Expressivism and Evidence for Moral Judgments

Abstract We often support our moral judgements by appealing to independent considerations. According to some approaches in moral epistemology, the best way to understand this support is as evidential . However, it is unclear how some metaethical positions, like expressivism, can be compatible with such a view. For expressivists, moral judgements are desire-like states, which ostensibly are not the sorts of states which can be evidentially supported. In this paper, I argue that expressivists can indeed make sense of relations of evidential support for moral judgements. Drawing on a common sides-stepping expressivist strategy, I argue that expressivists should first focus not on evidential relations themselves but on our thought and talk of the form ‘ e is evidence for p ’. I then appeal to a form of epistemic expressivism, according to which such claims express complex non-cognitive attitudes or normative perspectives about standards that make it permissible to judge that p given e . This approach allows expressivists to reinterpret questions about what evidential relations between evidence e and moral judgements that p are as first-order normative questions about which standards not ruled out by acceptable normative perspectives make it permissible to judge that p given e . Responses to these first-order questions should be, in principle, compatible with expressivist second-order accounts of moral thought and talk. Finally, to show that this first-order interpretation is plausible, I outline a version of evidential explanationism along those lines.