| Sumario: | It is often observed in metaethics that moral language displays a certain duality in as much as it seems to concern both objective facts in the world and subjective attitudes that move to action. In this paper, I defend The Dual Aspect Account which is intended to capture this duality: A person's utterance of a sentence according to which φing has a moral characteristic, such as 'φing is wrong,' conveys two things: The sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, the belief that φing has a moral property, and the utterance of the sentence carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the person in question has an action-guiding attitude in relation to φing. This account has significant advantages over competing views: ( i) As it is purely cognitivist, it does not have the difficulties of expressivism and various ecumenical positions. ( ii) Yet, in spite of this, it can explain the close, 'meaning-like,' connection between moral language and attitudes. ( iii) In contrast to other pragmatic accounts, it is compatible with any relevant cognitivist view. ( iv) It does not rest on a contentious pragmatic notion, such as conventional implicature. ( v) It does not imply that utterances of complex moral sentences, such as conditionals, convey attitudes. In addition, the generalized implicature in question is fully calculable and cancellable.
|
|---|