Motives for Moral Anti-Realism

Expressivism, or more generally moral anti-realism, is an area of tremendous philosophical endeavor these days, despite being counterintuitive to plain persons and a research program which has a history of making progress only at the cost of eliminating distinctions between itself and its rivals.  (OK, so I tipped my hand there.)  Why is it so popular?  What are the fundamental motivations behind it, and which is/are primary?  Or in other words, why do so many smart people think they can’t be moral realists?  I can think of four motivations, but I couldn’t say which is uppermost in people’s minds.  Since there are no doubt plenty of anti-realists who read this blog, maybe they can improve my understanding.

1. Naturalism.  Since the scientific world view contains no values, our moral discourse better not refer to any.
2. Motivational considerations of a broadly Humean sort.  Since moral commitments motivate and realist beliefs never do, moral commitments are not realist beliefs.
3. The agent-centered perspective.  We are agents and not merely spectators.  Moral realism gives us a false, spectatorial picture of moral thought.  Anti-realism gives us the true, agential (e.g. “planning-laden”) view of moral thought.
4. Realism ressentiment (operating at the Freudian level, if at all.)  It’s somehow distasteful/oppressive/square for there to be objective values which constrain the rightness of our choices.

Survey says…?  (And feel free to debate the merits of any of these motivations.)

Comments

[Jussi Suikkanen]

To put my cards on the table, I've always wanted to be a realist, but I'm finding myself defending various kinds of anti-realist views more often. I don't think that expressivist views are the best ones in the anti-realist camp but that is another question. I also feel more and more sympathy towards different kinds of naturalist, realist views. What motivates me towards the anti-realist side of things? Mainly the difficulty of understanding the 'strict' realist positions in the first place. I find it increasingly difficult. The stories I read about what the moral properties are supposed to be and how we are supposed to know about them all give analogies and metaphors that rely on good faith and usually are full of holes. If there was a comprehensible realist position, I'm sure I would be willing to endorse it wholeheartedly. I do find McDowell's position appealing but many realists don't.

Couple of other motivations result from supervenience and epistemological considerations. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

[David White]

Heath,

The options you offer seem to me to suggest a very simplified view of why people might reject realism as opposed to understanding more complex reasons they might have for accepting anti-realism. The last one of the suggestions is actually a borderline ad hominem, suggesting psychological reasons why anti-realists are unable to accept realism. The anti-realist's counterpart analysis of the realist would be to suggest that people have a psychological need to believe in realism that parallels the need some have to believe in religion. As Mackie puts it, "The denial of objective values can carry with it an extreme emotional reaction, a feeling that nothing matters at all, that life has lost its purpose."

Kant offers this self-diagnosis, "I inevitably believe in the existence of God and in a future life, and I am certain that nothing can shake this belief, since my moral principles would thereby be themselves overthrown, and I cannot disclaim them without becoming abhorrent in my own eyes." Kant admits here that his belief in realism is because it would be too awful to believe otherwise.

But most people - realist or anti-realist - will tell you that there complex reasons for holding the view they do that don't simply boil down to a single, simple reason. PEA Souper Michael Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism is a good example. He identifies five possible meta-ethical positions: non-cognitivism, subjectivism, nihilism, naturalism (reductionism), and intuitionism. He gives at length arguments against the four views he rejects (including one realist alternative) and, at even greater length, arguments for the one he accepts. There are many considerations which can't easily be summed up in a single line as the reason he is a realist (although if he thinks it can, I certainly would be interested to hear that from him). Similarly I don't think an anti-realist's reasons for holding the view he does can be in any one case boiled down to one line, let alone the reasons for anti-realists in general so easily being summarized.

It is odd to me that you put the question as "why do so many smart people think they can’t be moral realists?" First, it is not that they can't be realists, it is that they find arguments against realism compelling. Second, most (all?) realists find arguments against some forms of realism compelling, so even realists accept arguments against realism. Anti-realists might have some different, more general arguments that cut against any sort of realism (Mackie thought he had that), but all one needs to reject realism is to accept arguments that different realists also accept - perhaps just buying Huemer's arguments against naturalism/reductionism and buying naturalist arguments against intuitionism.

Or, just as realists think they primarily have arguments for a particular realist view and only secondarily arguments against other views, the anti-realist might think the issue is not "why can't I be a realist" so much as it is finding compelling positive arguments for a particular anti-realist view. Those arguments might be complex, and certainly will vary from one anti-realist view to the next.

[david killoren]

I think it would be useful for Heath to define or at least characterize realism. According to the way I would define realism, Kant most likely qualifies as a constructivist non-realist, but it seems David White wants to classify him as a realist. I don't know whether this is because David White interprets Kant differently than I do, or because he has a different understanding of realism than I do. A definition might help to avoid this sort of confusion, and so might make the discussion here a little easier.

[Mark Eli Kalderon]

Let me second David's remark that there are bound to be a plurality of reasons for adopting an anti-realist attitude towards morality. Nonetheless, I think that it is useful to divide these reasons into those that arise from considerations internal to moral practice and those that arise from considerations external to moral practice. Whereas motivational considerations and considerations about agential perspectives seem to be the former kind of reason, naturalism, as you characterize it, seems to be the latter kind of reason. Though even that can be a subtle matter, since a naturalist might draw attention to a special feature of the evaluative, say, that makes it somehow problematic that the evaluative has an intelligible place in nature. For what it is worth, my opinion, which I shall not defend here, is that the reasons internal to moral practice for being an anti-realist are more interesting than the reasons that are external to it. At least for a moral philosopher (though perhaps this last qualification trivializes the claim).

[Heath White]

David K,

The fact that no one has a good taxonomy in metaethics these days doesn’t help matters. Let’s say that an anti-realist, for present purposes, is one who thinks that moral judgments are not like ordinary beliefs and are more like ordinary desires or intentions (the “direction of fit” criterion). Claims that moral judgments are in some ways like both beliefs and desires we’ll count as anti-realist. That definition could be improved on, no doubt, but precision isn’t vital.

David W,

I recognize that many anti-realists’ assessment of their own reasons could be “there are a zillion considerations on both sides, and after weighing them up, I just come down on [some particular position on] the anti-realist side.” It could be that complex. But it might not be, at least for everyone, and at least for some kinds of considerations. For example, no one (yet) seems to embrace the naturalist line of reasoning I suggested. That’s at least a little informative. I also recognize that we could ask the same kinds of questions about realists, but that would be a different post.

