I hate these debates, and was aiming more for an expression of puzzlement than the beginning of something solidly documenting my experience. Take it for what it’s worth – which, since you don’t know me from Adam, can’t be much for you.

Can you quote examples ?

I have heard, however, that his relatively small “Dictionary of Phil” is quite useful. Haven’t looked at it myself, though.

Blackburn’s almost criminally vague and sloppy treatment of this absolutely crucial issue aside, I still insist that I got something out of Ruling Passions. It’s got some interesting things to say, and the writing is punchy and fun. At least, that’s how I remember it. So take that for what it’s worth. I suppose I was mainly interested to defend Blackburn against the schmucko reviewing him in Slate. I’m all for sensible Blackburn bashing of the kind you favour, but I don’t think this guy really knows what he’s talking about.

Oh by the way, I used Blackburn’s Being Good at the beginning of my biomedical ethics class at IC last year, and was sort of surprised to find that my students really hated it. I was expecting them to like it. So there you go: a whole roomful of Blackburn detractors. The poor guy.

My big problem with Blackburn is that he seems to think that the _metaphysics_ of morals has more to do with moral semantics than anyone would typically think. He says things like, Since the world is ‘value free’, we should not expect our claims about morality to be like scientific claims about what exists; no, they are claims expressing our various moral feelings and commitments. But when his is pressed to explain, as he should, in what circumstances moral claims *might* have had the ‘external,’ realist meanings that most realists (and Mackie, too) think they *do* have, he doesn’t have much to say:

There would be an external reading if realism were true. For in that case there would be a fact, a state of affairs (the wrongness of cruelty) whose rise and fall and dependency on others could be charted. But anti-realism acknowledges no such state of affairs and no such issue of dependency. (“Errors and Phen. of Value”)

But this is bizarre. Since Blackburn claims not even to understand what it would mean to say that realism is true (Would we be able to stub our toes on human rights?), why does he think that is the *only* circumstance that would lead to ‘external’ readings of our moral utterances are circumstances where realism is true? His account is not better–and indeed seems much less plausible–than the common sense view that *if* the world contains no moral facts, then our moral discourse is in some ways defective.

But Blackburn doesn’t want that, because he wants his quasi-realist sematics to swoop in and save the moral practices in distress.

So my problem with Blackburn is that he’s tried so hard to argue that the *possibility* that our moral utterances might incorporate quasi-realist semantics is enough to show that they do, while at the same time holding that the only case in which our moral utterances could be shown to incorporate realist semantics would be if the world contained causally efficacious moral facts. That seems to be a significant discrepancy in the burdens of proof imposed upon two views of one empirical phenomenon.

As we philosophers are wont to do after a tirade of that sort, I ask: Does that make sense??