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Expressivism

Expressivism is a metaethical theory positing that moral and normative statements primarily function to express the speaker's non-cognitive attitudes—such as emotions, desires, or endorsements—rather than to describe objective facts or properties in the world.^[1] This view, a form of non-cognitivism, contrasts with cognitivist theories like moral realism by denying that ethical claims are truth-apt propositions capable of being true or false in a literal sense.^[1] Instead, utterances like "Stealing is wrong" serve to convey disapproval or to influence others' attitudes, akin to exclamations of sentiment rather than declarative reports.^[2] The roots of expressivism trace to the early 20th-century logical positivist movement, particularly through emotivism, where ethical language was seen as evoking feelings. A.J. Ayer introduced this idea in his 1936 work Language, Truth and Logic, arguing that "ethical statements are expressions and excitants of feeling which do not necessarily involve any assertions," rendering them meaningful only in a non-propositional, emotive way under the verification principle.^[2] C.L. Stevenson advanced emotivism in Ethics and Language (1944), emphasizing its dual role in expressing attitudes and persuading others, as moral terms like "good" dynamically shift attitudes in ethical discourse.^[3] These early formulations addressed challenges like the lack of empirical verifiability for moral claims and the motivational force of ethics, avoiding commitments to mysterious moral entities.^[1] Contemporary expressivism has evolved to tackle embedding problems, such as the Frege-Geach issue, where moral terms appear in non-assertoric contexts like conditionals. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realist expressivism, developed in Ruling Passions (1998), projects attitudes onto the world to mimic realist discourse without positing objective moral facts, explaining moral truth-talk and disagreement through commitment to attitudes.^[4] Similarly, Allan Gibbard's plan expressivism in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990) analyzes normative judgments as expressions of acceptance toward systems of norms or "plans," integrating rationality and emotion in a naturalistic framework inspired by decision theory.^[5] These developments maintain expressivism's core while accommodating logical and semantic complexities, influencing debates on moral psychology and realism.^[1]

Core Concepts

Definition and Basic Principles

Expressivism is a metaethical theory that posits moral judgments, such as "stealing is wrong," primarily express the speaker's non-cognitive attitudes—such as emotions, desires, or prescriptions—rather than asserting propositions about objective facts.^[6] In this view, ethical claims do not describe mind-independent moral properties or states of affairs but instead serve to convey the speaker's motivational stance toward an action or situation.^[6] Expressivism thus falls under the broader category of noncognitivism, which denies that moral statements are truth-apt in the manner of factual assertions.^[7] A core principle of expressivism is that moral language functions to guide behavior, express feelings, or influence others, rather than to report truths or falsities as in cognitivist theories, where moral statements aim to correspond with reality.^[6] Cognitivist views, by contrast, treat moral judgments as belief-expressing claims capable of being true or false based on their descriptive content.^[7] Under expressivism, the meaning of a moral term derives from the non-cognitive mental state it expresses, emphasizing semantic ideationalism where attitudes, not propositions, constitute the semantics of ethics.^[6] For instance, the judgment "murder is wrong" is akin to exclaiming "Boo to murder!" in that it vents disapproval or endorses an aversion without committing to any descriptive fact about the world.^[6] Similarly, "stealing is wrong" expresses a prescriptive attitude urging avoidance, functioning more like a command or emotional outburst than a report of ethical reality.^[6] The roots of expressivism trace to logical positivism, particularly A. J. Ayer's emotivist account, which rejected ethical statements as cognitively meaningless because they lack empirical verifiability or analytic necessity.^[6] This foundational influence positioned expressivism as a response to the positivist critique, reframing moral discourse as expressive rather than declarative.^[6]

