Chapter 20 Moral Nihilism PDF

C H A PTE R 2 0 Moral Nihilism Russ Shafer-Landau University of Wisconsin-Madison There are basically three options when it comes to determining the status of morality. Morality might be objective, its rules applying to us independently of our opinions and desires. Or it might be relativistic, and...

C H A PTE R 2 0 Moral Nihilism Russ Shafer-Landau University of Wisconsin-Madison There are basically three options when it comes to determining the status of morality. Morality might be objective, its rules applying to us independently of our opinions and desires. Or it might be relativistic, and depend for its authority on personal or cultural preferences. Finally, morality may simply be a kind of make-believe, a complex set of rules and recommendations that represents nothing real. This last option is known as moral nihilism (from the Latin word nihil, meaning “nothing”). Moral nihilists join with relativists in opposing ethical objectivism. Morality is wholly a human creation—in this, nihilists and relativists are united. But nihilists are no fans of ethical relativism. Relativists believe in moral goodness, moral duty, and moral virtue. Nihilists don’t. Nihilists deny that there are any moral qualities. There are no moral requirements. Nothing is morally good. Nothing merits praise or blame. According to nihilists, there is a rigid fact-value distinction, which basically says that there is a sharp difference between facts and values. As nihilists see things, values are on the wrong side of the divide. Facts exist; values don’t. Of course people do value things, but their attitudes are directed at things that themselves possess no moral value, for nothing possesses any moral value. Value claims cannot be factual, and so cannot be true. Factual claims inform us of things; value claims are not informative, since they describe nothing. You might think that it’s a fact that betraying a friend is immoral, or a fact that happily giving to the 569 needy is morally virtuous. But if nihilism is right, there are no such facts. Facts are real; values aren’t. There are two important forms of moral nihilism: the error theory and expressivism. Error theorists claim that our moral judgments are always mistaken. Expressivists deny this, while also denying that our moral claims can ever offer an accurate take on reality. Expressivism is the more complicated doctrine, so let’s ease our way into the nihilist camp by first considering the error theory. 570 20.1 Error Theory The Theory and Its Attractions Did you ever have the feeling, deep down, that morality is a sham? That it’s just a set of traditional rules inherited from ancestors who based it on ignorance, superstition, and fear? Perhaps it’s only a convenient fiction, with no underlying authority at all. The error theory of morality is built upon these doubts. It is defined by four essential claims: 1. There are no moral features in this world. Nothing is morally good or bad, right or wrong, virtuous or vicious. A careful inventory of the world’s contents will reveal all sorts of scientific qualities: being symmetrical, being a liquid, being two feet long, carbon-based, spherical, and so on. But the list will contain no moral features. 2. No moral judgments are true. Why not? Simple: there is nothing for them to be true of. There are no moral facts. And so no moral claims can be accurate, since there are no moral facts for them to record. It follows that: 3. There is no moral knowledge. Knowledge requires truth. If there is no moral truth, there can be no moral knowledge. The last defining feature of error theory is 4. Our sincere moral judgments try, and always fail, to describe the moral features of things. Thus we always lapse into error 571  when thinking in moral terms. We are trying to describe the moral qualities of things when we make moral judgments. But since nothing has any moral qualities, all of our moral claims are mistaken. Hence the error. Error theorists are not launching some small-scale attack on morality. They are not criticizing our current views on, say, welfare policy or capital punishment, and trying to replace them with better ones. Rather, as they see it, all moral views are equally bankrupt. There is some very deep mistake that everyone committed to morality is making. The error theorist promises to reveal that mistake and to expose the real truth: morality is nothing but a fiction. For those who are fond of analogies, the following may help. The error theory is to morality as atheism is to religion. Error theorists and atheists deny the truth of a widely accepted worldview. They do this by trying to pinpoint an error that is said to lie at the very heart of the system they oppose. Atheists are, in effect, error theorists about religion. They believe that there are no religious features of the world, that no religious claims are true, and that religious believers try (and always fail) to speak the truth about God. Atheists deny that there is any religious knowledge. The central explanation for all of this is simple. If atheists are right, then common religious claims (God speaks to