Sorting Out Solutions to the Now-What Problem

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 17 (3) (2020)
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Abstract

Moral error theorists face the so-called “now-what problem”: what should we do with our moral judgments from a prudential point of view if these judgments are uniformly false? On top of abolitionism and conservationism, which respectively advise us to get rid of our moral judgments and to keep them, three revisionary solutions have been proposed in the literature: expressivism, naturalism, and fictionalism. In this paper, I argue that expressivism and naturalism do not constitute genuine alternatives to abolitionism, of which they are in the end mere variants—and, even less conveniently, variants that are conform to the very spirit of abolitionism as formulated by its proponents. The main version of fictionalism, by contrast, provides us with a recommendation to which abolitionists cannot consistently subscribe. This leaves us with only one revisionary solution to the now-what problem.

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François Jaquet
Université de Strasbourg

Citations of this work

Revolutionary Normative Subjectivism.Lewis Williams - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
Utilitarianism for the Error Theorist.François Jaquet - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (1):39-55.
Which answers to the now what question collapse into abolitionism (if any)?Wouter Kalf - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
The Goal Problem in the 'Now What' Problem.Xinkan Zhao - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (3).
Moral Fictionalism and Misleading Analogies.François Jaquet - 2024 - In Richard Joyce & Stuart Brock (eds.), Moral Fictionalism and Religious Fictionalism. Oxford University Press.

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References found in this work

Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence.Jonas Olson - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moral realism.Peter Railton - 1986 - Philosophical Review 95 (2):163-207.
Moral cognitivism and motivation.Sigrún Svavarsdóttir - 1999 - Philosophical Review 108 (2):161-219.
Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language.Simon Blackburn - 1984 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (2):211-215.
Realism, Mathematics and Modality.Hartry Field - 1988 - Philosophical Topics 16 (1):57-107.

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