Distinction from Descriptivist Subjectivism

Descriptivist subjectivism, often termed simple subjectivism, posits that moral statements function as descriptive reports of the speaker's personal attitudes or psychological states, thereby rendering them truth-apt propositions capable of being true or false relative to those attitudes.^[7] Under this view, a moral judgment like "stealing is wrong" is analytically equivalent to a factual claim such as "I disapprove of stealing" or "stealing is disapproved of by the speaker," reducing ethical discourse to empirical assertions about individual feelings or beliefs.^[8] This approach, rooted in broader sentimentalist traditions, maintains that moral facts exist but are subjective and contingent on the agent's mental states, allowing for cognitivist treatment where moral sentences express beliefs.^[9] In contrast, expressivism fundamentally rejects this descriptivist framework by maintaining that moral claims do not describe or report attitudes but instead directly express them through non-cognitive mechanisms, such as evincing emotions, issuing prescriptions, or performing illocutionary acts that guide behavior.^[6] Pioneered by A. J. Ayer and Charles L. Stevenson, emotivist variants of expressivism treat ethical statements as akin to exclamatory expressions—"Boo to stealing!"—lacking truth conditions and instead serving to ventilate attitudes or influence others' sentiments without asserting facts. Later developments, such as R. M. Hare's prescriptivism, emphasize the imperative force of moral language, where "stealing is wrong" functions as a universalizable command rather than a descriptive report, preserving the nonfactual nature of ethics while avoiding reduction to mere psychological description. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realist expressivism further refines this by accommodating apparent truth-aptness in moral discourse without committing to descriptive content, focusing instead on the projective expression of attitudes. The distinction carries significant implications for metaethics. Descriptivist subjectivism, while preserving truth-aptness, encounters challenges such as extreme relativism, where conflicting moral judgments (e.g., one person's approval versus another's) amount to compatible factual reports about differing attitudes, potentially eroding the motivational or action-guiding role of ethics by treating it as inert description.^[1] Expressivism, by eschewing description altogether, better captures the prescriptive and motivational essence of moral language—moral claims compel action or express aversion directly—though it must address issues like embedding in complex sentences without descriptive semantics. For instance, in the subjectivist reading, "If stealing is wrong, then we should not steal" reports a conditional belief about attitudes, whereas the expressivist interprets it as projecting prescriptive force into hypotheticals, maintaining ethical guidance without factual commitment.^[7] This non-descriptive stance underscores expressivism's commitment to the autonomy of ethics from empirical psychology.

Historical Development

Origins in Noncognitivism and Emotivism

Noncognitivism emerged as a metaethical position in the early 20th century, serving as an umbrella term for theories that deny moral statements any cognitive content, such as truth or falsity, thereby rejecting the idea that ethical judgments describe facts about the world.^[10] Instead, noncognitivist approaches, including expressivism as a key subtype, analyze moral language as primarily expressing non-cognitive attitudes, such as emotions, desires, or prescriptions, rather than asserting propositions that could be true or false.^[11] This framework positioned expressivism to challenge traditional cognitivist ethics by emphasizing the expressive function of moral discourse.^[11] The roots of expressivism lie in the logical positivist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which applied the verification principle to demarcate meaningful statements as those empirically verifiable or analytically tautological.^[12] A.J. Ayer, in his 1936 work Language, Truth and Logic, extended this principle to ethics, arguing that ethical statements lack cognitive significance because they cannot be empirically verified or reduced to logical contradictions.^[10] Ayer proposed an emotivist analysis, viewing moral utterances as mere exclamations that evince the speaker's emotions or attitudes, such as approval or disapproval, without asserting any factual claim; for instance, declaring "Stealing is wrong" functions to express personal aversion rather than to describe a property of stealing.^[10] This emotive theory aligned ethics with non-propositional expressions, like commands or interjections, and influenced the broader noncognitivist tradition by deeming moral discourse non-truth-apt.^[13] C.L. Stevenson advanced emotivism in the late 1930s and 1940s, building on Ayer's foundations while introducing a more nuanced account of moral language's persuasive role. In his 1937 essay "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" and subsequent 1944 book Ethics and Language, Stevenson characterized ethical terms as having both descriptive and emotive meanings, where the emotive component expresses attitudes and seeks to influence others' attitudes through dynamic persuasion.^[11] For example, the term "wrong" not only conveys emotional disapproval but also functions to sway listeners toward similar disapproval, distinguishing moral disagreement as a clash of attitudes rather than beliefs.^[11] Stevenson's emotivism thus emphasized the "magnetism" of ethical language—its inherent link to motivation and action—marking a shift toward viewing moral statements as tools for attitude coordination within interpersonal discourse.^[13] Developed amid the peak of logical positivism in the 1920s to 1940s, these ideas laid the groundwork for later noncognitivist developments, including prescriptivist variants.^[11]

