Emerging Themes in 21st Century meta-ethics: Evaluative and Normative Language

This research network will be a stimulus for new directions in the study of normative and evaluative language. Normative and evaluative language includes words like 'good', 'bad', 'desirable', 'unfair', 'ought', 'must', and 'should'. Over the past decade there has been a clear trend in the direction of exploring so-called hybrid theories in meta-ethics. According to these theories, these words both describe their subject and express evaluative attitudes towards it. Unfortunately, those working on such theories have given little sustained attention to other words that seem to be capable of simultaneously describing a subject and expressing evaluative attitudes towards it (slurs and pejorative language for example). This is a shortcoming because an understanding of how these words work will be of great interest to meta-ethics in determining whether normative and evaluative language functions in this same dual manner.

A second aspect of the narrow focus of previous work in meta-ethics is that philosophers have tended to only focus on how normative and evaluative language functions when used in centrally ethical contexts. Thus, for example, philosophers working on the ethical 'must' have tended to ignore how it relates to the 'must' that appears in claims about possibility and necessity. Sometimes this narrow focus was based on the assumption that the terms used in ethics have unique meanings. But other times the assumption goes unnoticed.

Recently some metaethicists, including those we plan to involve in this network, have challenged this assumption by looking at how these terms work when used in non-ethical discourse. It has also come from people working in other areas of philosophy and in linguistics who have started to examine features such as context-sensitivity and attitude expression and their application to normative and evaluative terms and other expressions. This has led to a broadening in focus from meta-ethics to the meta-normative, as philosophers become interested in and attuned to the non-ethical uses of these terms, and an increasing awareness that the work in philosophy of language and linguistics should be brought to bear upon meta-ethical questions.

This research network will be a stimulus for new directions in the study of normative and evaluative language. Some of the key research questions and themes are:

(1) Normative judgements (e.g. judgements that torture is wrong) seem quite different from non-normative judgements (e.g. judgements that the table is round). But what makes them distinctive? Is it their subject matter, the role they play in thinking and action, or something else? Are they beliefs, or desires, some combination of the two, or something else?

(2) Normative utterances (e.g. assertions of 'torture is wrong') seem quite different from non-normative utterances (e.g. assertions that Paris is the capital of France). Does this difference warrant treating their meaning as being of a different sort from more prosaically factual kinds of utterances?

(3) If normative judgements somehow combine beliefs and desires, or if the meaning of normative utterances is somehow different from the kind of meaning that prosaically factual statements have, do slurs and pejorative language provide a useful parallel for normative judgements and claims? But are there features of pejorative terms that undermine this parallel?

(4) How do normative judgements relate to modal judgements (judgements about possibility and necessity). For example, is there any connection between the respective uses of 'must' in 'you must treat people fairly' and 'everything that goes up must come down', or the respective uses of 'cannot' in 'you cannot treat people like this' and 'electrons cannot travel faster than the speed of light'.

The economic and societal impact of this project will come as a result of the Public Lecture at the end of the project. This will increase general public awareness of Meta-Ethics and the way in which different areas of Philosophy can fruitfully combine and how progress can be made in understanding normative discourse. It is also likely that some of the work produced by the network will be accessible to intelligent lay readers.

Another diffuse long term benefit of this research is the fact that by increasing our understanding of our normative language we are likely to be able to develop tools for better communication about practical matters of public disagreement.