me; God created the universe; God knows everything) are all wrong, because they are based on the mistaken assumption that God exists. Atheists can successfully defend their view only if they can convince us that there is an error at the heart of religious belief. Likewise, moral error theorists can vindicate their view only if they can show that there is some fatal flaw at the heart of morality. And that depends on what the fundamental error of morality is supposed to be. In principle, we can develop any number of error theories, 572 depending on which basic error morality is supposed to commit. But in practice, there really has been only one candidate. All error theorists have agreed that the core mistake that undermines morality is its assumption that there are objective moral standards that supply each of us with an excellent reason for obedience, regardless of what we care about. According to error theorists, just as religion crucially depends on the supernatural, morality essentially depends on its being objective and providing us with categorical reasons—reasons that apply to us regardless of whether acting on them will get us what we want.1 If this central assumption is mistaken, then the entire enterprise of morality is bankrupt. There are two substantial points that error theorists must convince us of. First, they must show that buying into morality really does assume a commitment to moral objectivity and categorical reasons. That will be news to many—to subjectivists and relativists, for instance, and to expressivists, whose views we are soon to discuss. If morality does not, in fact, rely on these assumptions, then the error theorist’s criticisms will fail. But suppose that the coherence of our moral thinking and practice does indeed depend on the twin assumptions that morality is objective and that it provides us with categorical reasons. This reveals the second burden that error theorists must shoulder: they must show that at least one of these assumptions is false. Perhaps they can do that. We have already considered arguments concerning our reasons to be moral,2 and we will (in the next chapter) look at the most prominent attempts to undermine the objectivity of morality. So, rather than repeat those efforts, let us consider the main attractions of the error theory. There are two of them. First, the error theory offers us a very simple, pared-down view of reality. It says that the world is as science describes 573 (or would describe, were science perfect). No extras. Assuming that the sciences are not going to ratify the existence of moral values, then such values count as extras. Most scientists and philosophers regard simplicity as a very important theoretical virtue; according to them, if competing theories are otherwise equal, the one that is simpler is likelier to be true. Among metaethical views, the error theory is about as simple as one can get. Its simplicity explains the other main attraction of the error theory— namely, the fact that it doesn’t need to explain either the objectivity of morality or the existence of categorical reasons. Philosophically, offering such explanations is a very big ask, and the explanations that ethical objectivists have offered have always been met with controversy. Error theorists can spare themselves all of that work, precisely because they deny that morality is objective and deny that there are any categorical reasons. Error theorists do of course have some explaining to do. They need to explain why almost everyone has been duped into thinking that there’s something real about morality, that some moral claims are true, and that we have at least some moral knowledge. But these explanations are ready to hand—they are basically the ones offered by ethical relativists, but without any attachment to the relativistic idea that there is moral truth and knowledge. People invented morality for their own purposes: to coordinate behavior, to strengthen motivations against temptation, to cement power relations, and so forth. But as the error theorist tells it, we largely forgot that morality was an invention, and instead came to regard it, mistakenly, as something objective. Two Mistaken Objections Though very few people outside of philosophical circles have ever heard of the error theory, the worry it expresses is familiar enough. And so, too, is the typical response: abandoning morality would have absolutely terrible 574 results. Further, even to seriously consider that morality may be a fiction is to show a corrupt mind, and error theorists are therefore not to be trusted. Once people give up on morality, they will feel free to act in any way they please. It won’t be pretty. There are actually two lines of criticism at work here, and both are mistaken. The first we might call the Argument from Disastrous Results: 1. If widespread acceptance of a view would lead to disastrous results, then that view is false. 2. Widespread acceptance of the error theory would lead to disastrous results. 