Linguistic Intuitions and Varieties of Ethical Naturalism

Abstract

Since the 1960s, linguistic philosophy has been out of vogue in ethical theory. A popular perception of this is that the shift to so-called substantive normative issues is due to the philosophic bankruptcy of linguistic problems about morality, or of linguistic methods for solving them. In a recent work, Gilbert Harman echoes this criticism of the older, linguistic tradition of meta-ethics (circa 1930-1960), while adding that the subsequent concern with normative ethics was induced or influenced by Quine's views in epistemology and philosophy of language, viz., his attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, and consequently, the rejection of any distinction between meaning and substance.' The thesis is presumably that linguistic moral philosophers, having assumed this distinction, too narrowly restricted themselves to a study of ethical language, or what often is disparagingly called mere semantics, refusing on general methodological grounds to cross the line, so to speak, into real moral issues. There is an immediate difficulty with Harman's, or the alleged Quinean, objection, for if in fact no line between meaning and substance exists, then presumably linguistic ethicists cannot be faulted for staying on one side of it. The initial point here is that, on the suggested Quinean view, one cannot formulate the objection by calling linguistic meta-ethics nonsubstantive and therefore trivial. A more cautious form of the objection would be that linguistic meta-ethicists unduly restricted themselves to what appeared to them as linguistic, non-substantive issues. The suggestion