Gamester, W. orcid.org/0000-0003-4376-4433 (Accepted: 2025) Expressivism and moral vagueness. Synthese. ISSN: 0039-7857 (In Press)
Abstract
Moral concepts are vague. For example, while some actions are clearly permissible and others are clearly impermissible, there are also borderline cases of moral permissibility. The first part of this paper argues that moral vagueness poses a problem for moral expressivists. In short, it is hard to see how expressivists can make sense of the orthodox idea that borderline sentences differ in alethic status to nonborderline sentences. The second part provides a solution to the problem. I argue that expressivists can make sense of moral vagueness, and normative indeterminacy more broadly, in terms of inquiry-resistance; and I show how to recover a variety of views on the alethic status of borderline moral sentences from the resulting framework.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an author produced version of an article accepted for publication in Synthese, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Aug 2025 14:07 |
Last Modified: | 06 Aug 2025 14:07 |
Status: | In Press |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:230079 |