In a recent response to a question, Michael Lacewing writes: "Blackburn’s quasi-realism argues that ethical language is rather more complex than either emotivist theory claims [Ayer's and Stevenson's]. First, ethical language does express propositions, such as ‘what she did was courageous’ or ‘his remark was unkind’ as well as ‘murder is wrong’. The predicates ‘was courageous’, ‘was unkind’, ‘is wrong’, attribute a property to something (what she did, his remark, murder). However, second, these predicates aren’t genuine descriptions of what she did, etc. but ‘projections’ of our evaluations. In using ethical language, we don’t speak of and think in terms our personal evaluations, but in terms of the properties of things in the world. We treat our evaluative commitments (to courage, to kindness etc.) as though they were judgments about how the world is. This is enormously useful, because it is much easier to coordinate our attitudes with other people if we think in terms of an intersubjective world of...

Your questions show that you really understand the debate here well, because they probe very deep into the motivation for quasi-realism. So to attempt a rather tentative answer, one that may help with all three questions. Blackburn starts from the claim that ‘Ethics is about how we live in the world… The practical role of ethics is what defines it. This is what ethics is for. If there is such a thing as ethical knowledge, it is matter of knowing how to act… more than knowing that anything is the case.’ (Ruling Passions, p. 1) This is intended as conceptual analysis. If this is right, then ethics is shown in our responses to the world. These responses arise as a result of how we represent the world. We recognise something distinctive about the situation we are in, and we respond with some attitude or emotion or behaviour. Our ‘ethical sensibility’ connects the input and the output. Very often, we describe the situation in value-laden terms. So it may seem that the input includes values. But Blackburn...