Abstract
There is a long-standing discussion concerning the nature of moral discourse. Multiple views range from realism—according to which moral discourse is closer to scientific discourse than to fictional discourse—to anti-realism—according to which moral discourse is rather closer to fictional discourse. In this paper, I want to motivate a novel anti-realist account. On this view, there are no moral properties or truths, neither mind-independent nor mind-dependent ones (i.e., anti-realism). However, moral cognition results from the use of higher order cognitive abilities with enough resources to grant moral discourse with all the features of a realist talk (i.e., cognitive quasi-realism). I defend this view based on empirical evidence on human moral development and by showing that the resulting account can meet the demands of robust moral realism. The paper concludes by placing the proposed view within the metaethical landscape by comparing it against other forms of anti-realism, most significantly against expressivism.
Highlights
Understanding moral discourse is a challenging task
I defend this view based on empirical evidence on human moral development and by showing that the resulting account can meet the demands of robust moral realism
Ref. [1] has offered a defense of the view that moral discourse is about “response-independent, non-natural, irreducibly normative truths, perfectly universal and objective ones, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct” ([1], p. 21)
Summary
Understanding moral discourse is a challenging task. Under the assumption that assertions involving moral terms—i.e., ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, and ‘right’—express some or other content several questions arise. Like other anti-realist accounts, this theory takes moral terms to be semantically empty. Unlike any other anti-realist account, this theory takes moral terms to have a genuine, truth-evaluable albeit non-semantic content. This content is understood as surrogate content, and is determined as the product of a non-linguistic, domain-general, cognitive mechanism closely associated to what cognitive psychologists have dubbed the “Theory of Mind Mechanism”. The paper concludes by classifying cognitive moral anti-realism as a form of quasi-realism and comparing it against its anti-realist competitors
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