3. Therefore, the error theory is false. It’s an interesting question whether premise 2 is true. I won’t venture an opinion here on whether it is. Nor do we need to, since premise 1 is definitely false. The truth of a theory does not depend on the results of everyone’s embracing it. To see this, consider a similar argument against atheism. Some people claim that widespread belief in atheism would generate disaster. I don’t know if that’s right, but suppose it is. Still, that is no evidence that God exists. After all, if some highly classified state secrets were revealed and became widely accepted, that might cause disaster, too. But that hardly shows that the claims made in those documents are false. So we cannot undermine the error theory by arguing that its popular acceptance would lead to the downfall of civilization—even if it would. Some have found premise 1 tempting because they have confused it with a close cousin: 1a. If widespread practice of a given action will lead to disastrous results, then that action is immoral. 575 But this really is a confusion, since premise 1 speaks of theories and their truth, rather than actions and their moral status. And in any event, 1a is false, as we saw in an earlier discussion.3 If everyone were to practice celibacy, then disaster would ensue. That doesn’t show that it is immoral to be celibate. Others have confused premise 1 with a more specific version: 1b. If widespread acceptance of a moral theory would yield disastrous results, then that theory is false. This cannot be so easily dismissed. Many philosophers have thought that 1b is true, though a number of others—mostly utilitarians—have rejected it.4 Fortunately, we do not have to settle the matter here, because the error theory is not a moral theory. It does not try to tell us where our duty lies, or which character traits are virtues. The error theory rejects all moral theories, and says that every single one is mistaken. Since the error theory is not a moral theory, principle 1b simply does not apply to it. If the error theory isn’t a moral theory, then what is it? In fancy terms, it is a metaphysical theory—a theory about what the world is truly like, and what really exists. Theism is a metaphysical theory. It says that God exists. Other metaphysical theories try to defend the existence of the soul, or free will, or immortality. The basic problem with the Argument from Disastrous Results is that metaphysical theories, such as the error theory, cannot be tested in the way that its first premise claims. For instance, we cannot prove that we have free will, just by showing (if we can) that terrible results would occur if we abandoned our belief in it. Metaphysical theories try to tell us what the world is like. Such theories might contain some bitter truths, ones that, if widely accepted, would lead to heartache, or loss of faith, or the breakdown of longstanding customs and social practices. (That’s what makes them bitter.) At best, this might give us some reason not to publicize these claims. But that is no reason to suppose that they are false. 576 Another popular objection to the error theory is really targeted at error theorists themselves. The idea here is that those who reject categorical reasons and the objectivity of morality are bound to be untrustworthy. Conscience serves as an effective check on our antisocial impulses only if we see moral duty as something real, as a set of rules imposed from the outside, ones that have genuine authority over us. Error theorists reject this picture. Critics claim that this rejection will encourage error theorists to let their destructive, selfish impulses take control of their decisions. Anyone who does that is surely untrustworthy. But this way of thinking is mistaken as well. Error theorists can care deeply about others, and can be strongly opposed to doing the things that we traditionally regard as morally wrong (e.g., killing, stealing, and lying). Of course error theorists, if consistent, will not regard such actions as immoral. But they may still be dead set against such behavior; they might find it distasteful, undesirable, unproductive, or otherwise unappealing. Still, one might argue that error theorists are not guaranteed to have the sorts of goals that we associate with upright behavior. And that is true. But such a guarantee fails to hold for many people who reject the error theory. How many atrocities each year are committed in the name of one morality upon those with different moral beliefs? Far more than those committed by error theorists! All that aside, this kind of criticism does nothing to address the issue of whether the error theory itself is true. Indeed, it represents a classic kind of fallacy—the ad hominem attack. When leveling such a critique, one tries to undermine the truth of a position by criticizing the character of its supporters. Don’t like the message? Attack the messenger. Aside from being bad sport, such a strategy entirely misses the mark. We want to know whether morality is all make-believe. We can’t answer that question by engaging in character assassination. The only way to answer it is by doing two things. First, we need to determine whether error theorists are correct in thinking that morality 577 really does depend on two assumptions: (i) that it is objective, and (ii) that it supplies us with reasons to obey it, regardless of our desires. I am not sure whether this is what we really are committed to when thinking morally. Certainly, subjectivists and relativists deny these assumptions. And so they will deny the existence of any error, since they reject the thought that morality depends on claims (i) and (ii). But suppose that error theorists are right about what we are committed to when we adopt a moral outlook. To assess their view, we must then undertake a second investigation, to determine whether categorical reasons exist and whether morality is objective. Stay tuned: we’ll consider these matters at greater length in chapter 21. 