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Metaethical Contextualism Defended
Gunnar Björnsson & Stephen Finlay
Short version (Finlay) for RoME 2009. Note that the Kolodny & MacFarlane paper is still work
in progress, and is discussed here with their permission. Please consult with them before citing.
ABSTRACT:
According to metaethical contextualism, by uttering the same ‘ought’ sentences different speakers
can express different propositions, because ‘ought’ is semantically incomplete and has one or
more open argument-places that can be filled in different ways. There are reasons to think that
‘ought’ claims are relativized both to (i) bodies of information, and (ii) standards (or ends).
Contextualism about information-relativity and contextualism about standard-relativity both face
parallel objections stemming from their treatment of our practices of disagreeing across contexts.
I argue first that contextualists can and should respond to Niko Kolodny & John MacFarlane’s
attack on contextualism about information-relativity by adopting a certain pragmatic strategy.
Then I show that structurally the same strategy is open to the contextualist as a response to
Weatherson’s attack on contextualism about standard-relativity.
According to one form of relativism about normativity, different people
commonly mean and say different things in uttering the same basic normative sentences,
like ‘X is wrong’ and ‘One ought to do X’. Metaethical Contextualism is the semantic
doctrine that terms like ‘wrong’ and ‘ought’ are semantically incomplete, and have one or
more open argument-places that can be filled in different ways, so that utterances of ‘X is
wrong’ and ‘X is not wrong’ do not necessarily express propositions that are
contradictory.
Gunnar and I are metaethical contextualists.1 We think we have a lot of good
reasons for holding this view, but since my time today is short, let’s not worry about what
those reasons are. What I’m interested in discussing instead is whether there is any
defensible way to be a metaethical contextualist, in the face of a group of objections that
have recently been pushed forcefully against contextualism by several philosophers.
These objections challenge contextualism’s ability to handle our practices of normative
disagreement.
I haven’t yet said what we take normative terms to be relativized to. Actually we
believe in two distinct forms of relativity: to information and to ends (although for
present purposes I will speak more vaguely and ecumenically about standards). On our
contextualism, therefore, any meaningful utterance of a sentence, ‘A ought to ’ will
express a proposition to the effect that A ought-relative-to-some-information-i-and-some1
I have defended a variety of contextualism about normative terms in my 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009.
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standard-s to . Parallel objections from disagreement are pressed against contextualism
about both standard-relativity and information-relativity. Since I have the good fortune
today to have Brian Weatherson as my commentator, I am going to focus on the
challenge against standard-relativity—since Brian has recently raised that challenge in a
particularly acute way. But to get there I will take a detour through informationrelativity. Here, the challenge to contextualism has so far been raised only by Niko
Kolodny and John MacFarlane, in work still in progress. My plan of attack is as follows.
First we argue that contextualists can and should respond to Kolodny & MacFarlane’s
attack on information-based contextualism by adopting a certain pragmatic strategy.
Then we show that structurally the same strategy is open to the contextualist as a
response to Weatherson’s attack on standard-based contextualism.
1. Information-relativity: deliberation and advice
When an agent deliberates to a conclusion about what he ought to do, it is generally
the case that this ‘ought’ is sensitive to the limitations of the agent’s epistemic situation.
But when advisors offer their advice as to what agents ought to do, these ‘oughts’ are
generally not sensitive to the agent’s epistemic limitations, but rather are sensitive to the
information of the advisor.
To use Kolodny & MacFarlane’s illustration,2 suppose that ten miners are trapped
together in one of two mine shafts, A and B, their lives threatened by impending
flooding. Agent does not know whether the miners are all in A or are all in B, and is able
to block either one of the shafts with sandbags, but not both. His evidence suggests that
if he blocks the correct shaft then all the miners will be saved, if he blocks the incorrect
shaft then all the miners will drown, and if he leaves both shafts unblocked then only one
miner (who is deepest in the shaft) will drown and the other nine will survive.
The appropriate outcome of Agent’s deliberation, it seems, is the judgment that he
ought to leave both shafts unblocked. A simple contextualist account can interpret this as
acceptance of the proposition that Agent ought-relative-to-Agent’s-information to leave
both shafts unblocked.
