Introduction
Quasi-realism, in Simon Blackburn’s (Reference Blackburn1984, 171) words is “the enterprise […] that […] tries to earn, on the slender basis [of expressivist theoretical resources], the features of moral language […] which tempt people to realism.” Quasi-realism is a prominent research program.Footnote 1 However, many complain that it is becoming increasingly unclear what exactly it involves: quasi-realism has become too much of a moving target to enable fruitful discussion about its merits, or so some argue. Hence, there is clearly a need for further clarifications of what this research project comes down to and what explanatory burdens it faces. This paper has two goals: first, to offer such clarifications. Second, to demonstrate why these clarifications are important and useful, how they work, and what they imply by using them to address a challenge pressed by Terence Cuneo (Reference Cuneo2020).
More precisely, I argue that we need to distinguish two distinct views that might be and have been bundled together under the label “quasi-realism”: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called.Footnote 2 These views are concerned with very different challenges and face distinctively different explanatory burdens. To give a brief outlook, conciliatory expressivism is a response to the challenge that expressivists should accommodate that normative and ordinary descriptive thought and language seem to share many features: normative statements seem to be assertions and normative judgments beliefs, it seems we can attribute truth or falsehood of normative thought and discourse, and so on. Conciliatory expressivism aims to show that this can be accommodated even if expressivism is true. Conciliatory expressivism, or so I will argue, is the only genuinely meta-ethical project falling within the quasi-realist research program. However, the scope of what conciliatory expressivism can be required to explain is, for principled reasons, narrower than what is normally considered to be within meta-ethics’ explanatory domain.
Quasi-realism, on the other hand, is, primarily, a response to a different challenge (though quasi-realists as expressivists will endorse some form of conciliatory expressivism). This is the challenge that normative thought and discourse seem legitimate in a certain sort of way—e.g., many normative judgments seem to have true answers, which do not just seem to depend on our attitudes, it seems that we can and do know some such answers, and so on. Quasi-realism aims to show that normative thought and discourse are legitimate in this way, even if expressivism is true. However, quasi-realism is not actually a genuine meta-ethical view; instead it needs to be understood as a first-order normative view. It is just that, again for principled reasons, certain sorts of explanatory challenges normally located in meta-ethics lie within the scope of this first-order view. The ways in which quasi-realists will discharge such challenges, though, will at least sometimes be different from the responses meta-ethical theories offer.
While this distinction can be found implicitly in the work of those working in the quasi-realist research program, the literature lacks a clear and systematic articulation of the distinction. This paper’s first contribution is to make the distinction explicit in a systematic fashion (i.e., to impose a systematic structure on the different remarks quasi-realists might make in one or the other direction)—to put it clearly on the table for others to directly engage with and to try to clearly define what explanatory burdens each part of the project involves. The paper’s second contribution is to demonstrate my clarifications’ fruitfulness by applying them to Cuneo’s recent challenge. Cuneo argues that quasi-realist expressivists lack the resources to plausibly accommodate certain data points. In response, I argue that my clarifications allow us to see that Cuneo’s challenge is based on mistaken assumptions about what explanatory burdens each part of the quasi-realist research program faces.
The paper proceeds as follows: section 1 introduces expressivism and the challenges the quasi-realist research program was developed to address. Based on those challenges, it distinguishes the two views that might be pursued within this research program. Section 2 presents conciliatory expressivism and section 3 quasi-realism in greater detail. Section 4 aims to support the fruitfulness of the distinction and the relevant clarifications surrounding it by replying to Cuneo’s challenge. Section 5 concludes.
1. Expressivism, two challenges, and the quasi-realist research program
All views in the quasi-realist research program are extensions of expressivism. As I understand it, expressivism subscribes to two theses: first, that the meaning of declarative sentences is explained in terms of the judgments they express. Second, that there is a fundamental difference between normative and ordinary descriptive judgments. Normative judgments play a nonrepresentational, directive role (regulating belief, intention, emotion), while ordinary descriptive judgments play a robustly representational role. So, on a toy expressivist view, e.g.,
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(1) Eating meat is wrong.
has its meaning in virtue of expressing disapproval of murder, where this disapproval is the judgment that eating meat is wrong.
The quasi-realist research program is concerned with certain commitments that seem to underlie our ordinary normative practice, but appear to be incompatible with expressivism. Its aims are to establish that these commitments actually fit with expressivism and to preserve their legitimacy. We can distinguish two distinct challenges based on such commitments.
The first challenge is that normative and ordinary descriptive thought and language appear to behave very much alike. In fact, on the surface, they look pretty much the same. These shared surface features include embedability, syntactic form, role in inference, and the like, but also that statements such as the following are intelligible:
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(2) Anna believes that Ben is a good person.
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(3) It is true that eating meat is wrong.
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(4) There are moral facts that are independent of what we think or feel.
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(5) If we think about it hard enough, we can come to know whether donating to charity is required.
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(6) I believe that abortion is sometimes permissible, but I might be mistaken.
On first sight, it seems that if expressivism was true, these statements would be nonsensical or otherwise confused. Indeed, this is what expressivism’s ancestors explicitly tend to entail. One challenge for expressivists is to show that this impression is false. Call this the descriptivists’ challenge. So, the challenge here is to account for all the trappings that normative and ordinary descriptive thought and discourse share. It is posed by those opponents of expressivism that believe normative and ordinary descriptive thought and language are fully alike (e.g., meta-ethical realists, subjectivists, constructivists, and error theorists).Footnote 3
Note, that the descriptivists’ challenge is not to show that the likes of (3)–(6) are true ([2] is different: to meet the descriptivists’ challenge [2] must be shown to be true). It is only to show that such claims are intelligible even if expressivism is true by giving an account of what people are doing when they make such claims. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that what needs to be captured are only claims that are plausibly coherent and meaningful in ordinary practice. One need not be able to capture what other meta-ethicists are saying.
