Expressivism and moral vagueness

Abstract Moral concepts are vague. For example, while some actions are clearly permissible and others are clearly impermissible, there are also borderline cases of moral permissibility. The first part of this paper argues that moral vagueness poses a problem for moral expressivists. In short, it is hard to see how expressivists can make sense of the orthodox idea that borderline sentences differ in alethic status to non-borderline sentences. The second part provides a solution to the problem. I argue that expressivists can make sense of moral vagueness, and normative indeterminacy more broadly, in terms of inquiry-resistance; and I show how to recover a variety of views on the alethic status of borderline moral sentences from the resulting framework.