Talk:Moral skepticism

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Early comments[edit]

(1)I do not see that the "Argument from Queerness" merits a separate page; it should be included in this article (or perhaps in moral nihilism) under a heading (e.g. "arguments"). (2) Criticisms should be addressed. (3) A distinction needs to be made between nihilism and skepticism; nihilism is a metaphysical claim that moral objects/values do not exist; skepticism is an epistemic claim that one cannot know a moral proposition to be true; nihilists are necessarily skeptics, but not vice versa. Mackie's view is properly "moral nihilism" - though he is also a moral skeptic. Unisonus 01:47, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]


what does "useful" mean to the moral skeptic?

The same as it means to anyone else, I think. :-) We can all agree that moral rules are useful, can't we? Evercat 00:58 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I wanted to give a thumbs-up to whoever wrote that line. Obviously encyclopedic writing doesn't allow for much "beauty" but that approached it. ] --[[User:Masmith|Marty] 03:54, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


Though Mackie labels his view skepticism, it seems to be of a different kind than first order moral skepticism, which is what this article labels "the weak kind". Perhaps we should split them into the view about ethical knowledge (ethical skepticism) and mackie's view (denying the existence of moral properties). Yesterdog 07:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The whole family of articles dealing with anti-objectivist moral theories is in a state of disrepair right now. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that Mackie and others didn't quite know how the terminological situation would develop and just tossed words out there, hoping they would work. As the range of possible positions became clearer, certain terms were abandoned and others embraced. At this point, there is some agreement on terms and I think Wikipedia ought to reflect it. Also, each page needs to make clear what other uses of the terms there are. Postmodern Beatnik 14:40, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If there is now agreement on terms (and I know you said "some"), and you can see it fairly clearly, could you give us a quick tutorial? Even as a philosophy PhD student working in a fairly closely related area, I often find the usage confusing. You might be able to help me, at least, both as a wikipedia editor, working on this and similar articles, and as a philosopher. Metamagician3000 00:32, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
My apologies for not seeing this way back when. I think the project is well under way now. Hopefully, you will find it useful! Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 14:56, 6 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe we should make a parent Moral anti-realism article as the starting point (if there isn't one already) and structure the family of anti-realist theories based on whether they are semantic antirealism (non-cognitivisms etc), ontological anti-realisms (constructivism, error-theory, etc.) and the like. Yesterdog 20:22, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Relationship to relativism[edit]

I'd like to see some mention of how moral skepticism relates to moral relativism. Does one imply the other? Are they orthogonal? -Ahruman 10:12, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to find consistency in the way the terminology is used. Harman, who is probably the leading moral relativist at the moment, has a position so close to moral scepticism of the Mackie variety that I frankly find it difficult to see what their substantive disagreement really is. Both deny that morality is objective in any ultimate sense, but Harman wants to avoid saying that his is an error theory of commonsense morality. Worse, Harman's theory seems to me to be rather different from most theories that get described as "moral relativism". And even worse, I'm not sure that Mackie's theory is what is popularly understood by "moral scepticism", even though he applies that label to himself and it's probably the theory that philosophers usually have in mind when they use it. What he is really sceptical about isn't the value of morality in some practical sense, it's the ultimate objectivity of morality. I'm doing a lot of reading on this at the moment and will report back with any other thoughts that I have. Anyone else? Metamagician3000 12:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Our meta-ethics article does offer a reasonably plausible taxonomy of these various theories, though I don't think it is totally uncontroversial. Metamagician3000 23:18, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed a Problem[edit]

I've just finished up some major revisions to this article. It's still in need of sourcing and expansion. My two recommendations to whomever continues to revise are as follows:

(1) if you include moral nihilism as a theory under the aegis of moral skepticism, remember to modify the first sentence of this entry to make it communicate that moral skepticism is a class of metaethical and normative ethical theories -- moral nihilism is a normative ethic.

