Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

The Role of Conceptual Ethics in Philosophical Reasoning and Argument

Date: 08 June 2015

Time: 16:30

Place: Seminari del Departament de Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència (4047)

Abstract

This paper is about philosophical disputes where the literal content of what speakers communicate concerns such object-level issues as ground, supervenience, or real definition. This includes, for example, disputes that we standardly (and intuitively) gloss as ones about the following issues: a) whether or not ethical facts (normative facts about what we should do) are entirely grounded in (or explained by) facts about the promotion of value and b) whether or not facts about what justice requires are explained by facts about what people would agree to in certain idealized conditions.  It is tempting to think that such disputes straightforwardly express disagreements about these topics. In contrast to this, I suggest that, in many such cases, the disagreement that is expressed is actually one about which concepts should be employed. I make this case as follows. First, I look at non-philosophical, everyday disputes where a speaker employs (often without awareness of doing so) a metalinguistic usage of a term. This is where a speaker uses a term (rather than mentions it) to express a view about the meaning of that term, or, relatedly, how to correctly use that term. A metalinguistic negotiation is a metalinguistic dispute that concerns a normative issue about what a word should mean, or, similarly, about how it should be used, rather than the descriptive issue about what it does mean. I argue that the same evidence that supports thinking that certain ordinary disputes are metalinguistic negotiations also supports thinking that some (perhaps many) philosophical disputes are. I then explore some of the methodological upshots of this understanding of philosophical disputes; an understanding on which a certain kind of normative issue (an issue in what I call ‘conceptual ethics', about which concepts we should employ) is a tacit part of much philosophical reasoning and argument.