Abstract
This paper deals with the prospects of using transcendental arguments against scepticism in practical philosophy, focusing especially on Stroud’s classic objections from 1968, and his claim that some form of idealism may be required in order to make them work. This might suggest one way in which such arguments are perhaps more effective in the practical case than the theoretical one, because anti-realism in ethics is less revisionary than in theoretical philosophy. But even in practical philosophy, people have often wanted to be more ambitious than this, where they have particularly appealed to retorsive transcendental arguments in order to “silence the sceptic”. I argue, however, that such arguments either collapse into deductive transcendental arguments, or just make the sceptical position harder to rebut, in both the theoretical and practical cases. There is thus little to be gained from this strategy of dealing with scepticism.