Evolution to Prescriptivism and Universalizability

In the mid-20th century, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, expressivism evolved from the emotivist frameworks of thinkers like Charles L. Stevenson, who emphasized the expression of attitudes to influence others, toward a more structured form known as prescriptivism. This shift, primarily driven by R.M. Hare, reframed moral statements not merely as emotional outbursts but as imperatives that prescribe actions, thereby emphasizing their directive force in guiding behavior. Hare articulated this view in his 1952 book The Language of Morals, where he argued that moral utterances function as prescriptions, akin to commands, expressing the speaker's intention to act in a certain way and to recommend that others do the same. Unlike pure emotivism, which Hare saw as overly focused on evoking feelings without sufficient logical structure, prescriptivism treats moral language as having an imperative logic that demands consistency and applicability beyond the individual speaker. For instance, saying "Stealing is wrong" is not just an expression of disapproval but a prescription against stealing, intended to guide conduct. A core innovation in Hare's prescriptivism was the principle of universalizability, which requires that any moral prescription be applicable to all relevantly similar situations, ensuring impartiality and preventing arbitrary favoritism. If one prescribes against lying in one's own case, the principle demands extending that prescription universally to anyone in a similar position, thereby imposing a rational constraint on moral judgment. This feature, detailed in The Language of Morals, transformed expressivism by combining the non-cognitivist emphasis on action-guidance with logical universality, making moral discourse more robust against charges of mere subjectivity. Prescriptivism offered key advantages over emotivism by addressing its perceived arbitrariness through these logical constraints, allowing moral judgments to express attitudes while incorporating rationality and consistency. Hare contended that emotivism's focus on emotional influence lacked the prescriptive punch needed for moral reasoning, whereas universal prescriptivism enabled genuine debate and deliberation by treating moral terms as both action-directing and logically binding. This evolution gained traction in the 1950s and 1960s, influencing metaethical discussions through Hare's lectures and publications, and extended into the 1970s with ongoing refinements in works like his 1972 essays on moral education.^[14] A significant debate arose in the 1960s regarding cultural relativism, to which Hare responded in his 1963 book Freedom and Reason by advancing universal prescriptivism. He argued that while individual or cultural prescriptions might vary, the universalizability requirement forces agents to consider impartial perspectives, rejecting relativism as incompatible with consistent moral commitment—for example, a culture's endorsement of slavery would fail under universal application, as no one could rationally prescribe it for themselves in similar circumstances. This response solidified prescriptivism's role in the 1950s-1970s metaethical landscape, bridging emotivist roots with a framework for cross-cultural moral reasoning.^[15]^[14]

Shift to Cognitivist Expressivism and Quasi-Realism

In the late 20th century, expressivism evolved from its earlier noncognitivist roots toward more sophisticated cognitivist variants, aiming to accommodate the surface-level features of moral discourse while preserving the core idea that moral judgments primarily express non-descriptive attitudes. This shift was bridged by R. M. Hare's prescriptivism, which introduced universalizability to handle logical embedding, paving the way for later developments that treated moral sentences as capable of minimal truth-aptness.^[16] Simon Blackburn played a pivotal role in this transition through his development of quasi-realism, first elaborated in Spreading the Word (1984) and further refined in Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993). Quasi-realism posits a projectivist account where moral attitudes, such as disapproval, are projected onto the world to simulate realist talk without committing to moral facts or properties. For instance, the term "wrong" expresses disapproval of an action, yet quasi-realism allows for complex embeddings like "if stealing is wrong, then it should be punished," by treating such constructions as commitments to consistent attitudes rather than truth-conditional propositions. This approach enables expressivists to "climb the mountain" of realist platitudes—affirming that moral claims can be true, false, or known—without descending into ontological realism.^[16]^[17] Allan Gibbard contributed to this cognitivist turn with his norm-expressive theory in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990), where moral judgments express acceptance of normative systems governing actions, feelings, and decisions. Gibbard's framework views moral language as a tool for coordinating social norms, akin to expressing feasibility or rationality in planning, thereby retaining expressivism's attitudinal core while allowing moral statements to function in logical and epistemic contexts. Like Blackburn, Gibbard endorses quasi-realism to vindicate realist-seeming features of moral discourse.^[18] Cognitivist expressivism, as advanced by Blackburn and Gibbard since the 1980s, maintains that moral sentences express attitudes but renders them truth-apt in a minimal sense, addressing challenges in embedding moral terms within conditionals, negations, or questions without reducing to full realism. This variant responds to pressures from moral realism by demonstrating that expressivism can mirror realist explanations of moral progress, disagreement, and justification through attitudinal consistency and projection.^[19] Central to these developments is minimalism about truth, which Blackburn and Gibbard adopt to argue that moral claims are true if they correspond to the attitudes they express, without requiring substantial truth-makers or correspondence to independent facts. This deflationary view of truth—where "'p' is true" simply asserts p—permits quasi-realists to affirm moral truths as assertoric commitments, sustaining the expressive function while aligning with ordinary moral practice. Ongoing work from the 1980s to the present has extended this to responses against realism, emphasizing how quasi-realism earns its title by quasi-fying realist commitments through expressive means alone.^[17]^[18]^[20]

