A problem for expressivism

Language, Truth and Logic added expressivism to the inventory of substantive positions in meta-ethics, and the recent defences of versions of it by Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard have enhanced its status as a major position. 1 Ayer presented the doctrine as an improvement on subjectivism – that is, on the doctrine that ethical sentences serve to report attitudes of approval and disapproval – and it is widely supposed to be an internally coherent and interesting position. We argue, however, that there is a serious problem that expressivists, unlike subjectivists, have to face which has not been adequately addressed in the development of the doctrine. Expressivism is a bipartite theory. It holds, first, that ethical sentences lack truth conditions – they are not truth apt, truth assessable etc. – and do not serve to report anything that the speaker believes to be so. And it holds, second, that ethical sentences express certain distinctive pro and con attitudes, and express them without in any sense reporting them: without reporting them even in the broad sense in which ‘The present King of France is bald’ reports the existence of the King as well as his baldness. 2 The first clause is a negative, semantic claim; it denies that ethical sentences have truth conditions. The second is a positive claim: it informs us about the function – that of expressing attitudes – served by ethical sentences. The second, positive clause is supposed to underpin the first, semantic claim in the following sense. If ethical sentences reported the presence of