Why Moral Error Theorists Should Become Revisionary Moral Expressivists

Journal of Moral Philosophy (1):1-25 (2015)
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Abstract

Moral error theorists hold that morality is deeply mistaken, thus raising the question of whether and how moral judgments and utterances should continue to be employed. Proposals include simply abolishing morality, adopting some revisionary fictionalist stance toward morality, and conserving moral judgments and utterances unchanged. I defend a fourth proposal, namely revisionary moral expressivism, which recommends replacing cognitivist moral judgments and utterances with non-cognitivist ones. Given that non-cognitivist attitudes are not truth apt, revisionary expressivism does not involve moral error. Moreover, revisionary expressivism has the theoretical resources to retain many of the useful features of morality, such as moral motivation, moral disagreement, and moral reasoning. Revisionary expressivism fares better than the three major alternatives in both avoiding moral error and preserving these useful features of morality. I also show how this position differs from the “revolutionary expressivism” of Sebastian Köhler and Michael Ridge.

Other Versions

reprint Svoboda, Toby (2015) "Why Moral Error Theorists Should Become Revisionary Moral Expressivists". New Content is Available for Journal of Moral Philosophy 0(1):48-72

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Toby Svoboda
Colgate University

Citations of this work

Sorting Out Solutions to the Now-What Problem.François Jaquet - 2020 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 17 (3).
Utilitarianism for the Error Theorist.François Jaquet - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (1):39-55.
Revolutionary Normative Subjectivism.Lewis Williams - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
The belief problem for moral error theory.Wouter Floris Kalf - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (4):492-513.
Tiantai Metaethics.Jason Dockstader - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):215-229.

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References found in this work

The moral problem.Michael Smith - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
Principia ethica.George Edward Moore - 1903 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Thomas Baldwin.
Moral realism: a defence.Russ Shafer-Landau - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Language, truth and logic.Alfred Jules Ayer - 1936 - London,: V. Gollancz.

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