Search Results

In chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. This chapter argues that this metaethical position, referred to as ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. It does this by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that has been used against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain natural properties — a recipe that is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario called Moral Twin Earth.

Moral Twin Earth thought experiments appear to show that practical language is highly stable, and that many possible users of practical language are capable of having genuine disagreements with each other. This chapter clarifies a tempting generalization of this idea, which is that the members of every pair of possible users of moral language are capable of having a genuine disagreement. This is the Universal Disagreement thesis. It then shows how this thesis can be adapted to a contextualist semantics for ‘ought’ and other practical terms. It concludes by arguing that, for the realist, the central explanatory target is a claim about the stability of practical language.

This chapter argues against the Universal Disagreement thesis. Some possible communities use moral language, but do not have substantive disagreements with others who use their moral language differently. These are cases where the parties both use their terms with a moral role, but instead of differing over which substantive theory they follow when applying their moral terms (as in the original Moral Twin Earth cases), they differ in which additional roles they use these terms with. This is consistent with intuitions about Moral Twin Earth cases, but shows that they can lead to overgeneralizations about the semantic effects of a moral role. Instead, what needs to be explained by a meta-semantics for moral language is a more limited claim. Realists will have to show that moral terms are highly stable, but that it is possible to use a term such as ‘right’ with a moral role without referring to moral rightness.

What considerations place genuine constraints on an adequate semantics for normative and evaluative expressions? Linguists recognize facts about ordinary uses of such expressions and competent speakers’ judgments about which uses are appropriate. The contemporary literature reflects the widespread assumption that linguists don’t rely upon an additional source of data—competent speakers’ judgments about possible disagreement with hypothetical speech communities. We have several good reasons to think that such judgments are not probative for semantic theorizing. Therefore, we should accord these judgments no probative value for the development of a semantics for our moral terms. Such judgments can no longer be presumed to put pressure on theories according to which our moral expressions share a semantics with ordinary, descriptive terms. Many rivals to pure, Descriptivist theories count among their advantages the ability to accommodate these judgments. If these judgments have no probative value, such theories lose an important source of support.

This chapter is centered on the question of whether it is possible for there to be normative concepts with the same normative roles as ours but not coextensive with them. If this is possible, an ardent realist faces a dilemma. The best way out of the dilemma is to deny that this scenario is in fact possible, and instead claim that normative role determines reference. The scenario used to present the dilemma is similar to the so-called Moral Twin Earth cases discussed in the literature, and the similarities and differences with the Moral Twin Earth challenge are discussed. An ardent realist might be tempted to respond to the dilemma by saying that some normative concepts are more fundamental or joint-carving than others. This response is explored and rejected.

This chapter explores the view—“presentationalism”—that normative sentences and propositions are mind-independently true, but what they represent is not normative. There are no normative properties or facts. This view, whatever in the end its fate, combines attractive features of realism and antirealism. The view is curiously absent from prominent accounts of the theoretical options. The possibility of a view like this problematizes important arguments in the literature, for example certain arguments for non-naturalism, and shows that one must be careful to distinguish between normative facts and normative truths. Toward the end of the chapter, I consider whether the Moral Twin Earth arguments present problems for the view.

Rationalism offers an account of moral properties as a subset of the properties which serve to rationalize right actions, and these properties are fit to be the referents of our moral terms. That fitness can be exploited in constructing an externalist theory of reference determination for these terms. The resulting externalist theory draws support from standard responses to Moral Twin-Earth scenarios. The relevance of these responses to moral semantics has recently been vigorously challenged by Dowell and by Schroeter and Schroeter. The social character of meaning relations, which can explain the openness of questions about an analysis, may thereby also make Twin-Earth judgements beside the point. But the resources available to translators go beyond semantic competence and it is these resources that nonetheless make the Moral Twin-Earth responses relevant.

Motivational internalists say there are necessary attitudinal conditions on moral judgment. Internalists typically explain these necessities by citing moral semantics, properties, or beliefs. But internalism can be explained without any assumptions about these things, making it compatible with the conjunction of objective moral realism, metaphysical naturalism, and motivational Humeanism. This chapter reviews and extends the case for this compatibility claim. The extension is to another claim prima facie incompatible with that conjunction. This is the claim, supported by cases like Moral Twin Earth, that moral judgments of a given type (e.g., wrong-judgments) are not all about the same objectively real natural property. If the conjunction is compatible with internalism, it is compatible with this claim too. This also makes it compatible with a different kind of internalism, “positive” internalism: roughly, that there are sufficient attitudinal conditions on moral judgment.

This chapter is one of three that draws out the consequences of Radical Interpretation for how concepts represent the world. This chapter introduces a famous ‘moral twin earth’ puzzle about the normative concept wrongness. It appears to have a distinctive referential stability: individuals or whole communities can be very mistaken in what they think makes an act morally right or wrong, but somehow they remain locked onto the moral subject matter. This chapter derives this stability as a prediction of Radical Interpretation. Radical Interpretation predicts the result when combined with first-order normative premises and premises about the conceptual role of the concept of wrongness.