"Are Moral Judgements Semantically Uniform?"

Benjamin De Mesel's paper in Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein is "Are Moral Judgements Semantically Uniform? A Wittgensteinian Approach to the Cognitivism--Non-Cognitivism Debate." As De Mesel says in the introduction to the paper (p. 126), "Cognitivists think that moral judgements express beliefs; non-cognitivists think that they express "non-beliefs", for instance, emotions or prescriptions." Each side in the debate seems to assume that all moral judgements are the same in this regard: they are either all beliefs or all non-beliefs. The main point of De Mesel's paper is to question this assumption. Almost as soon as he does so, it seems obvious that he's right. (That's meant as praise, not criticism.) It's not obvious that there isn't semantic uniformity in moral judgements, but that isn't his claim. What's obvious, or seems so now to me, is that the assumption that they are all uniform is not justified.

One response to this claim would be to question whether all those meta-ethicists on both sides of this long-running debate could really have overlooked such a seemingly obvious possibility. Well, maybe they haven't all done so, but De Mesel cites evidence suggesting that some very prominent ones have.

Another response could be to question what this has to do with Wittgenstein. The answer, as De Mesel shows, is: a lot. Wittgenstein challenges our "tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term" (from the Blue Book, quoted on p. 129). He rejects contempt for particular cases and wants us to attend to differences as well as similarities.

Thirdly, one might wonder whether anyone else has had similar thoughts about the alleged, or presupposed, semantic uniformity of moral judgements. They have, as De Mesel explains and discusses, but those who have questioned this assumption still often seem to suffer from the generalizing tendency that Wittgenstein rejects.

De Mesel has obviously had to do a lot of research to write this paper, but there's also a sense in which it seems that it would have almost written itself. The fact that no one has written it before (that I know of) shows that this isn't the case, but it still seems like a very good illustration of Wittgenstein's thought that:

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something -- because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. -- And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (PI 129)

In other words, it's a very nice paper.

The next paper in the book is Cora Diamond's "Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins." I've talked about it in this review, so I'll pass over it here.