1. For more on categorical reasons, see the discussion in chapter 11, “Morality and Rationality.” 2. See chapter 8, “Why Be Moral?”; chapter 11, “Morality and Rationality”; and chapter 14, “Why Be Moral?” 3. See chapter 11, “Consistency and Fairness.” 4. Many utilitarians think that widespread acceptance of the principle of utility might actually have quite bad results, despite firmly believing that the principle is true. See chapter 10, “Motivation,” for a discussion of this point. 578 20.2 Expressivism The Theory and Its Attractions Expressivism is another family of views that deny the objectivity of morality. Indeed, expressivists accept the first three claims that define the error theorist’s point of view: 1. There are no moral features in this world. 2. No moral judgments are true. 3. There is no moral knowledge. Unlike error theorists, however, expressivists think that morality is in pretty good shape. There is no deep error at the heart of our moral thinking. But how can that be, if 1–3 are true? Simple. Expressivists reject the fourth feature that is essential to error theory: 4. Our sincere moral judgments try (and always fail) to describe the moral features of things. According to expressivists, we are not trying to speak the truth when making moral judgments. We are not making an effort to describe the way the world is. We are not trying to report the moral features possessed by various actions, motives, or policies. Instead, we are venting our emotions, commanding others to act in certain ways, or revealing a plan of action. When we condemn torture, for instance, we are expressing our opposition to it, indicating our disgust at it, publicizing our reluctance to perform it, and strongly encouraging others not to go in for it. We can do all of these things without trying to say anything that is true. 579 One of the basic ideas behind expressivism is that moral claims function very differently from straightforward factual claims. Factual claims try to represent the way the world really is. If expressivism is right, moral claims serve quite different purposes. I know that sounds puzzling. To get a better sense of what is going on here, consider this sentence: A. Torture is immoral. It appears to function just like this sentence: B. Water is wet. Sentence (B) tell us that water has a certain feature—being wet. Sentence (A) looks similar. It appears to tell us that torture has a certain feature— being immoral. And there’s nothing special about (A). All moral claims seem to assign a moral quality to something or other. But if there aren’t any such qualities, then aren’t our moral claims always mistaken? Not necessarily. If expressivism is true, then the similarity between sentences such as (A) and (B) is only superficial. When we say that torture is immoral, for instance, we are not describing torture. We are not saying that it has any features at all. We aren’t even describing our feelings about it (as subjectivists claim). Rather, it’s as if we were saying one of the following: Torture—argghhh! Don’t torture! Let me plan a life that doesn’t include torturing others. Won’t everyone please refrain from torture? These utterances can’t be true. But they can’t be false, either. And that marks the central difference between expressivism and error theories. The error theorist thinks that our sincere moral claims are always meant to state the truth, but since there isn’t any moral truth, such claims are all 580 mistaken. The expressivist, by contrast, thinks that our moral claims are largely alright, since they are doing what they are intended to do. And what is that? According to expressivists, moral claims are not in the business of holding up a mirror to the world. Their job is to vent our feelings, give orders and commands, and express our commitments. Since they manage to do that just fine, there is no reason to charge them with error. The basic philosophical motivation behind expressivism is pretty straightforward. Unlike error theorists, who share their rejection of ethical objectivity, expressivists want a way to retain our confidence in morality. In doing so, they also want to avoid the difficulties that hamper cultural relativism and ethical subjectivism. The biggest problem for relativism and subjectivism (as we saw in the previous chapter) is that these views either generate contradictions or are unable to explain moral disagreement. Expressivism handles both problems with ease; that