I cannot express my delight at finding such a well articulated video on youtube. Kane, you truly are an applaudable thinker. I would like to thank you for putting out such great content for free and I hope reading this comment pleases you at least by a tiny bit.
the kind of inconsistency in conservationism kinda seems the same as the inconsistencies between eg quantum field theory and the "common sense" worldview that most people hold. I do most of the time genuinely believe that tables are solid, matter-all-the-way-through, discrete objects, even tho in more critical contexts I believe this to be false. this isn't to say that the same objections couldn't be made to both, just that holding inconsistent beliefs across contexts seems to be pretty standard
In an earlier video, moral error theory was stated as saying that all objective moral claims are false. Now, at least in the first few minutes of this video, it is stated that moral error theory is the claim that all moral claims are false.
It strikes me that the impossibility objection is much weaker for the substitutionist than for the fictionalist. This is because contextual signalling is less likely to undermine the force of moralising if we are expressing attitudes than if we are engaging fictions. This is because we already treat our emotions as important and action guiding, whereas fictions are at least in many contexts not as motivating. I also wonder whether the substitutionist couldn’t use the idea of critical contexts here. You can be an error theorist it seems to me even if you hold that people often use moral judgments to express emotions, so long as you hold that they would issue moral propositions in critical contexts. And perhaps the judgments people make in critical contexts aren’t the ones that most affect their behaviour. If this is so, substitutionism can simply work by reserving moralising for contexts where your interlocutors are expressing their emotions. It may be quite easy to spot this, for example, if they describe an act as ‘disgusting’ or ‘disturbing’, which often do show up in moral talk in everyday life. I’m an expressivist not an error theorist in general, but this strikes me as the most fruitful strategy.
I don’t know if you’ll respond Kane, but what are your personal objections to the companions in guilt argument since you stated below you lean towards moral anti realism?
Skepticism is the obvious choice on almost all topics. Knowing things is hard, and knowing important things is harder. No matter what our meta-ethics may be, it's almost inevitable that there is cause for skepticism. We can't know the consequences of our actions, so we're in a very poor position to say what actions are good and what are bad. For those who think morality depends on some sort of god, that just pushes morality into a supernatural realm where we are even less able to know things about it.
It depends on how you're defining "moral skepticism". I lean towards noncognitivism, and I'm confident that there are no moral facts, no moral truths, and no moral knowledge. If "moral skepticism" just refers to any kind of moral antirealism, then that makes me a moral skeptic. I prefer not to describe my views that way though, because "moral skepticism" might be defined more narrowly to describe those who either (a) are simply on the fence about whether or not there are moral facts or (b) think that there are moral facts but that we have no way of knowing what they are. I'm not on the fence about this stuff.
@Matheus Borges "Michael Huemer" What could be appealing about ethical intuitionism? Grounding any idea upon intuition is like building a house on quicksand. There's no reason behind an intuition, so we may as well just use an axiom instead. If we're just going to choose our moral principles based on no reason, then we've no reason to give special privilege to our intuitions.
@Matheus Borges Partly because that straightforwardly follows from noncognitivism, provided you don't buy into the quasi-realist attempts to tranquilize the position, which I do not; and partly because there are several antirealist arguments independent of noncognitivism that I find quite convincing, such as certain forms of the queerness argument. I don't think that moral antirealism generates any kind of problematic global antirealism - I discuss this point with respect to epistemic antirealism in this video: ua-cam.com/video/7HHBNU_gXP0/v-deo.html Basically, my views are that (1) Only some of the arguments for antirealism about ethical norms imply antirealism about epistemic norms, so it's not too difficult for moral antirealists to avoid epistemic antirealism. (2) In any case, epistemic antirealism is acceptable. I recall my reaction when I first encountered the "companions in guilt" argument was a somewhat bewildered "okay... so what?" Epistemic antirealism has always struck me as a perfectly intuitive position, for many of the same reasons as moral antirealism.
At 47 minutes, i would make the argument that all fiction has the additional premise that "and unless specified otherwise, everything else is the exact same as in the real world." That would allow us to say that "According to the fiction of dr who, my ring is made of gold" is an entirely true statement, since it is nowhere said in the dr who fictional universe that I don't exist there, so we can assume I do. And if I and my ring do exist in the dr who fiction, then in this fiction my ring would absolutely be deadly to cybermen. Just a thought.