Mark,

Thanks for the constructive suggestion. That’s the sort of thing I was looking for, to help me sort out my own thoughts.

[Dan Boisvert]

Hi Heath. Thanks for the post. You originally said this,

Expressivism, or more generally moral anti-realism…

and I was going to caution against conflating expressivism (a positive thesis about moral judgments) with anti-realism (a negative thesis about metaphysics). But then you said this:

Claims that moral judgments are in some ways like both beliefs and desires we’ll count as anti-realist…

so it seems as though you are aware that there are views that combine expressivism with—well, I was going to say "realism," but you are considering such views anti-realist. So, it seems to me that what you are really after is why folks would be expressivists.

The reason I find expressivism plausible has something to do with your third option. Moral judgment surely has *something* to do with pro- or con-attitudes. To me, the connection is so strong that I find that the notion of an amoralist (def., one who makes sincere moral judgments, but lacks the correlative pro- or con-attitude) to be conceptually incoherent. So I take this as strong evidence for expressivism. But you don't have to go all-out like me; that a change of attitude reliably follows in the wake of a change in moral judgment is sufficiently strong evidence, some think, for expressivism. A third reason is that moral judgments are normative, that is, they are intended, in the end, to guide behavior, and expressive or directive illocutionary acts, as opposed to assertive illocutionary acts, are usually far more apt to help achieve that objective. These are, of course, all defeasible reasons, but they should certainly carry some weight.

[Dan Boisvert]

Oh, by the way, do you (and do others) really think that expressivism is "counterintuitive to plain persons"?

[Michael Huemer]

I offer this characterization of realism, although it was disputed in another post:

Value realists think there are objective facts that make (some of) our evaluative statements true. For example, "Torturing puppies is wrong" is made true by the objective fact that torturing puppies is wrong.

How complex are the motivations for realism/anti-realism? As I think David White suggested, one might well answer Heath's opening question with a very long list of all the arguments that have been offered for realism, against realism, objections to those arguments, replies to those objections, etc. . . . And if we philosophers were purely rational beings, perhaps that would be the only appropriate response.

But here's why I don't think that's the most illuminating sort of response:

• Philosophers do not start out their intellectual lives as fully-formed philosophers, with worked-out metaethical (or other) theories. They start out as undergraduates, later evolving into graduate students looking for a dissertation topic, and only later emerging as professional philosophers with well-developed views.

• These proto-philosophers, in college and graduate school, already have *some* general sympathies in meta-ethics (or whatever field they're going to go into, but here let's just focus on metaethics), *before* having done the research, before having developed a specific theory or worked out elaborate arguments for it, before having read about alternative theories.

• Those general sympathies determine where the proto-philosophers direct their energies, where they look for arguments, e.g., whether they are *looking* for defenses of realism or of anti-realism.

• It's well-known that there exist competent, intelligent defenses of a great variety of meta-ethical views, both realist and anti-realist. Furthermore, of course one's initial sympathies and what one is looking for bias one's assessment of how good an argument is. As a result, pretty much *wherever* the protophilosopher goes *looking* for a defensible view, he'll find what he regards as one.
  In other words, if a graduate student decides to write a dissertation defending expressivism, say, then he will almost certainly "find" that there is at least one defensible form of expressivism, and he will almost certainly wind up for the rest of his career defending that. The probability that a graduate student deciding to write a dissertation on theory X, after doing the research, concludes that theory X isn't true after all, is almost 0.

• Therefore, the broad views that philosophers end up defending (e.g., "realism" vs. "anti-realism"--not the details, but the broad views) are almost entirely determined by their initial vague sympathies, prior to looking at the detailed arguments.
  Corrolary: the detailed arguments are almost entirely epiphenomenal.
  

I say something like this at the end of Ethical Intuitionism. Of course, this runs contrary to what we'd like to think about ourselves. But it's still true.

[david killoren]

I'm less sure than Michael H. that initial sympathies determine where a philosopher ends up. Here are three further factors that could diminish or eliminate the importance of initial sympathies:

1. Advisor bias: A grad student might have an advisor whose views differ from the student's initial sympathies. The student might find herself defending some or all of the advisor's views -- either because the advisor is persuasive, or because she thinks she must defend the advisor's views in order to succeed, or because she thinks things will be easier for her if she does, etc. In that case, the student's initial sympathies don't play much of an explanatory role.

2. Original contribution bias: A student might come up with a new line of argument for a view with which she did not initially sympathize. She might think that the new line of argument is more interesting or impressive than the arguments she would give to support the view she arrived to grad school having; so she might end up defending a view that differs from her initial or even current sympathies.

3. Attraction to perplexity: Someone might think that metaethical questions are genuinely perplexing, with seemingly good arguments on all sides, and this might be enough to attract her to metaethics even if she doesn't start out feeling strongly attracted in any particular direction.

[Jamie]

I wrote a dissertation defending moral relativism. I now doubt that moral relativism is true, though I still think it's worth taking seriously.
My dissertation advisor was (and is) a relativist, but I chose him because of my topic rather than vice versa.

Michael Smith also changed from being a kind of relativist, I think, though he didn't call it that.

[Kris McDaniel]

Hi Michael and David Killoren,

That is a pretty depressing line of thought you guys are pushing! (Doesn't mean that it isn't true, though.)

Michael: why do you think people have these "vague sympathies" prior to graduate school?

The way you guys seem to be spinning the story... well, it sounds like what views we end up defending and fully articulating is largely determined by non-rational (or irrational?) gut instinsts (Michael's suggestion) as well as social pressures and the desire to say something new and cool (David's suggestions). And that sounds pretty bad. Maybe even shameful.

Is this an accurate description of what happens?
In my case, the sympathies were not vague: I'm a hardcore moral realist, always have been, probably always will be. Torturing babies for fun is just wrong, independently of what anyone else thinks or feels about it, etc., etc.

There are cool and fun puzzles about how I know that torturing babies for fun is just wrong, independently of what anyone else thinks about it, but I do know it. And I knew it before I started taking philosophy classes in college. Maybe you did do?

