Ylwa Sjölin Wirling: "Expressivism and Progress in Ethics, Philosophy and Science"

Ylwa Sjölin Wirling, Göteborgs universitet och SCAS: "Expressivism and Progress in Ethics, Philosophy and Science"

Abstract
In the ongoing debate over the nature of philosophical progress, it is apparently widely assumed that normative ethics is just one philosophical subdiscipline among others and that it does not require special treatment. In this paper I will argue that if expressivism about moral discourse is correct, then that assumption is false. In particular, I argue that expressivists who want to say that normative ethics is a form of inquiry that can make progress are committed to rejecting two other central assumptions or desiderata that shape the current philosophical progress debate: that progress in all of philosophy is measured in terms of the same type of epistemic good, and that progress in science and philosophy is measured in terms of the same type of epistemic good. So expressivism has revisionary consequences for the progress debate. While it might seem that the expressivist could just take this implication of their view in stride, I suggest that doing so is in slight tension with the commitment to methodological naturalism that is apparently common among expressivists.