Abstract

Normative judgments are typically subject to emotional reasons that cannot be justified by reference to facts alone. As a result, practical disputes sometimes go unsettled in ways that support James Lenman's view of moral inquiry as politics. An important consequence is that reasonableness is often preferable to truth as a criterion of good practical judgment. Although the role of emotions suggests metaethical expressivism as preferable to realism for analysing practical reasoning, reasonableness transforms expressivism from a form of noncognitivism into a theory that recognizes cognitively rich forms of approval and disapproval. Defensible normative intuitions have good justifying reasons even when these reasons permit faultless differences of political opinion and ethical practice. Despite implying deep normative pluralism, however, a cognitivist form of expressivism explains how deliberative agents can construct and maintain reasonable moral communities.