## 1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realism



Traditionally, to hold a realist position with respect to *X*
is to hold that *X* exists objectively. On this view, moral
anti-realism is the denial of the thesis that moral
properties--or facts, objects, relations, events, etc. (whatever
categories one is willing to countenance)--exist objectively.
This could involve either (1) the denial that moral properties exist
at all, or (2) the acceptance that they do exist but this existence is
(in the relevant sense) non-objective. There are broadly two ways of
endorsing (1): moral noncognitivism and moral error theory. Proponents
of (2) may be variously thought of as moral non-objectivists, or
idealists, or constructivists. So understood, moral anti-realism is
the disjunction of three theses:


1. moral noncognitivism
2. moral error theory
3. moral non-objectivism



Using such labels is not a precise science, nor an uncontroversial
matter; here they are employed just to situate ourselves roughly. In
this spirit of preliminary imprecision, these views can be initially
characterized as follows:



**Moral noncognitivism** holds that our moral judgments
are not in the business of aiming at truth. So, for example, A.J. Ayer
declared that when we say "Stealing money is wrong" we do
not express a proposition that can be true or false, but rather it is
as if we say "*Stealing money!!*" with the tone of
voice indicating that a special feeling of disapproval is being
expressed (Ayer [1936] 1971: 110). Note how the predicate
"... is wrong" has disappeared in Ayer's
translation schema; thus the issues of whether the property of
wrongness exists, and whether that existence is objective, also
disappear.



The **moral error theorist** thinks that although our
moral judgments aim at the truth, they systematically fail to secure
it: the world simply doesn't contain the relevant
"stuff" to render our moral judgments true. For a more
familiar analogy, compare what an atheist usually claims about
religious judgments. On the face of it, religious discourse is
cognitivist in nature: it would seem that when someone says "God
exists" or "God loves you" they are usually
asserting something that purports to be true. However, according to
the atheist, the world isn't furnished with the right kind of
stuff (gods, afterlife, miracles, etc.) necessary to render these
assertions true. The moral error theorist claims that when we say
"Stealing is morally wrong" we are asserting that the act
of stealing instantiates the property of moral wrongness, but in fact
there is no such property, or at least nothing in the world
instantiates it, and thus the utterance is untrue.



**Non-objectivism** (as it will be called here) allows
that moral facts exist but holds that they are non-objective. The
slogan version comes from Hamlet: "there is nothing either good
or bad, but thinking makes it so." For a quick example of a
non-objective fact, consider the different properties that a
particular diamond might have. It is true that the diamond is made of
carbon, and also true that the diamond is worth $1000, say. But the
status of these facts seems different. That the diamond is carbon
seems an objective fact: it doesn't depend on what we think of
the matter. (We could all be under the impression that it is not
carbon, and all be wrong.) That the diamond is worth $1000, by
contrast, seems to depend on us. If we all thought that it was worth
more (or less), then it would be worth more (or less).



[This entry uses the label "non-objectivism" instead of
the simple "subjectivism" since there is an entrenched
usage in metaethics for using the latter to denote the thesis that in
making a moral judgment one is reporting (as opposed to expressing)
one's own mental attitudes (e.g., "Stealing is morally
wrong" means "I disapprove of stealing"). So
understood, subjectivism is a kind of non-objectivist theory, but
there are many other kinds of non-objectivist theory, too.]



It is tempting to construe this idea of non-objectivity as
"mind-dependence," though this, as we will see below, is a
tricky notion, since something may be mind-independent in one sense
and mind-dependent in another. Cars, for example, are designed and
constructed by creatures with minds, and yet in another sense cars are
clearly concrete entities whose ongoing existence does not depend on
our mental activity. Those who feel pessimistic that the notion of
mind-dependence can be straightened out might prefer to characterize
moral realism in a way that makes no reference to objectivity. There
is also the concern that the objectivity clause threatens to render
moral anti-realism trivially true, since there is little room for
doubting that the moral status of actions usually (if not always)
depends in *some* manner on mental phenomena, such as the
intentions with which the action was performed or the episodes of
pleasure and pain that ensue from it. (See Sayre-McCord 1986; also his
the entry on
 moral realism.)
 Whether such pessimism is warranted is not something to be decided
hastily. Perhaps the judicious course is to make a terminological
distinction between *minimal moral realism*--which is the
denial of noncognitivism and error theory--and *robust moral
realism*--which in addition asserts the objectivity of moral
facts. (See Rosen 1994 for this distinction.) In what follows,
however, "moral realism" will continue to be used to
denote the traditional robust version.