is its first main attraction. Contradictions arise when the same claim is said to be true and false at the same time. If expressivists are right, no moral claim is either true or false. And so moral contradictions disappear. Expressivists see moral disagreement as a clash of emotions or personal commitments. Debates about abortion, for instance, reveal nothing about its moral features (since there aren’t any), but a lot about the feelings of the differing parties. One side feels angered and upset by abortion, and the other doesn’t. The emotional investment we see in so many moral debates is just what we should expect, given the expressivist analysis of moral disagreement. Expressivism’s second attraction is its simplicity, a virtue it shares with error theory. Both views regard the world as containing nothing more than what our best sciences tell us. There is no additional layer of reality— moral values—to be added atop the value-free world as recorded by the sciences. 581 Expressivism’s third main attraction is that it neatly explains how our moral judgments so reliably motivate us. Ask yourself this question: if you sincerely judge an action to be your duty, aren’t you automatically motivated (at least a little bit) to do it? If you think a plan or a policy is a morally good one, aren’t you moved to some extent to help it along? If you answered yes, then you share the belief that moral judgments are motivational by their very nature. Their essence is to move people to act. That’s exactly what expressivists believe. If expressivism is true, it’s not just a coincidence or some kind of minor miracle that moral judgments are reliable motivators. They play this role because, at their core, what they do is express the very things that cause us to act—our desires, cares, commitments, and emotions. When we judge an action wrong, we are expressing our distaste or hatred of it, our desire that it not be done, our concern for those who might be harmed by it. Our moral judgments express our feelings, and our feelings are our basic motivations. That is why our moral judgments are so easily able to get us to act. Contrast this picture with another one. Beliefs, unlike moral judgments, are not really in the business of getting us to act in certain ways. They are focused on stating the facts, on reporting the truth, on describing reality. If I believe that there is a computer monitor in front of me and two cats nearby, I am not moved to act in any way at all. If I want to use the Internet or pet my cats, then these beliefs will help to direct my actions. But beliefs can do this only by attaching themselves to my desires. If I didn’t want to use the Internet or pet my cats, then neither of these beliefs would have helped at all in guiding my actions. This contrast between moral judgment, on the one hand, and belief, on the other, inspired David Hume to construct the following Motivational Argument: 1. Moral judgments are able, all by themselves, to motivate those who make them. 582  2. Beliefs are never able, all by themselves, to motivate those who hold them. 3. Therefore, moral judgments are not beliefs. But if moral judgments are not beliefs, what are they? Ask an expressivist, she’ll tell you: they are expressions of our emotions, desires, or plans. Since moral judgments aren’t beliefs, they can’t be true. But neither can they be false. They are just like the utterances we encountered earlier— neither true nor false. This is a nice package of attractions. But there are worries, of course. Three seem to be especially serious. How Is It Possible to Argue Logically about Morality? If, as expressivists say, moral claims cannot be true, then this makes it very difficult to understand how moral argument is possible. Logical argumentation is truth preserving—a logically valid argument is defined as one whose conclusion must be true, provided that its premises are true.5 If, as expressivists say, moral claims cannot be true, then how could they possibly be used to support other claims? To see the worry here, consider this argument: 1. All actions that dehumanize people are immoral. 2. Torture dehumanizes people. 3. Therefore, torture is immoral. The argument appears to be logically perfect. If you accepted both premises, you would have to accept the conclusion. After all, this argument has the very same logical structure as a philosophical classic: 1. All men are mortal. 