Expressivism and moral vagueness

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 non-borderline 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.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Gamester, W. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4376-4433
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	Expressivism; Vagueness; Indeterminacy; Truth
Dates:	Accepted: 31 July 2025 Published (online): 29 August 2025 Published: September 2025
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)
Date Deposited:	06 Aug 2025 14:07
Last Modified:	31 Oct 2025 15:38
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Identification Number:	10.1007/s11229-025-05196-z
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:230079

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Expressivism and moral vagueness

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