But now consider Advisor, who is privy to all Agent’s information but has
additional information that suggests that an attempt to block shaft A will fail, flooding
both shafts equally so that one miner will drown and nine survive, whereas blocking B
will save all the miners if they are in B but drown them all if they are in A, while if both
shafts are left unblocked then all will survive if they are in A but all will drown if they
are in B.
2
Adopted from Regan 1980.
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The appropriate advice for Advisor to offer, it seems, is the judgment that Agent
ought to block shaft A. A simple contextualist account can interpret this as acceptance of
the proposition that Agent ought-relative-to-Advisor’s-information to block shaft A.
What is the alleged problem for contextualism? We can distinguish two
challenges: a problem of practical integration and a problem of semantic assessment.
1.1 The Integration Problem
The problem of practical integration is that on contextualism, Advisor’s advice
doesn’t answer to the deliberative question with which Agent is concerned. Agent
deliberates over the question, ‘What ought I to do, relative to my information?’ while
Advisor gives him an answer rather to the question, ‘What ought I to do, relative to
Advisor’s information?’ Kolodny & MacFarlane observe that advice ‘is
characteristically intended to help the advisee arrive at the correct answer to the question
about which he is deliberating’. But on contextualism, Agent doesn’t need any help
answering his question, and Advisor doesn’t provide any. Practices of deliberation and
advice seem to come apart in a puzzling way.
This problem only arises for contextualism, of course, if the contextualist
relativizes the ‘oughts’ of deliberation and advice to different bodies of information. As
Kolodny and MacFarlane acknowledge, more sophisticated forms of contextualism are
less vulnerable. Contextualists need not understand normative judgments as inflexibly
relativized always to the speaker’s information, but can and should rather allow that they
can be relativized to bodies of information defined in different ways, as suits the
conversational purposes of the speaker. There are various ways of implementing this
idea. If Agent is in the company of others, such as Advisor, then it would be sensible for
him to see his practical problem as a shared problem, to be addressed through the
collective resources of his audience and himself. Plausibly, Agent’s judgment is better
interpreted as having the content that I ought-relative-to-OUR-information to block
neither shaft. But this judgment, relativized to the information collectively shared by (at
least) Advisor and himself, is false in virtue of Advisor’s information, and
straightforwardly contradicted by Advisor.
Kolodny and MacFarlane do not believe that this manouvre saves the
contextualist, because of the problem of ‘advice from unexpected sources’. Suppose that
after Agent reaches the judgment that he ought to block neither shaft, Physicist
unexpectedly lands in a helicopter, possessing knowledge that the miners are in fact all in
shaft A, and she tells Agent that he ought to block shaft A. This case presents the
contextualist with a dilemma: either Physicist is a member of the relevant group so that
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Agent’s judgment is sensitive to her information, or else she is not. Kolodny &
MacFarlane believe that contextualists face problems on both horns of the dilemma.
Suppose (a) the contextualist says that Agent’s deliberation and judgment was in
fact sensitive to Physicist’s information. Then Agent’s judgment was false, and K&M
suggest that he would have been ‘unwarranted and irresponsible’ in drawing it. For on a
contextualist interpretation of Agent’s judgment broad enough to encompass unknown
and absent people like Physicist, Agent would have no grounds for confidence that he
knows what the relevant body of information contains, and to reach any conclusion
would in his circumstances be unwarranted. But (as we agree) Agent’s judgment does
not seem unwarranted and irresponsible.
So suppose rather that (b) the contextualist says that Agent’s judgment concerned
a proposition that was not sensitive to Physicist’s information. Then we have the original
problem: it seems that Physicist’s advice does not address the question to which Agent
sought an answer in his deliberation.
We think that contextualists can embrace both horns of this dilemma. First, there
are plausible ways in which Agent could have intended to refer to a body of information
that included what Physicist knew. Consider as an illustration what we will call newssensitive contextualism. Faced with a practical problem, agents usually have a window
of time to conduct research and gather information before the moment when they have to
act. It is implausible, therefore, that the question a deliberating agent asks would be
‘What ought I to do, relative to my present information?’ More plausibly, deliberating
agents are concerned with what they ought to do, relative to something like the best body
of information they are able to acquire by the time when they must decide what to do.3
Since Physicist makes her information available in time, Agent’s judgment would then be
sensitive to it. While Agent would then have judged falsely, we disagree with Kolodny
& MacFarlane that he would have judged irresponsibly. It was perfectly reasonable for
Agent to have expected (mistakenly) that no information like Physicist’s would be
forthcoming in the short time at his disposal.
