Philosophie-Delor - Philosophy – Delor: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/ - Philosophy: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/ - A Reading List for Critical Thinking: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/reading_list/ - What Is Philosophy: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/what-is-philosophy/ - What Is Quality: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/what-is-qualety/ - Minimum Standards for Productive Philosophical Discussion: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/mindeststandards/ - Ethics: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/ethics/ - Hume’s Is–Ought Problem and Its Solution: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/ethics/hume_is_ought/ - Criticism and Reviews: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/ - The Misconception of Utilitarianism: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/utilltarissmus/ - Professor Hanno Sauer: The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/sauer_moral/ - How not to Prove Hume's Law: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/how-to-prove-humes-law/ - Satirical Criticism: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/ - As Free as a Turnspit: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/kants-idealissmus/ - The Two Dogmas of Königsberg-7: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/kants-imperativ/ - Expressivism: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/expressivism/ - Parfit and the Normative Parallel World: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/parfit/ - Thick Rules: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/thick-rules/ - The Gospel of Searl: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/the-gospel-of-john/ - Publications: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/publications/ - About the Author: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/about/ # The Ostrich Strategy of Ethics *Why Expressivism Fails – A Critique from the Perspective of Critical Rationalism* In *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, Douglas Adams describes the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal – a creature of such staggering stupidity that it believes if you can't see it, it can't see you. The recommended defence strategy is therefore to wrap a towel around your head. The Bugblatter Beast sees that you cannot see it, concludes that it cannot see you either, and consequently does not eat you. What does this have to do with metaethics? More than one might think. Imagine a murderer is after you – and he is an expressivist. Just before he strikes, you confront him: "Why do you want to kill me?" He will offer reasons – revenge, conviction, necessity, whatever. You reply: "According to your own theory, those are not truth-apt statements. They are mere expressions of attitudes – a 'boo!' directed at my continued existence, a 'hurrah!' for my death. Emotions. Not reasons. By your own logic, there is no reason to act on them." This is the correct application of the expressivist thesis. If normative sentences are nothing but expressions of attitudes, then there is no difference between "thou shalt not kill" and "I don't like parsley" – both express an attitude, neither is truer than the other, and neither binds anyone to anything. The expressivist has wrapped the towel around his head: he no longer sees the normative problem, so – he believes – it no longer exists. But the problem is still standing there. And it is hungry. ## 1. What Is Expressivism? Expressivism is a metaethical position claiming that moral sentences are not descriptions of the world but expressions of non-cognitive mental states. The sentence "stealing is wrong" does not, on this view, describe a fact but expresses an attitude of the speaker – an emotion, a volition, an acceptance of norms, or an action plan. The position comes in several variants, distinguished by *which* mental state moral sentences are supposed to express. **Emotivism** (Ayer, 1936; Stevenson, 1944) is the oldest and crudest form: moral sentences are expressions of feeling; "stealing is wrong" means roughly "stealing – boo!". Stevenson adds a persuasive component: moral discourse serves to influence attitudes. **Prescriptivism** (Hare, 1952, 1963) replaces emotions with universalisable imperatives: "stealing is wrong" means "do not steal!" – understood as a prescription the speaker intends to apply to all comparable cases. **Norm-expressivism** (Gibbard, 1990) interprets moral judgments as expressions of the acceptance of a norm system. **Plan-expressivism** (Gibbard, 2003) understands them as expressions of contingent action plans. **Quasi-realism** (Blackburn, 1984, 1993, 1998) is the most ambitious variant: Blackburn starts from an expressivist base but attempts to recover all realist-sounding features – truth-aptness, moral knowledge, moral facts – as projections legitimised within the framework. Despite these differences, all variants share a common core: moral sentences have no propositional content that could be true or false of the world. Normativity is not a feature of