Transparency in Metaethics

Abstract

Many of us pride ourselves on our moral credentials. But, while we may be confident in our views about what is right or wrong, when we take a step back to consider our moral views more generally or abstractly, we recognize that there are many features of our moral thought and talk that moral competence does not shed light on. Being able to answer questions about what kind of person we ought to strive to be, or what actions we are forbidden from performing does not mean that we are able to answer metaethical questions about the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological views, assumptions, and commitments that underlie these practices. Moral competence does not guarantee true beliefs about metaethical issues, or competence to engage with such issues at the level of abstraction this kind of engagement actually requires. Answers to metaethical questions are often opaque to us rather than transparent: we can participate competently in our moral practice without having true beliefs about its metaethical underpinnings; indeed, we can participate without having any such beliefs at all. Metaethicists have lots of beliefs about the metaethical underpinnings of our moral practices. But for all their successes, metaethicists often fail to pay attention to the ways that failures of transparency matter to metaethical theorizing. Often, in the course of defending or arguing against a particular metaethical theory, metaethicists assume that the claims made by that theory would have to be transparent to competent moral speakers if they were true: that if the theory is right that something is true of our moral thought and talk, then the theory is also committed to those who are competent with moral thought and talk believing that that something is true. I call this mistake “the transparency fallacy.” In the first paper of my dissertation, I provide a clear, general formulation of the transparency fallacy, which is assuming, without further argument, that if p, then competent moral speakers and thinkers believe that p, where p is some putative metaethical fact. In the second paper of my dissertation, I consider a particular commission of the transparency fallacy made by Jack Woods in his recent argument against expressivism. And in the third paper of my dissertation, I consider a case where a failure of transparency leads to a dialectical impasse between cognitivists and expressivists. My dissertation represents only a first attempt to tackle some very large questions in metaethics and metametaethics (to borrow Jamie Dreier’s unfortunate but apt term). I gesture at how these questions might be answered but leave the details to be worked out in later research.