The second challenge connects directly to the first clarification just made. After all, it might appear that some statements like (1), (3), (4), (5), and (6) are true. More specifically, it seems that certain commitments underlie our ordinary practice that pertain to it having a certain legitimacy: that some normative judgments are true, and objectively so, that we often know the answers to normative questions, and so on. These are commitments that it seems must be true if we are to take “normativity seriously” (to paraphrase David Enoch [Reference Enoch2011]). The challenge here is to show that one can preserve this kind of legitimacy of our ordinary practice even if expressivism is true. Call this the realists’ challenge because the legitimacy in question is the one most often associated with and championed by meta-ethical realist views.
When we consider the realists’ challenge, it is especially important to be clear about what needs vindication. Not every assumption that meta-ethical realists make is one that expressivists must vindicate. Again, only assumptions required for the relevant kind of legitimacy of our ordinary practice need vindication. While some assumptions made by meta-ethical realists might qualify, it is by no means clear that all do. Unfortunately, it is underexplored what the exact default should be, but we should be clear that there is room for pushback.
With these two challenges in view, we can distinguish two sorts of views that fall under the quasi-realist research program: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. Conciliatory expressivism is concerned with fully meeting the descriptivists’ challenge. Quasi-realism attempts to discharge the realists’ challenge. Which of these two projects those who call themselves “quasi-realists” have been pursuing and when is not always clear. Often the remarks of self-identifying quasi-realists are ambiguous in a way that masks this distinction and what project is being undertaken. Take, e.g., Blackburn’s (Reference Blackburn1993, 206) following remark:
Now if the projectivist adopts quasi-realism, he ends up friendly to moral predicates and moral truth. He can say with everyone else that various social arrangements are unjust, and that it is true that this is so. Once this is said, no further theoretical risks are taken by saying that injustice is a feature of such arrangements, or a quality that they possess and that others do not. The first step, in other words, is to allow propositional forms of discourse, and once that is done we have the moral predicate, and features are simply abstractions from predicates.
On one reading, Blackburn is only pursuing conciliatory expressivism: if we adopt minimalism about truth, properties, etc., then expressivism is compatible with talk and thought of moral properties, moral facts, etc. But he can also be read as taking a quasi-realist stance. The most problematic term here is “can,” which might mean either “it’s possible” or “we are entitled to.”
Note that the quasi-realist research program’s opponents often have also not made clear what part of the project they are attacking. Both practices are problematic because the views have very different tasks and commitments, as I will now argue.
2. Conciliatory expressivism
Conciliatory expressivism aims to meet the descriptivists’ challenge: it aims to show that expressivism is fully compatible with the trappings that normative and ordinary descriptive thought and language share, such as normative judgments being beliefs, it being intelligible to call normative judgments true, it being intelligible to say of normative judgments that they constitute knowledge, etc. One part of the project is to deal with the Frege-Geach problem and similar problems. While important, this is not the project’s part that I will focus on here. Instead, I will focus on a different part, which is to deal with claims that seemingly have theoretical implications at odds with expressivism. These are claims such as
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(2) Anna believes that Ben is a good person.
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(3) It is true that eating meat is wrong.
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(4) There are moral facts that are independent of what we think or feel.
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(5) If we think about it hard enough, we can come to know whether donating to charity is required.
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(6) I believe that abortion is sometimes permissible, but I might be mistaken.
How does conciliatory expressivism deal with this part of the descriptivists’ challenge?Footnote 4
A crucial realization underlying conciliatory expressivism is that when we are trying to see how claims such as (2)–(6) fit with expressivism as these claims figure in ordinary practice, there is no reason to let expressivists’ opponents dictate what terms such as “true,” “mind-independent,” “believes,” “knows,” etc. mean. Before the advent of the quasi-realist research program, it was an implicit assumption in meta-ethics that we must understand such notions in a representationalist fashion. For example, there’s a tendency to assume that the default reading of such notions has distinctively metaphysical implications. Conciliatory expressivists urge us to question this assumption. This is the first step of how conciliatory expressivists approach the relevant commitments: they note that we are dealing with the relevant notions as they figure in ordinary practice and so must resist presupposing any theoretically laden reading of them. Instead, they propose that when it comes to dealing with the relevant commitments, we need to understand them as theoretically uncommitted as possible and see different views as offering interpretations of those notions.
The second step is to offer interpretations of the relevant notions as they figure in ordinary practice on which (2)–(6) fit with expressivism’s commitments. A trusty instrument in conciliatory expressivists’ toolkit is the minimalist or deflationist package. For example, they might adopt a minimalist conception of belief on which a belief in the ordinary sense is just any mental state expressed by asserting a meaningful declarative sentence. If this was true, then expressivists would earn the right to sentences like (2) if they can show that expressivist normative judgments can be expressed by meaningful declarative sentences—another part of conciliatory expressivism.
This second step of how conciliatory expressivism deals with claims such as (2)–(6) thereby takes a distinctive form when it comes to those kinds of claims that are directly relevant for dealing with the realists’ challenge, i.e., claims such as (3)–(6). Here, conciliatory expressivists’ core strategy is to develop ways in which the commitments we undertake by using such statements do not go beyond what we already do when we use ordinary normative judgments like
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(1) Eating meat is wrong.