And isn't telling a Story and describing it the very same thing? Maybe when telling a Story I make it Sound more entertaining, but I would take them to be functionally the same. Doyle could have started his sherlock holmes series by saying: "hereby i will describe the fiction of sherlock holmes as it was thought of by myself, Arthur Conan Doyle", and it be functionally no different, in that he is conveying to us the content of a fiction. Just the latter explicates it, the former only implies it.
Well, one can be an abolitionist about moral normativity without being an abolitionist about normativity in general (about which one can be a realist, a subjectivist, a substitutionalist, a conservationist or a fictionalist). This way one can non-self-defeatingly say "We ought to abolish morality" as long as the "ought" isn't moral. It could be prudential or desires-based.
How many of these arguments against objective morality are appealing to subjective morality? How can subjective morality disprove objective morality? How can subjective anything disprove the objective?
There’s an error within the very statement “what should moral error theorists do”. The thing is that moral error theory precludes there being any way one “should” act and subsequently the moral error theorists can just live with falsehood. A moral error theorists could just say that they don’t have to be without error and can simply just live with moral thoughts, regardless of their belief that such thought are false or delusional. They don’t ought to believe anything and so any discrepancy of their own behavior can be disregarded without wrongness.
I address this point at 4:02 in the video. See also 15:47 in my video introducing error theory: ua-cam.com/video/MbTcXDMyFrA/v-deo.html So the short answer is that most error theorists do not object to hypothetical imperatives, and that's how the "ought" and "should" claims with respect to the Now What question should be understood.
@@KaneB "The short answer is that most error theorists do not object to hypothetical imperatives." There have to be limits to how broad the hypothetical can be, or else error theory becomes meaningless. Certainly an error theorist has no cause to object to the idea that we ought to use flour if we want to bake a cake; that's a particular task leading to a particular goal, and that has nothing to do with morality. In contrast, if we say we ought to do X if we want to have a stable society, social cooperation, maximized true beliefs, etc., then the hypothetical is so broad that it is effectively a categorical imperative. This is no longer a way to achieve a particular goal; we're now talking about the general good of society, and that's the domain of morality. If error theory doesn't claim that such oughts are false, then it's allowing for some moral propositions to be true.
@@Ansatz66 Most error theorists reject that characterization of morality. They tend to say that the moral facts are categorical and would give us reasons for action that are independent of our own personal desires and interests. Perhaps they are wrong about this. But if so, then what we should say is simply that morality can involve only hypothetical imperatives. I don't see how "if you want a stable society, you ought to do X" is categorical, or is no longer describing a way to achieve a particular goal. That just seems obviously false to me, to the point that I wonder if I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here. A categorical claim would be something like: you ought to act in such a way as to promote a stable society, regardless of whether or not you want a stable society.
@@KaneB It's true that it's technically a hypothetical ought, but a broad enough hypothetical ought will tend to mean the same as a categorical ought. If we say that we categorically ought to do X, then the overwhelming expectation would be that X would be for the benefit of society and people in general. When we say we ought to do X if we want a stable society etc., the hypothetical part of that claim is redundant and may as well be dropped, because if the claim is true then we ought to do X regardless of whether we want a stable society. What is the point of error theory if error theorists are going to smuggle the whole of morality in under the guise of hypotheticals? A proper error theorist ought to hold that murder is no worse than giving to charity, and actually follow through with that idea, shooting random people with one hand and handing out money with the other. If the error theorist merely acknowledges that murder is no worse than charity, and then goes on to say that by happy coincidence she has a hypothetical imperative to prevent her from murdering for the general good of society, then her error theory is just a word game. She blatantly doesn't really think that murder is no worse than charity, and she's using a hypothetical to justify her avoidance of murder just so she doesn't have to admit that murder is wrong.
@@Ansatz66 I don't understand how we're quantifying the "broadness" of hypothetical oughts, or how broadness can make a hypothetical ought become categorical. In the case of "if you want a stable society, you ought to do X", it just isn't true that the hypothetical part is redundant. Why? Because somebody can release themselves from that imperative by simply not having the desire to promote a stable society. Basically, this jump: "because if the claim is true then we ought to do X regardless of whether we want a stable society" makes no sense whatsoever. It may well be true that we ought to do X, regardless of whether or not we want a stable society. But that doesn't follow from the hypothetical claim "if you want a stable society, you ought to do X".