If moral anti-realism is understood in this manner, then there are
several things with which it is important not to confuse it.



First, moral anti-realism is not a form of **moral
skepticism**. If we take moral skepticism to be the claim that
there is no such thing as moral knowledge, and we take knowledge to be
justified true belief, then there are three ways of being a moral
skeptic: one can deny that moral judgments are beliefs, one can deny
that moral judgments are ever true, or one can deny that moral
judgments are ever justified. The noncognitivist makes the first of
these denials, and the error theorist makes the second, thus
noncognitivists and error theorists count as both moral anti-realists
and moral skeptics. However, since the non-objectivity of some fact
does not pose a particular problem regarding the possibility of
one's knowing it (I might know that a certain diamond is worth
$1000, for example), then there is nothing to stop the moral
non-objectivist from accepting the existence of moral knowledge. So
moral non-objectivism is a form of moral anti-realism that need not be
a form of moral skepticism. Conversely, one might maintain that moral
judgments are sometimes objectively true--thus being a moral
realist--while also maintaining that moral judgments always lack
justification--thus being a moral skeptic. (See entry for
 moral skepticism.)



Speaking more generally, moral anti-realism, as it has been defined
here, contains no epistemological clause: it is silent on the question
of whether we are justified in making moral judgments. This is worth
noting since moral realists often want to support a view of morality
that would guarantee our justified access to a realm of objective
moral facts. But any such epistemic guarantee will need to be argued
for separately; it is not implied by realism itself. Indeed, if
objective facts are those that do not depend on our mental activity,
then they are precisely those facts that we can all be mistaken about,
and thus it seems reasonable to suppose that the desire for moral
facts to be objective and the desire for a guarantee of epistemic
access to moral facts are desiderata that are in tension with each
other.



Second, it is worth stating explicitly that moral anti-realism is not
a form of **moral relativism**--or, perhaps more
usefully noted: that moral relativism is not a form of moral
anti-realism. Moral relativism is a form of cognitivism according to
which moral claims contain an indexical element, such that the truth
of any such claim requires relativization to some individual or group.
According to a simple form of relativism, the claim "Stealing is
morally wrong" might be true when one person utters it, and
false when someone else utters it. The important thing to note is that
this would not necessarily make moral wrongness non-objective. For
example, suppose someone were to make the relativistic claim that
different moral values, virtues, and duties apply to different groups
of people due to, say, their social caste. If this person were asked
in virtue of what these relativistic moral facts obtain, there is
nothing to prevent them offering the full-blooded realist answer:
"It's just the way the universe objectively is."
Relativism does not stand opposite objectivism; it stands opposite
absolutism (the form of cognitivism according to which the truth of
moral claims does not require relativization to any individual or
group). One can be both a moral relativist and a moral objectivist
(and thus a moral realist); conversely, one can be both a moral
non-objectivist (and thus a moral anti-realist) and a moral
absolutist. (See entries for
 relativism
 and
 moral relativism.)



Of course, someone could simply stipulate that moral realism includes
the denial of moral relativism, and perhaps the philosophical
community could be persuaded to adopt this definition (in which case
this entry would need to be revised). But it seems reasonable to
suspect that the common tendency to think that moral realism and moral
relativism are opposed to each other is, more often than not, due a
confused conflation of the objectivism/non-objectivism distinction and
the absolutism/relativism distinction.



