Blackburn’s Moral Quasi-realism

An important issue in the study of meta-ethics is to determine the properties of ethics statement.In this regard,there are non-cognitive emotional stance and cognitive descriptive stance.In terms of determining the properties of ethics statement,the contemporary British important researcher ethics Blackburn not only inherited the emotivism,adhered to the cognitive standpoint,but also accepted a sense of realism,avoid the dilemma that emotivism encountered in the process of explaining the “truth-maker” problem.Therefore,he insisted on a quasi-realist viewpoint in the study of ethical judgments.By analyzing the relationship between the non-cognitivism and moral judgments shows that compared with the cognitive realism,the “quasi-realism” can well explain the non-existence of the mixed world without the assumption in the sense of metaphysics.Objectively speaking,the ethic non-cognitions of Blackburn’s realism has some superiority in the solution of Frege-Geach problem.However,Blackburn’s quasi-realism has also been questioned by other scholars.This article focuses on the connotations,merits,and developments of this point of view.The first part mainly expounds that starting from the rise of meta-ethics.Moore’s intuitionist theory begins with the logical analysis of moral concepts and moral propositions,trying to prove the possibility of ethics as a science.However,the logical positivism movement of the analysis of discourse significance turned the scientific analysis of the ethics proposition into the study of emotional expression.It was considered that the moral statement was only the expression of emotions,thus rejecting the ethics in the field of science.The basic position of Blackburn’s quasi-realism originated from sentimentalism,but on this standpoint,it is possible to make the true and false moral judgments,which makes ethical science scientific.The second part mainly introduces Blackburn’s projectionism andthe quasi-realist thought based on projectionism.Like previous logical positivism and sentimentalism,Blackburn rejects metaphysics and believes that moral statements are expressions of emotion.However,he introduced natural attributes into the discussion of emotions so that moral attributes are attached to natural attributes.We can talk about objective values in the absence of moral facts,and further construct truth values for objective values to make us talk about emotions.The attitude is true or false.This approach has changed the way that meta-ethicists have consistently distinguished between beliefs and attitudes,facts and values,and blurred the boundaries between them.Because of this,Blackburn could explain the Frege-Geach problem that the emotionalists had been unable to explain.The third part mainly analyzes the advantages and problems of Blackburn’s quasi-realist theory.It focus on the shortcomings of Quasi-Realism in its theoretical development process,and shows that Quasi-Realism does not require the commitment of realism ontology in theory,and further maintains the theoretical position of Quasi-Realism.