My preferred method is abolitionism. I think normally when someone tries to argue by saying something like "Hook-up culture is wrong!" they're engaging in moral small-talk. I can just say "Well I think hook-up culture is right" and then we're at a deadlock in the conversation. I need to know what wrong-making property they think hook-up culture contains to make sense of their statement. If they say hook-up culture is wrong because they think it destroys your character, or it decreases utility by making more single mothers, or it's against the natural law, then I can understand what they're saying and engage with their point. I think saying "x is wrong" just adds an extra layer to the conversation that doesn't mean much. Paraphrasing wrongness with "decreases utility," "makes me feel bad," "isn't a good character trait" seems to me to make the most sense out of moral statements, and this is already how I speak irl. That being said I think being an abolitionist about normativity is much more awkward. If my friend asks "Which candy bar should I get," I'm going to respond with "You should get this one," not "It is consistent with your prior goals and standards relating to taste and nutrition to get this one." There's just too many fucking words. I support abolition in principle but pragmatically "should" and "ought" are just much more efficient than desire-reductionist paraphrases of normativity.
This raises the question of whether error theorists are sincere about error theory. The abolitionist presents an apparently moral argument against using moral discourse. An error theorist would reject that characterization of the argument, but that's exactly what he would say if he thought that moral discourse were immoral. If he believed that all moral propositions are false, then he wouldn't be trying to support abolitionism using moral propositions. Instead he's trying to smuggle moral propositions into his argument under the guise of non-moral propositions, and the only apparent reason he might be so tricky is because he views moral discourse as immoral and he hopes to avoid the negative consequences of moral discourse, or at least he wants to avoid being blamed. As for the conservationalist, we're explicitly directed to hold contradictory beliefs. The error theorist is explicitly denying being an error theorist, even while bizarrely also affirming being an error theorist. In this case, the insincerity seems opposite to the abolitionist. Instead of seeing moral discourse as being immoral, the conservationalist sees moral discourse as being a moral obligation that must not be abandoned, and yet still insists on maintaining error theory for some reason, even at the penalty of cognitive dissonance. In the case of fictionalists, we have the suggestion that we should express false claims with the pretense of truth, also known as lying. Surely the fictionalist doesn't seem to be trying to deceive since he's open about being a fictionalist, but what if error theory and fictionalism is all a fiction? In fact he doesn't act as though he were truly an error theorist since he uses moral propositions. He claims that his moral propositions are fictions, but once we accept that a person is willing to use moral fictions then anything they say on moral issues must be examined as potentially insincere. Finally, substitutionism would have us redefine moral language and use it to mean something other than what it is commonly taken to mean, but that makes little sense under error theory. Any attempt to force a word to change its meaning is bound to create confusion, but it's even worse when the the new definition expresses an idea that's contrary to the original. By the usual meanings of these words, all moral propositions are false, and yet the substitutionist wants to redefine words in order to express ideas that won't be immediately rejected as false. For example, suppose we redefine the word _triangle_ to mean cake and we redefine _four_ to mean chocolate and we redefine _sides_ to mean frosting, and then we say, "The triangle has four sides." There are two blatant problems with this: the problem of great confusion from changing the meanings of words, and the problem of the fact that the proposition would be taken as false under the original meanings of those words. For an error theorist, all moral propositions are supposed to be false, and trying to express meaningful ideas using words that traditionally express false ideas is silly. It's hard to believe that this is truly what the substitutionist is trying to do, when it would be obviously better to just use different words.
The abolitionist can present their case in terms of prudiental reasons, eg. objecting to abortion bans because of a desire to not live in an oppressive theocracy. The substitutionist case needn't be as radical as you say. Most in the metaethics discussion agree that if moral properties exist, then they supervene on non-moral/natural properties. (If moral properties would be identical with natural ones, every property trivially supervenes on itself). You can stipulate schmoral discourse which doesn't contain the problematic presuppositions of moral discourse (irreducible, desire and institution independent normativity or whatever) such that for every false proposition ascribing a moral property, there's a corresponding true proposition that ascribes a schmoral property.
