Why look at ethics?

The normative question requests a justification of a command or permission under which our behaviour may be constrained. Obviously, this issue can be raised in domains other than ethics or semantics. Why do we look at ethics to have a better understanding of semantics? Why don’t we consider other normativity laden disciplines such as philosophy of law or aesthetics? Some reasons for this is suggested by Gibbard (1994) in this rather extended quotation:

Metaethics ... has two crucial ties to an alleged normativity of mean- ing. One is that metaethics studies meanings. The other is that metaethics studies normativity. Metaethics just is, in large part, the theory of meaning applied in a special domain, namely ethics. The subject has a life of its own, because ethics, as a domain of meaning, has seemed specially problematic. Still, much of metaethics is a part of the theory of meaning. Anyone in metaethics will have to see how a normativity of meaning would bear on the meaning of ethical state- ments. That’s not half the linkage, though: If meaning is normative, then a central topic in the philosophy of language becomes a part of metaethics. Metaethics can turn imperialistic, and grab territory from the philosophy of language. It takes over the study of what meaning means.

Gibbard warns against an interpretation of this relationship as a substantive absorption, a statement about the assimilation (or assimilability) of semantic concepts by ethical ones. I.e., this does not imply that semantics is reducible to ethics. The link described pertains to the interaction between metasemantics

and metaethics. While the former one strives to understand the justification of semantic judgments, among other important issues, the latter one is recognized as the natural study of the meaning of normative statements. Our proposed trans- position is actually a study of what a theory of semantic judgments can draw from the toolkit of notions that metaethics offers to understand the justification of ethical judgments. Note that it is not clear, however, whether Gibbard’s sug- gestion implies an identification of the reasons in each domain. This will have to be considered in the forthcoming.

Certainly, this link will have a certain bearing for semantics as a part of linguistics. Suppose we could obtain — albeit indirectly and quite modestly — some characterization of what can be a source of semantic normativity. Semantic models or systems including a representation of the source of how an interpreter or speaker judges the moves in the dialogue would have to account for, or at least be compatible with, such a picture. For instance, if it turned out that the source cannot be located at the level of isolated individuals, then the criterion for the correctness of judgments in the formal theory would have to rely on something different than just each individual’s information state. We will return to these questions in the last part of this manuscript.

Similar threats for ethics and semantics

A different reason for turning our attention to ethics is suggested by the existence of similar threats to normativity in ethics and in semantics.

Both in semantics and in ethics the need of prescriptive theories is objected by descriptivists who dispute the need of a deontological theory. Anti-normativists as presented in the debate above are a neat example. In the debate, for instance, semantic anti-normativists claimed that no statements about what we ought (not) to or may (not) do with S directly follow from its having certain correctness conditions. The anti-normativist in ethics asserts that there might be something that is correct to do but that ethical theories may just describe and need not prescribe what is correct as what has to be done.

The risk of incurring in a regress of justification is another common worry. We can ask “Why should I do what morality tells me to do?”, if the response is “You should do what morality tells you to do because morality has property X”, any answer invites the reply: “Why should I do something that has prop- erty X?”. The voluntarist, for instance, proposes that the property is to be commanded by someone with power over you. When we ask “Why should I do what is commanded by someone with power over me?” we are in the loop of a regress. As indicated in 2.3.3 above, similar problems appear when considering the justification of use/interpretation.

The sceptical threat and complete relativism are also present crosswise. While “(t)he true moral sceptic is someone who thinks that the explanation of moral concepts will be one that does not support the claims that morality makes on us”

(Korsgaard (1996), p.13), semantic scepticism argues that we do not (logically cannot) follow rules in order to use language competently, to express ourselves meaningfully.

The privacy problem appears to be genuinely peculiar for ethics and semantics. Why moral reasons and meanings are not private seems to be similarly urgent problems in the philosophical agenda. The issue why I should value others seems to be at least as difficult as the problem of whether there can be meaning con- sidering just one subject. Meanwhile, the possible privacy of art seems far less problematic. Art can be present to one isolated person; this is not necessarily inconsistent with being a piece of art. In the case of law, examples of private law as being inconsistent with the normativity of law are not abnormal. Pri- vacy is a junction for ethics and semantics which, we feel, is a strong call for an investigation.

This should partly help to understand why we turned only to Korsgaard’s discussion of the formulation and answer to the normative question. Her argument on the public character of reasons for ethical judgment, as we will see below in 3.1.1, deliberately draws upon Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. According to Korsgaard’s reconstruction of this argument, semantic normativity is not possible unless meaning is admitted to be relational. Likewise, she argues, reasons for ethical judgment cannot be private, just as meanings are relational. Norms require a legislator and a citizen to obey, and so the mere definition of what is a reason, a norm, shows that reasons cannot be private.