Contemporary Expressivism

Sophisticated non-cognitivism that explains moral language as the expression of planning or norm-acceptance while recovering its realist-sounding surface.

Definition

Contemporary expressivism is the family of refined non-cognitivist theories on which moral judgements express conative or planning states (e.g. acceptance of a system of norms, or plans about how to live) rather than represent moral facts, supplemented by accounts that earn the realist-sounding features of moral discourse.

Scope

This topic covers the post-1980s expressivist program that succeeds emotivism and prescriptivism. Gibbard's norm-expressivism and later planning theory, alongside Blackburn's quasi-realism, reconstrue moral judgement as the expression of states such as acceptance of norms or plans about how to live, while developing machinery to validate moral logic, moral truth-talk, and the appearance of objectivity.

Core questions

• What state of mind does a moral judgement express on the expressivist view?
• How can expressivism vindicate moral truth, validity, and objectivity without moral facts?
• Does expressivism differ in substance, or only in explanatory order, from realism?
• Can the expressivist account of disagreement and inquiry match the cognitivist's?

Key concepts

• norm-acceptance
• planning states
• minimalism about truth
• quasi-realism
• the problem of creeping minimalism

Key theories

Norm-expressivism

To judge an act rational or wrong is to express acceptance of a system of norms that permits or forbids it; this grounds an account of normative judgement and its role in coordination.

Planning theory of normative judgement

Normative judgements express states of planning — settling on what to do or feel — so that thinking how to live can be modelled as plan-laden states that nonetheless behave logically like beliefs.

Quasi-realist expressivism

Blackburn's projectivist expressivism aims to earn realist talk of moral truth, knowledge, and mind-independence while keeping an antirealist explanatory order.

History

Contemporary expressivism emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s as a response to the technical and explanatory shortcomings of emotivism and prescriptivism. Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990) and Thinking How to Live (2003), together with Blackburn's quasi-realist works, gave non-cognitivism the resources to model moral logic and objectivity, making it a leading metaethical research program.

Debates

Creeping minimalism

If expressivists can claim moral truth, facts, and knowledge in deflationary terms, it becomes unclear what still distinguishes their view from realism; this is the problem of creeping minimalism.

The logic of attitudes

Expressivists must show how logical relations among moral judgements follow from relations among the attitudes they express, the modern descendant of the Frege-Geach challenge.

Key figures

• Allan Gibbard
• Simon Blackburn

Seminal works

• gibbard1990
• gibbard2003
• blackburn1998

Frequently asked questions

How does contemporary expressivism improve on emotivism?

It replaces the crude idea that moral talk merely vents feeling with structured states of norm-acceptance or planning, and adds formal machinery to explain valid moral inference and moral truth-talk — features emotivism could not capture.