The Possibility of Moral Community

There are many practical obstacles and difficulties in bringing about and sustaining a viable and attractive human moral community. The book I plan to write will however be concerned with certain supposed philosophical difficulties. In particular it will concern supposed difficulties in sustaining a moral community whose members can enjoy a shared understanding of their moral relationships, of their mutual normative and moral obligations and responsibilities, that makes convincing philosophical sense and is free of controversial or illusory metaphysical beliefs. This might be thought problematic in two main ways. 1. It might be thought that normative and in particular moral concepts can only make adequate sense and can only carry the authority they need to carry if we suppose they make reference to a domain of moral facts construed in a robustly realist way as prior to and independent of our own concerns and our own refection and deliberation. 2. It might be thought that the concept of moral responsibility can only make good sense if we suppose that we have free will in some robustly libertarian sense that conflicts with a metaphysically sparse, naturalistic understanding of ourselves and our environment. Some philosophers defend these claims and are led by scepticism about the suppositions they invoke to a sceptical view of the concepts in question. Others reject the former scepticism, urging that the suppositions in question are in fact credible. I will argue that the relevant concepts can make perfect sense with no reference to the suppositions in question. A rich understanding of our mutual moral relations can thereby be rendered fully intelligible without the need to take on any such problematic metaphysical baggage.

In making this argument I will rely on an idea (associated in the literature with so called metaethical constructivism) that we should stress the practical as opposed to theoretical character of the problems to which the project of constituting a moral community is addressed. Given that, what we do in seeking to make sense of the relevant practices and concepts is best understood as an enterprise akin less to science where we seek to ascertain facts constituted prior to and intependently of the enterprise than to a form of political process, specifically the practical task of seeking normative and moral understandings we are able to live with and, crucially, to live with together. Thinking along these lines has been thought to ease the metaphysical perplexity reflection on morality can sometimes induce. We finds this idea aired in recent American philosophy by writers such as John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard but not, I think, fully or convincingly developed by them. I aim to do better, in large part by marrying this constructivist insight to an expressivist semantics for normative language that sees it not as descriptive of some putative domain of normative facts but as expressive of broadly conative states of mind such as emotions and desires. In this broad theoretical framework I am very hopeful of arriving at clear, metaphysically unassuming and original understandings of moral semantics, moral knowledge and the sort of moral objectivity we need to make sense of moral accountability.