Internalism and Speaker Relativism

Abstract

In this article I set out a reason for believing in a form of metaethical In rough terms, the reason is this: a widely held thesis, internalism, tells us that to accept (sincerely assert, believe, etc.) a moral judgment logically requires having a motivating reason.1 Since the connection is logical, or conceptual, it must be explained by a theory of what it is to accept a moral claim. I argue that the internalist feature of moral expressions can best be explained by my version of moral relativism, which I call speaker relativism. Like noncognitivist theories, my view builds into the very semantics of moral terms a connection to the speaker's motivating reasons. Unlike any noncognitivist theory, my account of the semantics is truth conditional; I offer an analysis of moral expressions which specifies the conditions in which sentences containing them are true on a given occasion of use. My theory differs from noncognitivism in that it presents a way in which tokens of sentences containing moral terms can be straightforwardly true or false. I argue that this difference is an advantage for my account. Speaker relativism is the theory that the content of (what is expressed by) a sentence containing a moral term varies with (is a function of) the context in which it is used.2 The content of a moral term itself depends on the most salient moral system in the context of use. Just what a moral system is, and which systems are most salient in a context, I shall explain presently. For now, let me note why I call this view a form of