So I am a little unhappy with how you represent the progression through graduate school. In my case, and I suspect for many others, things went like this:

I started off prior to intensively studying philosophy in college and graduate school knowing that certain things were wrong, and that they were wrong independently of what anybody thought or felt. In college and graduate school, I had a finite amount of time, and so I couldn't read everything that was of interest to me. I was aware that people wrote whole books and long articles defending views I antecedently knew to be false. These works looked pretty interesting, but if you need to cut something from the reading list, defenses of views antecdently known to be false seems reasonable. Sometimes I would come across a cool or interesting challeng to my moral realism, and I would try to figure out how to answer the challenge. (Sometimes I came across cool and interesting challenges to the claim that there are tables, and I tried to figure out how best to respond to the challeng.) Since I knew the conclusion was false, I wasn't going to be convinced by the challenge -- but it was still worthwhile, and fun, and perhaps illuminating to figure out where the challenge went wrong, i.e., to diagnose the flaw in the argument.

So I didn't start with "vague sympathies." I started with some concrete, first-order moral knowledge, and some concrete, meta-ethical knowledge about the first order judgments. A lot of our anti-realist colleagues will be unhappy with my way of describing my situation; I understand this, and respect them -- but I'm going to stick to my guns and stand by this description.

Michael: Given your own meta-ethical views, do you think I am not entitled to describe my situation in this way? (I have purchased your newest book, but it hasn't arrived yet, so forgive me if you discuss this in the book.)

[Andrew Howat]

Perhaps this is clash of intuitions territory but I found your 1, 2 and 3 to be pretty powerful motivations (I don't think I understand 4, and share the worry it contains an ad hominem element). I'll grant you that it's not clear the natural or best way to respond to these motives is anti-realism (cf Crispin Wright's often undervalued remarks on how to frame this debate in Truth & Objectivity). Nevertheless, your 1-3, plus a broad feeling that moral values exhibit *some* degree of relativity or response-dependence (pretty much a platitude among new undergraduates I find) seem to me overpowering motivations for anti-realism or at least a 'qualified' realism, as Mark Johnston put it.

[Aaron Boyden]

2 and 3 look pretty good to me. I'm less impressed with 1 and 4, but two strong reasons is better than one often gets in philosophy.

I also question whether meta-ethical anti-realism is counter-intuitive to the "plain person." It seems to me that the plain person has contradictory tendencies in this respect, favoring either realism or anti-realism depending on how the issue is raised (Plato was perhaps not the first to notice this, but it is well presented in the views of his character Euthyphro).

[david killoren]

I just want to say that Kris M's explanation sounds totally plausible to me. And I also want to point out that the explanations I offered aren't all cynical. I think if someone got into metaethics because they were "attracted to perplexity", that wouldn't be shameful.

[Michael Huemer]

My characterization of how philosophers come to their positions in my first post is oversimplified: I agree with David K's comments about further factors that influence our positions. Also, "vague sympathies" may not have been the right term. What I meant was that in college or graduate school before your dissertation, you might have realist or anti-realist sympathies, but you probably do not embrace any very specific or detailed theory. So Kris McDaniel, in college, had a very strong belief in realism, but he probably did not have a specific or detailed version of realism, he probably did not have responses to the objections to realism, and so on.

Kris, I think you probably do *know* that baby-torture is wrong, and also know that that's objective. You probably even knew it when you were in college. But just to be extra cautious, and nice to the anti-realists, let's say that you strongly believed in moral realism. So, if you decided to make metaethics your main area, you would almost certainly have wound up producing more elaborate defenses of some more elaborate version of realism.

At the same time, there were other, intelligent people in college who strongly believed in anti-realism (they would have said they "knew" that there are no objective moral facts). And if one of them were to go into metaethics, they would almost certainly wind up producing elaborate defenses of some more elaborate version of anti-realism.

If you were to read their arguments, or they were to read yours, we can already predict (even without knowing any of the details of how your or their arguments would go) that neither of you would be convinced by the other.

So, in this sense it seems to me that the detailed philosophical arguments are largely epiphenomenal.

But, this doesn't mean that we're irrational, nor that considering arguments is pointless. Rather, it means that we need to pay more attention to the general, non-technical, original motivations behind realism and anti-realism, rather than to the more detailed, technical arguments that most academic discourse focuses on. Which is why Heath's opening post is a good one.

I think the underlying motivation for realism, for most realists, is indicated by Kris' post: Some things just seem obviously wrong, and it doesn't matter how anyone feels about them (etc.). It doesn't seem like the badness of torture is just a matter of some convention, or my just happening to prefer non-torture over torture, like how I prefer chocolate over vanilla ice cream. (Of course, this characterization of the motivation is pretty close to just saying: anti-realism seems obviously wrong.)

I think one of the underlying motivations for anti-realism is that moral properties are "weird". This isn't discussed much in print (except for Mackie's famous discussion of "queerness"), but I think philosophers are constantly moved by the sense of what is weird. Some philosophers would rather say almost anything than wind up with a "weird" metaphysical view.

[Michael Huemer]

One other, small comment: Heath's mention of motive #4 isn't "ad hominem". Heath isn't arguing that anti-realism is false because anti-realists have bad motivations (that would be an argument ad hominem). Hypothesis #4 might be (slightly) *insulting* to anti-realists, but then that's no reason to think it isn't true.

[Michael Smith]

Michael Huemer says: "I think the underlying motivation for realism, for most realists, is indicated by Kris' post: Some things just seem obviously wrong, and it doesn't matter how anyone feels about them (etc.). It doesn't seem like the badness of torture is just a matter of some convention, or my just happening to prefer non-torture over torture, like how I prefer chocolate over vanilla ice cream. (Of course, this characterization of the motivation is pretty close to just saying: anti-realism seems obviously wrong.)"

But this can't be right. Anti-realists like Gibbard and Blackburn also say that some things just seem obviously wrong and that it doesn't matter how anyone feels about them. They also say that it doesn't seem like the badness of torture is just a matter of some convention, or my just happening to prefer non-torture over torture, like how I prefer chocolate over vanilla ice cream. Moreover, they say these things wholeheartedly, not tongue in cheek or with fingers crossed.

What makes them anti-realists, rather than realists, is not the fact that they deny truisms like this. What makes them anti-realists is that they say, in addition, that what they are doing when they say these things is expressing their non-cognitive attitudes. So what makes realists realists must be the fact that they say, in addition, that what they are doing when they say these things is expressing their cognitive attitudes. Their respective motivations for being realists and anti-realists are therefore their respective motivations for saying these additional things, whatever they are.

[Matt McAdam]

Professor Smith writes:

"What makes them anti-realists, rather than realists, is not the fact that they deny truisms like this."