reality but a feature of the speaker. ## 2. Where Does Expressivism Come From? Expressivism is not an independent discovery but a reaction to an assumption: that the is–ought gap is in principle unbridgeable. If normative conclusions cannot follow from descriptive premises, then ought-sentences can have no connection to the empirical world. If they have no connection to the world, they cannot be true or false. And if they cannot be true or false, the only remaining explanation is: they express something other than factual claims – namely attitudes, emotions, plans, norm-acceptances. Expressivism is therefore parasitic on the impossibility thesis. It becomes a rational option only if it has been shown that ought-sentences are in principle not reconstructable as truth-apt statements. If the impossibility thesis falls, the foundation of expressivism falls with it. ## 3. The Problems of Expressivism ### 3.1 The Frege-Geach Problem The technically most severe problem for expressivism comes from Peter Geach (1960, 1965), building on Frege's distinction between sense and reference. The objection concerns the logical embedding of moral sentences. Consider the following argument: (1) If stealing is wrong, then inciting theft is wrong. (2) Stealing is wrong. (3) Therefore, inciting theft is wrong. This is a valid modus ponens. But its validity presupposes that "stealing is wrong" has the same content in premise (1) and premise (2). In premise (2) the sentence is asserted; in premise (1) it occurs as an unasserted component of a conditional – it is not expressed but presupposed. If "stealing is wrong" is merely an expression of attitude, then in (1) it has no propositional content that could function as the antecedent of a conditional. A "boo!" cannot be embedded in an if-then: "if boo!, then ..." is not a well-formed sentence. The Frege-Geach problem shows that expressivism cannot account for the logical structure of ordinary moral reasoning. Expressivists have spent decades attempting to solve this problem – Blackburn with his "logical grammar of attitudes", Gibbard with his plan systems – but none of these attempts reproduces the power of classical propositional logic without tacitly reintroducing propositional content. Whoever reintroduces propositional content has abandoned expressivism. ### 3.2 No Answer to the Normative Question The deepest problem of expressivism lies not in logic but in substance. Ethics attempts to answer a question: *What ought we to do?* Expressivism denies that this question can be answered in a truth-apt manner. Moral sentences express attitudes, but no attitude is truer than any other. This means expressivism denies not merely a particular answer but the legitimacy of the question itself. "What should I do?" becomes a question with no possible correct answer – like "What colour is the number seven?". This is not a solution to the normative problem but its abolition. And the abolition of a question is justified only if it has been shown to be genuinely meaningless. Expressivism has not shown this; it has merely presupposed it by accepting the impossibility thesis as given. ### 3.3 Concealed Intuitionism and Relativism In practice, expressivists avoid open nihilism by appealing to factual convergences of attitudes, reflective equilibrium, or evolutionarily shaped intuitions. But these evasive manoeuvres generate new problems. If moral intuitions are to serve as orientation but possess no truth-conditions, then the question "Why this intuition and not another?" cannot be answered. This is intuitionism without a testing authority. The result is that expressivism collapses into relativism: different individuals and cultures have different attitudes, and none is objectively better than any other. Between "raising a family" and "becoming a serial killer" there are then only differences of attitude, not differences of correctness. This is logically consistent but practically nihilistic – and it answers not a single question that human beings put to ethics. ### 3.4 Quasi-Realism Solves Nothing Blackburn's quasi-realism attempts to circumvent the problem: one can *act as if* moral sentences were true or false, and this as-if suffices for practical purposes. But the question "sufficient for what?" itself requires a standard. Whether an as-if "works" can only be assessed relative to a goal. Without such a goal, the claim "it suffices" is empty – it reproduces precisely the problem it purports to solve. Quasi-realism thus either tacitly smuggles in a standard it officially rejects, or it says nothing. ### 3.5 Immunisation Against Criticism From the perspective of critical rationalism, the weightiest objection is methodological. If moral sentences are not truth-apt statements, they cannot fail against experience. No observation and no argument can show an attitude to be *wrong* – only unusual, unpopular, or psychologically explicable. Normative statements are thereby immunised against empirical criticism. A system that produces statements about human action that are in principle unfalsifiable is, in the sense of critical rationalism, to be methodologically rejected. It says nothing about