Third and finally, it might be helpful to clarify the relationship
between moral anti-realism and **moral naturalism**. The
moral naturalist believes that moral facts exist and fit within the
worldview presented by science. (For example, a utilitarian view that
identifies moral obligation with the production of happiness will
count as a form of moral naturalism, since there is nothing
particularly scientifically mysterious about happiness.) A moral
naturalist may maintain that moral facts are objective in nature, in
which case this moral naturalist will count as a moral realist. But a
moral naturalist may instead maintain that the moral facts are not
objective in nature, in which case this moral naturalist will count as
a moral anti-realist. Consider, for example, a simplistic
non-objectivist theory that identifies moral goodness (say) with
whatever a person approves of. Such a view would be a form of
anti-realism (in virtue of its non-objectivism), but since the
phenomenon of people approving of things is something that can be
accommodated smoothly within a scientific framework, it would also be
a form of moral naturalism. Conversely, if a moral realist maintains
that the objective moral facts cannot be accommodated within the
scientific worldview, then this moral realist will count as a moral
non-naturalist. (See entries for
 naturalism
 and
 moral naturalism.)



The noncognitivist and the error theorist, it should be noted, count
as neither moral naturalists nor moral non-naturalists, since they do
not believe in moral facts at all. These kinds of moral anti-realist,
however, may well be naturalists in a more general sense: they may
maintain that the only items that we should admit into our ontology
are those that fit within the scientific worldview. Indeed, it is
quite likely that it is their commitment to this more general
ontological naturalism that lies behind the noncognitivist's and
the error theorist's moral skepticism, since they may deem that
moral properties (were they to exist) would have to have
characteristics that cannot be accommodated within a naturalistic
framework.



Summing up: Some moral anti-realists will count as moral skeptics, but
some may believe in moral knowledge. Some moral anti-realists will be
relativists, but some may be moral absolutists (and many are neither).
Some moral anti-realists will be moral naturalists, but some may be
moral non-naturalists, and some will be neither moral naturalists nor
non-naturalists. These various positions can be combined into a
potentially bewildering array of possible complex metaethical
positions (e.g., non-skeptical, relativistic, non-naturalistic moral
anti-realism)--though, needless to say, these views may vary
greatly in plausibility.


## 2. Who Bears the Burden of Proof?



It is widely assumed that moral realism enjoys some sort of
presumption in its favor that the anti-realist has to work to
overcome. Jonathan Dancy writes that "we take moral value to be
part of the fabric of the world; ... and we should take it in the
absence of contrary considerations that actions and agents do have the
sorts of moral properties we experience in them" (1986: 172). In
a similar vein, David McNaughton claims "The realist's
contention is that he has only to rebut the arguments designed to
persuade us that moral realism is philosophically untenable in order
to have made out his case" (1988: 40-41). David Brink
concurs: "We begin as (tacit) cognitivists and realists about
ethics.... Moral Realism should be our metaethical starting
point, and we should give it up only if it does involve unacceptable
metaphysical and epistemological commitments" (1989:
23-24).



It may be questioned, however, whether moral realism really does enjoy
intuitive support, and also questioned whether, if it does, this
should burden the anti-realist with extra labor.



On the first matter, it may be argued that some of the distinctions
drawn in distinguishing moral realism from anti-realism are too
fine-grained or abstruse for "the folk" to have any
determinate opinion. It is, for example, radically unclear to what
extent common sense embraces the *objectivity* of moral facts.
There have been some empirical investigations ostensibly examining the
extent to which ordinary people endorse moral objectivism (e.g.,
Goodwin & Darley 2008; Uttich et al. 2014), but, upon examination,
many of these studies seem in fact to examine the extent to which
ordinary people endorse moral *absolutism*. (See Hopster 2019.)
And if even professional researchers struggle to grasp the concept of
moral objectivity, it is difficult to maintain confidently that
"the folk" have a firm and determinate intuition on the
subject. Furthermore, even if empirical investigation of collective
opinion were to locate strong intuitions in favor of a
mind-independent morality, there may be other equally robust
intuitions in favor of morality being mind-*dependent*. (For
example, the fact that we seem unwilling to defer to experts when
forming moral views appears to count against realism; see McGrath
2011. Similarly, the fact that we do not expect a person necessarily
to accept others' reasons for their moral views seems to reveal
anti-realist tendencies; see Foot 1958 for discussion.) Given the
difficulties in deciding and articulating just what kind of
objectivity is relevant to the moral realism/anti-realism division,
and given the range and potential subtlety of options, it might be
thought rash to claim that common sense has a firm opinion one way or
the other on this subject.