This seems to be saying that realists and anti-realists are on the same page when it comes to claims like 'torture is wrong'; that neither denies these "truisms". But do anti-realists take these kinds claims to be "truisms" that can be denied? 'Denial' sounds to me just like another word for 'claiming to be false', which ,by virtue of their non-cognitivism, they're obviously not doing. The sense in which anti-realists aren't denying these claims is quite different from the sense in which realists don't deny them, no?

[DW]

Michael Huemer wrote:

"I think the underlying motivation for realism, for most realists, is...: Some things just seem obviously wrong, and it doesn't matter how anyone feels about them (etc.).... (Of course, this characterization of the motivation is pretty close to just saying: anti-realism seems obviously wrong.)"

Both parts of that seems right to me. The parenthetical also sounds a lot like what we might say about people who are religious - It just seems obvious that where there is something there must be a maker of that something, thus the universe must have a creator. And both of those ideas do have a pull to them, but just as one might question religious assumptions one can also question realist assumptions, especially when there seems little evidence beyond the "logical" appeal.

"I think one of the underlying motivations for anti-realism is that moral properties are 'weird'."

This also seems right to me and to have a natural parallel to religious belief. While the idea of there being a creator seems obvious at first, it starts to shake under scrutiny. Conceptions of God can be logically impossible or incoherent. The idea that there is a creator does not explain how God was created, thus not providing an ultimate explanation. In the end, religious stories become just too weird to believe. But that seems to be a reasonable complaint, at least as a justification of a shift of the burden of proof squarely onto the theist.

"One other, small comment: Heath's mention of motive #4 isn't 'ad hominem'. Heath isn't arguing that anti-realism is false because anti-realists have bad motivations (that would be an argument ad hominem)."

I agree. The reason I called it "borderline ad hominem" is because his list consists of three reasons one might have to reject realism followed by one possible cause for rejecting it. Since he did not clearly distinguish the reasons from causes, it seemed that one might read his list and interpret them all as claims about reasons. I don't think that is what he intended, thus my use of the qualifier "borderline".

[Mike Almeida]

What makes them anti-realists, rather than realists, is not the fact that they deny truisms like this. What makes them anti-realists is that they say, in addition, that what they are doing when they say these things is expressing their non-cognitive attitudes. So what makes realists realists must be the fact that they say, in addition, that what they are doing when they say these things is expressing their cognitive attitudes.

Wouldn't Mike H's response be that, were realists to express other cognitive attitudes to torture (e.g. asserting that it is permissible), it would still not be the case that torture is permissible. On the other hand were anti-realists to express other non-cognitive attitudes to torture (e.g. approving of torture in some way or other), it might be the case that torture is permissible. Isn't this the worry, or something close to this?

[Jussi Suikkanen]

It's pretty incredible that one still sees this kind of comments repeated:

"But do anti-realists take these kinds claims to be "truisms" that can be denied? 'Denial' sounds to me just like another word for 'claiming to be false', which ,by virtue of their non-cognitivism, they're obviously not doing."

"On the other hand were anti-realists to express other non-cognitive attitudes to torture (e.g. approving of torture in some way or other), it might be the case that torture is permissible. Isn't this the worry, or something close to this?"

It's not like anti-realists aren't aware of these objections. Blackburn wrote a reply to this line of thought against expressivism already 1988 (How to be an Ethical Antirealist). Of course people kept repeating the objection so he had to write another paper making the same points. That paper, 'Must We Weep for Sentimentalism', was published this year in Dreier's 'Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory' collection. Highly entertaining and recommended. It would be nice to hear what's wrong in Blackburn's reply before we proceed and keep on repeating the old objection.

[Michael Smith]

Suppose we were to ask Gibbard and Blackburn whether torture would be permissible if they were to express approval of torture. I take this to be equivalent to asking them whether torture is permissible in the nearest possible world in which they have and express an attitude of approval towards torture. Would they answer yes? Plainly not. For in answering this question they would still have to express their actual non-cognitive attitudes. Since they presumably actually disapprove of torture even in that world--they disapprove of torture-whether-or-not-they-disapprove-of-it--I am quite certain that they would vehemently deny that torture is permissible in that world.

[Neil Sinclair]

"On the other hand were anti-realists to express other non-cognitive attitudes to torture (e.g. approving of torture in some way or other), it might be the case that torture is permissible. Isn't this the worry, or something close to this?"

Jussi is surely right, but can I also put in a word for Stevenson here. He was clear if moral judgements express attitudes, then what justifies the moral judgement is just what justifies the attitude. I morally disapprove of toture because of the unnecessary pain it causes. I express this by saying 'torture is wrong'. What justifies this claim is just what justifies the attitude it expresses, namely the unnecessary pain of torture. Since this fact hasn't changed in a world in which my attitude has, I will not make a different judgement about the wrongness of torture in that world. That claim was always present in expressivism - indeed it was what defined the movement from a naive subjectivism to expressivism. So its a very old point.

Also regarding this comment:

"But do anti-realists take these kinds claims to be "truisms" that can be denied? 'Denial' sounds to me just like another word for 'claiming to be false', which ,by virtue of their non-cognitivism, they're obviously not doing."

I guess minimalism about truth might sort that out (which again is nothing new - it was suggested by Stevenson in the final essay of his 'Facts and Values').

[Mike Almeida]

It's not like anti-realists aren't aware of these objections. Blackburn wrote a reply to this line of thought against expressivism already 1988

Jussi, I'm glad they're aware of it. My question was simply trying--off the cuff, since I'm not familiar with all of the exchanges on this issue and presumably you are--what Mike H's worry was. That is, I was trying to locate what Mike H. found troubling about anti-realism. I wasn't presuming to offer any new criticism of anti-realism. Now, I guess if it's ok with you, I'm going to try to relocate it.

Michael Smith writes,

. . . I take this to be equivalent to asking them whether torture is permissible in the nearest possible world in which they have and express an attitude of approval towards torture.

That sounds right. Let that world in which they express and attitude of approval to torture be w.

Would they answer yes? Plainly not. For in answering this question they would still have to express their actual non-cognitive attitudes.

Right. In the closest world to ours in which my attitudes have changed on torture, there is probably something wrong with my attitudes, and torture is still wrong. But consider worlds that are not close to ours. Consider distant worlds where my attitudes are different and there isn't anything wrong with them. Maybe you're claiming that there aren't any such worlds or that it begs the question to assume there are such worlds.

Since they presumably actually disapprove of torture even in that world . . . I am quite certain that they would vehemently deny that torture is permissible in that world.

