How to Be a Self-Effacing Consequentializing Quasi-Realist

Consequentialists often argue that their opponents’ views can be consequentialized or that their own view is partly self-effacing. These arguments resemble the quasi-realist moves that many expressivists make. I argue, however, that consequentializing and self-effacement are surprisingly hard to accommodate within an expressivist framework. This threatens to show that expressivism is false, since it threatens to show that there are meaningful normative sentences that do not express noncognitive attitudes. I then argue that this threat can be neutralized by taking expressivists’ quasi-realist moves further than they are normally taken. This also reveals a deeper resemblance between quasi-realist moves and self-effacement.