On the second matter: even if we were to identify a widespread
univocal intuition in favor of moral realism, it remains unclear to
what extent we should adopt a methodology that rewards moral realism
with a dialectical advantage when it comes to metaethics. By
comparison, we do not think that physicists should endeavor to come up
with intuitive theories. (There is, for example, a widespread
erroneous intuition that a fast-moving ball exiting a curved tube will
continue to travel on a curving trajectory (McCloskey et al. 1980).
The fact that Newtonian physics predicts that the ball will in fact
continue on a straight trajectory is surely in no sense a mark against
the theory.) Moreover, it is important to distinguish between any such
pro-realist intuitions *ex ante* and *ex post*. Once
someone has accepted considerations and arguments in favor of moral
anti-realism, then any counter-intuitiveness that this conclusion
has--ex ante--may be considered irrelevant. One noteworthy
type of strategy here is the "debunking argument," which
seeks to undermine moral intuitions by showing that they are the
product of processes that we have no grounds for thinking are reliable
indicators of truth. (See Street 2006; O'Neill 2015; Joyce 2013,
2016.) To the extent that the anti-realist can provide a plausible
explanation for why humans would tend to think of morality as
objective, even if it is not objective, then any counter-intuitiveness
in the anti-realist's failure to accommodate objectivity can no
longer be raised as an ongoing consideration against moral
anti-realism.



A theory's clashing with common sense is not the only way in
which it can face a burden of proof. Of two theories, A and B, if A
explains a range of observable phenomena more readily than B, then
proponents of B will have to undertake extra labor of squaring their
theory with the available evidence--and this may be the case even
if B strikes people as the more intuitive theory. For example, perhaps
Newtonian physics is more intuitive than Einsteinian, but there is
observable data--e.g., the results of the famous solar eclipse
experiments of 1919--that the latter theory is much better
equipped to explain.



What is it, then, that metaethical theories are expected to explain?
The range of phenomena is ill-defined and open-ended, but is typically
taken to include such things as the manifest features of moral
language, the importance of morality in our lives, moral practices and
institutions, the way moral considerations engage motivation, the
character of moral disagreement, and the acquisition of moral
attitudes.



Consider the first of these explananda: moral language. Here it seems
reasonable to claim that the noncognitivist shoulders a burden of
proof. Moral predicates appear to function linguistically like any
other predicate: Just as the sentence "The cat is brown"
may be used as an antecedent of a conditional, as a premise of an
argument, as the basis of a question ("Is the cat
brown?"), have its predicate nominalized ("Brownness is
had by the cat"), be embedded in a propositional attitude claim
("Mary believes that the cat is brown"), and have the
truth predicate applied to it ("'The cat is brown'
is true")--so too can all these things be done, without
obvious incoherence, with a moral sentence like "Stealing is
morally wrong." This is entirely as the cognitivist would
predict. By contrast, for a noncognitivist who maintains (as Ayer did)
that this moral judgment amounts to nothing more than
"Stealing!" uttered in a special disapproval-expressing
tone, all of this linguistic evidence represents a major (and perhaps
insurmountable) challenge.



Other explananda, on the other hand, may reveal that it is the moral
realist who has the extra explaining to do. If moral properties are
taken to have an essential normativity--in terms of, say, placing
practical demands upon us--then the realist faces the challenge
of explaining how any such thing could exist *objectively*. The
moral non-objectivist, by contrast, sees moral normativity as
something that we create--that practical demands arise from our
desires, emotions, values, judgments, practices, or institutions. Thus
the task of providing a moral ontology that accommodates normativity
seems a much easier one for the non-objectivist than for the moral
realist. (The noncognitivist and the error theorist would seem to have
an even easier time, since for them there is no moral ontology at
all.)



There remains a great deal of dispute concerning what the phenomena
are that a metaethical theory should be expected to explain; and even
when some such phenomenon is roughly agreed upon, there is often
significant disagreement over its exact nature. For example, pretty
much everyone agrees that any decent metaethical theory should be able
to explain the close connection between moral judgment and
motivation--but it is a live question whether that connection
should be construed as a *necessary* one, or whether a reliably
contingent connection will suffice. (See Svavardottir 2006;
Rosati 2021.) Even when such disputes can be settled, there remains
plenty of room for arguing over the importance of the explanandum in
question (relative to other explananda), and for arguing whether a
given theory does indeed adequately explain the phenomenon.