Arguments Supporting Expressivism

Open Question Argument

The open question argument, developed by G.E. Moore in his 1903 work Principia Ethica, serves as a foundational critique of naturalistic ethical theories that attempt to define moral terms like "good" in terms of natural properties. Moore contends that "good" denotes a simple, non-natural, and indefinable property, irreducible to empirical or descriptive concepts such as pleasure, desire, or existence.^[21] He illustrates this through the "naturalistic fallacy," where equating "good" with a natural predicate fails to capture its unique ethical content.^[22] The logical structure of the argument hinges on the persistence of meaningful inquiry following proposed definitions. For instance, if one claims that "X is good" simply means "X is pleasant," the follow-up question "Is pleasure good?" remains substantively open and non-trivial for competent speakers, rather than tautological or senseless. This openness demonstrates that no naturalistic analysis can fully equate the moral predicate with its proposed referent, as the ethical evaluation retains independent force. Moore applies this test across various candidates, such as defining "good" as "what we desire to desire" or "what is normal," each time revealing the question's unresolved status.^[21]^[22] In the context of expressivism, Moore's argument underscores the irreducibility of moral terms to descriptive analyses, thereby supporting non-descriptivist interpretations where such terms function to express sui generis attitudes rather than to denote objective properties. Expressivists, as a branch of noncognitivism, draw on this to argue that moral utterances like "X is good" convey non-cognitive endorsements or prescriptions, evading the reductive pitfalls highlighted by the open question. This alignment bolsters expressivism by undermining attempts at descriptivist reductions, preserving the distinctive, attitude-involving role of ethics.^[23]^[24]

Argument from Moral Disagreement

The argument from moral disagreement contends that the persistent and often intractable nature of moral disputes—such as those concerning the ethics of abortion—undermines moral realism by suggesting there are no objective moral facts to be discovered or verified, but rather expressions of incompatible attitudes like approval or disapproval. These disagreements persist across cultures and rational agents despite shared non-moral information, pointing to subjective stances rather than empirical errors about the world. Expressivists respond by analyzing moral disagreement as a conflict of non-cognitive attitudes, where utterances like "abortion is wrong" serve to advocate for or against certain feelings or plans, rather than assert propositions that could be true or false. For Simon Blackburn, such clashes involve one party attempting to project and instill a commitment in another, as seen in quasi-realist accounts where moral language coordinates attitudes without requiring objective truth. Allan Gibbard develops this further in his norm-expressivism, viewing moral claims as expressions of hypothetical planning states, so disagreement reflects divergent norms for rational acceptance or rejection, often resolved through emotional or rhetorical persuasion rather than evidential reasoning.^[18] In contrast, moral realists must account for widespread disagreement by positing either systematic errors in judgment or the possibility of faultless disputes, both of which strain the idea of accessible objective moral facts; expressivism avoids this explanatory burden by denying the truth-aptness of moral statements altogether. Blackburn argues that realism's commitment to mind-independent values fails to explain why moral conflicts endure without convergence, unlike scientific disputes resolvable by evidence.^[25] Illustrative examples include cultural variances in attitudes toward honor killings, where some communities express approval as a defense of family honor while others voice condemnation as barbaric, not as corrections of factual mistakes but as divergent projections of value. Similarly, disagreements over vegetarianism often manifest as clashes between endorsements of compassion for animals and acceptances of traditional dietary practices, highlighting attitude-based expressions rather than disputes over objective properties of food or ethics. Gibbard emphasizes how these cases involve coordinating communal plans, where no side is "wrong" in a descriptive sense but incompatible in normative commitment.^[18] Blackburn and Gibbard's developments refine this argument within quasi-realism and norm-expressivism, respectively, allowing expressivism to accommodate the phenomenology of moral debate—such as appeals to reasons and consistency—while preserving the core insight that disagreement stems from attitudinal divergence, not ontological commitment to facts. This approach complements conceptual critiques like the open question argument by emphasizing the empirical intractability of moral conflicts.

