Tuesday August 3. 11-1.00 W6A Room 127 Moral Attitudes for Expressivists Tristram McPherson (Minnesota Duluth) Metaethical expressivism takes moral utterances to express non‐cognitive attitudes. A natural question is: which attitudes? This paper offers an answer to this question on behalf of the expressivist. We first show that the task of offering an adequate answer to this question can seem impossible, because there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any such answer. We then show that this problem is an instance of a more general problem, which we call the specification problem, which applies with similar force to expressivism’s leading competitors. We suggest a solution to the specification problem that involves providing principled reasons for rejecting both a range of intuitions of ‘real disagreement’ and the underlying assumption that moral judgment must be characterized by a specific attitude or cognitive content. The first part of our solution is a sophisticated expressivist account, according to which, in paradigm cases, moral utterances express a complex but functionally unified state. The second part is an explanation of how the functional story that underpins this account explains and defuses the intuitive judgments that otherwise make the task of specifying the moral attitude seem hopeless. We conclude by showing that the sort of solution that we propose to the specification problem is very difficult for realist cognitivists to adopt. Surprisingly, then, despite appearing to be an intractable problem for expressivists, the specification problem turns out to support rather than to undermine expressivism.
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