That is, the core strategy is to make judgments like (3)–(6) come out as normative judgments themselves and then to give an expressivist treatment of those judgments too. Here, of course, the minimalist or deflationist package is particularly helpful for a relevant range of judgments because, roughly, if one adopts a deflationary conception of truth, there is nothing more to asserting
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(3) It is true that eating meat is wrong.
than there is to asserting (1). In terms of a familiar distinction: the core strategy for dealing with claims such as (3)–(6) is to argue that the relevant terms in ordinary practice must be interpreted so that these claims should not be read as meta-ethical claims external to normative thought and practice, but instead as normative claims internal to this domain. Just to be clear, let me emphasize that conciliatory expressivists are not committed to dealing with all aspects of the descriptivists’ challenge in this way. Accounting for (2) or dealing with the Frege-Geach problem, for example, normally will not proceed along these lines.
The second step completes the conciliatory expressivist project with regards to claims such as (2)–(6) (of course, there is still a lot of work to do when it comes to actually completing that step). What the project shows, if successful, is that there is nothing incoherent or nonsensical about saying and thinking things such as (2)–(6) even if expressivism is true. Obviously, this has not done anything yet to show us whether claims like (3)–(6) are true (remember that [2] was different). But, conciliatory expressivism does not attempt to show this. And, it has good reasons for declining to do so. On conciliatory expressivists’ own interpretation of (3)–(6), they express normative judgments. But, as a meta-ethical position, conciliatory expressivism is not in the business of inquiring about their truth (or, at least, first-order neutrality is a well-known commitment of meta-ethical expressivism). In fact, because conciliatory expressivists are expressivists, their accounts of the distinction between descriptive and normative judgments will embody a strong commitment to Hume’s dictum (“no ought from an is”). As such, their meta-ethical accounts themselves entail that they will be absolutely silent on normative issues (see Köhler [Reference Köhler2014], where I explicitly draw this implication of expressivism’s commitments out). So, conciliatory expressivism qua meta-ethical position cannot inquire about the truth of these claims. What this means, though, is that at least some of the explanatory burdens people tend to locate in meta-ethics are not, actually, such burdens for conciliatory expressivists. While they might concede that the truth of (3)–(6) should be accounted for, they will resist having to give a meta-ethical account that does so, and also resist the assumption that their meta-ethical account has the burden of discharging this. Rather, they will insist that these burdens are located in normative inquiry.
Of course, one underappreciated aspect of conciliatory expressivism is that even if it does not address the realists’ challenge, it might still play a therapeutic role vis-à-vis some parts of it. Specifically, conciliatory expressivism’s picture might make some skeptical challenges to the truths of claims such as (3)–(6) look misguided or not very serious. For example, once we see that denying
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(4) There are moral facts that are independent of what we think or feel.
takes a moral stance (as prominently suggested by e.g., Blackburn [Reference Blackburn1993, 19–20, 153–58, 172–74] and Gibbard [Reference Gibbard1992, 164–66]) we might start to feel that such denial is fundamentally misguided. Here conciliatory expressivism does not establish the truth of these claims, but it might serve as a kind of Wittgensteinian therapy, letting us see that there is less to worry about than we initially thought. Similarly, once we see that judgments about normative facts are just ordinary normative judgments, we might think that worries about the queerness of normativity are misguided. In general, conciliatory expressivism has the potential to deflate the importance of certain skeptical challenges raised for the normative domain. In this and only this sense conciliatory expressivism could advance the issue regarding the truth of claims such as (3)–(6), even if it does not actually establish the truth in these matters.
3. Quasi-realism
Quasi-realism aims to fully meet the realists’ challenge. Given my description of conciliatory expressivism and its commitments, it should now be clear what quasi-realism’s nature is: quasi-realism is a thoroughly normative position.Footnote 5 What this means is that for quasi-realists, giving an account of the truth of claims like
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(3) It is true that eating meat is wrong.
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(4) There are moral facts that are independent of what we think or feel.
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(5) If we think about it hard enough, we can come to know whether donating to charity is required.
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(6) I believe that abortion is sometimes permissible, but I might be mistaken.
is a purely normative issue to be answered by the methods of answering normative questions, the most sophisticated forms of which are the normative disciplines such as applied ethics, normative ethics, first-order epistemology, and the like. This means that how this view will attempt to discharge the explanatory burden of showing that claims like (3)–(6) are true will sometimes be quite different from the way that certain sorts of meta-ethical theories discharge this burden. For example, on this view, how do we account for (4)? We show that for the best theories in normative ethics, the moral status of actions does not depend on the way we think or feel but on something independent of our attitudes. How do we account for (3)? By arguing that the best theories in normative ethics imply that eating meat is wrong.
Hence, discharging the relevant explanatory burdens will, for quasi-realists, be purely a project to be taken on in first-order normative inquiry. There will be no equivalent to certain sorts of metaphysical explanations offered by meta-ethical realists. And this is the reason why it is simply false that quasi-realism faces the same problems as meta-ethical realism—for quasi-realists the explanatory problems are of a different kind than they are for meta-ethical realists and require different kinds of answers. Note that all of this is explained by conciliatory expressivism’s account of normative thought and language; specifically, its treatment of the crucial terms involved in articulating claims like (3)–(6).
Note also that there will be a sense in which quasi-realists will hold that normative facts have certain sorts of explanatory powers—a point that will be relevant later on. For quasi-realists, there is no real difference between
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(1) Eating meat is wrong.
and
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(7) It is a fact that eating meat is wrong.
