ENR · Expressivism and Normative Realism

Expressivism and Normative Realism

Normative thought is both inescapable and puzzling. We cannot help pondering what we have reason to do, whether our acts are permissible, or what makes our lives go well. Moreover, our verdicts often carry objective force: most of us believe that genocide is wrong no matter what anyone thinks about it. Call "realism" the view that there are objective normative facts and many of our beliefs about these facts are true. When we examine normative discourse from a naturalistic perspective, however, we find it cannot easily be construed as representing any part of reality. Within a scientific conception of the world it is hard to find room for objective facts about the good, the right, or the rational. Moreover, our normative beliefs are subject to evolutionary and social influences that seem to have little to do with normative truths: our best science suggests that the function of normative concepts is to allow us to convey our emotions and attitudes in ways that influence other people and promote social cooperation, rather than to enable the discovery of normative truths. Thus, some philosophers have argued that our current scientific understanding of human psychology requires a reinterpretation of normative discourse: according to expressivism, normative claims express desire-like mental states, such as attitudes of approval and disapproval, rather than ordinary beliefs that aim to describe normative facts. These two perspectives on normativity— realism and expressivism—are in tension, yet each seems to capture something essential about normative thought: realism makes good on intuitions about truth and objectivity that seem non-negotiable from the engaged perspective of a deliberating agent, while expressivism accounts for the motivational force of normative thought and for the possibility of radical disagreement on normative matters. The primary objectives of this project were to produce three research papers arguing that expressivism and normative realism are fundamentally compatible, and exploring the philosophical benefits of this result.

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