Summary |
Moral error theory is roughly the
view that morality is a (perhaps biologically-useful) illusion. More precisely, error
theory combines a cognitivist, representationalist view of moral judgments with
an antirealist view of the moral domain. Error theorists typically reason as
follows: moral judgments aim to represent the world as being a certain way, morally
speaking, and are thus capable of being either true or false depending on
whether the world has the moral features one takes it to have. However, the
world is morally void in that there are no moral facts, properties, or values
‘out there in the world’ to be discovered. Thus, our moral judgments are
typically false. When we judge, for example, that slavery is immoral, we are
(perhaps unknowingly) projecting our feelings, wants and demands onto the world
and mistakenly thinking that we’ve come into cognitive contact with objective
moral facts. While error theorists
widely agree about the nature of morality and moral judgment, they disagree
about what to do with moral discourse--an issue that has come to be known as the now-what problem. Some error theorists who address now-what problem contend that
morality is a useful fiction which, with some qualifications, should be retained.
Adherents of this approach are called moral fictionalists. It should be noted,
however, that some fictionalists are not error theorists. Mark Kalderon, for
example, rejects the view that moral judgments aim to represent the world as
being a certain way, morally speaking. He contends, instead, that propositions
(including moral ones) aim to describe the world, but that people use these
descriptive propositions to express non-representational mental states. Finally, some error theorists (e.g., Bart Streumer) adopt an error-theoretic stance toward any and all irreducibly normative facts or properties, not just moral ones. Given the substantial degree of overlap between normative and moral error theories, articles on normative error theory are included in this category as well. |