This means that the notion of a “fact” does no relevant explanatory work. However, it is compatible with (7) explaining things—it can explain anything that (1) could explain. So, saying that normative facts can explain certain things for the quasi-realist just means that we can invoke normative claims to explain the truth of other normative claims.Footnote 6 For example, quasi-realists will not deny that the wrongfulness of inflicting pain explains why it is wrong to torture animals. They also will not deny that what could explain that inflicting pain is typically wrong is that actions are wrong if and only if and because they fail to maximize utility (for expressivist-friendly accounts of explanation talk and thought, see e.g., Baker [Reference Baker and Shafer-Landau2021] and Berker [Reference Berker and Shafer-Landau2020]).
As I read it, few people who call themselves “quasi-realists” have actually undertaken the real quasi-realist project in a systematic and principled manner. Most of the time, a quasi-realist stance is taken or a suggestion is made in a relatively off-hand or superficial manner. Rather, most of the things that go under “quasi-realism” in the literature are plausibly read as versions of conciliatory expressivism. This is probably because self-identifying quasi-realists work in meta-ethics and, thus, focus on the meta-ethical part of the project. Note, however, that there is actually some relevant theoretical work to be done for those who subscribe to quasi-realism that is not, on first sight, extensively pursued in most existing first-order normative inquiry. Quasi-realists are committed to viewing certain quite abstract issues as normative issues, e.g., issues such as mind-independence, the determinacy of answers to normative questions, how we come to know answers to normative questions, and so on. However, even at the most fundamental level, the normative disciplines do not currently tend to pursue serious and systematic treatments of these sorts of abstract issues. So, too little work is being done pursuing these kinds of issues as first-order normative issues and determining what kinds of approaches this would make feasible (one major exception here is Matthew Kramer’s work [Reference Kramer2009]. Tim Scanlon [Reference Scanlon2014] has also made some relevant suggestions). Quasi-realists, who are committed to such issues being normative issues, therefore have some real theoretical work they should push further.
4. Putting the distinction to work
I think my distinction helps us understand and more clearly classify the different components of the quasi-realist research program and the respective commitments they entail. I also think that being clearer about the relevant explanatory burdens of these respective projects helps dispel worries that have been raised about the quasi-realist research program. To demonstrate, consider how this distinction helps us deal with Cuneo’s (Reference Cuneo2020) recent objection to expressivism.
4.a Expressivism: Thin and thick
Cuneo distinguishes between thin and thick expressivism, where the former is characterized as follows (Reference Cuneo2020, 221):
When addressing the metaethical question “Are there moral facts?” [t]hin expressivism employs a method of avoidance. Rather than answer the question, the view offers (inter alia) an expressivist account of moral thought and discourse of what it is to think or say that there are moral facts. Moreover, it holds that this account of moral thought and discourse “undercuts” (or legitimately avoids) any theoretical requirement to theorize about moral reality and our relation to it. Roughly, the idea is that, since moral thought and discourse are not in the business of representing moral reality, there is insufficient reason to posit or investigate moral facts and how we might be related to them.
Thick expressivism, on the other hand, is characterized as follows (Reference Cuneo2020, 222):
Thick expressivism […] employs a method of partial avoidance. Unlike Thin expressivism, the position directly answers the metaethical question “Are there moral facts?” in the affirmative. But in doing so, it avoids making any commitment to there being any moral facts as metaethical positions such as realism typically think of them, claiming that these facts are mere “shadows” of moral thought and discourse. Thick expressivism, then, makes no attempt to undercut or avoid any theoretical requirement to posit or investigate moral facts, provided that they’re understood along deflationary lines.
At first sight, this distinction might look similar to the distinction between conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism that I introduced above. However, there are important differences between them. As I will explain later, these differences help evade the problems that Cuneo finds with the views he characterizes.
First, while thin and conciliatory expressivism look similar, they differ in two important respects. The first difference is that conciliatory expressivism does not undercut any theoretical requirement to theorize about moral reality and our relation to it. Of course, here we need to be very careful how we understand “theorizing about moral reality and our relation to it.” There is one reading of this that is not already metaphysically inflated. On this reading, it is just theorizing about whether any things are right or wrong and how we find out about whether they are. Conciliatory expressivism does not imply that there is no theoretical requirement for theorizing of this sort. It implies, though, that this is not a meta-ethical requirement, but the work of normative inquiry, which finds its most sophisticated form in other philosophical disciplines than meta-ethics.
This highlights an important point of contention between conciliatory expressivists and meta-ethical realists: if we take conciliatory expressivism seriously, we must accept that it is an open question whether claims such as
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(8) There are moral facts.
(as they figure in ordinary practice) are themselves normative or meta-ethical claims. As such, we must start by reading the claims that are to be accommodated in a theory-neutral fashion. Note that this means that it is also severely misleading to label conciliatory expressivism “anti-realist,” especially if realism is connected to the assertion of claims like (8). Conciliatory expressivism is anti-realist only in that it rejects the philosophical positions of meta-ethical realists, not in the sense that it is committed to rejecting something like (8).
The second important difference between thin and conciliatory expressivism is this: it is not because “moral thought and discourse are not in the business of representing moral reality” that the latter stays out of “theorizing about moral reality and our relation to it.” Rather, conciliatory expressivism refrains from engaging in such theorizing due to two commitments: that the relevant sort of theorizing turns out to be first-order normative inquiry and that the gap between meta-ethical and first-order normative inquiry is sharp.
Thick expressivism and quasi-realism also bear some initial similarity. However, there is a key difference: quasi-realism takes the question “Are there moral facts?” (on the relevant reading) not to be a meta-ethical question at all. Furthermore, claiming that for quasi-realists moral facts are “shadows” of moral thought and discourse is misleading, because it creates the mistaken impression that quasi-realists are committed to some sort of mind-dependence view of moral facts. Again, for quasi-realists (who are conciliatory expressivists), there is no real difference between
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(1) Eating meat is wrong.
and
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(7) It is a fact that eating meat is wrong.
