Two Defenses of Moral Expressivism—— From Simon Blackburn’s Quasi-Realism to Wang Yangming’s Agent-based Moral Realism

Both Blackburn and Wang Yangming are moral expressivists.Instead of regarding value judgments as descriptions or representations of some putative properties or facts existing out there in a mind-independent way,they take them to be expressions of our feelings,emotions,attitudes,or,better,besires,which we project or spread on things.Moral expressivists,however,have to face the question about how to determine whether a particular value judgement is true of false.Neither Blackburn nor Wang Yangming takes a thorough-going moral anti-realist approach,as both believe that our value judgements can be true or false,and at least some of them are true,despite their subjective nature.To determine their truth value,Blackburn adopts three criteria,coherence,pragmatism,and correspondence in a different sense: whether the value judgements correspond to human nature.Wang Yangming has a fully developed agent-focused moral realism,which provides a much firmer ground than Blackburn’s quasi-realism for determining whether our moral judgements are true or whether we express appropriate besires and spread appropriate values on things outside us.