Or so the reference magnetist claims.One way of understanding Horgan & Timmons' famous Moral Twin Earth argument is in the following way. It seems to us that Earthers and Moral Twin Earthers disagree in a substantive way. But if metaethical naturalism is conjoined with a semantic theory entailing that Earthers and Moral Twin Earthers mean different things by their moral words, then it seems that the disagreement between them is merely verbal. The disagreement will be about the meanings of their words and not on the moral facts. But this seems to be the wrong result.Reference magnetism is a robust metasemantic theory that endeavors to provide the resources to a naturalistic semantics sufficient to account for substantive disagreements between Earthers and Moral Twin Earthers. Reference magnetists claim that some properties are so metaphysically elite (reality joint-carving) that they literally attract some of the terms of our language--without our ever needing to knowing it. If you're interested in knowing how reference magnetism from here accounts for how Earther and Moral Twin Earther can engage in substantive debate, please have a listen. Thank you for listening!
Among the moral realists there are moral non-naturalists as well and moral naturalists. The former claim, unsurprisingly, that morality does not reduce to natural facts or properties. The latter, on the other hand, claim that such a reduction (or a set of such reductions) is correct. In this episode, I focus on synthetic realism, which is a kind of metaethical naturalism that theorizes about moral phenomena in large part in terms of the methodologies of the natural sciences. I develop the view just enough to target it with the famous Moral Twin Earth objection developed by Horgan and Timmons at the end of the last century.
J.L. Mackie argued that moral sentences express beliefs but also that every such belief is false. This view is known as error theory, which has it that people are systematically mistaken about the truth of their moral beliefs. Mackie infamously developed arguments about the weirdness of morality, were it to enjoy objective existence. He also argued that widespread moral disagreement provides a significant challenge to moral realism. But Mackie's error theory has been challenged on many grounds. One challenge is that he should have been consistent in his trusting ordinary moral thinking.
In this episode, I discuss challenges to both Moore's Open Question Argument and to emotivist (non-cognitivist, more generally) metaethical theories. In response to the OQA, I develop a well known challenge that can be captured in slogan form: not all true definitions are true by definition. I show how the definition of 'water' supports the latter slogan and damages Moore's OQA. Then I discuss the oft-invoked Frege-Geach problem for non-cognitivist metaethical theories. According to this problem, non-cognitivists struggle to satisfy an eminently reasonable semantic constraint regarding the compositionality of complex moral sentences.
Philosophers like A.J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson argued that at least a major function of ethical language is for speakers to express emotions, not for speakers to express beliefs about the world. In this episode, I discuss Ayer's pure emotivism, his arguments for this metaethical view, and then I discuss Stevenson's attempts at improving Ayer's view. I call Stevenson's view an impure version of emotivism.
In his metaethical treatise Principia Ethica, G.E. Moore argued, among other things, that goodness is the foundation of ethics and thus of ethical theory. But he also argued that 'good' can't admit of definition and that the property of goodness is an irreducible, sui generis feature of the world. In this inaugural episode of Philosophy with Many Gaps, I discuss the arguments Moore provided for the semantic and metaphysical claims noted just above.