However, this solution obliges us to find a solution to the other horn of the
dilemma too. For on this contextualist account, the sensitivity of Agent’s judgment to
Physicist’s information depends on whether Physicist chooses to make it available.
Hence, Physicist makes Agent’s judgment false by making her information available. We
still need to explain how Physicist is helping Agent answer the question he deliberates
over.
3
Presumably this also cannot be exactly right. The right account will at least have to be sensitive to the
fact that sometimes a quick decision is preferable to a well-researched decision, for example. Note that
Gunnar and I disagree over how best to formulate news-sensitivity.
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It turns out, however, that this is everybody’s problem. It’s not at all plausible to
respond to this kind of case by denying that the truth of an ought-judgment like Agent’s
is information-relative. (As Agent well knows, what he ought to do given all the facts
both known and unknown is to block the shaft that actually contains the miners. But
knowing that shouldn’t stop him from reaching and acting on the deliberative judgment
that he ought to block neither shaft.) Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that it should lead us
to embrace the radical thesis of semantic relativism in place of (orthodox) semantic
contextualism: the thesis that although different ought-claims like those made by Agent
and Physicist express nonrelativized propositions (contra contextualism), these
propositions have different truth values for different assessors. The proposition that
Agent ought to leave both shafts unblocked is true as assessed relative to Agent’s
perspective and information, and false as assessed relative to Physicist’s perspective and
information.
But the move from contextualism to relativism does not help to resolve the
integration problem. Although Agent and Physicist are both interested in the truth values
of the same proposition, they are not now interested in the same truth value. Agent
deliberates with purpose of determining the truth relative to Agent’s information of the
proposition that he ought to leave both shafts unblocked, while Physicist advises him
rather about the truth relative to Physicist’s information of that proposition. Any
perceived advantage here to relativism over contextualism is therefore illusory.
We suggest that the solution to the integration problem lies in rejecting a basic
assumption underlying Kolodny & MacFarlane’s challenge: the assumption that the
fundamental aim of deliberation is to determine the truth of certain ought-propositions.
This assumption doesn’t take account of the fact that deliberating agents generally prefer
better and fuller information if they can get it. Rather, we suggest that agents’
fundamental aims in deliberating are typically the promotion and protection of certain
values or things that matter to them.4 In the mine scenario, Agent’s fundamental
concerns are for the preservation of each of the miners’ lives. Fuller information is
desirable to him because it increases the likelihood that he can make better decisions with
respect to promoting those values.
Given this view of the aims of deliberation, determining the truth of oughtpropositions relativized to particular bodies of information will be of derivative and
instrumental interest to deliberating agents. Deliberators seek to determine what they
ought to do relative to the best information available to them, simply because given their
epistemic situations, these propositions are the best guides available with respect to their
preferences. But should they become privy to new information, the former proposition
4
It is difficult to know exactly how to formulate these more fundamental goals precisely. It seems to me
that in order to avoid having the same problem reappear at this new level, these goals have to be plural.
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loses this derivative significance and becomes pragmatically moot. Deliberating agents
would therefore lose all interest in them, and abandon them for the question of what they
ought to do relative to the new, improved body of information.
Hence, Agent is fundamentally concerned to prevent the deaths of each of the
miners, and only has an instrumental interest in determining what he ought to do relative
to his own information. But he would be very much interested in acting instead on an
ought-judgment based on superior information. This is something that Physicist is in a
position to provide, and hence Physicist’s advice assists Agent address his fundamental
practical concerns.
1.2 The semantic assessment problem
Even if contextualists can explain how judgments of deliberation and advice
could be integrated, it doesn’t follow that this is how deliberation and advice are actually
integrated. Contextualism’s opponents maintain that our linguistic practices are
inconsistent with what contextualism predicts—particularly our practices of semantic
assessment, or responding to ought-claims with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, and our evaluations of
them as true or false.
