No. 74 (2026): Número en curso
Articles

Expressivists Beware—Moral Judgments Do Not Aim at a Deflationary Truth

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  • Rodrigo Valencia-Pacheco
Rodrigo Valencia-Pacheco
University of Leeds

Published 2025-09-30

Keywords

  • expressivism,
  • interpretationism,
  • deflationism,
  • metaethics,
  • moral beliefs,
  • aiming at truth,
  • propositional attitudes,
  • non-representational belief,
  • desire-like state,
  • Brown
    • ...More
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Valencia-Pacheco, R. (2025). Expressivists Beware—Moral Judgments Do Not Aim at a Deflationary Truth. Tópicos, Revista De Filosofía, 74, 45-64. https://doi.org/10.21555/top.v740.3093
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Abstract

Brown (2022) has recently argued that metaethical expressivists should adopt an interpretationist account of propositional attitudes. Expressivism has traditionally been the view that moral judgments are best understood as desire-like states with a primarily practical function of guiding and producing actions. Most problems for expressivists, however, come from the fact that moral judgments have many belief-like properties: being truth evaluable, epistemically evaluable, embeddable in complex truth-functional constructions, etc. By adopting Brown’s proposal, expressivists would avoid several of these problems since they could claim that moral judgments are just beliefs but of a non-representational variety. In this article, I argue that, while promising, this view has a substantial problem. A crucial element of the rationalising interpretation is that beliefs are governed by a norm of aiming at truth. But contrary to what Brown suggests, deflationist accounts of truth cannot help expressivists explain why moral judgments are also subject to this norm. 

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