Defenses of Moral Error Theory

Abstract

Abstract This chapter runs through several arguments that have been mounted against moral error theory. (1) It is incoherent to class all moral judgments as false, because if it false that φ is morally prohibited then φ must be morally permissible. (2) The moral error theorist must hold that love is a mistake. (3) The companions in guilt argument: if there are no moral reasons, then there would be no epistemological reasons either, but that would be absurd. (4) The moral error theorist is on a slippery slope to rejecting all normative claims. (5) The challenge from Moorean epistemology: we are more confident of certain basic moral claims than we are in any argument offered by a moral skeptic. (6) The moral indispensability argument: moral facts are essential to our lives and thus we must accept them into our ontology. It is argued that all six of these objections fail.