How To Do Things with Thick Terms: The Moral Significance of Thick Moral Language

Among moral philosophers in the analytic tradition it has become customary to draw a distinction between thin and thick terms (or concepts). Paradigmatic instances of the former are words like ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘right,’ ‘ought,’ ‘permissible,’ while the latter are exemplified by terms such as ‘cruel,’ ‘courageous,’ ‘kind,’ ‘treacherous,’ ‘generous’ or ‘dishonorable’. During the 1950s some philosophers variously influenced by Wittgenstein started to draw attention to the latter with the intuition that there was something special about them that was important to take into account for a fully satisfying explanation of moral language and thought. In the last decade or so there has been a lively, technically sophisticated debate about thick terms, centered on the question of whether they are separable into a nonevaluative and a thinly evaluative component or not. In my dissertation I argue that both sides of the current debate are governed by an assumption I call representationalism and define as the idea that i) the aim of moral language use is to “get it right” about a moral situation and that ii) a philosophical theory can help justify use of that language by laying out its correctness-conditions. I suggest that representationalism distorts the ways in which we actually use thick terms and is an unreliable account of their meaning. I hence develop an “ordinary language philosophy” conception of thick terms according to which use of thick terms is to be understood as the making of a moral move in a context of utterance rather than a mere attempt to get it right about what is morally the case. On this conception one can argue that there are things we do morally with thick terms which we cannot do otherwise, thereby showing why they are morally important.