In short, attempts to establish the burden of proof are as slippery
and indecisive in the debate between the moral realist and the moral
anti-realist as they tend to be generally in philosophy. The matter is
complicated by the fact that there are two kinds of burden-of-proof
case that can be pressed, and here they tend to pull against each
other. On the one hand, it is widely assumed that common sense favors
the moral realist. On the other hand, moral realists face a cluster of
explanatory challenges concerning the nature of moral facts (how they
relate to non-moral facts, how we have access to them, why they have
practical importance)--challenges that seem much more tractable
for the moral non-objectivist and often simply don't arise for
either the noncognitivist or the error theorist. This tension between
what is considered to be the *intuitive* position and what is
considered to be the empirically, metaphysically, and
epistemologically *defensible* position, motivates and animates
much of the debate between the moral realist and moral
anti-realist.


## 3. Arguing For and Against Moral Anti-realism



Given that moral anti-realism is a disjunction of three views, then
any argument for any of those views is an argument for moral
anti-realism. By the same token, any argument against any of the three
views can contribute to an argument for moral realism, and if one is
persuaded by arguments against all three, then one is committed to
moral realism. Here is not the place to present such arguments in
detail, but offer a flavor of the kinds of considerations that push
philosophers to and fro on these matters.


### 3.1 Noncognitivism



On the face of it, when we make a public moral judgment, like
"That act of stealing was morally wrong," what we are
doing is asserting that the act of stealing in question instantiates a
certain property: moral wrongness. This raises a number of extremely
thorny metaethical questions: What kind of property is moral
wrongness? How does it relate to the natural properties instantiated
by the action? How do we have epistemic access to the property? How do
we confirm whether something does or does not instantiate the
property? (And so on.) The difficulty of answering such questions may
lead one to reject the presupposition that prompted them: One might
deny that in making a moral judgment we are engaging in the assignment
of properties at all. Such a rejection is, roughly speaking, the
noncognitivist proposal. (See entry for
 moral cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism.)



It is impossible to characterize noncognitivism in a way that will
please everyone. Sometimes it is presented as a view about mental
states and sometimes about moral language. This is because it is a
claim about "moral judgments," and we can consider moral
judgments either as private mental acts or as public utterances. If we
are thinking of moral judgments as mental states, then noncognitivism
is the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs. If we are thinking
of moral judgments as speech acts, then noncognitivism is the view
that moral judgments do not *express* beliefs--i.e., it is
the view that moral judgments are not assertions. Here, for brevity,
the latter formulation will be preferred.



If moral judgments are not assertions, then what are they? Here the
different kinds of answers give rise to different forms of
noncognitivism. Ayer, as was mentioned earlier, maintained that when
we make a moral judgment we are expressing certain feelings, such as
approval or disapproval. Another influential kind of noncognitivism
called "prescriptivism" claims that moral judgments are
really veiled commands whose true meaning should be captured using the
imperative mood: Someone who says "Stealing is morally
wrong" is really saying something like "Don't
steal!" (see Carnap 1935: 24-25). R.M. Hare (1952, 1963)
restricted this to commands that one is willing to universalize.



If noncognitivism is defined as the negation of cognitivism--as a
theory about what moral judgments are not--then the two theories
are not just contraries but contradictories. However, a degree of
benign relaxation of criteria allows for the possibility of
"mixed" theories. If we consider noncognitivism not as a
purely negative thesis, but as a range of positive proposals (such as
those just mentioned), then it becomes possible that the nature of
moral judgments combines both cognitivist and noncognitivist elements.
For example, moral judgments (as speech acts) may be *two*
things: They may be assertions *and* ways of issuing commands.
(By analogy: To call someone a "kraut" is both to assert
that they are German and to express a derogatory attitude toward
people of this nationality.) C.L. Stevenson held such a mixed view
(1944); for modern versions, see Copp 2001; Schroeder 2009; Svoboda
2011.