(2) Keep the current organization. It is helpful to distinguish between Moral Error Theory (which holds that moral claims are false, and so unjustified) and Dogmatic Moral Skepticism (which holds that moral claims are unjustified, but does not commit itself to the additional, error theoretic, proposition that moral claims are false). This distinction maps onto the marked and age-old difference between ontology and epistemology, and the arguments deployed by these two moral skeptical schools are, accordingly, significantly dissimilar. WilliamPitts (talk) 09:32, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The revisions are by and large good ones, but I think it is important to note that Mackie used "moral skepticism" in the sense that we would today use "moral anti-realism." True, his view is still skeptical in that it denies the possibility of positive moral knowledge, but today we would call him an anti-realist and a moral nihilist. Which brings me to my second point: moral nihilism can be both a metaethical view and a normative view. I (and others) have advocated the use of "metaethical nihilism" for the second order application, but this is not yet the norm. In its metaethical application, nihilism is the view that there are no moral truths (a stronger claim than that we don't know if their are moral truths). FInally, can't we come up with a better name for the agnostic skeptical position discussed than "dogmatic moral skepticism?" This comes across as rather pejorative, especially without the contrast to Pyrrhonian skepticism, and even Walter Sinnott-Armstrong admits it is a poor name (though he takes the time to note as much). Since we are already dividing moral skepticism up into ontological moral skepticism and epistemological moral skepticism, I suggest that we divide the discussion of the latter into both Pyrrhonian/weakly agnostic skepticism and the Dogmatic/strongly agnostic position under those names. That way we get both sets of terminology but also understand the distinction that drives the words. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 15:55, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You're right about the ambiguity in "moral nihilism." I also agree that including both moral error theory and "epistemological moral skepticism" as subclasses of "moral skepticism" is a bit misleading. Indeed, current convention has metaethics divided into four (maybe four and a half), fairly distinct, groups of theories: (1) moral realism, which holds that (a) moral claims are truth-apt (or, as Richard Joyce would have it, assertions) and (b) some moral claims are true; (2) noncognitivism, which holds that (a) is false and so, a fortiori is (b); (3) moral error theory, which holds that (a) is true and (b) is false; and (4) epistemological moral skepticism (of the sort propounded by Harman, Ruse, etc.), which holds that (a) is true and we are unjustified in believing (b), but does not make the further claim that (b) is false. (I'd say (4.5) is Simon Blackburn's "moral quasi-realism," which holds that (a) and (b) are both true, but only does so by revising conventional notions of truth-aptitude.) There's already a page on moral realism and one on quasi-realism. If I had my druthers we'd scrap this page and export it to two new entries, one on moral error theory and the other on "epistemological moral skepticism" (or whatever). (We'd then include under epistemological moral skepticism entries on Pyrrhoninian and Dogmatic versions of the theory). That might be infeasible, though, so in the meantime I'll rename the section currently titled "Dogmatic Moral Skepticism" "Epistemological moral skepticism" and include subheadings on the dogmatic and Pyrrhonian varieties. All of these entries could do with some major expansion, BTW. WilliamPitts (talk) 22:50, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The other problem is that some moral philosophers, such as myself, follow the example of Pekka Väyrynen and define moral realism in terms of three theses, not two. And since the moral realism page here seems to be following Väyrynen's lead, I think the pages on moral anti-realism and skepticism should, as well. This makes subjectivists and relativists anti-realists, rather than realists (which makes sense to me). And so the major problem to me seems to be that we need to agree on the particular taxonomy of moral philosophy we are going to use before we can know exactly how to flesh out each page. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 13:24, 8 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This article needs a lot of love. The positions that are described here seem like caricatures of the actual views of the philosophers concerned, though they might be presented in this way to first-year philosophy students. For the moment, I agree that subjectivists and relativists are usually classified as moral anti-realists. Metamagician3000 (talk) 10:53, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I notice that I made some comments to similar effect 15 years ago, and I haven't really helped since then. *sigh* I did publish a little book which covers some of this stuff, back in 2016 (called The Mystery of Moral Authority), and I tried in that book to untangle some of the difficulties/complexities. But everything in this area is contentious, and I'm not going to cite my own book as an authoritative source for Wikipedia. Metamagician3000 (talk) 10:59, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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Error Theory = Nihilism?[edit]

I've noticed that "Error theory" in the error theory section links to the page on Nihilism. Is this really? intended? --109.192.165.115 (talk) 15:44, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 3 January 2020[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus to move the page to the proposed title at this time, per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 14:19, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]


Moral skepticism → Moral anti-realism – More common name for the subject at hand, see SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/ - || RuleTheWiki || (talk) 07:43, 3 January 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 13:52, 11 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Nope. Those are different. See the moral skepticism entry in the source you cited: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral/ Teishin (talk) 15:04, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Moral anti-realism encompasses all the viewpoints covered by moral skepticism, except that moral skepticism is an action rather than a meta-ethical thesis, you can be a moral skeptic whilst also being a moral realist, but if you adopt a the meta-ethical position of anti-realism then you adopt of concrete definition of denying the thesis of moral realism rather than just being a 'skeptic'.- || RuleTheWiki || (talk) 18:03, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Since by your admission one could logically be committed to moral skepticism without also being committed to moral anti-realism, that shows the topics are in fact distinct. I think this shows this article should not be moved. I would say that "moral anti-realism" has a metaphysics connotation and "moral skepticism" has an epistemology connotation. The article as it exists is flawed- crucially in identifying "moral skepticism" with views that entail that there is no moral knowledge, rather than with the thesis that there is no moral knowledge itself. This definition captures all moral anti-realism, because all moral anti-realisms are committed to some form of moral skepticism (they're defined by their opposition to the moral realist's claim there is a certain kind of moral fact, so they're of course forced to deny there could be knowledge of such moral facts). But if we moved this article to "moral anti-realism", we'd be defining moral anti-realism in the bizarre manner of looking at the epistemological theses it entails rather than its denial of the existence of moral facts. The problem is fundamentally that the article defines its subject in a way that conflates what should be two distinct subjects: moral skepticism, moral anti-realism. Moving the article from one place to the other will not remove this conflation; I think edits that address this issue are called for first. - Keegan.Landrigan (talk) 08:51, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We could split the article if that's the preferred option. I agree with your premises that the subjects have in explaining what entails rather than the stated position and in my opinion they should be rewritten for 2 separate articles.- || RuleTheWiki || (talk) 03:43, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per the references, Further reading section, and External links. Not a philosophical question but a name that the sources use. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:37, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
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