Talk:Moral skepticism

message: I'd like to see some mention of how moral skepticism relates to moral relativism. Does one imply the other? Are they orthogonal? -Ahruman 10:12, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Unfortunately, it's very difficult to find consistency in the way the terminology is used. Harman, who is probably the leading moral relativist at the moment, has a position so close to moral scepticism of the Mackie variety that I frankly find it difficult to see what their substantive disagreement really is. Both deny that morality is objective in any ultimate sense, but Harman wants to avoid saying that his is an error theory of commonsense morality. Worse, Harman's theory seems to me to be rather different from most theories that get described as "moral relativism". And even worse, I'm not sure that Mackie's theory is what is popularly understood by "moral scepticism", even though he applies that label to himself and it's probably the theory that philosophers usually have in mind when they use it. What he is really sceptical about isn't the value of morality in some practical sense, it's the ultimate objectivity of morality. I'm doing a lot of reading on this at the moment and will report back with any other thoughts that I have. Anyone else? Metamagician3000 12:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Our meta-ethics article does offer a reasonably plausible taxonomy of these various theories, though I don't think it is totally uncontroversial. Metamagician3000 23:18, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relationship to relativism 

message: I've just finished up some major revisions to this article. It's still in need of sourcing and expansion. My two recommendations to whomever continues to revise are as follows:
(1) if you include moral nihilism as a theory under the aegis of moral skepticism, remember to modify the first sentence of this entry to make it communicate that moral skepticism is a class of metaethical and normative ethical theories -- moral nihilism is a normative ethic. 
(2) Keep the current organization. It is helpful to distinguish between Moral Error Theory (which holds that moral claims are false, and so unjustified) and Dogmatic Moral Skepticism (which holds that moral claims are unjustified, but does not commit itself to the additional, error theoretic, proposition that moral claims are false). This distinction maps onto the marked and age-old difference between ontology and epistemology, and the arguments deployed by these two moral skeptical schools are, accordingly, significantly dissimilar. WilliamPitts (talk) 09:32, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The revisions are by and large good ones, but I think it is important to note that Mackie used "moral skepticism" in the sense that we would today use "moral anti-realism."  True, his view is still skeptical in that it denies the possibility of positive moral knowledge, but today we would call him an anti-realist and a moral nihilist.  Which brings me to my second point: moral nihilism can be both a metaethical view and a normative view.  I (and others) have advocated the use of "metaethical nihilism" for the second order application, but this is not yet the norm.  In its metaethical application, nihilism is the view that there are no moral truths (a stronger claim than that we don't know if their are moral truths).  FInally, can't we come up with a better name for the agnostic skeptical position discussed than "dogmatic moral skepticism?"  This comes across as rather pejorative, especially without the contrast to Pyrrhonian skepticism, and even Walter Sinnott-Armstrong admits it is a poor name (though he takes the time to note as much).  Since we are already dividing moral skepticism up into ontological moral skepticism and epistemological moral skepticism, I suggest that we divide the discussion of the latter into both Pyrrhonian/weakly agnostic skepticism and the Dogmatic/strongly agnostic position under those names. That way we get both sets of terminology but also understand the distinction that drives the words.  Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 15:55, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  You're right about the ambiguity in "moral nihilism." I also agree that including both moral error theory and "epistemological moral skepticism" as subclasses of "moral skepticism" is a bit misleading. Indeed, current convention has metaethics divided into four (maybe four and a half), fairly distinct, groups of theories: (1) moral realism, which holds that (a) moral claims are truth-apt (or, as Richard Joyce would have it, assertions) and (b) some moral claims are true; (2) noncognitivism, which holds that (a) is false and so, a fortiori is (b); (3) moral error theory, which holds that (a) is true and (b) is false; and (4) epistemological moral skepticism (of the sort propounded by Harman, Ruse, etc.), which holds that (a) is true and we are unjustified in believing (b), but does not make the further claim that (b) is false. (I'd say (4.5) is Simon Blackburn's "moral quasi-realism," which holds that (a) and (b) are both true, but only does so by revising conventional notions of truth-aptitude.) There's already a page on moral realism and one on quasi-realism. If I had my druthers we'd scrap this page and export it to two new entries, one on moral error theory and the other on "epistemological moral skepticism" (or whatever). (We'd then include under epistemological moral skepticism entries on Pyrrhoninian and Dogmatic versions of the theory). That might be infeasible, though, so in the meantime I'll rename the section currently titled "Dogmatic Moral Skepticism" "Epistemological moral skepticism" and include subheadings on the dogmatic and Pyrrhonian varieties. All of these entries could do with some major expansion, BTW. WilliamPitts (talk) 22:50, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The other problem is that some moral philosophers, such as myself, follow the example of Pekka Väyrynen and define moral realism in terms of three theses, not two.  And since the moral realism page here seems to be following Väyrynen's lead, I think the pages on moral anti-realism and skepticism should, as well.  This makes subjectivists and relativists anti-realists, rather than realists (which makes sense to me).  And so the major problem to me seems to be that we need to agree on the particular taxonomy of moral philosophy we are going to use before we can know exactly how to flesh out each page. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 13:24, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This article needs a lot of love. The positions that are described here seem like caricatures of the actual views of the philosophers concerned, though they might be presented in this way to first-year philosophy students. For the moment, I agree that subjectivists and relativists are usually classified as moral anti-realists. Metamagician3000 (talk) 10:53, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I notice that I made some comments to similar effect 15 years ago, and I haven't really helped since then. *sigh* I did publish a little book which covers some of this stuff, back in 2016 (called The Mystery of Moral Authority), and I tried in that book to untangle some of the difficulties/complexities. But everything in this area is contentious, and I'm not going to cite my own book as an authoritative source for Wikipedia. Metamagician3000 (talk) 10:59, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fixed a Problem 

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thread_title:  External links modified (February 2018) 

message: I've noticed that "Error theory" in the error theory section links to the page on Nihilism. Is this really? intended? --109.192.165.115 (talk) 15:44, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error Theory = Nihilism?