@@jolssoni2499 "The abolitionist can present their case in terms of prudiental reasons, eg. objecting to abortion bans because of a desire to not live in an oppressive theocracy." That sort of reasoning is exactly identical to moral reasoning. The abolitionist is still free to use it, but it undermines them as a sincere error theorist. "You can stipulate schmoral discourse which doesn't contain the problematic presuppositions of moral discourse (irreducible, desire and institution independent normativity or whatever) such that for every false proposition ascribing a moral property, there's a corresponding true proposition that ascribes a schmoral property." The trick seems to be that schmorality is just morality by another name. The error theorist is still so eager to use moral language that it seems that their only real issue is with the word _morality,_ so instead we can give them _schmorality_ which we define in such a way so that it is exactly the same as morality, but presented as if it is a separate thing. This way the error theorist can have what they truly seem to want: to have their cake and eat it too, to have morality and reject it.
@@jolssoni2499 "Prudentiality is identical to morality?" That seems fair, depending on exactly what one means by prudence. It usually means acting with caution to avoid bad outcomes, or perhaps wisdom in practical matters. It seems clear that a prudent person acts morally in that the prudent person will do what is best. However we define prudence, it is moral to act to avoid an oppressive theocracy.
@@jolssoni2499 There is no necessary connection between living in an oppressive theocracy and objecting to abortion. Many a secularist object to abortion. Apart from that good observations.
It is unreasonable to say there are no objective moral values, just as unreasonable as it is to say there is no God. As an atheist I do not believe there is a God I reject the proposition that there is a God, but I do not assert that there is no God because that would be unreasonable; that would imply that I were capable of proving a negative proposition, which is impossible. At best anyone who wishes to reject objective morality would have to be agnostic to the concept in order to be reasonable.
My Patreon: www.patreon.com/kanebaker91
I cannot express my delight at finding such a well articulated video on youtube. Kane, you truly are an applaudable thinker.
I would like to thank you for putting out such great content for free and I hope reading this comment pleases you at least by a tiny bit.
You should check out the book *The End of Morality* that was edited by Joyce and Garner. There is a lot of essays on this subject.
Really great video, perfect to get a general overview of the area
the kind of inconsistency in conservationism kinda seems the same as the inconsistencies between eg quantum field theory and the "common sense" worldview that most people hold. I do most of the time genuinely believe that tables are solid, matter-all-the-way-through, discrete objects, even tho in more critical contexts I believe this to be false. this isn't to say that the same objections couldn't be made to both, just that holding inconsistent beliefs across contexts seems to be pretty standard
Ppt slides please?
Regards
In an earlier video, moral error theory was stated as saying that all objective moral claims are false. Now, at least in the first few minutes of this video, it is stated that moral error theory is the claim that all moral claims are false.
It strikes me that the impossibility objection is much weaker for the substitutionist than for the fictionalist. This is because contextual signalling is less likely to undermine the force of moralising if we are expressing attitudes than if we are engaging fictions. This is because we already treat our emotions as important and action guiding, whereas fictions are at least in many contexts not as motivating.
I also wonder whether the substitutionist couldn’t use the idea of critical contexts here. You can be an error theorist it seems to me even if you hold that people often use moral judgments to express emotions, so long as you hold that they would issue moral propositions in critical contexts. And perhaps the judgments people make in critical contexts aren’t the ones that most affect their behaviour. If this is so, substitutionism can simply work by reserving moralising for contexts where your interlocutors are expressing their emotions. It may be quite easy to spot this, for example, if they describe an act as ‘disgusting’ or ‘disturbing’, which often do show up in moral talk in everyday life.
I’m an expressivist not an error theorist in general, but this strikes me as the most fruitful strategy.
I don’t know if you’ll respond Kane, but what are your personal objections to the companions in guilt argument since you stated below you lean towards moral anti realism?
iirc, they don't care about it, because they didn't believe in categorical epistemic norms anyway
What do you think about moral skepticism?
Skepticism is the obvious choice on almost all topics. Knowing things is hard, and knowing important things is harder. No matter what our meta-ethics may be, it's almost inevitable that there is cause for skepticism. We can't know the consequences of our actions, so we're in a very poor position to say what actions are good and what are bad. For those who think morality depends on some sort of god, that just pushes morality into a supernatural realm where we are even less able to know things about it.