I'm not sure what you mean by "they actually disapprove of torture in that world". I think this means that they disapprove of torture in that world. But recall that that world is w, by stipulation. So now they also disapprove of torture in w, which seems contrary to the hypothesis.

[Michael Smith]

Mike Almeida asks what I meant by "they actually disapprove of torture in that world"." What I meant is that in the actual world they disapprove of torture in w (where w is, by stipulation, a world in which they approve of torture).

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Mike,

I'm sorry. It's just that one becomes slightly frustrated of hearing the same objections so many times. The issue has been discussed earlier here on Pea Soup too like in the Huemer thread few days ago. But, I'm sure we all have similar cases. I guess the non-naturalists are just as sick of hearing that science proves that there are no moral properties so aren't you believing in similar things as fairies? Of course the non-naturalists have replies to this too but it's not like many people are listening. The same seems to be true of expressivism and the dependence of moral obligations of the attitudes of the appraisers.

[Neil Sinclair]

Everyone will judge torture to be wrong in a world in which they are stipulated to judge torture to be wrong, whether that judgement is expressive of an attitude or belief. So that can't be the problem (which would be the same for expressivists and anti-realists alike). The problem is whether we - in the actual world - have to consider that judgement in the stipulated world to be appropriate. Expressivists (and realists) do not, since for expressivists the wrongness depends on the pain (which is unchanged) not the attitude.

[Neil Sinclair]

Of course in my last post I meant to say "which would be the same for expressivists and realists alike".

Mike also says: "Consider distant worlds where my attitudes are different and there isn't anything wrong with them. Maybe you're claiming that there aren't any such worlds or that it begs the question to assume there are such worlds."

Expressivists need say neither. Expressivists will ask: what must the world be like if there isn't anything wrong with (moral) approval of torture? The only thing I can think of is a world in which torture doesn't cause unnecessary pain (since pain is what the moral disapproval depended on).
So there are such worlds, and expressivists will say that torture is acceptable in them, but then they are also worlds in which it's no longer clear that torture isn't acceptable.

(Perhaps then it wouldn't be "torture", depending on the load you think that term bears.)

[Mike Almeida]

Jussi, I haven't been reading a lot of Pea lately and so not paying much attention to what's come up on earlier posts. I do understand the frustration.

Neal, you write,
Expressivists will ask: what must the world be like if there isn't anything wrong with (moral) approval of torture? The only thing I can think of is a world in which torture doesn't cause unnecessary pain (since pain is what the moral disapproval depended on).

There are other things you can think of. Maybe the psychology of these agents is radically different. Maybe pain does not have quite the same qualitative feel (though it plays the same functional role) in other worlds. Maybe pain is so celebrated for its incredible biological utility in some worlds that agents find it difficult to disapprove of it.

[Mike Ridge]

Hi everyone,

Just to weigh in on this on a few points.

First, I am expressivist. What do I take to be good reasons for believing expressivism? That is a long story, but since at least some of my reasons do not appear on the initial list of four reasons given, I shall at least indicate what they are.

Rejecting expressivism plausibly commits one to some form of cognitivism (some could object even here, but I think the objections can be answered). Cognitivist views typically come in reductionist and anti-reductionist versions (there are versions try to avoid the idea that moral predicates refer to properties at all, but while remaining cognitivist - I have in mind e.g. Horgan and Timmons' stuff, among others; I am putting those views to one side for these purposes to avoid unnecessary complexity - H & T themselves at some point come close to conceding that their view might reasonably be characterized as a form of expressivism anyway).

Back to the main plot: Reductionist forms of cognitivism face a challenge from Moore's Open Question Argument and its successors, where its successors include Hare's missionary and the cannibal tale and Horgan and Timmons style 'moral twin earth' arguments and the like. I think these arguments can be supplemented and strengthened in vaious ways so that they still make some trouble for 'Cornell style' forms of realism and the like.

Anti-reductionist views face different objections, but one I think is often not fully appreciated is the challenge to explain supervenience.

So I'd recommend adding a fifth reason to your list, which is really a dilemma: In rejecting expressivism, you are led to either reductionist or anti-reductionist cognitivism. On the first horn, the OQA and its more sophisticated successors cause trouble. On the second horn, the challenge to explain how irreducible and sui generis moral properties supervene (as a necessary truth) poses problems. This is all very quick and simplistic, but hey, this is just a quick post on a blog which is inevitably going to be a bit elliptical.

Then again, I suppose this could all be epiphonemenal. I could just be an expressivist because I wasn't breast fed or something. I'll put those Freudean hypotheses firmly to one side. For what its worth, my main advisor (Geoff Sayre-McCord) was a pretty hard core realist. On the other hand, I did work with Simon Blackburn a fair bit.

Oh, and Michael Smith and Jussi and the rest are absolutely right about the attitude dependence stuff. We expressivists don't believe for a minute that right and wrong is attitude dependent in the way critics have often assumed. It is a bit frustrating that this objection keeps getting wheeled out again and again, when its been so firmly and effectively dealt with so many times for decades now - Simon Blackburn's latest paper on this is the last in a long line of expresivist tracts explaining why this objection rests on a conflation of expressivism with subjectivism. But enough said about that.

- Mike

[Antti Kauppinen]

While I agree with Jussi and others that Blackburn and Gibbard have heard and rebutted the "But surely killing babies would be wrong even if I didn't disapprove of it!" objection about seven million times, I'm not sure if the fact that expressivists have a good response invalidates the original point. The question at this point in the dialectic was why some people have an initial bias for realism. The fact that the most sophisticated anti-realist views combined with minimalism may license us to say "It is part of the eternal furniture of the universe that torture is wrong" (which, of course, is for them just another expression of complex con-attitudes toward torture) is far from obvious to someone beginning metaethics. (Unless they happen to be taught by a sophisticated expressivist, of course.) For psychological explanatory purposes, it's enough that it appears as if expressivists can't say these things, or take them at face value. So the desire to say such things may well lead to looking for a defense of industrial-strength realism, and if Michael H.'s pessimistic view is correct, that basic pro-attitude toward realism (note the irony!) may well remain after the student comes to understand all the resources of contemporary expressivism.

Moreover, it remains controversial whether expressivists can indeed handle all the truisms, arguably especially if we include explanatory ones like "I believe that torture is wrong because torture is wrong". Unless they go minimalists about explanation, at which point we can forget about the realism/anti-realism debate...

[Jamie]

Antii, is I believe that torture is wrong because torture is wrong really a truism?

