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Semantic Attributivism: What It Is and What It Can(Not) Do
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Semantic Attributivism: What It Is and What It Can(Not) Do
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Dissertation
Semantic Attributivism: What It Is and What It Can(Not) Do
2023
Overview
Semantic attributivism (SA) is the thesis that “good” and “bad” each have only a single semantic function that is attributive. That is, no meaningful use of “good” or “bad” ascribes a single property goodness or badness across all meaningful deployments, but instead meaningful deployments of “good” and “bad” ascribe the variable property of being good in some respect, such as good as a knife, good at chess, good for koalas, etc. SA is frequently taken to ground an argument against the existence of goodness simpliciter, the evaluative property championed by G. E. Moore and utilized by many consequentialist normative theories. In this paper, I have two main aims. First, I resolve two puzzles for SA, developing a clearer and more explanatory version of the theory. Second, I argue that the improved version of SA has no implications for the existence of goodness simpliciter and therefore no implications for consequentialism. The result is that SA, when understood more fully, is revealed to have fewer axiological and normative implications than it is sometimes thought to have.