Here we’ll have to make do with a single example. When Physicist unexpectedly
arrives, she might plausibly reject Agent’s claim that he ought to leave both shafts
unblocked by saying,
(1) No, you ought to block shaft A.
This looks like a problem for contextualism. If Agent’s judgment was relativized to his
own information, then it was true, and Physicist has no grounds for thinking otherwise. If
Agent’s and Physicist’s ought-claims are relativized to different bodies of information,
then they are not contradictory. But intuitively it seems that unexpected advisors with
better information often do disagree with agents’ ought-claims. For example, it would be
very strange for Physicist to say,
(2) Yes, that’s true. But you ought to block shaft A.
This supports the semantic relativist’s claim that the content of ought-claims is not
relativized to bodies of information.
News-sensitive contextualism can accommodate this point about advice, since it
identifies a common subject-matter. But a similar problem reemerges for any form of
contextualism from cases of mere evaluation or eavesdropping, in which the assessor is
unable to provide her information or advice. Suppose that Physicist is observing Agent
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over closed-circuit television, with no way to communicate with him. Hearing him
declare that he ought to leave both shafts unblocked, she might say,
(3) No, he ought to block shaft A.
Again, it would be very strange for her to say,
(4) Yes, that’s true. But he ought to block shaft A.
On its face, it therefore appears that semantic relativism treats our agreement and
disagreement with ought-claims more faithfully than even a sophisticated version of
contextualism does.
This objection against contextualism relies on a covert but significant assumption:
that appropriate assessment of a person’s utterance or judgment with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and as
‘true’ or ‘false’, is always assessment of the same proposition that the person asserted or
accepted. As an empirical matter, this assumption is mistaken. Consider,
(5) [A:] I think that Sally stole the money.
(6) [B:] ??Yes, that’s true, you do.
(7) [B:] Yes, that’s true, she did.
(8) [A:] I can’t believe how healthy John looks.
(9) [B:] ??Yes, that’s true, you can’t.
(10) [B:] Yes, I can’t either.
It is natural to respond to an utterance of (5) or (8) by offering an assessment of a
proposition other than that which (on an orthodox account) they literally assert. Often, as
with (5), the assessed proposition is also plausibly something that the speaker implicated
or in some other way expressed. But in other cases the assessed proposition is apparently
not plausibly anything that the speaker expressed. In the case of the assessment of (8), it
seems most plausible that the ‘Yes’ of (9) is meant as acceptance of the proposition that B
can’t believe how healthy John looks.
This observation may seem surprising, and calls for explanation. How could it be
that the salient proposition for the semantic assessment of people’s speech or mental acts
is a proposition other than that which they thereby asserted or accepted? We suggest that
propositions are selected for salience pragmatically, in accordance with the following
principle:
Pragmatic Principle of Assessment: The salient proposition for semantic
assessment of a speech or mental act is the proposition associated with that act
that has the most relevance for conversational interests.
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In the case of (5), what is of primary conversational interest is the truth of the proposition
that the speaker reports that he believes, and not the reported fact of his believing it. In
the case of (8), we suggest that by sharing his opinion in the mode of gossip, the first
speaker implicitly invites the other to reciprocate by sharing his own opinion on the same
subject.5 Of course, usually the most conversationally relevant proposition associated
with a speech act will be the original proposition asserted. But we see that this is not
invariably the case. In section 1.1 above, we found reason to think that it is often not the
case with ought-claims in particular.
Deliberators seek to form their decisions on the basis of the best information
available to them. Ought-propositions are therefore only conversationally relevant in
deliberative contexts insofar as they are relative to the best available information, and
once this is no longer the case they become conversationally moot. Assessment of these
original propositions then becomes pragmatically pointless, doing nothing to advance the
practical concerns motivating the conversation. After Physicist’s superior information
becomes available, for either Physicist or Agent to assess the original proposition
asserted by Agent—while lives are at stake!—would manifest a perverse fixation on truth
for truth’s sake.
When the informational context improves in this way, the original oughtpropositions thus lose their conversational relevance. But there are still relevant oughtpropositions, which are associated with sentences expressed by the agent’s speech act in
the following way: they are the propositions that the agent would have asserted had his
utterance been made in the new, improved context. The pragmatic principle of
assessment therefore predicts that if contextualism is correct, in contexts of advice we
assess previous ought-claims as if they had been made relative to the presently best
available information, and express agreement or disagreement with the now-relevant
propositions rather than the original propositions.
