Our Normative Judgements Are All Wrong

Abstract

Abstract Bart Streumer defends a global normative error theory which says all normative judgements are false. He professes not to believe this theory and urges it cannot be believed but thinks honesty demands we should come as close to believing it as we can. But if the theory is true neither honesty nor anything else can demands that we do anything. And if it is false then it is false that we should come as close as we can to believing it. Streumer is at pains to respect what he takes to be central thoughts about the normative but philosophical understanding of a concept may legitimately put some strain our prior beliefs about it. The key thing is whether we can make good sense of our practice with the concept. When we can do so, tolerating a little such strain is a far better theoretical option than taking something as wild as global normative error theory seriously. Streumer’s arguments for rejecting the alternatives to the error theory, and in particular non-reductive naturalism and expressivism, are considered and found nowhere near as telling as they would need to be to warrant his resort to an endorsement of radical normative scepticism, even when that endorsement takes the strangely ambivalent form of Streumer’s professedly non-doxastic dalliance.