This is all it means to say that facts are “shadows.” But, of course, this does not mean that eating meat being wrong is a shadow of moral thought and discourse. With these clarifying remarks in place, let’s turn to Cuneo’s objections to thin and thick expressivism and my explanation of why these objections are evaded if we reject Cuneo’s distinction in favor of mine.
4.b Troubles for thin and conciliatory expressivism?
Cuneo’s objections to both thin and thick expressivism have to do with what he calls “core metaethical data” (or “core data”). These are “data that any satisfactory metaethical position must accommodate and explain” (Reference Cuneo2020, 223). For his purposes he introduces four data points (223):
Judgment Moral judgments have the marks of a descriptive belief: they are classificatory, truth-evaluable, apt candidates for knowledge, and apt for inference.
Practicality Moral judgments have the marks of a practical attitude: they are often directive and motivationally efficacious.
Mistake Not any response to a moral question will do; we can make moral mistakes.
Epistemic Achievements Some moral judgments enjoy epistemic achievements in the sense of being trustworthy, warranted, or justified.
Cuneo’s problem with thin expressivism is that it does not venture to accommodate claims such as Epistemic Achievements, but only meta-semantic claims, such as
Epistemic Achievements* Agents aptlyFootnote 7 think or say that some moral judgments enjoy epistemic achievements, such as being trustworthy, warranted or justified. (230)
Cuneo suggests that thin expressivists hold that they can substitute Epistemic Achievements* for Epistemic Achievements and so can still explain all relevant core data, even if they cannot account for Epistemic Achievements itself. Generally, he suggests that thin expressivists distinguish two types of core data: those they can accommodate directly, like Judgment and Practicality, and those they can accommodate indirectly by substituting them for meta-semantic claims, such as Mistake and Epistemic Achievements.
However, Cuneo thinks that this position is problematic: according to him (231), the core data “are supposed to be theory-neutral starting points of metaethical inquiry in the sense that they function as fallible, common currency among different metaethical theories, anchoring metaethical inquiry.” So, any theory that suggests that it need not actually account for one of them needs an explanation. Hence, thin expressivists need an explanation why they can rest at accounting for Epistemic Achievements* rather than Epistemic Achievements. But, according to Cuneo, thin expressivists’ available explanations are bad. He considers two, but here I will only present the one that conciliatory expressivists will also use.
That explanation is that how we understand a core datum depends on the meta-ethical view in question. For thin-expressivists, a datum like Epistemic Achievements would be a normative claim and so would fall outside of meta-ethics. This is why thin expressivism can stop at Epistemic Achievements*. Cuneo’s (232) problem with this explanation is that the “data are supposed to function as the theory-neutral starting points […] of metaethical theorizing. We determine the adequacy of metaethical theory by adverting to them, determining to what extent different theories accommodate and explain them (and how they do so, or whether they provide satisfactory explanations for not doing so).” Cuneo thinks that it is problematic for thin expressivists to rely on something like Practicality in their arguments against realism, if they resist accommodation of Epistemic Achievements on the basis of considerations about what would be the case if expressivism was true. After all, if this maneuver was available to expressivists, realists could do the same in response to challenges based on Practicality.
It should be clear that if there is an objection here, it would affect conciliatory expressivism just like it would affect thin expressivism. After all, conciliatory expressivism will also only account for something like Epistemic Achievements*, but not Epistemic Achievements. Conciliatory expressivists, however, have a good reply available to Cuneo. First, note that conciliatory expressivists would not substitute Epistemic Achievements* for Epistemic Achievements. What Cuneo seems to gloss over is that both Epistemic Achievements* and Epistemic Achievements need to be accounted for. In fact, accommodating Epistemic Achievements* is part of accommodating a datum like Judgment. However, conciliatory expressivists will hold that while they do need to account for Epistemic Achievements* it is not their job to account for Epistemic Achievements for the exact reason cited in Cuneo’s suggested explanation: for conciliatory expressivists, Epistemic Achievements is located in the normative domain. Given the sharp distinction they draw between the meta-ethical and the normative domain, conciliatory expressivists must hold that it is not their job to account for that datum. Note that conciliatory expressivists do not deny that Epistemic Achievements is something that needs to be explained. They just deny that their meta-ethical position needs to deliver this, i.e., that it is something on which their meta-ethical position hinges. So, how convincing is Cuneo’s objection to this move?
The problem with Cuneo’s objection lies in the assumption that the “core data” are the core data of meta-ethical inquiry.Footnote 8 Characterizing the data in this way already betrays that the set-up is not theory-neutral, because it suggests that any view would be mistaken on which it turns out that some of the data are located in another domain of inquiry. But, clearly, we should not assume from the outset that this could not happen. In fact, note that locating Epistemic Achievements in meta-ethics begs the question, for example, against views that would accept a naturalized epistemology on which the truth of something like Epistemic Achievements would be a thoroughly empirical matter—and so, the subject of some empirical discipline, not meta-ethics.