To me it sounds very strange, not obvious at all. I doubt very much that it is an 'ordinary thought', one that occurs to anyone outside of self-conscious philosophy.

What's a truism?

[Michael Huemer]

Michael Smith points out that anti-realists claim to be able to accomodate some of the intuitions that I said motivate realism. But that doesn't show that those intuitions are not in fact a large part of the motivation for realism. It shows that anti-realists dispute whether the motivations for realism are good motivations. If you think the anti-realists are right, then that shows that realism is poorly-motivated.

I, of course, think the anti-realists are wrong. I think the expressivists, in particular, cannot accomodate common sense moral thoughts like, "Torture would be wrong even if I approved of it." I also think they have no right to speak of moral facts, moral properties, or moral truth. I'm fully aware that they claim to be able to speak of those things, but I disagree. I think they are merely trying to change the meanings of words like "property", "fact", and "truth", to enable them to talk like realists. And the reason they're doing this is that if they stated their views forthrightly (like Ayer and Stevenson did), people would see that they were obviously wrong.

Jussi points out that anti-realists such as Blackburn have responded to some simple and obvious objections to their views. That's right. But here's an objection the expressivists haven't responded to yet: the Frege-Geach problem. It's an extremely well-known, potentially fatal objection to expressivism/non-cognitivism; they've had 50 years to respond to it; and they still haven't solved the problem. Yet expressivism remains perhaps the most popular view in meta-ethics, and expressivists still go on talking as if they'd solved the problem, using the very sentences that Peter Geach pointed out 50 years ago that their view couldn't make sense of.

Now someone (perhaps Jussi?) is going to point out that Blackburn, Hare, et al. made some efforts in the direction of solving the Frege-Geach problem. These efforts generally overlook the generality of the problem, i.e., they give an ad hoc account of how to understand one or two specific kinds of sentences. But Frege-Geach is a general problem involving *any and every* context in which a proposition can be embedded (since all of these contexts can take moral claims in place of the proposition).

Geach's original example--

If doing something is wrong, then getting your little brother to do it is wrong.

--is just one illustration of this problem. How would an expressivist understand what that sentence means?

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Michael,

I was surprised to see this criticism in your book. Here's one basic line one could take.

If p, then q

is logically equivalent with

not-p or q.

Now take the set of planned worlds from Gibbard semantics. Not-p is a set of planned worlds that is ruled out by the plans expressed by the moral claim p. q is the set of planned worlds that include the plans expressed by q. not-p or q a.k.a. if p, then q is the aggregate set of these two sets of planned worlds. So, you are committed to either plans that do not involve the actions that are mentioned in the p or the actions that are involved in the q. Of course the fact that your p is an instance of a sentence including an existential quantifier makes the sets more complicated. But, there is nothing different in this semantic analysis than in the possible world semantics which a realist would give.

Your claim in the book was that the complex claim expresses a belief in a sui generis non-structured proposition. There is a worry that this is denying compositionality which is problematic in many ways.

[david killoren]

Jamie,

Here's an exchange:

A: You believe torture is wrong because you're so emotional: you're disgusted by the thought that anyone would ever suffer.

B: No, I believe torture is wrong because *torture is wrong*.

I think that conversation could occur among non-philosophers.

[Jamie]

David, maybe you're right.

Some moral realists (Nick Zangwill in particular) deny that moral facts can cause moral beliefs, though, so if it is a common sense intuition that they do (and I still doubt it is), it isn't one that cuts between realism and anti-realism.

[Sergio Tenenbaum]

Jamie:

I don't know what Nick Zangwill believes in this matter but one need not accept that there is a causal relation between "A believes that p" and p in order to accept the truth of "A believes that p because p". Especially if the belief in case is a case of a priori knowledge, one can think that the fact that p is at least part of the explanation of why the agent believes that p without thinking that there is a causal relation between p and the subject's belief that p. I take it that one can say, presumably correctly at times, "John believes that 'if p then (if q then p) is a tautology' because 'if p then (if q then p) is in fact a tautology" without thereby committing oneself to a causal relation between the fact that a certain sentence is a tautology and John's belief.

[david killoren]

Jamie,

To add to Sergio's points, which I think are correct, I just want to say that although not all realists think that moral facts have causal/explanatory powers, it's probably the case that only realism is compatible with the view that moral facts have causal/explanatory powers. (This is especially likely if we accept the very broad definition of realism that many here seem to accept.) Thus, I think that although any common-sense intuition that moral facts have these powers wouldn't "cut between" the realism/anti-realism distinction, it remains that the intuition would support realism unless it were explained away.

[Mike Ridge]

Michael H.,

On the Frege-Geach problem, it is a serious problem, and I think every expressivist realizes that dealing with that problem is a key challenge. Indeed, I have myself recently taken a stab (shameless plug: see my "Ecumenical Expressivism: Finessing Frege") at it. My solution, if it works, is perfectly general, and so meets your concern about the generality of the problem. I won't rehearse that solution here though.

Of course, realist views face serious problems too (some of which I mentioned in my previous post). I am not sure we make much progress just by pointing out that opposing views face certain well-known objections. That is true on both sides of the dispute.

You also dispute expressivist construals of a variety of claims, but without any further argument (apart from F-G) that these construals must be incorrect. You then offer the following diagnosis:

"And the reason they're doing this is that if they stated their views forthrightly (like Ayer and Stevenson did), people would see that they were obviously wrong."

Hmm. Seems a bit uncharitable, somehow.

Also, this accusation presumes that Blackburn's and Gibbard's *real* view is not their stated view, and that they secretly think that torturing babies would be OK if everybody approved of it - or think something which, when stated forthrightly obviously entails such conclusions. I see absolutely no reason to believe this. You may be right that their analysis of what it means to say 'Torturing babies would be wrong even if everybody approved of it' is incorrect, but that is another matter. That doesn't imply that Blackburn and Gibbard (and Hare and myself, for that matter) secretly believe some *other* semantic view, according to which these statements make no sense or are incoherent or some such.

Regards,

- Mike

[Robert Johnson]

Mike H.,
I don't see why expressivists have had a harder time explaining the Frege-Geach problem than cognitivists have had explaining the motivating nature of moral beliefs. Both views have their burdens to bear. And there's no better solution for cognitivists than the efforts expressivists have made toward solving F-G. Or at least I don't see why we should think cognitivism has the upper hand.