Embeddability and Projectivism

Projectivism, as developed within expressivist theories, posits that moral properties are not features of the world that we discover but are instead projected onto it from our own attitudes, such as approvals or disapprovals. This projection enables expressivists to explain the apparent objectivity of moral discourse without requiring moral sentences to possess descriptive truth conditions, particularly in complex embeddings like conditionals. For instance, the sentence "If stealing is wrong, then we should not steal" does not assert a factual conditional but expresses a conditional attitude of disapproval toward stealing. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realist variant of projectivism addresses embeddings by simulating the inferential structure of realist moral logic through a logic of expressive attitudes.^[25] In this framework, embedded moral terms do not describe propositions but regulate attitudes in a way that mirrors logical relations; for example, the antecedent of a conditional embedding prompts acceptance or rejection of the consequent attitude under specified conditions, such as conditional disapproval if the antecedent holds. This approach allows quasi-realism to vindicate moral reasoning without positing genuine moral facts. Allan Gibbard's norm-expressivism complements projectivism by analyzing embeddings as expressions of higher-order norms governing attitudes toward plans or decisions. According to Gibbard, a conditional like "If stealing is wrong, then returning stolen goods is right" expresses a norm about coordinating attitudes, where the embedding specifies what one would plan or feel appropriate under the hypothetical scenario, thereby maintaining expressive content without descriptive commitments.^[18] These projectivist strategies fill a critical gap in earlier forms of expressivism, which struggled with non-declarative contexts, by permitting robust moral deliberation in hypotheticals and disjunctions while avoiding a slide into descriptivist subjectivism. A technical illustration is the disjunctive sentence "Either stealing is wrong or taxes are unjust," which, under projectivism, articulates a disjunctive attitude—disapproval of one or the other—rather than a truth-apt claim about moral properties. This mechanism underscores the evolution toward cognitivist expressivism, where expressive attitudes underpin the surface logic of moral language.

Major Objections

Frege-Geach Embedding Problem

The Frege-Geach embedding problem, named after logician Gottlob Frege and philosopher Peter Geach, originates from Geach's critique of noncognitivist theories in metaethics during the 1960s.^[7] Geach drew on Frege's principle that a proposition retains the same cognitive content whether asserted or embedded in non-assertoric contexts, such as conditionals or questions. In his 1960 paper "Ascriptivism" and further in 1965's "Assertion," Geach argued that moral terms must function descriptively to preserve logical relations when embedded, challenging views that treat them as mere expressions of attitude.^[26] The problem specifically arises for expressivist or noncognitivist semantics, which deny that moral sentences like "Stealing is wrong" assert propositions with truth values, instead positing that they express non-cognitive states such as disapproval or commands.^[7] When such sentences are embedded in complex structures—for instance, the conditional "If stealing is wrong, then it ought to be punished"—the expressive force appears to dissipate if moral terms lack descriptive content. For early emotivists, this creates nonsense: A.J. Ayer's analysis of "Stealing is wrong" as "Boo to stealing!" cannot coherently translate to "If boo to stealing, then it ought to be punished," as the interjection fails to contribute to the conditional's logical form.^[7] This embedding issue undermines the ability of simple noncognitivist theories to validate moral inferences, such as modus ponens applied to ethical premises.^[26] Consider Geach's example: From "If tormenting the cat is bad, then getting your little brother to torment it is bad" and "Tormenting the cat is bad," one should infer "Getting your little brother to torment it is bad." Without propositional content for "bad," expressivists cannot explain why this deduction holds without equivocation or ad hoc adjustments.^[7] Consequently, deductive moral reasoning and the logic of ethical discourse become untenable under such semantics. Historically, the problem was raised in analytic philosophy debates against emotivist accounts, particularly Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and Charles Stevenson's Ethics and Language (1944), which Geach targeted for conflating ascription of properties with expression of attitudes.^[26] Geach's objection highlighted a semantic inadequacy in these views, prompting scrutiny of how non-descriptive theories handle moral language in non-assertoric roles.^[7]

Illocutionary Act-Intention Argument

The Illocutionary Act-Intention Argument, developed by philosopher Terence Cuneo, constitutes a significant objection to expressivism by contending that the theory fails to account for the assertive nature of moral utterances as understood through speech act theory. Drawing on J.L. Austin's and John Searle's frameworks, which distinguish illocutionary acts—such as asserting, promising, or commanding—as performative uses of language tied to speaker intentions and social commitments, Cuneo argues that moral statements like "Torture is wrong" are intended by speakers to perform assertive illocutionary acts, thereby stating beliefs about objective moral facts rather than merely expressing non-cognitive attitudes.^[27]^[28] According to this view, expressivism mischaracterizes the illocutionary force of moral discourse by reducing it to the expression of pro- or con-attitudes toward actions or states of affairs, without any commitment to truth-apt propositions. Cuneo maintains that sincere moral speakers, under optimal conditions of reflection, intend their utterances to convey factual claims subject to norms of truth and sincerity, such as the wrongness of deliberate deception; this intention presupposes the existence of moral facts, which expressivism denies, leading to a contradiction in how moral language functions.^[27]^[29] A key illustration of the argument arises in contexts of moral disagreement, such as debates over the justice of certain policies, where participants treat opposing views as errors in asserting moral truths rather than mere clashes of personal attitudes. For instance, when one party claims "Torture is wrong" and the other disputes it, the exchange assumes shared truth conditions and the possibility of rational resolution, which expressivism's attitude-only semantics cannot adequately explain without collapsing into incoherence. This reliance on assertive intentions, Cuneo argues, reveals expressivism's inadequacy in capturing the normative structure of everyday moral communication.^[27]^[28]