This pragmatic account supports what we like to think of as a ‘quasi-expressivist’
model of normative discourse. Since ought-propositions relative to the best available
information always provide agents with the best available bases for deciding what to do,
ought-claims with these contents have the conversational role of recommendations.
Recommendations have to be endorsed or rejected as new information becomes
available; even if Physicist does not reject any proposition that Agent accepts, she still
(more importantly) rejects Agent’s decision. (We find it significant that it would be
considerably more natural for Physicist to say, ‘No, don’t do that!’ than it would be for
her to say, ‘No, that’s false!’) The most efficient and convenient way of endorsing or
rejecting recommendations is to express agreement or disagreement with the ought-
5
For the connection between gossip and reciprocity, see Haidt 2006: 54.
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claims that play that conversational role. This is how the contextualist should understand
context-insensitive assessments.
The question remains, of course, whether we should prefer this pragmatic
contextualist model, or the rival relativist model, or some third alternative. In the longer
paper from which this talk is drawn, we go on to argue that this contextualist account is at
least no more radical and complicated than the relativist alternative.6 Here, however, I
will move straight to consider the largely parallel case of disagreement-based objections
to contextualism about standard-relativity.
2 Standard-relativity
Consider Huckleberry Finn’s belief that he ought to tell on Miss Watson’s
fugitive slave, Jim.7 Huck wrestles with this belief through Twain’s novel, and as readers
we reject it: it’s not the case that Huck ought to tell on Jim. Plausibly, Huck subscribes to
a different moral standard than we do. According to a contextualist treatment of
standard-relativity in normative judgment, it is possible that the propositions that Huck
accepts and we reject are different: Huck accepts the proposition that he ought-relativeto-standard-Y to tell on Jim, while we reject the proposition that he ought-relative-tostandard-Z to tell on Jim. As before, sophisticated contextualisms are possible that avoid
this result. But here we’re interested in exploring the options available to a contextualism
that accepts it—particularly in following the playbook we established in defending
contextualism about information-relativity—and so we shall assume for the sake of
argument that there is a difference of this kind between Huck’s moral judgment and our
own.
The cases of information-relativity and standard-relativity are analogous in that
each presents contextualism with both an integration problem and a semantic assessment
problem. A significant disanalogy is that whereas in the case of information-relativity
cross-contextual disagreement is supposed to tell in favour of semantic relativism, in the
case of standard-relativity it is supposed to tell in favour of semantic invariantism: the
thesis that normative (or at least moral) claims express nonrelativized propositions that
have nonrelative truth-conditions. We will argue that contextualism has resources to
explain this difference. As before, we first discuss the integration problem and then use
our solution to that to address the semantic assessment problem.
6
Contextualism seems to yield more accurate predictions for cases that have different pragmatic dynamics
(e.g. postmortem assessments and assessments from contexts of inferior information). Relativism can
accommodate these cases, but only by appealing a similarly complex pragmatic story, about how the
context of assessment is determined.
7
Weatherson’s paper discusses the similar example of Jefferson Davis’s belief that helping fugitive slaves
is wrong.
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2.1 Integrating moral disagreement
The integration problem for contextualism about standard-relativity is that
fundamental moral ‘disagreement’ would address the answer to a question different from
the one addressed by the original belief, and so it is hard to see how it can be genuine
disagreement. Moral judgment, like deliberation, aims at determining what ought to be
done, and so moral disagreement, like advice, presumably aims at correcting judgments
about what ought to be done. In our treatment of information-relativity, we denied that
integrating deliberation and advice requires identifying a shared concern about any
particular ought-propositions, because deliberators have a more fundamental interest in
the promotion of certain values. This is plausibly also the case with moral thought and
discourse: people who subscribe to moral standards are concerned about the values
underlying those standards. However, while deliberation and advice are typically
integrated by a shared conversational interest in the same values, fundamental moral
disagreements are presumably characterized by concern for divergent and conflicting
values. We must therefore look elsewhere to find what might integrate Huck’s and our
own moral beliefs in such a way to accommodate the intuition that there is some form of
disagreement here.