As mentioned, one of the major attractions of noncognitivism is that
it is a means of sidestepping a number of thorny puzzles about
morality. In addition, there are several features of morality that, it
has been argued, the noncognitivist can accommodate more readily than
the cognitivist. Here are three.



First, it has often been argued that noncognitivism does a good job of
accounting for the motivational efficacy of moral judgment. If, when I
say "Stealing is morally wrong," I am expressing my
disapproval of stealing, and if disapproval is a motivation-engaging
state, then it seems to follow that when I sincerely judge that
stealing is morally wrong, I will also be motivated not to steal. By
contrast, if a Humean view of psychology is accepted, according to
which beliefs alone can never motivate, then the cognitivist must
allow that moral judgment *alone* cannot motivate; it requires
the presence of certain desires as well. A number of philosophers have
argued that the cognitivist view of moral motivation seems inadequate
(Smith 1994; Toppinen 2004; see also Carbonell 2013). See entry for
 moral motivation.



Second, it has been argued that moral disagreements have certain
qualities that are accommodated better by the noncognitivist than the
cognitivist. The fact that moral disagreements are often both vehement
and seemingly intractable, for example, might be taken as evidence
that what is really going on is a clash of emotional attitudes rather
than a clash of beliefs (Stevenson 1948; Gibbard 1992; Blackburn
1998).



Third, it has often been observed that we are markedly uncomfortable
with the idea that anyone should come to hold a moral view on the
basis of having deferred to an expert on morality--in contrast to
the way that we are perfectly comfortable with the idea that a person
should defer to experts when forming beliefs about, say, plate
tectonics. This reluctance to defer to experts in forming our moral
views would make sense if what we are doing when we make a moral
judgment is expressing our emotional attitudes on the matter. (See
McGrath 2009: 322, 2011; Hills 2011.)



Standing against these considerations in favor of noncognitivism are a
number of weighty problems. The most well-known challenge for
noncognitivism is the so-called Frege-Geach problem. If
"Stealing is morally wrong" is not even the kind of thing
that can be true or false, then how can we make sense of it when it is
embedded in logically complex contexts (such as "If stealing is
morally wrong, then encouraging your brother to steal is morally
wrong"), and how are we to make sense of it as a premise in a
valid argument (since validity is, by definition, a truth-preserving
relation)?



There have been considerable efforts on behalf of noncognitivism to
answer this challenge. Simon Blackburn, for example, has pursued what
he calls a "quasi-realist" program (Blackburn 1984, 1993,
1998). The quasi-realist is someone who endorses an anti-realist
metaphysical stance but who seeks, through philosophical maneuvering,
to *earn the right* for moral discourse to enjoy all the
trappings of realist talk. Such a view may hold that although the
underlying logical structure of the sentence "Stealing is
morally wrong" is nothing more than "Stealing:
Boo!", it is nevertheless legitimate for ordinary speakers to
say things like "If stealing is morally wrong, then encouraging
your brother to steal is wrong" or "'Stealing is
morally wrong' is true." One might, for instance, argue
that all that is required to make it acceptable to consider
"Stealing is morally wrong" true or false (and thus a
legitimate antecedent in a conditional) is that it has the appropriate
surface propositional grammar ("x is P"); and one might
maintain that choosing to employ such grammar to express one's
noncognitive attitudes brings no ontological commitment to any
troublesome property of *moral wrongness*.



One of the main challenges for the quasi-realist is to maintain a
theoretic distance from the moral realist. If the quasi-realist
program succeeds in vindicating the use of the truth predicate for
moral sentences, and if in addition it makes it permissible to say
"It is a fact that stealing is wrong," "It is a
mind-independent fact that stealing is wrong," "Stealing
would be wrong even if our attitude toward it were different,"
and so on--mimicking all and any of the moral realist's
assertions--then in what sense is quasi-realism
*quasi*-realism?--Why has it not simply collapsed into the
robust moral realism that it set out to oppose? (See Wright 1988;
Dreier 2018.) [A quick note on terminology: Although I have here
presented Blackburn's quasi-realism as a potential avenue for
the noncognitivist to pursue, it should be noted that Blackburn
himself eschews the label "noncognitivism" to describe the
position he defends (Blackburn 1996); his preferred term is
"projectivism." (For discussion of the relation between
the two views--noncognitivism and projectivism--see Joyce
2009.)]