Challenges from Moral Realism and Error Theory

Moral realism challenges expressivism by positing that moral statements describe objective, mind-independent facts about the world, a view that expressivists reject in favor of treating such statements as expressions of attitudes or emotions. Russ Shafer-Landau, a prominent moral realist, argues that expressivism fails to explain the apparent cognitive content and truth-aptness of moral discourse, which seems to track genuine properties rather than mere subjective responses.^[30] He contends that without objective moral facts, expressivism undermines the justificatory role of moral claims in reasoning and deliberation, reducing them to non-propositional endorsements that cannot genuinely conflict or converge on truth.^[30] This objection gained traction in the late 20th century, as realists like Shafer-Landau emphasized expressivism's inability to accommodate the intuition that moral disagreements involve factual disputes rather than attitudinal clashes.^[31] Error theory, advanced by J.L. Mackie in his 1977 work Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, presents a distinct ontological challenge by claiming that moral terms systematically presuppose the existence of objective values that do not obtain, rendering all moral judgments false or erroneous.^[32] Mackie argues that this queerness of moral properties—their categorical imperativeness and motivational force—indicates a metaphysical error in ordinary moral practice, which expressivism sidesteps by denying cognitive content altogether. Critics from the error-theoretic perspective accuse expressivism of quietism, as it avoids confronting the error in moral language by reinterpreting statements non-assertorically, thereby failing to explain why moral discourse appears committed to realism in the first place.^[33] This view ties into broader non-cognitivist debates, where expressivists are seen as evading the need to revise or eliminate erroneous moral commitments.^[32] A key objection uniting these challenges concerns expressivism's capacity to account for moral progress and convergence, which realists interpret as discoveries of objective truths and error theorists as persistent illusions.^[31] Expressivists, by viewing moral claims as attitude expressions, struggle to distinguish genuine progress—such as the abolition of slavery—from mere shifts in collective sentiments, lacking a standard beyond subjective endorsement. This issue intersects with motivational internalism, a doctrine often linked to expressivism, which holds that moral judgments necessarily motivate action; realists and error theorists argue this internal link presupposes nonexistent objective properties, further eroding expressivism's explanatory power. Debates from the 1970s through the 2000s, including responses from expressivists like Simon Blackburn, highlighted these tensions, with realists pressing for an account of moral ontology that expressivism cannot provide without collapsing into realism. In counter, expressivists occasionally invoke disagreement arguments to suggest that attitudinal clashes suffice for moral discourse's structure, though this does little to resolve the ontological divide.^[31]

Contemporary Applications and Variants

Expressivism in Aesthetics and Epistemology

Expressivism extends beyond metaethics to aesthetics, where it posits that evaluative judgments about art or beauty primarily express the speaker's affective attitudes rather than asserting objective descriptive facts.^[34] For instance, a statement like "This painting is beautiful" is analyzed as conveying the speaker's positive emotional response or pro-attitude toward the painting's sensuous qualities, rather than predicating an independent property of beauty in the object itself.^[34] This view draws on the idea that aesthetic discourse functions to communicate personal endorsements or pleasures, akin to exclamations of approval, thereby emphasizing subjective experience over factual representation.^[35] Hybrid variants of aesthetic expressivism refine this approach by combining expressive elements with minimal descriptive content, such as ascribing response-dispositional properties to the object that align with the speaker's attitude.^[34] In Jochen Briesen's speech-act theoretic framework, uttering "X is beautiful" performs a dual illocutionary act: asserting that X disposes observers under ideal conditions to undergo a positive mental state, while simultaneously expressing the speaker's own liking for X's appearance.^[36] This hybrid model addresses concerns about the truth-aptness of aesthetic claims by allowing them partial cognitive status without committing to robust realism about aesthetic values.^[34] In epistemology, expressivism applies to domains like epistemic modals and norms, treating statements such as "It might rain" as expressions of the speaker's credence or doxastic commitments rather than assertions about objective possibilities. Dorothy Edgington's contextualist semantics for epistemic modals and conditionals supports this by interpreting them as conveying degrees of belief or probabilistic attitudes, avoiding the need for hidden factual content. Matthew Chrisman's epistemic expressivism further develops this, arguing that epistemic judgments express practical commitments to inquiry or belief revision, paralleling metaethical expressivism in non-cognitivist terms.^[37] These applications highlight expressivism's advantages in handling non-factual discourses: in aesthetics, it accommodates the subjectivity of taste without positing elusive objective properties; in epistemology, it sidesteps realism about epistemic facts by focusing on attitudinal guidance for rational belief.^[37] Developments in the 2000s, including Benj Hellie's defense of expressivism for epistemic modals against contextualist rivals and Chrisman's integration of expressivist ideas into metaepistemology, underscore its interdisciplinary utility in explaining subjective evaluative practices.