reality; it merely reproduces the attitudes of its bearers. On such a foundation, any arbitrary ethics can be erected – and none can fail. The result is structural nihilism: not as a tragic insight but as a methodological artefact of a false initial decision. ## 4. Why Expressivism Is Superfluous Expressivism derives its entire plausibility from the assumption that the is–ought gap is unbridgeable. If ought-sentences in principle cannot follow from is-sentences, then there remains only the choice between dogmatic stipulation (ought as an ungroundable axiom) and expressivism (ought as an expression of attitude without truth-value). Under this assumption, expressivism would even be the more honest position. But the assumption is false. If "ought" is reconstructed as a goal-relative operator with empirical content – as a claim about what promotes a goal under given boundary conditions – then ought-sentences are truth-apt, empirically testable, and falsifiable. They describe not the attitudes of the speaker but means–end relations in the world. Goal-relativity alone, however, does not yet solve the problem. For immediately the question arises: relative to *which* goal? Without an answer, goal-relative reconstruction delivers only hypothetical normativity – if goal Z, then means M – and expressivism could retort that the choice of the goal is itself just another expression of attitude. The answer lies in the structure of goals themselves. Goals are hierarchically ordered: instrumental goals derive their value from their relation to higher goals, and this chain terminates in an ultimate goal. Aristotle already recognised this hierarchical structure clearly and identified the ultimate goal as eudaimonia – as precisely as was possible without evolutionary theory (Aristotle, *Nicomachean Ethics*, Book I). What Aristotle lacked was the means to identify this ultimate goal empirically rather than postulate it philosophically. Evolutionary theory provides exactly that. The ultimate goal is not freely chosen but reconstructable as the factual goal-structure of living systems – teleonomically, not teleologically: goal-directedness as the result of selection, without a purposive agent. What selection produces over generations are dispositional bundles whose effect typically increases lineage fitness – the long-term persistence and reproduction of the genetic lineage. Lineage fitness is thus the teleonomically reconstructed ultimate goal relative to which ought-sentences acquire their empirical content. The full derivation of this argument is given in the paper "The Solution to the Is–Ought Problem" (Delor, 2025/2026). This eliminates the reason to abandon propositional content. Expressivism becomes a solution to a problem that no longer exists. The crucial point is that such a reconstruction also explains what expressivism merely describes. That human beings have moral intuitions, that these intuitions vary across cultures, that they sometimes converge and sometimes diverge – all of this makes coherent sense within an evolutionarily grounded, goal-relative ethics. Intuitions are proximate mechanisms typically oriented toward lineage fitness but liable to misfire under changed environmental conditions. Goal-relative ethics explains why we have moral attitudes, where they come from, when they are reliable and when they are not. Expressivism merely notes that they exist and declines to test them. It offers less explanatory power at greater methodological cost. ## 5. Summary Expressivism is parasitic on the impossibility thesis; solves no normative problem but denies that normative questions can be answered in a truth-apt manner; fails on the Frege-Geach problem because expressions of attitude cannot be embedded in logical structures; collapses into relativism and structural nihilism because it provides no standard for evaluating competing attitudes; immunises normative statements against empirical criticism, thereby violating the fundamental methodological principle of critical rationalism; and becomes superfluous as soon as a truth-apt reconstruction of ought-sentences is available. It is not a solution but a symptom of a false framework. --- *Frieder Delor, 2026. This text supplements the paper "The Solution to the Is–Ought Problem" (Delor, 2025/2026).* ## References Ayer, A. J. (1936). *Language, Truth and Logic*. Victor Gollancz Ltd. Blackburn, S. (1984). *Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language*. Clarendon Press. Blackburn, S. (1993). *Essays in Quasi-Realism*. Oxford University Press. Blackburn, S. (1998). *Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning*. Clarendon Press. Geach, P. T. (1960). Ascriptivism. *The Philosophical Review*, 69(2), 221–225. Geach, P. T. (1965). Assertion. *The Philosophical Review*, 74(4), 449–465. Gibbard, A. (1990). *Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment*. Harvard University Press. Gibbard, A. (2003). *Thinking How to Live*. Harvard University Press. Hare, R. M. (1952). *The Language of Morals*. Clarendon Press. Hare, R. M. (1963). *Freedom and Reason*. Clarendon Press. Stevenson, C. L. (1944). *Ethics and Language*. Yale University Press.