Neglected Differences

One of the goals of my dissertation is to give a positive account of the difference(s) between moral judgments and descriptive judgments. As such, preliminary targets of mine include (i) philosophers whose account of moral judgment does not offer a positive account of any such difference(s), and (ii) philosophers whose account mischaracterizes the difference(s).

Examples of (i) include most contemporary moral realists, e.g.:

-the so-called “Cornell realists” and Peter Railton, who argue for realism by treating moral theory as a species of natural science

-proponents of the so-called “companions in guilt argument”, such as John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, who argue for realism by pointing out that the arguments for moral anti-realism, if accepted, equally well entail that some less-obviously unreal facts are unreal (such as color facts, or natural scientific facts)

-philosophers such as Kant and McDowell who, on the basis of moral phenomenology or the so-called “rule-following considerations”, argue against the Humean theory of motivation (and the anti-realism it is widely taken to imply) by rejecting the claim that there are no intrinsically action-guiding descriptive judgments

-advocates of “disciplined syntacticism” (such as Lovibond and Boghossian), the view that a judgment has truth-conditions iff it (a) has the syntactic features of paradigmatically truth-apt judgments (i.e., that it can be embedded in conditionals, etc.), and (b) its use exhibits sufficient discipline such that we can identify clear cases of correct and incorrect uses

Examples of (ii) include Simon Blackburn and Crispin Wright, among others. (More about them later.)