A better approach, I think, is to suggest that the core data are all data that need to be explained in some way or other (I think this much is common currency), with the default assumption being that they need to be explained by metaethical inquiry. However, this default is something that can be challenged, for example, if a theory implies that some core datum falls out of the meta-ethical domain. And this is the case for conciliatory expressivism. The interpretation conciliatory expressivism gives of Epistemic Achievements* entails that Epistemic Achievements falls outside the meta-ethical domain and that it is not something conciliatory expressivism qua meta-ethical view could account for. Note that seeing the situation like this does not undermine conciliatory expressivism’s ability to appeal to data like Practicality to argue against meta-ethical realists. After all, nothing in most meta-ethical realists’ accounts implies that Practicality falls outside the domain that they are concerned with (similarly for Epistemic Achievement). Hence, it seems to me that conciliatory expressivism can deal with Cuneo’s challenge to thin expressivism. So, let’s turn to his objection to thick expressivism.
4.c Problems for thick expressivism and quasi-realism?
According to Cuneo, thick expressivism must try to accommodate data such as Epistemic Achievements. This is because “when a position commits itself to the existence of facts of a given type, it is legitimate to raise questions about their character and how they interact with the core data” (2020, 236). However, Cuneo (236) thinks that a view like thick expressivism lacks the resources to accommodate core data like Epistemic Achievements, because as an expressivist view he thinks thick expressivism
denies that moral judgments are trustworthy, warranted, or justified because they accurately represent the moral facts. This follows from our earlier interpretation of the expressivist thesis that I called:
No Explanation When attempting to accommodate and explain core data such as Judgment, do not appeal to Moral Representation or Moral Facts. Rather, appeal to claims such as Attitude.
On Cuneo’s account, Moral Representation, Moral Facts, and Attitude are the following claims (224-25):
Moral Representation Moral thought and discourse represent moral facts. That is, they have moral representational content.
Moral Facts There are moral facts.
Attitude Moral thought and discourse are or express attitudinal states. These are states of commendation and condemnation that lack moral representational content.
Cuneo’s main objection seems to be that if one denies that moral facts have any explanatory role, one lacks the resources to explain something like Epistemic Achievements. For example, suppose that the thick expressivist tries to accommodate Epistemic Achievements by appealing to certain intermediate nonmoral facts that she can allow to have an explanatory role. To account for Epistemic Achievements, these intermediate facts then need to be correlated with the relevant moral facts and we need to be able to grasp this. And here expressivists lack the necessary explanatory resources because they endorse No Explanation, according to Cuneo (238):
[E]ither moral facts explain (at least in part) how an agent comes to understand that acts of torture or failing to maximize happiness are tethered to the moral domain or they don’t. If they do, then Thick expressivism cannot endorse this option, given No Explanation. If they do not, then the coincidence remains.
And, hence, Cuneo holds that thick expressivism simply lacks the theoretical resources to account for all the data it has committed itself to explain.
It should be clear that if there is an objection here, it would affect quasi-realism as I understand it just as it would affect thick expressivism. After all, quasi-realism is also committed to explaining data like Epistemic Achievements or Mistake or, for that matter to accommodating
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(8) There are moral facts.
However, quasi-realists have a reply to this objection. They can point out that the objection is based on a false assumption. Cuneo seems to assume that everything he subsumes under “core data” needs to be accounted for in the same way. This is what No Explanation indicates: on No Explanation all core data are to be explained by appeal to Attitude. But, this is simply wrong. There is a crucial difference for conciliatory expressivists and quasi-realists that cuts through the core data. Some of the core data are genuine meta-ethical data, while others are located in the normative domains. As we saw, this assumption is completely compatible with seeing the core data as the starting points of meta-ethical inquiry, at least as long this is understood in a genuinly theory-neutral way. But, if some of the core data are located in the normative domain and some in the meta-ethical domain, the ways we deal with the core data will have to be very different for conciliatory expressivists and quasi-realists.
While all expressivists will agree that the meta-ethical core data need to be accounted for by appeal to No Explanation, it is very clear that no quasi-realist will accept something like No Explanation for Epistemic Achievements. Most people working within the quasi-realist research program explicitly deny that we should explain something like Epistemic Achievements only by appeal to our attitudes. Rather, quasi-realists will try to deal with something like
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(8) There are moral facts.
or
Mistake: Not any response to a moral question will do; we can make moral mistakes.
or
Epistemic Achievements: Some moral judgments enjoy epistemic achievements in the sense of being trustworthy, warranted, or justified.
with the methods of normative inquiry, by appealing to normative considerations and the like. This is so, because for quasi-realists these kinds of core data fall outside the scope of meta-ethics and into the domain of first-order normative inquiry. However, within normative inquiry, there is no reason to assume that quasi-realists need to appeal to No Explanation to deal with the relevant core data.
To see why, let me highlight again that it is misleading to say that quasi-realists have to deny that moral facts play an explanatory role. On the way quasi-realists view moral facts, there is no real difference between
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(1) Eating meat is wrong.
and
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(7) It is a fact that eating meat is wrong.
As noted earlier, though, this commitment is perfectly compatible with moral facts playing certain explanatory roles. After all, anything that could be explained by (1) is something that could be explained by (8), and quasi-realists would not deny that (1) could explain certain things. Most importantly, (1) can play various explanatory roles within normative inquiry and it is exactly this explanatory role that quasi-realists will allow. After all, on my reading, quasi-realism is thoroughly embedded in normative inquiry. Hence, given that the relevant explanatory work for the quasi-realist is in normative inquiry, she has good reason to resist something like No Explanation and concede that in her domain moral facts can do relevant explanatory work.
So, the problem with Cuneo’s objection to thick expressivism/quasi-realism is quite similar to the problem that his objection to thin expressivism/conciliatory expressivism faced: he assumes that expressivists will use the same explanatory resources for all data points. But that assumption is false because the data points the quasi-realist is concerned with are normative data points for her, to be dealt with in normative inquiry.