583  2. Socrates is a man. 3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. And everyone admits that this argument is logically valid. Given the truth of the two premises, the conclusion can’t possibly be false. From a logical point of view, these two arguments appear to be identical. And there is a natural explanation for this: the first two premises in each argument can be true, and if they are, then the conclusion must be true as well. But expressivists cannot accept this natural explanation, since they deny that moral claims can be true. Look at the first argument. If premise 1 really means: 1a. Dehumanizing actions—yecchhh! or 1b. Don’t dehumanize people! then there is no way that this premise can be used to logically support any conclusion. But it seems clear that it is being used in precisely this way. The logic of the first argument is watertight—even if you are suspicious about the merits of the actual premises. Indeed, logical moral argumentation seems like a real possibility—we do it all the time (and have been doing it throughout this book). Expressivism does not seem able to explain this. Expressivism and Amoralists An amoralist is someone who sincerely makes moral claims, but is entirely unmoved by them. Such people create a serious problem for expressivism.6 584 Expressivists warn us not to be fooled by the superficial similarity between factual claims (water is wet) and moral ones (torture is immoral). Moral claims assert nothing. They describe nothing. Instead, they express our feelings. Indeed, that is how the expressivist explains why our moral judgments so reliably motivate us. These judgments convey our feelings, and our feelings are what move us to act. But this makes it impossible for someone, say, to really think that charity is admirable and yet be indifferent when it comes to forking out his own money. It would be impossible for a soldier to think it his duty to face enemy fire while remaining completely unmotivated to do so. Such cases may really be impossible, but the evidence points the other way. Amoralism is unusual, to be sure, but not unheard of. Indeed, expressivism faces the same problem that psychological egoism does.7 In the face of evidence that supports the existence of altruism, egoists insist that people must be either deceiving themselves or lying to us about their motivations. Expressivists have to say the same thing about the evidence of amoralism. All such evidence must be disqualified. The person who really is lacking in motivation cannot be sincere in his moral claims. Or, if he is sincere, then he really must be motivated, and so his claims to the contrary are either lies or instances of self-deception. Such a diagnosis may be correct. But the burden here weighs heavily on the expressivist’s shoulders. The Nature of Moral Judgment A final concern has to do with whether expressivists are right to challenge the dominant view of what we do when we make moral judgments. Ethical objectivists, ethical relativists, and error theorists agree on almost nothing. But they have reached consensus on one point: moral judgments are beliefs aimed at describing the moral features that things actually 585 have. Such judgments can be true or false, depending on how well they report the truth about which things have which moral qualities. Expressivists deny this. They reject the idea that moral judgments are beliefs that aim to represent the way things are. They deny that there are any moral features. They deny that moral judgments could ever offer accurate descriptions of reality. How do we know whether their hypothesis is correct? Return to our original example, the claim that torture is immoral. If we understand this literally, the sentence says that torture has a certain feature—being immoral. As we saw, expressivists can’t read it this way. They have to paraphrase this sentence so that it isn’t assigning any specific feature to torture. Perhaps you found the various translations they offered above to be attractive. But what about these claims? Nobody but Jeff knows how to behave when the boss is around. I’m not sure whether torture is ever acceptable, but I am sure that those who are wiser than I am have the correct answer. There is a difference between an action’s being required, morally good, virtuous, and deserving of praise. Some actions fulfill moral duties and yet lack moral worth. The degree of punishment should match the degree of wrongdoing. Virtue is its own reward. If war is immoral, then military generals are less virtuous than they seem. Read as objectivists, subjectivists, relativists, or error theorists would do, the sentence structure of these claims is transparent. They are readily understandable. It’s not at all clear how expressivists could reword them to turn them into commands, emotional expressions, or plans. 586 People put their words to various purposes. The best way to tell whether people are joking, questioning, inviting, or trying to state the truth is simply to ask them. People are usually pretty trustworthy on this score. (Not always, of course. When we play to win at poker, or negotiate a business deal, we may be deliberately misleading.) Still, exceptions aside, people are the best judges of their own intentions, and their testimony in such matters is usually reliable. That’s not a thrilling point, but it has a direct bearing on expressivism’s plausibility. When we ask people how they think of their moral claims, almost everyone will reject the expressivist analysis. For the most part, we do regard our moral claims as true. We regard our opponents’ views as false. We take our moral condemnations to be cases of describing, say, the injustice of insider trading, or reporting the moral corruption of an unprincipled politician. At bottom, we intend our moral judgments to function as something other than emotional outbursts or expressions of commands or plans. We might all be lying, or deceiving ourselves about what we are actually doing. But by far the more charitable view is that we mean what we say. When making moral judgments, we are trying to speak the truth. We are intending to state the facts. We aim to accurately present the moral details of the situations we are thinking of. If that is so, then expressivism is in serious trouble. 