It depends on how you're defining "moral skepticism". I lean towards noncognitivism, and I'm confident that there are no moral facts, no moral truths, and no moral knowledge. If "moral skepticism" just refers to any kind of moral antirealism, then that makes me a moral skeptic. I prefer not to describe my views that way though, because "moral skepticism" might be defined more narrowly to describe those who either (a) are simply on the fence about whether or not there are moral facts or (b) think that there are moral facts but that we have no way of knowing what they are. I'm not on the fence about this stuff.
@Matheus Borges "Michael Huemer"
What could be appealing about ethical intuitionism? Grounding any idea upon intuition is like building a house on quicksand. There's no reason behind an intuition, so we may as well just use an axiom instead. If we're just going to choose our moral principles based on no reason, then we've no reason to give special privilege to our intuitions.
@Matheus Borges Partly because that straightforwardly follows from noncognitivism, provided you don't buy into the quasi-realist attempts to tranquilize the position, which I do not; and partly because there are several antirealist arguments independent of noncognitivism that I find quite convincing, such as certain forms of the queerness argument.
I don't think that moral antirealism generates any kind of problematic global antirealism - I discuss this point with respect to epistemic antirealism in this video: ua-cam.com/video/7HHBNU_gXP0/v-deo.html Basically, my views are that (1) Only some of the arguments for antirealism about ethical norms imply antirealism about epistemic norms, so it's not too difficult for moral antirealists to avoid epistemic antirealism. (2) In any case, epistemic antirealism is acceptable. I recall my reaction when I first encountered the "companions in guilt" argument was a somewhat bewildered "okay... so what?" Epistemic antirealism has always struck me as a perfectly intuitive position, for many of the same reasons as moral antirealism.
@Matheus Borges Epistemic reductionism to veritism doesn't fail, read Cowie's Morality and Epistemic Judgment.
At 47 minutes, i would make the argument that all fiction has the additional premise that "and unless specified otherwise, everything else is the exact same as in the real world." That would allow us to say that "According to the fiction of dr who, my ring is made of gold" is an entirely true statement, since it is nowhere said in the dr who fictional universe that I don't exist there, so we can assume I do. And if I and my ring do exist in the dr who fiction, then in this fiction my ring would absolutely be deadly to cybermen. Just a thought.
And isn't telling a Story and describing it the very same thing? Maybe when telling a Story I make it Sound more entertaining, but I would take them to be functionally the same. Doyle could have started his sherlock holmes series by saying: "hereby i will describe the fiction of sherlock holmes as it was thought of by myself, Arthur Conan Doyle", and it be functionally no different, in that he is conveying to us the content of a fiction. Just the latter explicates it, the former only implies it.
I feel like abolitionism is sort of self-defeating without presupposing substitutionalism
Well, one can be an abolitionist about moral normativity without being an abolitionist about normativity in general (about which one can be a realist, a subjectivist, a substitutionalist, a conservationist or a fictionalist). This way one can non-self-defeatingly say "We ought to abolish morality" as long as the "ought" isn't moral. It could be prudential or desires-based.
How many of these arguments against objective morality are appealing to subjective morality? How can subjective morality disprove objective morality? How can subjective anything disprove the objective?
There’s an error within the very statement “what should moral error theorists do”. The thing is that moral error theory precludes there being any way one “should” act and subsequently the moral error theorists can just live with falsehood.
A moral error theorists could just say that they don’t have to be without error and can simply just live with moral thoughts, regardless of their belief that such thought are false or delusional. They don’t ought to believe anything and so any discrepancy of their own behavior can be disregarded without wrongness.
I address this point at 4:02 in the video. See also 15:47 in my video introducing error theory: ua-cam.com/video/MbTcXDMyFrA/v-deo.html
So the short answer is that most error theorists do not object to hypothetical imperatives, and that's how the "ought" and "should" claims with respect to the Now What question should be understood.
@@KaneB "The short answer is that most error theorists do not object to hypothetical imperatives."
