Abstract
Moral anti-realism comes in two forms – noncognitivism and the error theory. The noncognitivist says that when we make moral judgments we aren’t even trying to state moral facts. The error theorist says that when we make moral judgments we are making statements about what is objectively good, bad, right, or wrong but, since there are no moral facts, our moral judgments are uniformly false. This development of moral anti-realism was first seriously defended by John Mackie. In this paper I explore a dispute among moral error theorists about how to deal with false moral judgments. The advice of the moral abolitionist is to stop making moral judgments, but the contrary advice of the moral fictionalist is to retain moral language and moral thinking. After clarifying the choice that arises for the moral error theorist, I argue that moral abolitionism has much to recommend it. I discuss Mackie’s defense of moral fictionalism as well as a recent version of the same position offered by Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall, and Caroline West. Then I second some remarks Ian Hinckfuss made in his defense of moral abolitionism and his criticism of “the moral society.” One of the worst things about moral fictionalism is that it undermines our epistemology by promoting a culture of deception. To deal with this problem Richard Joyce offers a “non-assertive” version of moral fictionalism as perhaps the last option for an error theorist who hopes to avoid moral abolitionism. I discuss some of the problems facing that form of moral fictionalism, offer some further reasons for adopting moral abolitionism in our personal lives, and conclude with reasons for thinking that abolishing morality may be an essential step in achieving the goals well-meaning moralists and moral fictionalists have always cherished.
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Notes
John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).
Blackburn could say this because, as a “quasi-realist” he held that no mistake is involved in moral judgments.
Mackie later adds that the notion of a right is “valuable and indeed vital.” (1977, p. 173).
John Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 154.
See what Simon Blackburn has to say about “the holism of the mental,” in Blackburn (1998).
Ian Hinckfuss, “The Moral Society: Its Structure and Effects,” Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy (Canberra: Australian National University, 1987), fn. 11, p. 18.
William Lycan, “Moral Facts and Moral Knowledge,” in the 1985 Spindel Conference on Moral Realism, edited by Norman Gillespie. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXIV, Supplement, n. 29.
Joyce’s reference is to Peter Singer’s, The Expanding Circle (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), p. ix.
Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2006). In Chapter Six of The Myth of Morality, Joyce explains how evolution has given us a “hardwired predilection to believe that moral obligations exist.” (p. 146).
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An article submitted for the special edition on John Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (to be edited by Richard Joyce).
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Garner, R. Abolishing Morality. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 10, 499–513 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9085-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9085-3