Egan 2007; Köhler 2015). An example: Ava has just completed a term paper arguing that eating meat is morally wrong. She's con dent that her thesis is true. Still, she admits that it's possible that her thesis is mistaken. Ethics is hard, and she's aware that many smart people disagree with her. She is thus inclined to say things like: (1) a. I believe eating meat is wrong. b. But I might be mistaken. 1 How should we understand these acknowledgments, if moral beliefs are just desire-like states? Call this 'The Fallibility Challenge. ' 1 Beddor and Goldstein (2018) call these conjunctions 'concessive belief attributions' based on their resemblance to concessive knowledge attributions (sentences of the form, ⌜I know φ, but I might be mistaken⌝). Interestingly, while such CKAs are typically judged infelicitous, their belief-involving counterparts sound perfectly natural.

Noncognitivism in Metaethics and the Philosophy of Action

“…18 See (Gibbard 2003) . 19 Compare also (Schroeder 2008, 101-3;Beddor 2020). 20 (Schroeder 2008, 10-12).…”

“…1-3). Compare also (Schroeder 2008, 42ff), as well as (Baker and Woods 2015;Beddor 2020). 6 (Marušić and Schwenkler 2018).…”

Attitudinal Ambivalence: Moral Uncertainty for Non-Cognitivists

“…This conception of non-cognitivism might be contested by quasi-realists, such as Simon Blackburn [1984Blackburn [ , 1993 and Allan Gibbard [2003], who adopt a minimalist theory of truth to claim that terms like 'fact', 'belief', and 'true' can be applied to moral judgments, even though they are not representational. Indeed, there has been extensive debate in this journal about whether quasi-realism is equipped to make sense of self-doubt and moral fallibility [Egan 2007;Blackburn 2009;Köhler 2015;Beddor 2020;Lam 2020]. However, I will set these accounts aside for now, and will focus on non-cognitivism as characterised above, since quasi-realism is sufficiently distinctive to require its own separate analysis.…”

Probabilistic Antecedents and Conditional Attitudes

“…It looks like we're in a bind, but there are two other plausible ways to understand (14). Inspired by the expression of credence picture from section 4, the first says that I express a partial intention in uttering (14) (perhaps of the sort suggested in Holton [2008], Shpall [2016], Goldstein [2016], or Beddor [2020]). The second says that I express both an ordinary intention and high but not total confidence that I will go to the store.…”