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Allan Gibbard (1942–)

Gibbard built an expressivism around the acceptance of norms: to call an act rational, or wrong, is not to describe it but to express one’s endorsement of a system of norms that permits or forbids it. Where the emotivists made moral language voice feeling, he made it voice a normative stance, and grounded that stance in a naturalistic account of the moral emotions. His two major books recast the idea a decade apart — first around norms and the feelings they govern, then around planning and the question of how to live. He also did substantial early work in decision theory and social choice before the metaethics that made his name, and he stands with Simon Blackburn among the expressivists who took the view past its emotivist origins.

Allan Gibbard trained at Harvard under John Rawls and taught for most of his career at the University of Michigan, where he was Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. His early technical results — the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem on the manipulability of voting schemes, and work on the foundations of decision theory — belong to social choice and rational-choice theory; the metaethical programme followed in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990) and Thinking How to Live (2003).

Key concepts

Norm-expressivism. In Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, to judge something rational is to express acceptance of norms that permit it. A judgement of rationality is not a report on a property the act has but the voicing of a normative stance the speaker occupies. The account is built to cover rationality in general — belief, action, and feeling alike — with moral judgement a special case: to think an act wrong is to accept norms that warrant guilt in the agent and resentment in others.

The apt feelings. Gibbard ties the normative to a natural story about the moral emotions. Guilt, resentment, and anger are the feelings whose warrant moral judgements govern; the question “is this wrong?” is, on his analysis, the question of whether guilt and resentment are apt. This grounds the expressivist account in a naturalistic and broadly evolutionary picture of why creatures like us have such feelings and coordinate through them, without reducing the normative claim to a factual one.

Planning and thinking how to live. In Thinking How to Live, Gibbard reworks the framework around plans. A normative judgement — what one ought to do — is the adoption of a contingency plan for the situation in view: to accept that one ought to X in circumstance C is to plan to X should C arise. Normative thought is planning thought. This “plan-laden” account lets him treat ordinary factual belief and normative judgement within one framework, since deciding how to live involves holding beliefs and plans together.

Answering Frege–Geach through disagreement. The embedding problem — what “wrong” means in an unasserted clause — Gibbard addresses through the logic of plans and the disagreement they encode. Two people disagree normatively when their plans cannot be jointly carried out under a shared hyperstate of fact-plus-plan; logical relations among normative sentences are inherited from the relations among the plans they express. Consistency becomes a matter of whether plans can be held together, which gives embedded normative clauses determinate content without positing normative facts.

Where Gibbard stops

The expressivist owes an account of how normative language behaves exactly like fact-stating language — truth, logic, embedding — while denying that it states facts. Gibbard’s plan-based logic is one of the most developed answers, but it inherits the standing worry pressed against all expressivism: whether a logic of plans genuinely reproduces the full inferential behaviour of normative discourse, or reconstructs a well-behaved fragment while harder cases (nested conditionals, attitudes toward others’ attitudes) remain contested. The adequacy of the reconstruction is a live question rather than a settled result.

A second boundary is the naturalism. Grounding moral judgement in the aptness of guilt and resentment ties the account to a particular story about the moral emotions; critics ask whether that story fixes the content of a normative judgement or only explains why we make judgements at all — whether, having naturalised the feelings, anything is left over that the aptness-claim is answerable to. Gibbard holds the normative question apart from the explanatory one; whether the separation holds is disputed in his reception.

Key works

See also: Ethics · Blackburn · Brandom