Expressivism and Moral Epistemology

Expressivism is the view that the primary function of moral thought and talk is practical as opposed to representational. In this thesis, I offer the first systematic study of the prospects and problems of an expressivist moral epistemology. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first one is about the challenge of epistemic evaluability: explaining how moral judgments can be both desire-like in their practical function and belief-like in their epistemic evaluability. In Chapter 1, I offer a new way to understand the challenge based on how the epistemic evaluability of states like beliefs is explained by their constitutive norm of aiming at the truth. Chapters 2 and 3 are about possible solutions. In Chapter 2, I explore the prospects of indirect explanations of epistemic evaluability. While I do not think these views work, they teach us valuable lessons about how expressivists should think of epistemic evaluability. In Chapter 3, I offer a different direct response.
The second part of the dissertation is about epistemic evaluations. In moral practice, we evaluate moral judgments as justified, rational, warranted, counting as knowledge, etc. Instead of explaining each of those, I focus on some of the central concepts we use or assume when making these evaluations: evidence, reliability and a prioricity. In Chapters 2 and 3, I argue that expressivists can explain how evidence and reliability work as applied to moral judgments by securing a non-accidental connection with truth. In Chapter 4, I change the focus to concepts central to the sources of those epistemic evaluations. Using resources developed in other parts of the thesis, I argue that expressivists do not need to deny and can explain how some of the sources that ground our epistemic evaluations for moral judgments are a priori.