Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Moral expressivists think that moral discourse is best explained as expressing our moral attitudes, rather than representing the world around us. One common motivation for this view is the wish to account for the distinctness of moral discourse, while avoiding being committed to non-natural, normative properties. Recently, Shamik Dasgupta has argued that semantic realism is committed to normative non-naturalism. I use his conclusion to argue that the motivation for moral expressivism generalises and motivates global expressivism instead. This is the view that all discourses are best explained as expressing our attitudes rather than representing the world. The strongest objection to this conclusion is to deny that motivational internalism is true about the relevant discourse. I argue that if one accepts moral motivational internalism, then this objection fails, since a prominent objection to moral motivational internalism fails in the semantic case. Therefore, if one accepts moral expressivism for the reasons mentioned, one ought to accept global expressivism instead.
Author: Ribé, Madeleine
Institution: Umeå University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7112381871