Fallibility for Expressivists

Abstract

Quasi-realist expressivists face significant difficulties in accounting for acknowledgments of moral fallibility, such as asserting a moral belief while conceding that one might be mistaken. Standard idealization-based analyses fail because they generate compositional anomalies and mistakenly deem coherent doubts about idealized agents to be contradictory. A superior alternative integrates moral expressivism with credal expressivism regarding epistemic modals. Under this credal analysis, acknowledging moral fallibility simply expresses moral uncertainty by assigning positive credence to the negation of a moral judgment. To reconcile moral credences with expressivist tenets, moral uncertainty can be analyzed via a framework combining plan expressivism with a reactive-attitudes account. While moral importance tracks the severity of targeted reactive attitudes, moral certitude corresponds to an agent’s degree of planning to adopt those attitudes. Whether developed through a cognitivist model of plans as action-guiding beliefs or a dispositional model grounded in modal features of intention, this framework accounts for the probabilistic coherence of moral credences. Consequently, expressivists can systematically explain both ordinary ascriptions of moral uncertainty and the linguistic reality of moral fallibility without abandoning non-descriptivist foundations. – AI-generated abstract.