Aniket Chakravorty (New College): 'Moral Vagueness: A problem for epistemicism?'
Moral Vagueness is often taken to be an important feature of moral terms like ‘permissible.’ However, moral terms also seem to have features which do not lend themselves easily to being explained by many different theories of vagueness. I first show that moral terms are semantically stable- their meanings tend not to shift over time. I argue that this is a feature supported both by linguistic data and most prominent meta-ethical views. I then ask whether this poses a problem for epistemicism, which relies on semantic instability to explain vagueness. I conclude that most prominent theories of vagueness struggle with semantic stability, and so moral terms may not be vague after all.
