ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the issue of thick moral concepts and properties.
Agreeing with Dancy’s stress on the central importance of these, and on the
view that they essentially involve response(s) of observers, it reminds the reader
that in his earlier paper (Dancy 1986) Dancy forcefully argues against response-
dispositional accounts of moral concepts and properties. The first part of
the present paper further argues that an anti-dispositional view is incom-
patible with the first two points concerning thick concepts. If the argument
is right, Dancy is implicitly committed to a kind of response-dependentism. The second part proposes a response-dependentist alternative. First,
response-dependence is not built into the ordinary thick moral concept
itself, since ordinary moral phenomenology is not response-dependentist. A
response-dependent account is a theoretical, philosophical account, and not
a part of moral commonsense. Second, thick moral concepts are defined by
an implicitly held commonsense theory, which can be either true or false, in
spite of being constitutive for the concept. Third, the semantics of these
concepts is very close to the semantics of serious pejoratives, and a single theory can account for both.