[Jamie Dreier]

Sergio, good point.
I have to admit that I have a lot of trouble seeing how the fact that if p then (if q then p) is a tautology could explain someone's belief that it's a tautology.
You weren't careful with the quotation marks, but I assume you meant a conditional proposition to be the tautology, and not some sentence. But in that case, that a certain proposition is tautologous is itself a tautology. And if we want a sense of 'explanation' with oomph, then it's hard for me to see how tautologies can explain things.

David, again, if we're talking about explanatory powers, so that it's a kind of metaphysical explanation, then I don't see any clear piece of common sense that tells us that moral facts have them.
Your idea that only realism is compatible with the explanatory powers of moral facts seems plausible to me, but I'm not confident that it's true. (I'm pretty confident that it's in the right neighborhood.)

[david killoren]

Jamie,

Yeah, I was trying to be careful to leave open the possibility that common sense doesn't tell us moral facts have these powers; that's why I used phrases like "the intuition would support realism" rather than "the intuition supports realism."

As for the other point: I'd be interested to know which versions of non-realism you think have a chance of giving a causal/explanatory role to moral facts. It seems very unlikely to me that expressivism could do this, but I'm not so sure about other kinds of non-realism. (Of course, if realism = non-expressivism, as Heath's post seems to suggest, then there aren't any other kinds of non-realism; but I'm guessing you've got a narrower definition of realism in mind than that.)

[Antti Kauppinen]

I don't have much to add at this point to David and Sergio's responses to Jamie. Except maybe this: while I think it's commonsensical to say the sort of things David suggested, I'm not sure what the force of 'because' is in that sort of claims. *Perhaps* it is the sort of thing an expressivist could say. All I wanted to point out is that that's not obvious even after we've taken in the lessons of contemporary expressivists on other realist-sounding tropes.

[Mark van Roojen]

Mike writes:

But here's an objection the expressivists haven't responded to yet: the Frege-Geach problem. It's an extremely well-known, potentially fatal objection to expressivism/non-cognitivism; they've had 50 years to respond to it; and they still haven't solved the problem.

Actually it isn't quite 50 years since the first mention of the point by Geach (I think it was 1957-8), though Mark Kalderon tells me the point is in Ross much earlier.

But anyway, while I'm not an expressivist, two points seem fair to raise on their behalf. (1) In philosophy 50 years is not all that long of a time, and (2) in that 50 years several expressivists have tried to handle the problem at some level of generality. (For that matter some non-expressivists have worked on approaches to the problem as an earlier thread here highlighted about a week or so ago.) I've argued in various places that some of the extant attempts don't work, but there surely have been serious attempts that look/looked promising. Gibbard's world/norm and fact/prac proposals are surely and attempt to deal with the issue in a relatively wide-ranging way, though it is controversial how successful it is in handling all the relevant embedded constructions. Hare, was in many ways worried about related issues even before Geach published his objection, and Hare pursued the issues involved at a quite general level. I could mention others, but you get the idea.

The development of expressivism seems a lot like the development of other philosophical theories. Someone proposes a theory in a relatively simple form to capture a certain set of philosophical motivations. Objections are put forth by detractors. Fans of the theory find ways to modify it to avoid the objections while retaining the key ideas. Some of these modifications generate new objections, or there are new versions of the old objections put forth. New modifications are made. And so on.

I don't think the modifications are meant to hide what the theorists really think. Rather I think they are an attempt to come up with a theory that captures the original motivations for the view while avoiding the most telling objections. I think this means that it is always worth going back to the simple versions of the theory when you are trying to get clear on the motivations because they typically get captured in the most simple way by those early theories. But I don't think that means that you can refute the whole range of theories that develop out of this theory just by showing that the theory is subject to some objection in its most simple version.

[Mark Eli Kalderon]

I am a bit dismayed that some have found it obvious that expressivists flout firm moral intuitions---in effect that expressivism would constitute a debunking explanation of morality. This just misses the insight, if it is one, that is common between contemporary expressivists and moral sense theorists like Hume (sensibility theories can but need not be construed along expressivist lines). When a hungry child asks for bread and someone give him a stone, Hume would complain of that person's want of a natural affection. The complaint seems both sound and sensible. What's so bad about giving to those in need because of your compassion for the needy? This is not the same as saying something is right because I wanna or wanna wanna or whatever.

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Mark,

that's a good point. I think though what drives the opposite side is Kantian insight of the blindness and contingency of natural affections. We see people whose affections are more towards cruelty and come to think that it could have just as well happened that our inclinations would have been targeted towards giving the stone instead of the bread. Such causal contingency in explanations for our natural affections seems to make us want to look for grounds for why some affections are better than others. I take it that this drives the realist's motivation for moral facts that give standards for the blind compassions. I'm not saying that this is an argument for the realist side but it does give an explanation for wanting to resist the purely sentimentalist picture.

[Kris McDaniel]

I have some questions for the expressivist, plus the customary apology for the author's own ignorance of the details of the expressivist position.

According to Michael Smith, "What makes them anti-realists, rather than realists, is not the fact that they deny truisms like this. What makes them anti-realists is that they say, in addition, that what they are doing when they say these things is expressing their non-cognitive attitudes. So what makes realists realists must be the fact that they say, in addition, that what they are doing when they say these things is expressing their cognitive attitudes."

Question 1: Is this a fair characterization?

Question 2: Suppose the answer to question 1 is "yes." Suppose I say the words, "Torturing babies for fun is wrong." Call this sentence "P." When I say P, I have not expressed a cognitive attitude, but rather a non-cognitive one.

Belief is a paradigmatic cognitive attidude. Here is a sentence:

I believe that P.

Is this true (by the expressivists's light)?

How can this sentence be true , if my saying P only expresses something non-cognitive?

Question 3: Suppose the expressivist says that "I believe that P" is true. Suppose I say:

1) I believe that torturing babies is wrong.

2) I believe that the democrats have retaken the House and the Senate.

Does the word "believe" have the same meaning in sentence one and sentence two?

Question 4: If the answer to question 3 is "yes", why is the view a non-cognitivist view?

Question 5: If the answer to question 3 is "no", what does the expressivist say about:

I believe that torturing babies is wrong and 2+2=4.

I hereby apologize if the answers to these questions are well-known and tedious to provide. (Although a good reference would be appreciated.)

