An Expressivistic Theory of Normative Discourse

Abstract

For more than half a century after G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, much of analytical moral philosophy concerned the meanings of moral terms. Out of this discussion came analyses of a radically new kind: analyses of meaning that were noncognitivistic. Moral terms had resisted ordinary definition. Moore himself claimed they stood for non-natural properties, but to others that came to seem mysterious. Then in the 1930s, Barnes, Ayer, and Stevenson proposed a way out: that moral terms not stand for properties at all, but have meaning of a different kind.' Moral terms, they proposed, are not used to make assertions that can be true or false, but to something else. According to Ayer, for example, what moral terms is to express emotions, and that is what gives them their special meanings. Here I too propose to explore and develop an analysis that is noncognitivistic. Mine, though, is not most directly an analysis of moral terms; I take up normative language of another kind. Philosophers sometimes ask what constitutes a rational course of action. Faced with a choice, we can ask what it is rational to or, in terms less high-flown, what it to do. Now this language seems just as puzzling as moral language. Should we think that being something it makes sense to do is a property? If so, what is that property? Suppose two people disagree, say, on whether it makes sense to pursue honor for its own sake. What is at issue between them? Various kinds of answers might be