There have to be limits to how broad the hypothetical can be, or else error theory becomes meaningless. Certainly an error theorist has no cause to object to the idea that we ought to use flour if we want to bake a cake; that's a particular task leading to a particular goal, and that has nothing to do with morality. In contrast, if we say we ought to do X if we want to have a stable society, social cooperation, maximized true beliefs, etc., then the hypothetical is so broad that it is effectively a categorical imperative. This is no longer a way to achieve a particular goal; we're now talking about the general good of society, and that's the domain of morality. If error theory doesn't claim that such oughts are false, then it's allowing for some moral propositions to be true.
@@Ansatz66 Most error theorists reject that characterization of morality. They tend to say that the moral facts are categorical and would give us reasons for action that are independent of our own personal desires and interests. Perhaps they are wrong about this. But if so, then what we should say is simply that morality can involve only hypothetical imperatives. I don't see how "if you want a stable society, you ought to do X" is categorical, or is no longer describing a way to achieve a particular goal. That just seems obviously false to me, to the point that I wonder if I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here. A categorical claim would be something like: you ought to act in such a way as to promote a stable society, regardless of whether or not you want a stable society.
@@KaneB It's true that it's technically a hypothetical ought, but a broad enough hypothetical ought will tend to mean the same as a categorical ought. If we say that we categorically ought to do X, then the overwhelming expectation would be that X would be for the benefit of society and people in general. When we say we ought to do X if we want a stable society etc., the hypothetical part of that claim is redundant and may as well be dropped, because if the claim is true then we ought to do X regardless of whether we want a stable society.
What is the point of error theory if error theorists are going to smuggle the whole of morality in under the guise of hypotheticals? A proper error theorist ought to hold that murder is no worse than giving to charity, and actually follow through with that idea, shooting random people with one hand and handing out money with the other. If the error theorist merely acknowledges that murder is no worse than charity, and then goes on to say that by happy coincidence she has a hypothetical imperative to prevent her from murdering for the general good of society, then her error theory is just a word game. She blatantly doesn't really think that murder is no worse than charity, and she's using a hypothetical to justify her avoidance of murder just so she doesn't have to admit that murder is wrong.
@@Ansatz66 I don't understand how we're quantifying the "broadness" of hypothetical oughts, or how broadness can make a hypothetical ought become categorical. In the case of "if you want a stable society, you ought to do X", it just isn't true that the hypothetical part is redundant. Why? Because somebody can release themselves from that imperative by simply not having the desire to promote a stable society. Basically, this jump:
"because if the claim is true then we ought to do X regardless of whether we want a stable society"
makes no sense whatsoever. It may well be true that we ought to do X, regardless of whether or not we want a stable society. But that doesn't follow from the hypothetical claim "if you want a stable society, you ought to do X".
My preferred method is abolitionism. I think normally when someone tries to argue by saying something like "Hook-up culture is wrong!" they're engaging in moral small-talk. I can just say "Well I think hook-up culture is right" and then we're at a deadlock in the conversation. I need to know what wrong-making property they think hook-up culture contains to make sense of their statement. If they say hook-up culture is wrong because they think it destroys your character, or it decreases utility by making more single mothers, or it's against the natural law, then I can understand what they're saying and engage with their point. I think saying "x is wrong" just adds an extra layer to the conversation that doesn't mean much. Paraphrasing wrongness with "decreases utility," "makes me feel bad," "isn't a good character trait" seems to me to make the most sense out of moral statements, and this is already how I speak irl.
That being said I think being an abolitionist about normativity is much more awkward. If my friend asks "Which candy bar should I get," I'm going to respond with "You should get this one," not "It is consistent with your prior goals and standards relating to taste and nutrition to get this one." There's just too many fucking words. I support abolition in principle but pragmatically "should" and "ought" are just much more efficient than desire-reductionist paraphrases of normativity.
This raises the question of whether error theorists are sincere about error theory. The abolitionist presents an apparently moral argument against using moral discourse. An error theorist would reject that characterization of the argument, but that's exactly what he would say if he thought that moral discourse were immoral. If he believed that all moral propositions are false, then he wouldn't be trying to support abolitionism using moral propositions. Instead he's trying to smuggle moral propositions into his argument under the guise of non-moral propositions, and the only apparent reason he might be so tricky is because he views moral discourse as immoral and he hopes to avoid the negative consequences of moral discourse, or at least he wants to avoid being blamed.
