Practical Expressivism

An underappreciated but core part of metaethical expressivism is a thesis about moral practice’s function as a tool for coordination. Neil Sinclair’s Practical Expressivism brings this thesis to the fore and demonstrates that functions can help expressivists a lot. It does so by developing “practical expressivism,” a view with three core commitments. First, the metasemantic view that the semantic function of moral judgments is not to describe the world or express moral beliefs, but to express moral commitments (33). Second, the psychological view that moral commitments are (at least partially) “stable, reflectively endorsed, general attitudinally ascended states of approval and/or disapproval, including dispositions to avowal in moral discussion” (53). Third, the view that moral practice has the distinctive function as a coordination device that enables “human beings to work towards, test, refine, and sustain mutually beneficial patterns of action and reaction” (38). The third commitment, thereby, is...