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Kris,

good questions altogether. It's always difficult to put words in someone's mouth so I'll start by quoting Blackburn: 'I think that naturalism demands this view of ethics (quasi-realism), but in any case it motivates it. It does so because in this package the fundamental state of mind is not located as a belief (the belief in a duty, right, value). We may *end up* calling it a belief, but that is after the work has been done. In fact, we may end up saying that there really are values (such as the value of honesty) and facts (such as the fact that you have a duty to your childre)."

So, given this passage, I think expressivists would accept that 'I believe that p' is true even in the moral cases. What would be true is that I accept that p and that this acceptance is technically constituted by desire-like attitudes. We have just ended up calling acceptances of moral judgments beliefs and there is no reason to abandon this first-order practice even though in doing metaethics we come to realise that the attitudes are not what philosophers mean by beliefs. In this way the ordinary discourse is a minimalist about 'beliefs'.

3 is a good question. Much depends on what is meant by mean the same and whether the claims are made in the internal or the external perspective. I don't think that the second claim either commits to any technical notion of beliefs but only to the acceptance of the claim as does the first to the acceptance of the moral claim. At least the utterances would be used for the same purpose. We don't usually say these kinds of things to describe our own mental life but to say that torture is wrong or who won the election.

Of 5, I wonder if the expressivist would say that when we say things like that we are not really saying that 'I believe (torture is wrong & 2+2=4)' but rather 'I believe (torture is wrong) & I believe (2+2=4)'. The natural language can hide such subtle differences.

[Kris McDaniel]

Hi Jussi,

Thanks for the helpful replies. I have some follow up questions to what you've just said.

You wrote in your response to my first question:

"In this way the ordinary discourse is a minimalist about 'beliefs'."

Why is this the right thing to say? I'm inclined to think that what we've learned (given that expressivisim is true) is that there isn't a unique *non-disjunctive* mental state that fits the ordinary notion of belief. There are mental states -- call them "acceptances" which apparently are desire-like-- and there are mental states that philosophers have called beliefs -- call thse states "P-beliefs". Something is a belief in the oridnary sense if and only if it *either* an acceptance *or* a P-belief.

(And isn't this a surprising result? Wouldn't we have been inclined to think that beliefs formed a unified psychological kind if we weren't expressivisits?)

You wrote: "3 is a good question. Much depends on what is meant by mean the same and whether the claims are made in the internal or the external perspective."

I didn't understand the second sentence, so this follow-up question is just a request for clarification.

"Of 5, I wonder if the expressivist would say that when we say things like that we are not really saying that 'I believe (torture is wrong & 2+2=4)' but rather 'I believe (torture is wrong) & I believe (2+2=4)'. The natural language can hide such subtle differences."

Suppose the expressivist grants that I believe that torturing babies is morally wrong. I also believe that 2+2=4. Doesn't it follow then that I have two beliefs? So if the expressivist feels pressure to say what you suggest the expressivist could say -- well, I worry that what you say doesn't help with the problem.

(But if the expressivist does take someone to have a belief that P just in case that person either accepts that P or P-believes that P, then I guess the expressivist can happily say that I have two beliefs.)

You didn't answer Q4, so I want to push a little harder here. Why is expressivism a version of anti-realism? Expressivism says that:

(1) Moral claims can be the objects of beliefs *in the ordinary sense of "belief"*.

(2) Many moral beliefs are true, and moreoever are true independently of what people wanna or wanna wanna. (And since the minimalist story about truth is the whole story about truth, moral beliefs are even true in the same (minimal) way in which every truth is true.)

And finally, since expressivism is all about respeciting the platitudes, the expressivist will presumably grant:

(3) The true moral belief that Hitler was a really bad guy is far more reasonable to believe than its denail.

So why not also grant:

(4) We know that Hitler was a really bad guy.

This is why I'm puzzled: in what sense is this view an anti-realist view?

[Mark Schroeder]

This is in response to Kris.

Jon believes that grass is green just in case Jon stands in a certain relation to the proposition that grass is green. Call this relation 'B'. According to a common view, B is the semantic value of 'believes that', and so 'Jon believes that P' can never be true unless 'P' picks out a proposition to which Jon stands in this relation.

Expressivists do not think that in order for 'Jon believes that murder is wrong' to be true, 'murder is wrong' must pick out a proposition, and Jon must stand to it in B. Does it follow that they must think that 'believes that' is ambiguous?

No. The ambition of expressivism is to offer a univocal semantics for 'believes that' which yields as a special case that when 'P' is a descriptive sentence, 'Jon believes that P' is true just in case Jon stands in B to the propositional content of 'P', but when 'P' is a normative sentence, 'Jon believes that P' is true in virtue of Jon's having some non-cognitive attitude. So - different realizers for descriptive and normative belief, falling out from a single semantics.

That is the ambition, I say. Can anything like this work? Well, here is a first pass: 'Jon believes that P' is true just in case Jon is in M, where M is the mental state expressed by 'P'. If descriptive sentences express mental states that consist in bearing R to their propositional contents, then if 'P' is descriptive, 'Jon believes that P' is true, on this view, just in case Jon stands in R to the propositional content of 'P'. While if normative sentences express noncognitive attitudes, then if 'P' is normative, 'Jon believes that P' will be true, given this view, just in case Jon is in that noncognitive attitude. So that gets us what we wanted.

Your question #4 is a good one, and I think many people have been confused about this. Given this semantics, the expressivist will continue to say things like 'there are moral beliefs', 'moral sentences express beliefs', and so on. So what makes it expressivist?

The answer is that someone who holds this view thinks that though descriptive beliefs consist in bearing a certain relation, R, to a proposition, moral beliefs do not consist in bearing that very relation R to any proposition. This is a very theory-laden thesis, about the nature of moral thought. But no surprises there - expressivism is a _theory_ - a theory about the nature of moral thought and moral language.

Is the toy semantics for 'believes that' offered just above a plausible one? That's something that we can test. You test it the way that you test any other semantic theory. For example, does it license the inference from 'Jon believes that murder is wrong' and 'Mary believes that murder is wrong' to 'there is something Jon and Mary believe'? Or from 'Jon believes that murder is wrong' and 'it is true that murder is wrong' to 'Something Jon believes is true'? I don't know how to construct an expressivist semantics for 'believes that' which licenses the second inference in any natural way, and the one that I gave above doesn't explain either one.

My point is: from the fact that expressivists have the ambition to explain these things, it does not follow that they will be able to explain them. That's why it's important both to take expressivists at their word about what they would _like_ to construct a semantics in order to be able to do, but also to test them on whether any theory that they construct is actually able to do these things.