Abstract
This essay develops James Lenman’s view that ‘‘moral inquiry is politics.’’ Unlike empirical investigation, moral inquiry is not connected with a domain of facts that exist independently of the inquiry and help explain its success. It is outward looking – your thought that slavery is wrong is not a thought about you – but confident moral beliefs are not best understood as receptivity to moral aspects of the world. Rather, they come from successfully negotiating, constructing and sustaining the rules of a moral community. Lenman’s picture entails an expressivist approach to moral philosophy in contrast to moral realism, but it also exhibits cognitively ample forms of approval and disapproval that expressivists have not very fully explored. In order to frame the cognitive richness of practical deliberation, the first part of this discussion sets out important metaethical parameters. In particular it surveys differences between semantic and epistemic conceptions of truth in connection with determining and justifying reasons for belief. They suggest a case for saying that when philosophers speak of normative truth they can only demonstrate reasonableness. The second part of the discussion supports this case by displaying the advantages of focussing upon reasonableness. It supports locating a cognitivist expressivism between the extremes of normative realism and non-cognitivism where the weaknesses of standard expressivism can be avoided. The benefits include better understanding and potentially addressing many of the ethical and political issues that arise in morally engaged societies. Practical inquiry is inherently subject to disputes that go unsettled, making it dubious that ‘‘We may, and must, assume our opinion to be true for the guidance of our own conduct.’’ By preferring to make
Highlights
This essay develops James Lenman’s view that ‘‘moral inquiry is politics.’’1 Unlike empirical investigation, moral inquiry is not connected with a domain of facts that exist independently of the inquiry and help explain its success
In order to frame the cognitive richness of practical deliberation, the first part of this discussion sets out important metaethical parameters
Emotional thinking is neither sentient nor ideally rational, marking ground between these modes of awareness that should be open to explication by a form of cognitivist emotivism or expressivism
Summary
Following Lenman, let us call normative beliefs ‘‘intuitions’’ in broad contrast to beliefs that arise from factual observation. If considering slavery hateful is not justified by reference to a demonstrable reality, differences of moral and political belief have to be managed through reasonable deliberation It is this concept rather than meaning that requires further explication, and because that account will include the role of determining properties the third defining condition of non-cognitivism has to be qualified. In contrast to ‘‘Slavery is wrong,’’ with which we expect reasonable people in a liberal society to concur, we may comprehensibly hesitate to say, ‘‘It is true that slavery is wrong’’ unless we wish to make an anodyne semantic point or recognize an example of special declarative language whose most famous example is, ‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal....’’24 There is, in short, a prima facie case for supposing that distinctively moral and political deliberation and judgment insist less upon truth than upon reasonableness
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