How to Guide with Words: Moral Advice as a Speech Act

Abstract

This thesis examines moral advice as a distinctive speech act, focusing on its aim in guiding deliberation. Despite its prevalence in moral discourse, moral advice has been overlooked in comparison to other speech acts, such as blame, praise, and promise. Drawing on speech act theory, I categorise moral advice as a directive speech act, and argue that it is best understood as a hearer-first directive: it aims to guide for the hearer’s sake and for the morality’s sake while respecting their autonomy. Adopting an intentionalist view, I claim that the type of speech act performed is determined by the speaker’s illocutionary and relevant perlocutionary intentions, and that felicity depends on additional normative and contextual conditions.
I make four key contributions. First, I develop the priming view of explicit performatives, showing how explicit advisory utterances can guide action by shaping the hearer’s interpretation of the utterance as intended. Second, I examine the family of directives by distinguishing between speaker-first and hearer-first directives, and clarify how advising differs from other directive speech acts. Third, I argue that the speaker’s intentions and their normative standing both contribute to a unified account of speech acts: the former determines the type of speech act performed, while the latter determines felicity conditions. I clarify that standing can be conferred by the hearer, and that advising can be felicitous without uptake. On my account, moral advising is an invitation to deliberate on normative reasons rather than a demand for compliance. Fourth, I revise Sbisà’s account of the norms of the speech act of advice. I propose felicity-enabling rules in light of the speaker’s normative standing and the hearer conferring that standing, modify the maxims of advice, and suggest a unified evaluative requirement for moral advice.
Taken together, these contributions provide a comprehensive account of how moral advice functions as a speech act and how it should be evaluated. By examining both its performative structure and its normative requirements, the thesis provides tools for understanding when moral advice is performed, when it is felicitous, and how it can be evaluated. This not only advances debates in the philosophy of language and the norms of moral discourse but also informs practical contexts in which advice is given, including cases of discursive injustice and situations where it is unsolicited.

• author: Kim, Jiwon
• supervisor: Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen; David Alm; Martin Jönsson
• opponent: professor Rae Langton, University of Cambridge
• organization: Practical Philosophy
• publishing date: 2025-09-03
• type: Thesis
• publication status: published
• subject: Philosophy; Ethics
• keywords: Advice, Speech Act Theory, Directives, Normative standing, Uptake, Perlocutionary intention, Felicity conditions, Moral deliberation, Moral Advice
• pages: 275 pages
• defense location: LUX C121
• defense date: 2025-10-04 10:00:00
• ISBN: 978-91-90055-30-4
• ISBN: 978-91-90055-31-1
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• id: 46c224d5-629a-41ea-81f9-02b4a473fc36
• date added to LUP: 2025-09-03 12:02:39
• date last changed: 2025-09-06 18:09:31