Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn is a British philosopher whose work in metaethics developed quasi-realism, an account of how moral discourse can resemble factual description without requiring mind-independent moral facts.

Metaethics: The branch of philosophy that studies the meaning, status, and foundations of moral judgments. Blackburn’s central work asks what moral claims mean and whether they can be true.
Quasi-realism: Blackburn’s metaethical project of explaining realist features of moral discourse from an expressivist account of moral judgment. This is Blackburn’s signature account of how anti-realism can accommodate moral truth and objectivity talk.
David Hume: An eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher whose work examined sentiment, reason, causation, and human nature. Hume’s account of moral sentiment supplies a major intellectual source for Blackburn’s metaethics.
Think: Simon Blackburn’s introductory book presenting core problems and arguments in Western philosophy. This book exemplifies his effort to make philosophical questions accessible without reducing their complexity.
Moral realism: The view that moral judgments can state facts and that at least some are true independently of anyone’s attitudes. Quasi-realism aims to explain moral truth-talk without accepting this view’s metaphysical commitments.
Projectivism: The view that people project their attitudes onto the world and experience them as features of things. Blackburn uses projection to explain why moral values seem to belong to the world.
Allan Gibbard: An American philosopher known for expressivist theories of moral judgment and rationality. Gibbard developed a neighboring expressivism that clarifies both shared aims and differences with Blackburn.
Ethics: A Very Short Introduction: Simon Blackburn’s concise introduction to ethical theories, moral reasoning, and practical questions. It presents ethical debates in the same clear, argument-focused style as his academic work.
Moral anti-realism: The family of views denying that moral judgments describe stance-independent moral facts. Blackburn’s position belongs to this broad family while preserving much realist-sounding moral discourse.
Frege–Geach problem: The challenge of explaining how non-descriptive moral judgments retain consistent meaning in embedded contexts such as conditionals. Any expressivism Blackburn defends must explain moral reasoning in these contexts.

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J. L. MackieCompared with: Blackburn offers a noncognitivist response to the metaethical alternatives Mackie helped shape.