2004: ‘Meta-ethics and the Problem of Creeping Minimalism

This is a paper about the problem of realism in meta-ethics (and, I hope, also in other areas, but that hope is so far pretty speculative). But it is not about the problem of whether realism is true. It is about the problem of what realism is. More specifically, it is about the question of what divides meta-ethical realists from irrealists. I start with a potted history of the Good Old Days. I. The Good Old Days It used to be easy to tell a moral realist from a moral irrealist. You could just ask, ‘‘Is there really such a thing as moral wrongness?’ ’ Realists of all stripes, from Bentham to Moore to Warnock, would all say, ‘‘Of course there is,’ ’ while irrealists (as we now call them retrospectively) from Mackie to Ayer say not. In the Good Old Days, there were two kinds of irrealists. Non-factualists like Ayer denied that moral judgments express any sort of proposition at all, while Error Theorists like Mackie insisted that they do express propositions, only uniformly false ones.1 Ayer’s radicalism was at the level of language, denying that simple declarative sentences play the linguistic role of stating facts or expressing our beliefs, and instead construing them as ‘‘simply evincing’’ our feelings, which, he famously stressed, ‘‘is not at all the same as saying that [we] have them’ ’ (Ayer 1971, p. 109). Mackie’s radicalism, by contrast, was at the level of ontology. The semantics of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong is essentially the same as the semantics of Principia Ethica. The difference is that Mackie doesn’t believe in that simple, non-natural quality that Moore (thought he had) put at the center of his metaphysics of morals. This distinction, between Mackie’s sort of irrealism and Ayer’s, is familiar and meta-ethicists have been fairly comfortable with it. Ayer said repeatedly that moral judgments cannot be true or false. When he said so, he had apparently forgotten his own view about truth, and later emotivists (or as we now generally call them, and as I will be calling them hereafter, expressivists) have tried to detach that part of th