Normative Concepts for Expressivists

We possess a range of normative concepts. What, if any, are the priority relations among them? This paper explores the question of priority from a noncognitivist expressivist perspective. I first clarify what the question of priority amounts to for the expressivist, given the view’s distinctive theoretical commitments. In the rest of the paper, I develop and defend an answer which draws in various ways from the oeuvre of Allan Gibbard. On this Gibbardian account, the basic normative concept belongs to the fittingness family, and beliefs involving this concept express decisions to have attitudes. I argue that, with its notion of decision, the account has the resources to explain certain (putative) features of fittingness-family concepts just as well as existing cognitivist accounts. I conclude by defending the Gibbardian identification of fittingness beliefs with decisions from two classes of counterexample.