In moral dispute there is something that is of more fundamental interest to both
parties than the truth of any particular ought-proposition: the issue of what to do. As
expressivists from Charles Stevenson to Allan Gibbard have argued, conflicts in moral
attitudes need not involve contradictory contents; moral conflict characteristically
involves a disagreement in ‘attitude’ rather than a disagreement in belief. A conflict of
this kind exists between Huck and ourselves.8
According to contextualism, our moral judgments are relativized to the standards
to which we subscribe. To subscribe to a moral standard is (inter alia and in general) to
have a strong preference that people conform to it in their conduct. Even if our beliefs
strictly speaking don’t conflict with Huck’s, in combination with our subscription to
conflicting standards these beliefs place us in conflict over the practical matter of what to
do in situations like Huck’s. In virtue of his subscription to standard Y, Huck’s moral
belief commits him to favour telling on fugitive slaves. In virtue of our subscription to
standard Z, our moral belief commits us to oppose telling on fugitive slaves. Hence these
noncontradictory moral beliefs precipitate a disagreement in attitude toward Huck’s
action.
8
Is it a problem that Huck is a fictional historical character? We suggest that the typical purpose of
expressing moral disagreement with fictional and/or historical characters is to express our attitudes about or
settle what to do in situations like theirs.
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2.2 Standard-insensitive assessments
Even if contextualists can explain how dissenting moral claims could be
integrated, it doesn’t follow that this is how dissenting moral claims are actually
integrated. As in the case of information-relativity, contextualism’s opponents maintain
that it is inconsistent with our practices of semantic assessment in moral discourse. One
version of this objection is pressed by Brian Weatherson (2008),9 who directs our
attention to pairs of sentences like the following:
(11)
(12)
Huck believed that he ought to tell on Jim.
Huck knew that he ought to tell on Jim.
The belief report (11) intuitively seems true, and so the relevant standard here is
presumably Huck’s standard Y (being the standard towards which he has an attitude),
rather than our standard Z (with which Huck might even be unacquainted). As
Weatherson points out, however, we seem obliged to reject the knowledge report (12);
Huck couldn’t have known that he ought to tell on Jim, because it is false. It therefore
seems that the relevant standard here is our standard Z rather than Huck’s standard Y,
since it may well be that Huck’s moral standard really does require him to tell on Jim,
and that he is epistemically justified in believing it to be the case.
Weatherson argues that this combination of accepting (11) as true and (12) as
false is an unacceptable cost of contextualism, because it requires that normative terms
behave differently (pick out different standards) in knowledge reports than they do in
belief reports. Why is this a problem? The main reason he gives is that belief and
knowledge reports don’t diverge like this in general, so moral terms would be anomalous
if contextualism were true. We actually think this is false as an empirical matter;
epistemic modals sometimes display the same pattern. When Physicist learns about
Agent’s predicament, for example, she can sensibly assert (13) while rejecting (14):
(13)
(14)
Agent believes that the miners might be in shaft B.
Agent knows that the miners might be in shaft B.
Even if the pattern is not as general as Weatherson maintains, the problem can be
motivated in the following way. People’s beliefs are a subset of their attitudes toward
propositions. What people know is a subset of what they believe. So we would expect
that knowledge reports will concern propositions that the subject believes. Hence, ‘it
would be a real shock if some term t behaved quite differently in belief and knowledge
reports’.
9
Streiffer (2003) and Schroeder (2009) offer similar objections.
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I will now explain how contextualists can reply to Weatherson’s objection by
employing a strategy analogous to our treatment of context-insensitive semantic
assessments of information-relative ought-claims. As in the previous case, the challenge
is to explain why semantic assessment of another’s speech or mental act would address a
proposition other than the original proposition he asserted or accepted. The general form
of our explanation above consisted in (i) observing that the relevance of oughtpropositions to conversational interests is derivative on our more fundamental interest in
promoting our values, and (ii) proposing the pragmatic principle of assessment, according
to which salience for assessment of others’ speech and mental acts is controlled by
relevance to conversational interests.
