Phil. 173: Metaethics Nov. 26, 2019 Lecture 25: Expressivism and Normative Authority

I. Can Norm-Expressivism Account for Claims to Objectivity? A lingering worry for Gibbard’s norm-expressivism: that it isn’t adequately objective. Gibbard motivates this worry by imagining an encounter one might have with an ideally coherent anorexic who accepts a fully coherent system of norms that permits her to starve herself for the sake of a trim figure. Suppose I say to her, “It’s irrational for you to starve yourself.” According to Gibbard’s account (as presented so far), I have thereby expressed my acceptance of a system of norms that forbids her from starving herself. But to many people this doesn’t seem like enough: they want, says Gibbard, there to be some sense in which, in saying this, I claim my system of norms to have an objective backing that hers lacks. (side comment: Is this really what people are looking for—that I be able to claim that my system has an objective backing? Or are they looking for it in fact to have an objective backing?) Gibbard considers three different senses in which a given utterance might carry with it a claim to objectivity, and he argues that he can account for these senses by revising his analysis. One sense that he does not attempt to account for: a Platonistic claim to objectivity, according to which among the facts about the world are facts about what is and is not rational, and successful judgments of rationality involve discerning or detecting those facts.

II. First Sense: Objectivity as Mind Independence the problem: Someone who accepts a given norm as a requirement of rationality usually thinks that, even if he/she did not accept the norm, it would still be valid. Gibbard’s solution is to say that when I utter the sentence, “It is irrational for the ideally coherent anorexic to starve herself for the sake of a trim figure,” I’m expressing my acceptance of norms that forbid her from starving herself even if she fails to accept such norms (p. 165). However, Gibbard has slipped up here. What he has accounted for, in this revision of his analysis, is agent mind-independence (= my taking an agent to be rationally required to do/believe/feel something regardless of whether she, the agent, accepts that requirement). But what he set out to account for is critic mind-independence (= my taking an agent to be rationally required to do/believe/feel something regardless of whether I, the critic, accept that requirement). So, instead, what Gibbard should say is that, in uttering the above sentence to the coherent anorexic, I’m expressing my acceptance of norms that forbid her from starving herself and would forbid her to do so even if I failed to accept such norms.

III. Second Sense: Objectivity as a Contrast with Existential Commitments the problem: It seems that someone might have an existential commitment to a certain personal ideal, without taking that ideal to be a demand of rationality. Gibbard’s solution appeals to higher-order norms that govern the acceptance of other norms: to accept a norm as a requirement of rationality = to accept the norm along with higher-order norms that require its acceptance by everyone. to accept a norm as an existential commitment = to accept the norm along with higher-order norms that permit it, but also permit accepting at least one incompatible alternative. IV. Third Sense: Objectivity as Normative Authority the problem: When I say that something is rational or irrational, I seem to be claiming some sort of authority for the norms that I accept. Gibbard accounts for this authority by revising his analysis so that the utterance of a normative sentence not only evinces one’s acceptance of a given set of norms, but also exerts a conversational demand on one’s interlocutors to accept those norms as well.

V. Why Comply with Another’s Conversational Demands? Three ways in which we could come to accept a normative utterance made by some speaker: • by taking the speaker to have contextual authority: we presuppose that the speaker accepts the same fundamental norms as we do, and use the speaker’s reasoning as proxy for our own; • through the speaker exerting Socratic influence on us: by prodding us to think along certain lines and come to our own conclusions, the speaker can lead us to accept certain things even if we accord him/her no authority; • by taking the speaker to have fundamental authority: even though the speaker has fundamentally different norms on the matter than we do, we come to accept her norms anyway. The puzzle for Gibbard is to explain why, on his account, we should ever take others to have fundamental authority.

VI. Self-Trust First, Gibbard argues that one must (in some sense) accord fundamental authority to at least some of one’s past and future judgments. • past judgments: To refuse to accord past judgments any authority is to give up on multi-step reasoning, since that involves trusting one’s past conclusions without reviewing all of one’s grounds. • future judgments: Pondering what to do, think, or feel involves trusting one’s future judgments, for why else should one care about what one’s conclusion will be? Not only do we as a matter of fact accord authority to our past and future judgments, but to refuse to do so is to be become a kind of hyperskeptic who accepts only what she at the moment finds to be self-evident, and doubts everything else. This, supposedly, is too costly an option to consider. The relevant sense in which one “must” accept this conclusion: “In so speaking, I express the state of mind I reach after pondering the considerations that I have been laying out. I express my acceptance of a higher- order norm that accords authority to my own normative judgments” (p. 179).

VII. Trusting Others Second, Gibbard argues that one must accord at least some fundamental authority to others. • One must accord legitimacy to some past influences from others: to extirpate all past influences from others would involve reshaping one’s thoughts and sentiments beyond all recognition, which would carry “a prohibitive cost” (p. 179). • One must accord legitimacy to some future influences from others: to accept past influences of others but reject all future influences is arbitrary, since one has no plausible story of why one’s current others- influenced judgments are worthy of trust, but one’s future others-influenced judgments are not. Note how weak the conclusion of this argument is: all it establishes is that one must in some cases accord fundamental authority to others, and nothing is said about what determines when those cases obtain. Or rather, all that is established is this: after pondering these sorts of considerations, Gibbard judges that he must in some cases accord fundamental authority to others (and he suspects that you will, too).