Home > Positioning > Persons > Blackburn

Simon Blackburn (1944–)

Blackburn is the leading developer of quasi-realism — the attempt to begin from the expressivist premise that moral judgements voice attitudes rather than report facts, and then to earn back, from inside moral practice, everything the realist wanted: talk of moral truth, moral knowledge, moral facts, and the mind-independence of moral demands. The wager is that a projectivist can end up entitled to the whole realist-sounding vocabulary without ever positing a realm of values for it to answer to. He stands in the expressivist line that runs from Hume through the emotivists, and alongside Bernard Williams among the British moral philosophers who took ethics away from the theory-building of the mid-century.

Simon Blackburn was educated at Cambridge and held chairs at Oxford (as a Fellow of Pembroke College), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Cambridge, where he was Professor of Philosophy until 2011. His technical work is gathered in Spreading the Word (1984), Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993), and Ruling Passions (1998), the fullest statement of the position. He is also among the most successful philosophical popularisers of his generation — Think (1999), Being Good (2001), and Lust (2004) reached a wide general readership, and he edited the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

Key concepts

Projectivism. Inherited from Hume: the mind “gilds and stains” the world with sentiments drawn from feeling, and we then experience value as though it were a feature of things themselves. Moral qualities are projections of our attitudes onto conduct and character, not properties discovered in them. Blackburn takes projectivism as the honest starting point and treats the appearance of objectivity as something to be explained rather than taken at face value.

Quasi-realism. The programme’s core move. If moral thought only expresses attitudes, it should — on the face of it — lack the trappings of fact-stating discourse: truth, knowledge, doubt, proof, the ability to embed in conditionals. Quasi-realism argues that the practice earns those trappings anyway. Once attitudes are held toward attitudes, disciplined by consistency and by the demand to stand up under scrutiny, the practice generates its own standards of correctness — and the realist-sounding talk is licensed by what the practice constitutively involves, not by a property the world supplies. The realist and the quasi-realist may end up saying the same things; they differ on what entitles the saying.

The Frege–Geach problem. The sharpest technical challenge to any expressivism, and much of Blackburn’s ingenuity is spent on it. If “lying is wrong” merely expresses disapproval, what does the phrase mean in an unasserted context — “if lying is wrong, then getting your brother to lie is wrong” — where no disapproval is voiced? A theory of meaning that starts from expressed attitude owes an account of logical embedding. Blackburn’s answer builds a logic of attitudes: consistency among the commitments a speaker undertakes, so that endorsing the premises while rejecting the conclusion is a kind of fractured sensibility rather than a formal contradiction.

Truth without correspondence. On the quasi-realist account, calling a moral claim true is a way of endorsing it and signalling that it withstands the pressures the practice applies, not a claim that it corresponds to a moral fact. Blackburn is willing to speak of moral truth, moral knowledge, and even moral facts as internal achievements of the practice — a minimalism about truth that lets the vocabulary run without the metaphysics.

Practical stances and the quasi-realist of everything. Blackburn extends the projectivist-then-earn-back strategy beyond ethics to causation, modality, and probability — domains where we seem to talk of objective structure but where he argues the objectivity is a projection disciplined into the shape of fact. The method generalises: begin with the human stance, then reconstruct the objective-seeming discourse from it.

Where Blackburn stops

Quasi-realism sets out to mimic realism so exactly that, by its own account, nothing in first-order moral practice comes out different: the quasi-realist says everything the realist says. This raises a persistent objection — whether a view that reproduces realism’s whole surface has genuinely stayed on the anti-realist side, or has collapsed into a notational variant of the realism it meant to replace. Blackburn treats the indistinguishability as the success condition; critics treat it as the point at which the distinction stops doing work. The dispute is unresolved and is internal to the programme’s ambition.

The companion worry is creeping minimalism. To earn back moral truth, knowledge, and facts, quasi-realism leans on deflationary readings of each — truth as endorsement, a fact as whatever a true claim states. Critics press that once enough of the realist vocabulary is deflated and handed back, it is no longer clear the position has kept anything distinctively anti-realist to disagree with; the expressivist starting point risks being absorbed by its own success. Blackburn holds that the genealogy still matters — that beginning from attitudes rather than facts remains a substantive claim about what moral thought is, however much surface vocabulary is recovered. Whether the difference survives the deflation is a live question in his reception.

Key works

See also: Ethics · Hume · Bernard Williams · Gibbard