Moral subjectivism and the semantics of disagreements

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss which semantic theory moral subjectivists should adopt. Moral subjectivism is understood broadly to include all theories according to which moral sentences are truth-apt, at least sometimes true, and made true by the mental attitudes of certain relevant agent or set of agents. Due to the breadth of this definition, an initial concern is whether a unified semantic approach is able to accommodate all varieties of subjectivism. I argue that it is. I then proceed to analyse the main semantic theories for moral sentences as they apply to the standard issue of moral disagreements. I conclude in favour of so-called Non-Indexical Contextualism.