Responses to Recent Criticisms

In response to the Frege-Geach embedding problem, quasi-realists like Simon Blackburn have developed protocols that allow moral discourse to participate in logical inferences without committing to moral truths or propositions. Blackburn argues that quasi-realist expressivism can mimic the inferential roles of realist discourse by treating moral commitments as commitments to attitudes that track consistency in a non-descriptive sense, thus avoiding the need for truth-conditional semantics in embedded contexts. This approach, elaborated in the 1990s, posits that expressions like "if stealing is wrong, then..." do not assert facts but express conditional attitudes, preserving the surface logic of moral reasoning.^[38] Expressivists maintain that their view naturally accommodates motivational internalism, the thesis that moral judgments are inherently connected to motivation. By analyzing moral terms like "wrong" as expressions of aversion or disapproval rather than descriptive beliefs, expressivism implies that sincerely judging an action wrong involves a motivational state, such as a disposition to avoid it. This link is seen as a virtue over externalist realist views, where moral beliefs might fail to motivate without additional desires.^[39] Recent criticisms have prompted hybrid forms of expressivism, which blend expressive and belief-like attitudes to address embedding and semantic issues. Michael Ridge's ecumenical expressivism, for instance, proposes that moral sentences express both cognitive states (beliefs about non-moral facts) and non-cognitive attitudes (like desires), allowing them to function in complex logical contexts while retaining motivational force.^[40] This hybrid strategy responds to objections that pure expressivism struggles with the descriptive content in moral claims, offering a middle ground that finesses Frege-Geach concerns without abandoning expressivist insights.^[41] Evolutionary debunking arguments, such as Sharon Street's 2006 challenge, question the reliability of moral intuitions by highlighting their evolutionary origins, but expressivists reply that these arguments pose no threat to their non-cognitivist framework. Since expressivism does not posit that moral judgments track independent truths, evolutionary influences on attitudes like disapproval are expected and unproblematic, unlike for realists who must explain why such origins yield justified beliefs. Quasi-realists further contend that debunking undermines realism more directly, as it reveals a tracking problem absent in attitude-based views.^[42] In the 2010s and 2020s, expressivists have defended their positions against critiques of global or broad-scope applications, particularly in meta-normative theories of reasons. Mark Schroeder, for example, has argued that expressivist accounts of normative reasons can handle weighing and aggregation without descriptive commitments, using attitude-based semantics to explain rationality constraints.^[43] Recent work also addresses objections to expressivism in epistemic and practical normativity, showing how it avoids circularity in justifying normative authority by grounding it in non-representational commitments. These developments fill gaps in earlier formulations, emphasizing expressivism's flexibility in contemporary debates over reasons and normativity. For instance, as of 2024, applications have extended to expressivism in the metaethics of AI alignment, where normative judgments in algorithmic decision-making are treated as expressions of designer attitudes toward ethical plans.^[44]

