Metaethical Contextualism, Triviality and Semantic Blindness

This paper answers an objection to metaethical contextualism. Contextualism is the view that moral claims involve reference to standards or ends determined by context. The problem is that contextualism entails that certain moral claims are trivially true, which is contrary to appearances. I develop an account of semantic competence with moral terms that explains why it is not obvious to speakers that moral claims are indexed to standards or ends. This masks the trivial nature of the relevant moral claims.