How exactly would quasi-realists deal with these kinds of core data, though? Obviously, I cannot offer fully fleshed out answers here. But I will sketch how quasi-realists might deal with (8), Mistake and Epistemic Achievements. Although further investigation will be required to assess how convincing these answers are, these sketches should illustrate how quasi-realists would deal with the core data and lend prima facie plausibility to these moves. At the same time they show that Cuneo’s assumptions about how quasi-realists must deal with core data are mistaken (i.e., that they are committed to No Explanation when it comes to these kinds of core data that they locate outside of meta-ethics).
Start with (8). Regarding (8), quasi-realists will agree with so-called “relaxed realists” (see e.g., Dworkin [Reference Dworkin2011, 10], Kramer [Reference Kramer2009, 1], Nagel [Reference Nagel1986, 144], or Scanlon [Reference Scanlon2014, 20]) that (8) is itself a normative thesis. Their reasoning to this idea is as follows. On their account
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(7) It is a fact that eating meat is wrong.
is a first-order normative claim just like
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(1) Eating meat is wrong.
The claim
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(8) There are moral facts.
in turn, now states that some moral judgment such as (7) is true. Specifically, (8) states that some judgments in the domain of moral judgments are true, without making a commitment as to which exact judgments these are. Hence, one way to analyse (8) is to interpret it along the lines of an infinite disjunction of moral claims.Footnote 9 Given that, on such a reading, (8) is equivalent to a disjunction with only moral disjuncts, most plausibly (8) should be read as a moral judgment too.
How would quasi-realists argue for the truth of (8)? Unfortunately, this is a relatively unexplored matter, I suspect because most quasi-realists are quite confident about the truth of a significant number of moral claims and so are already quite confident about (8). And this, of course, highlights one way for quasi-realists to settle the truth of (8): by arguing in, e.g., normative or applied ethics that some judgments such as (1) are true. However, we might wonder whether there are any other ways for first-order normative inquiry to arrive at (8). After all, it seems possible to hold (8) to be true, independently of one’s commitment to judgments like (1).
Here is one way such an argument might proceed.Footnote 10 If (8) is false, no moral question has a determinately correct answer. So, let’s take two first-order moral theories: A, which implies (8) is true, and B, which implies (8) is false. As long as we have not made up our mind as to whether there are well-supported answers to moral questions, we should concede that both A and B could, in principle, be correct. However, there is still a way to rule out B via first-order moral reasoning: independently of what else we think, if we compare these two theories, it seems clear that the truth of A would be morally better than the truth of B. After all, moral deliberation is a central part of our deliberative lives, but if moral questions had no correct determinate answers we “would […] be left all alone with the moral conflicts we face” (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2019, 878). But, if A is morally better than B, it is difficult to see how B could still be the true moral theory. That is, B seems to violate an “important moral constraint on moral theories, such that a moral theory cannot be true if there is another moral theory which is morally better” (878). However, when we impose that constraint, we do not leave moral deliberation, so B would be ruled out from within first-order moral theorizing. But, the reason for which B is ruled out also provides a general first-order argument for (8). In fact, the same sort of reasoning supports the idea that a significant number of moral questions have determinately correct answers. And we can do all this while staying mostly neutral on the exact content of the true moral theory. Hence, this is the kind of reasoning quasi-realists could use to argue for (8) on first-order grounds without arguing for any particular moral judgment.
Next, turn to Mistake. Here you might think that one could simply appeal to the fact that people have moral beliefs that are contradicted by those of other people. Things are not so simple, though. Think about judgments about what is tasty: I think pumpkin is tasty; my son disagrees. However, that we have contradicting judgments does not entail that either of us has made a mistake. So, that people judge differently does not yet yield that people make mistakes. How, then, would quasi-realists accommodate Mistake? I think they’d use reasoning similar to Blackburn’s (Reference Blackburn1998, 318):
Of course there is no problem thinking that other people may be mistaken, or indeed are mistaken. Anyone thinking that kicking babies for fun is OK is mistaken.
The problem comes with thinking of myself (or of us or our tradition) that I may be mistaken. How can I make sense of fears of my own fallibility? Well, there are a number of things I admire: for instance, information, sensitivity, maturity, imagination, coherence. I know that other people show defects in these respects, and that these defects lead to bad opinions. But can I exempt myself from the same possibility? Of course not (that would be unpardonably smug). So I can think that perhaps some of my opinions are due to defects of information, sensitivity, maturity, imagination, and coherence. If I really set out to investigate whether this is true, I stand on one part of the (Neurath) boat and inspect the other parts.
Note that even to explain that other people are—or may be—mistaken, Blackburn is taking a first-order stance. His reasoning about “us” being possibly mistaken, then also proceeds (if read charitably, as he makes clear in Blackburn [Reference Blackburn2009]) along the lines of first-order normative deliberation: he uses considerations about what sorts of features make processes for forming and revising normative judgments admirable, i.e., how such processes could be improved. He then combines normative conclusions about how such processes could be improved with the acknowledgment that some of his beliefs would disappear after such improvement. Note that Blackburn (Reference Blackburn2009) would readily concede that improvements of the relevant mechanisms are those that are more likely to lead to true normative judgments. A claim he will likely argue—per reflective equilibrium—by appealing to certain normative facts, i.e., by making assumptions about what kinds of normative judgments can be presupposed as true and then calibrating his assessment of what features are admirable in belief-forming processes accordingly. And this is how a quasi-realist would accommodate Mistake, purely from within first-order normative inquiry.Footnote 11 Note that this treatment of Mistake might offer another way to argue for (8): rather than focus on individual moral judgments, quasi-realists might focus on processes of belief-formation and revision and argue that sufficiently improved processes will converge on answers to some moral questions.Footnote 12 Notice, though, that Blackburn’s reference to Neurath’s boat indicates that he thinks that none of these issues can be sufficiently answered while suspending belief in all normative judgments—a commitment that all quasi-realists as expressivists will likely share.