5. For more on logic and validity, please see the Introduction, “Moral Reasoning.” 6. For more on the amoralist, see the discussion of Hobbes’s Fool in chapter 14, “Why Be Moral”?” 7. See the discussion “Letting the Evidence Decide” in chapter 7. 587 20.3 Conclusion The vision of morality that so many of us believe in—one that sees morality as a set of objective duties and rules, supplying each of us with strong reasons to do as it says—may be fundamentally mistaken. Subjectivists and relativists certainly think so. And so do error theorists and expressivists. Error theorists are the most pessimistic of the lot, thinking as they do that morality is a bankrupt enterprise. This thought stems from their view that our moral thinking is based on assumptions that turn out to be false. If the foundations of an entire way of thinking are corrupt, then the whole worldview must come tumbling down. That’s the way atheists see religious claims. And that is the way error theorists see moral ones. Expressivists are not so pessimistic. They agree with error theorists in denying that ethics is objective and in denying that moral duties supply us with categorical reasons. But since expressivists do not believe that moral thinking rests on these foundations, they don’t feel the need to accuse the rest of us of error. Moral talk does pretty much what it is supposed to do— give vent to our emotions, express our feelings about things, and signal our commitments. And so there is little reason to worry. But as we have seen, expressivism does give us some cause for concern. True, it offers a picture of morality that frees it of fundamental error. It solves the problem of contradiction. It neatly explains the nature of moral disagreement. It offers a streamlined, simple view of reality. It straightforwardly explains how moral judgments reliably motivate us. And yet it has difficulty making sense of how logical moral argumentation is possible. It fails to make room for amoralism. It clashes with our views about what we are intending to do when we make moral judgments. 588 Expressivists are hard at work on these problems. There is a very lively conversation about the pros and cons of expressivism going on right now in philosophy departments around the world. In the last decade, this conversation has reached levels of sophistication that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago. It’s far too early to tell whether expressivism is down for the count or whether its defenders can identify new solutions to these perennial problems. Even if, in the end, expressivism turns out to have more costs than benefits, this doesn’t leave objectivists in the clear. It may be that morality is all make-believe, as error theorists claim. Most of us (especially we textbook authors!) hope this isn’t so. Yet a hope is hardly evidence one way or the other. Whether we should think of morality as bankrupt depends on what the best arguments tell us about the nature of morality. We’ll be in a better position to see the force of those arguments after working through the next chapter. 589 2 0. 4 D I S C U S S I O N Q U E S TI O N S 1. What are the two types of moral nihilism, and what is the main difference between them? In what ways does each theory agree with ethical objectivism, and in what ways does each disagree? 2. What do error theorists typically claim is the “error” at the heart of our moral practice? Is the assumption that they identify really essential to our moral thought? If so, do you agree that it is an error? 3. Some critics of the error theory claim that it is false because (i) disaster would result were most people to accept it, and (ii) its defenders are untrustworthy. Why are these criticisms problematic? 4. What does it mean to say that stealing is wrong, according to expressivism? Do you find the expressivist translation to be plausible? Why or why not? 5. Why does the fact that people make logical arguments about moral issues raise a challenge for expressivism? How might an expressivist respond to this challenge? 6. What is an amoralist? Can expressivism make sense of the idea of such a person? If not, is this a problem for the theory? 7. Think carefully about what you are doing when you are forming your own moral judgments. Does the expressivist analysis of moral judgments accurately capture what you are doing? Why or why not? 590 Chapter 20 Self-Quiz [Please note: You must be using an online, browser-based eReader in order to view this content.] Chapter 20 Flashcards [Please note: You must be using an online, browser-based eReader in order to view this content.] 591 LIST OF KEY TERMS ad hominem attack categorical reasons error theory expressivism fact-value distinction metaphysical moral nihilism 592