As for the conservationalist, we're explicitly directed to hold contradictory beliefs. The error theorist is explicitly denying being an error theorist, even while bizarrely also affirming being an error theorist. In this case, the insincerity seems opposite to the abolitionist. Instead of seeing moral discourse as being immoral, the conservationalist sees moral discourse as being a moral obligation that must not be abandoned, and yet still insists on maintaining error theory for some reason, even at the penalty of cognitive dissonance.
In the case of fictionalists, we have the suggestion that we should express false claims with the pretense of truth, also known as lying. Surely the fictionalist doesn't seem to be trying to deceive since he's open about being a fictionalist, but what if error theory and fictionalism is all a fiction? In fact he doesn't act as though he were truly an error theorist since he uses moral propositions. He claims that his moral propositions are fictions, but once we accept that a person is willing to use moral fictions then anything they say on moral issues must be examined as potentially insincere.
Finally, substitutionism would have us redefine moral language and use it to mean something other than what it is commonly taken to mean, but that makes little sense under error theory. Any attempt to force a word to change its meaning is bound to create confusion, but it's even worse when the the new definition expresses an idea that's contrary to the original. By the usual meanings of these words, all moral propositions are false, and yet the substitutionist wants to redefine words in order to express ideas that won't be immediately rejected as false.
For example, suppose we redefine the word _triangle_ to mean cake and we redefine _four_ to mean chocolate and we redefine _sides_ to mean frosting, and then we say, "The triangle has four sides." There are two blatant problems with this: the problem of great confusion from changing the meanings of words, and the problem of the fact that the proposition would be taken as false under the original meanings of those words. For an error theorist, all moral propositions are supposed to be false, and trying to express meaningful ideas using words that traditionally express false ideas is silly. It's hard to believe that this is truly what the substitutionist is trying to do, when it would be obviously better to just use different words.
The abolitionist can present their case in terms of prudiental reasons, eg. objecting to abortion bans because of a desire to not live in an oppressive theocracy.
The substitutionist case needn't be as radical as you say. Most in the metaethics discussion agree that if moral properties exist, then they supervene on non-moral/natural properties. (If moral properties would be identical with natural ones, every property trivially supervenes on itself). You can stipulate schmoral discourse which doesn't contain the problematic presuppositions of moral discourse (irreducible, desire and institution independent normativity or whatever) such that for every false proposition ascribing a moral property, there's a corresponding true proposition that ascribes a schmoral property.
@@jolssoni2499 "The abolitionist can present their case in terms of prudiental reasons, eg. objecting to abortion bans because of a desire to not live in an oppressive theocracy."
That sort of reasoning is exactly identical to moral reasoning. The abolitionist is still free to use it, but it undermines them as a sincere error theorist.
"You can stipulate schmoral discourse which doesn't contain the problematic presuppositions of moral discourse (irreducible, desire and institution independent normativity or whatever) such that for every false proposition ascribing a moral property, there's a corresponding true proposition that ascribes a schmoral property."
The trick seems to be that schmorality is just morality by another name. The error theorist is still so eager to use moral language that it seems that their only real issue is with the word _morality,_ so instead we can give them _schmorality_ which we define in such a way so that it is exactly the same as morality, but presented as if it is a separate thing. This way the error theorist can have what they truly seem to want: to have their cake and eat it too, to have morality and reject it.
@@Ansatz66 Prudentiality is identical to morality?
@@jolssoni2499 "Prudentiality is identical to morality?"
That seems fair, depending on exactly what one means by prudence. It usually means acting with caution to avoid bad outcomes, or perhaps wisdom in practical matters. It seems clear that a prudent person acts morally in that the prudent person will do what is best. However we define prudence, it is moral to act to avoid an oppressive theocracy.
@@jolssoni2499 There is no necessary connection between living in an oppressive theocracy and objecting to abortion. Many a secularist object to abortion. Apart from that good observations.
It is unreasonable to say there are no objective moral values, just as unreasonable as it is to say there is no God. As an atheist I do not believe there is a God I reject the proposition that there is a God, but I do not assert that there is no God because that would be unreasonable; that would imply that I were capable of proving a negative proposition, which is impossible. At best anyone who wishes to reject objective morality would have to be agnostic to the concept in order to be reasonable.