On Blackburn's Quasi-moral Realism

Blackburn’s quasi-realism has a very important position in western ethics, on one hand, when Blackburn carries on the ideas of emotivism, he wants to avoid the problem about "truth-aptness" which is emotivism cannot answer; on another hand, he is in favor of the reasoning of moral realism, at the same time, he doesn’t agree to follow realist to accept the antecedent as a metaphysical assumption to judge a moral fact true or false. Thereofre, Blackburn prove his quasi-realism by which called supervenience.Blackburn wants to prove the projection of moral attribute is reasonable, without presuming a metaphysical hypothesis. In other words, although moral statements do not refer to any real property, what statements projection is also real. Therefore, when people express moral ideas with word, they can talk about truth-aptness of moral legitimately. The two basic points of quasi-realism as follows:first, moral predicates does not refer to any proposition, that is, they are not of some assertions of the outside world. Second, moral predicates is the project of our emotion and attitude to the objects, which seems to have real property. And some projection are legitimate, the others are not.Of course, quasi-realism has to meet some challenges, just like Frege-Geach problem, threatens from logically incompatible, causal explanation mind-independence, moral truth, and minimalism.As the writer, I think Blackburn’s quasi-realism wants to compound the mess between emotivism and realism, who hopes to stick to emotivist’s position, at the same time, achieve realist’s aim of the possible of moral judgments. But it is hard to make a difference between quasi-realism and realism, because they are merely not any difference in logical form. Furthermore, there are many others can be talked about, like ficitionism. In short, quasi-realism is very important.The significance of this paper is that making a research of quasi-realism is helpful to our understanding of metaethics. In the America, the books of quasi-realism are used to be teaching material of graduate students. The theory has been studied for many years in foreign countries, but not in china, or only a little. Therefore, this paper can fill the gaps to some extent.