Ariel Pontes

Logical positivists have tried to distinguish meaningful questions from meaningless ones for decades. Their criterion of verifiability (and later of falsifiability) has left a strong mark in modern philosophy. However, logical positivism has been declared dead and many of the topics considered meaningless by them, such as ethics and aesthetics, are still lively debated by philosophers. It could even be argued that the conclusion that ethics and aesthetics should be dismissed as meaningless is a reductio ad absurdum of any theory of meaning. However, it is an equally absurd position to dismiss the broader idea that we must respect certain criteria in order to be entitled to claim that our statements are meaningful. In this thesis, therefore, I will try to reconcile the principles of logical positivism with ethics, proposing an alternative set of criteria for meaning and a pragmatic approach to ethics that should respect this criteria. I will do this by using Parfit's (2011) arguments in defense of objectivism as a case study. In chapter one I introduce the concepts that will serve as a foundation for my thesis. In chapter two, I begin my argumentation by laying out a fuzzy theory of meaning that allows for different degrees of meaningfulness based on Wittgenstein’s later work and concepts from cognitive science such as prototype theory and conceptual metaphors. In chapter three I argue that Parfit’s objectivism has a low degree of meaningfulness because it relies on the assumption that there is a “fundamental metaphysical relation that holds between facts, on the one hand, and beliefs, desires, aims, and actions, on the other”, a view that Smith (2017) calls “reasons fundamentalism”. Smith rejects reasons fundamentalism but accepts Parfit’s metaphysical framing of the debate. I will argue that the metaphysical nature of the argument renders it largely meaningless. Finally, in chapter four, I argue that although most metaethics is indeed meaningless, especially questions concerning the ontology of moral claims, the dismissal of moral utterances as mere expressions of emotions is also unjustified, and therefore I promote a pragmatic universalist metaethics that is compatible with the criteria of meaning described in chapter one. Essentially, I defend the thesis that the purpose of ethics is to resolve moral conflict, and that this should be done by appeal to logic, consistency, and universal moral intuitions, not contentious metaphysical commitments and category mistakes.