What about Epistemic Achievements? Here, the discussion of Mistake should help us see how quasi-realists would likely accommodate it. First, they will hold that our moral judgments enjoy epistemic achievements if they are formed in certain sorts of ways (this is itself a first-order normative assumption). They will then try to develop an account of what sorts of features judgment-forming processes need to have to produce judgments that enjoy epistemic achievements. Blackburn himself suggests some such features. For simplicity, though, let’s assume that the feature just is to be reliable in the following sense: it needs to result in more true than false normative judgments. However, for the quasi-realist, what makes processes reliable with regards to normative judgments is itself a normative question. After all, you cannot deliberate about it without considering what kinds of judgments the process produces and whether such judgments are true. But, the judgments you need to consider here are normative judgments, so you cannot deliberate about the reliability of the relevant mechanism here without deliberating about the truth of normative judgments.
So, just as in response to Mistake, the quasi-realist accommodates Epistemic Achievements by making some initial partial assumptions about where the truth lies on normative matters to “generate a tentative […] epistemology [of the normative], which in turn helps refine our sense of which of the initial assumptions are, after all, trustworthy, which in turn helps further our theory of [normative] truth, which allows us in turn to refine the epistemology, and so on” (Sinclair Reference Sinclair and Shafer-Landau2018, 114). Quasi-realists will argue that at the end of such normative inquiry we will have the full account of reliable processes for forming and revising normative judgments that will allow us to fully account for Epistemic Achievements. Of course, quasi-realists might also hold that we already have a good grip on features that make processes better or worse and so might already be able to judge the epistemic status of some beliefs. Note that this strategy of dealing with Epistemic Achievements has independent credibility, as it proceeds along the same lines recently suggested as defenses against evolutionary debunkers (e.g., Sinclair Reference Sinclair and Shafer-Landau2018).
On this account, there is a relevant sense in which quasi-realists invoke normative facts to explain Epistemic Achievements: normative facts are invoked to explain what processes lead to judgments that enjoy epistemic achievements. But, the explanation is again a purely first-order normative explanation. Note that contra to what Cuneo (Reference Cuneo2020, 237) claims at some point, quasi-realists might even be able to say that there is a sense in which such beliefs “track” the normative facts. But, that is not a sense that would be incompatible with expressivism’s meta-ethical commitments, because the sense in which that is true is a normative one judged from within a normative perspective. While this might not be the sense that, e.g., meta-ethical realists think we need to invoke, it would be question-begging at this point to simply insist that we must invoke that sense to accommodate Epistemic Achievements. After all, it is quite plausible that a belief formed by reliable processes is trustworthy. And this is what the quasi-realist account delivers.
In fact, on the account on offer, the normative facts can explain “how an agent comes to understand that acts of torture or failing to maximize happiness are tethered to the moral domain” (Cuneo Reference Cuneo2020, 238). After all, to understand that torture is wrong is more than to just believe this. For a belief to amount to (true) understanding it must (at least) be true and formed in the right way. For the quasi-realist, this makes the question of whether someone has understood that torture is wrong itself (partially) a normative question.Footnote 13 More importantly, quasi-realists can hold that in order to explain when a belief is formed in the right way to qualify for understanding we need to appeal to normative facts in the sense sketched above. Quasi-realists qua expressivists only hold that to explain what it is to make normative judgments we do not need to invoke normative facts. But, they can concede that normative facts could be invoked to explain, e.g., when a normative judgment is justified—itself a normative issue. For example, they might hold that such facts need to be invoked to explain what sorts of judgment-forming mechanisms lead to trustworthy judgments in the manner I suggested above. However, such an appeal would not conflict with expressivism’s basic commitments, since all of these assessments happen from within the normative standpoint.
In conclusion, I take my discussion to support that establishing the relevant core data that are of concern to quasi-realism is by the lights of that project fully a matter of first-order normative and not meta-ethical inquiry. Thus, quasi-realists should have no issue appealing to normative facts in their explanations of the relevant core data, such as Mistake or Epistemic Achievements. Doing so, though, would not conflict with expressivism. After all, none of the kinds of explanatory roles such facts were assigned in the above quasi-realist accounts of the relevant core data would do so. Hence, quasi-realism can also evade Cuneo’s problem for thick expressivism.
5. Conclusion
This paper suggests that the quasi-realist mantle comprises two legitimate but distinct projects: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. The paper also explicated what explanatory burdens these projects face and how they would shoulder these burdens. Conciliatory expressivism aims to fully deal with the descriptivists’ challenge. The way conciliatory expressivists do this, though, importantly implies that at least certain questions normally located in meta-ethics are relegated to the business of first-order normative inquiry. Quasi-realism is the attempt to meet the realists’ challenge. However, quasi-realism is itself a first-order normative position and, hence, aims to deal with this challenge within normative inquiry. I have then used my clarifications to respond to a recent challenge by Terence Cuneo to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the distinction, as well as the different explanatory burdens that distinction highlights.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ben Ferguson, Mike Ridge, Christine Tiefensee, and two anonymous referees for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for helpful, encouraging, and constructive comments, conversations, or feedback.
Sebastian Köhler is assistant professor of philosophy at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Frankfurt, Germany. He works on meta-ethics, ethics, personal identity, and ethics of information technology.