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[PDF] Emotivism and Internalism: Ayer and Stevenson
Prescriptivism holds that moral judgments are universal prescriptions or imperatives that express the decisions or wishes of those who make them. Reichenbach,6.
[14]
R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason - PhilPapers
It is argued that moral judgements are universalizable and prescriptive, and have an element of descriptive meaning. Moral judgements seriously intended must be ...
[15]
Freedom and Reason - R. M. Hare - Google Books
Bibliographic information ; Title, Freedom and Reason ; Author, R. M. Hare ; Publisher, OUP Oxford, 1965 ; ISBN, 0191607037, 9780191607035 ; Length, 236 pages.
[16]
Spreading the Word - Simon Blackburn - Oxford University Press
Free delivery 25-day returns> Philosophy of Language > Spreading the Word Remove. $74.00. Paperback. Published: 08 March 1984. 378 Pages | figures. ISBN: 9780198246510. Bookseller Code (06).
[17]
Essays in Quasi-Realism - Simon Blackburn - Oxford University Press
Free delivery 25-day returns17 June 1993. 272 Pages. 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches. ISBN: 9780195080414. Also Available As: Paperback · Paperback Cover. Paperback. $110.00. 17 June 1993. Access for ...
[18]
Wise Choices, Apt Feelings - Harvard University Press
This book examines some of the deepest questions in philosophy: What is involved in judging a belief, action, or feeling to be rational?Missing: expressivism | Show results with:expressivism
[19]
[PDF] Hybrid Theories: Cognitivist Expressivism - PhilArchive
Semantic properties of sentences (e.g., inconsistencies, entailments) are to be explained in terms of properties of attitudes conventionally expressed by uses.Missing: definition | Show results with:definition
[20]
[PDF] Blackburn's Wittgenstein: The Quasi-Realist - PhilArchive
I will rather concentrate on his reading of the following Wittgensteinian ideas: minimalism about truth, the relation between grammar and expressed commitments, ...
[21]
Principia Ethica, by George Edward Moore—A Project Gutenberg ...
We shall find that metaphysical writers seem to have failed to distinguish this primary ethical question: What is good? from various other questions; and to ...
[22]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/#NonNatOpeQueArg
[23]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/#Inf
[24]
Moore's Open Question Maneuvering: A Qualified Defense
§13 of Principia Ethica contains G. E. Moore's most famous open question arguments. Several of Moore's contemporaries defended various forms of metaethical ...
[25]
Ruling Passions - Simon Blackburn - Oxford University Press
Free delivery 25-day returnsSimon Blackburn puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve?
[26]
P. T. Geach, Ascriptivism - PhilPapers
Ascriptivism · P. T. Geach · Philosophical Review 69 (2):221-225 (1960). @article{Geach1960-GEAA, author = {P. T. Geach}, doi = {10.2307/2183506}, journal ...
[27]
https://philpapers.org/rec/CUNSWW
[28]
Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking
May 26, 2016 · Cuneo's new argument for moral realism is a positive argument rather than a defensive one, and it is a bold argument. Its consequences are ...
[29]
[PDF] A MORAL ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE O - Scholars Crossing
Mar 26, 2021 · expressivism, emotivism, quasi-realism ... Frege-Geach problem,182 Terence Cuneo's illocutionary act-intention argument,183 the problem.
[30]
Aesthetic Judgments, Evaluative Content, and (Hybrid) Expressivism
Jul 18, 2024 · Aesthetic statements of the form 'X is beautiful' are evaluative; they indicate the speaker's positive affective attitude regarding X.
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Full article: Aesthetic Evaluation and First-Hand Experience
Jan 28, 2018 · First, the acquaintance inference provides support for the expressivist idea that speakers express affective attitudes when they make aesthetic ...
[32]
https://philpapers.org/rec/MACEIR
[33]
Epistemic Expressivism - Matthew Chrisman - PhilPapers
Epistemic expressivism is the application of a nexus of ideas, which is prominent in ethical theory (more specifically, metaethics), to parallel issues in ...
[34]
Quasi-Realism, Negation and the Frege-Geach Problem - jstor
Expressivist analyses of moral language have been of considerable interest for some time. Examples include Ayer's and Stevenson's emotivism, Hare's.
[35]
Moral Motivation - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Oct 19, 2006 · Motivational judgment internalism, hereafter “internalism,” holds that a person cannot sincerely make a moral judgment without being motivated ...
[36]
Ecumenical Expressivism: Finessing Frege* Michael Ridge - jstor
However, hybrid views (like cognitivism itself) leave open the possibility that all nontrivial moral claims are false. John Mackie's error theory is compatible ...
[37]
Hybrid Expressivism: How to Think about Meaning
It argues that moral sentences have both descriptive and nondescriptive meaning where this should be understood within an expressivist framework.
[38]
[DOC] Download - PhilArchive
Be that as it may, it is on both sides clear that insofar as the plausibility of expressivist arguments remains an open question, the expressivist substitution ...
[39]
Expressing (outweighed) reasons: a challenge for expressivism
Jun 27, 2025 · Expressivists aim to account for our ordinary discourse about moral reasons, which involves the distinction between merely having a pro tanto reason to do ...