Projection, Indeterminacy and Moral Skepticism

Abstract

According to one way of understanding moral skepticism, to be a skeptic about morality is to hold that all moral claims are either false, incoherent, or something else misleadingly expressed. This tripartite disjunctive formulation is due to Bernard Williams, who made this claim about attributions to agents of reasons for action said to obtain regardless of the contents of their desires, and hence about any moral reasons so said to obtain (Williams 1981). Williams's formulation (although not his entire view) broadly captures the central claims of other recent proponents of moral skepticism, such as John Mackie (1977), Richard Joyce (2001), and Jonas Olson (2014)-also commonly known as 'moral error theorists'. In what follows, I use the terms 'moral skepticism' and 'moral error theory' interchangeably. According to moral error theory, morality is something invented, constructed or made; but mistakenly presents itself to us as if it were an independent object of discovery. According to moral constructivism, morality is something invented, constructed or made. 1 Thus understood, error theory and constructivism are close philosophical relatives (Lillehammer 2011). Both types of view take morality to be a construction. But error theorists go further than constructivists in claiming that moral thought necessarily, or 'constitutively', presents itself as something different, or 'more' than that, namely, a cognitive reflection of a moral reality that 1 I intend this characterization of constructivism and error theory to be consistent with the claim that significant aspects of the human moral sensibility are a product of evolutionary and other non-intentional causes (see e.g. Lillehammer 2003). I mainly ignore this complication in what follows.