In the case of fundamental moral disagreements too, it is plausible that the
relevance of standard-relative ought-propositions to our conversational interests is
derivative on a more fundamental interest in the promotion of our values; i.e. in agents’
conformity with the moral standards to which we subscribe. The truth of oughtpropositions relativized to other standards is irrelevant to this conversational interest. To
address the question of whether Huck was right to think that telling on Jim is required by
Huck’s standard Y, when the issue is how to act in circumstances like Huck’s, would
therefore be a perverse fixation on truth for truth’s sake, in neglect of what is relevant to
the purpose of moral thought and discourse. However, there is a relevant oughtproposition, which is associated with Huck’s utterance in the following way: it is the
proposition that Huck’s utterance would have asserted if it was relativized rather to the
standard Z to which we subscribe. The pragmatic principle of assessment therefore
predicts that if contextualism is correct, in contexts of fundamental moral disagreement
we assess others’ ought-claims as if they had been made relative to the standards to
which we subscribe, and express agreement or disagreement with these propositions
relevant to us rather than with the original propositions.
Unlike the information-relativity case, in fundamental moral disagreement the
different parties have divergent and conflicting conversational aims; they are contending
against rather than cooperating with each other. This would not lead to a breakdown in
communication, so long as it is mutually understood that each party to a moral dispute
has the fundamental concern of promoting conformity to her own moral standards, and
there is an implicit understanding of the pragmatic principle of assessment.
This pragmatic account supports a ‘quasi-expressivist’ model of fundamental
moral disagreement. Just as ought-claims relativized to the best available information
have the conversational role of recommendations, so ought-claims relativized to the
standard to which a speaker subscribes will have the conversational role of prescriptions.
Speakers have a pressing interest in endorsing or rejecting prescriptions, regardless of
whether they accept or reject any proposition that the other asserted. The most efficient
and convenient way of endorsing or rejecting prescriptions is by expressing agreement or
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disagreement with the ought-claims that play that conversational role. This is how a
contextualist can understand context-insensitive moral assessments.
We therefore propose the following answer to Weatherson’s challenge. In
reporting beliefs, our conversational interest is in conveying an understanding of the
subject’s attitudinal state. In the case of ‘moral beliefs’, these states involve two distinct
attitudes: (i) an ordinary belief in a standard-relative ought-proposition, and (ii) a proattitude of subscription toward the standard in question. We therefore interpret (11) as
ascribing to Huck a compound attitude of subscribing to some standard and believing that
this standard requires him to tell on Jim. But in reporting knowledge, we are in part
engaging in assessment of Huck’s attitudinal state. Since (as we have just argued)
assessing Huck’s moral belief is assessing a proposition associated with his speech or
mental act that is relevant to our conversational interests, we assess the proposition that
Huck ought-relative-to-Z (i.e. our standard) to tell on Jim. Since that proposition is false,
we appropriately reject the knowledge report.
To be clear, we have not argued here that this pragmatic contextualism is correct,
merely that it is a line of defense available to the contextualist, following principles
derivable from how we’ve argued contextualism about information-relativity should be
defended. However, the resulting ‘quasi-expressivist’ model of fundamental moral
disagreement happens to be one that I have championed in some other papers over the
last few years.
References
NOTE: for a fuller bibliography, see our original paper at:
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~finlay/MCD.pdf
Stephen Finlay (2004), ‘The Conversational Practicality of Value Judgement’, Journal of
Ethics 8: 205-223.
_______ (2005), ‘Value and Implicature’, Philosophers’ Imprint 5 (4): 1-20.
_______ (2006), ‘The Reasons that Matter’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84: 1-20.
_______ (2009), ‘Oughts and Ends’, Philosophical Studies 143: 315-40.
Jonathan Haidt (2006), The Happiness Hypothesis. Basic Books.
Niko Kolodny & John MacFarlane (ms), ‘Ought: Between Subjective and Objective’.
Donald Regan (1980), Utilitarianism and Cooperation. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
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DRAFT (6-18-09); Please don’t cite without permission
Mark Schroeder (2009) ‘Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices’, Ethics 119: 257-309.
Robert Streiffer (2003), Moral Relativism and Reasons for Action. New York: Routledge.
Brian Weatherson (2008), ‘Attitudes and Relativism’, Philosophical Perspectives 22:
527-44.
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