How Ecumenical Expressivism Confuses the Trivial and the Substantive

Abstract

Ecumenical expressivism models normative judgments as hybrid mental states combining a non-cognitive attitude of approval toward actions exhibiting a particular property with a belief that an action possesses that property. This architecture renders the theory incapable of distinguishing between the endorsement of certain substantive normative principles and trivial logical truths. Specifically, for an agent whose approval is elicited by a given property, judging that an action is right if and only if it possesses that property is constituted by the exact same combination of non-cognitive attitude and belief as judging that an action is right if and only if it is right. Consequently, the framework cannot account for rational differences in confidence, justification, or cognitive significance between trivial tautologies and substantive moral commitments. This difficulty generalizes across Plain Vanilla, Ideal Advisor, and Standards-Based variants of the view. Attempts to resolve the conflation by positing distinct modes of presentation, invoking modal differences in constitution, or modifying the predicate substitution procedure either fail or merely recreate the problem at another level. Because the uniform substitution mechanism generating this issue is essential to how ecumenical expressivism resolves the Frege-Geach problem, the theory cannot readily resolve the dilemma without relinquishing its core meta-semantic explanatory power. – AI-generated abstract.