### 3.2 Error Theory



The error theorist is a cognitivist: maintaining that moral judgment
consists of beliefs and assertions. However, the error theorist thinks
that these beliefs and assertions are never true. (The error theorist
contrasts here with what can be called the "success
theorist.") Moral judgments are never true because the
properties that would be necessary to render them
true--properties like moral wrongness, moral goodness, virtue,
evil, etc.--simply don't exist, or at least are not
instantiated. Defenders of moral error theory include Mackie 1977,
Hinckfuss 1987, Joyce 2001, and Olson 2014.



If I assert that my dog is a reptile, then I've asserted
something false--though in this case there are other things that
are reptiles. If I assert that my dog is a unicorn then again
I've asserted something false--though in this case
there's nothing in the actual world to which I could attach the
predicate "... is a unicorn" and end up with a true
assertion. The error theorist thinks that employing moral discourse is
rather like talking about unicorns, though in the case of unicorns
most people now know that they don't exist, while in the case of
moral properties most people are unaware of the error. To be an error
theorist about unicorns doesn't require that you think unicorns
are *impossible creatures*; it's enough that you think
that they simply don't actually exist. In the same way, to be a
moral error theorist doesn't require that you think that moral
properties couldn't possibly exist; it would be enough to think
that they are never actually instantiated. (Note that there may be a
difference between saying "Property P is never actually
instantiated" and "Property P doesn't exist,"
but that's a problem for metaphysicians to sort out. Holding
either view with respect to moral properties is enough to make one a
moral error theorist.)



To be an error theorist about unicorns does not mean that every
assertion involving the word "unicorn" is false. There
would be no error, for example, in asserting "Unicorns do not
exist," "The ancient Greeks believed that unicorns lived
in India," or "My dog is not a unicorn." What is
distinctive about these three sentences is that one would not, in
asserting them, be committing oneself to the existence of unicorns.
(It would be rather troubling if this were not true of the first, in
particular!) Similarly, the moral error theorist may allow that the
following are true: "Moral wrongness does not exist,"
"Augustine believed that stealing pears was wrong," and
"Stealing is not morally wrong."



The last example ("Stealing is not morally wrong") calls
for an extra comment. In ordinary conversation--where,
presumably, the possibility of moral error theory is not considered a
live option--someone who claims that *X* is not wrong
would be taken to be implying that *X* is morally good or at
least morally permissible. And if "*X*" denotes
something awful, like torturing innocent people, then this can be used
to make the error theorist look awful. But when we are doing
metaethics, and the possibility of moral error theory is on the table,
then this ordinary implication breaks down. The error theorist
doesn't think that torturing innocent people is morally wrong,
but doesn't think that it is morally good or morally permissible
either. It is important that criticisms of the moral error theorist do
not trade on equivocating between the implications that hold in
ordinary contexts and the implications that hold in metaethical
contexts.



The sentence "Unicorns exist" is false, but there are
nevertheless various contexts where one might have reason to utter the
sentence: telling a story, joking, acting, speaking metaphorically,
giving an example of a two-word sentence, etc. What is distinctive
about these contexts is that one would not be *asserting* the
sentence, and thus (as before) one would not, in making these
utterances, be committing oneself to the existence of unicorns.
Similarly, the moral error theorist might propose that we carry on
saying things like "Stealing is morally wrong" but in a
manner that deprives our utterances of ontological commitment to moral
properties and, thus, removes the *error* from our discourse.
If the error theorist proposes to accomplish this by modeling moral
language on a way that familiar engagement with fictions nullifies
commitment, then such a moral error theorist is a
**fictionalist**. (See entry for
 fictionalism;
 see also Kalderon 2005; Joyce 2017.) Other moral error theorists may
think that we would be better off if we pretty much eliminated moral
talk from our thoughts and language. Such moral error theorists are
known as "abolitionists" or "eliminativists."
(I say "pretty much" since presumably even the
abolitionist allows that we can carry on using moral language in the
context of plays, jokes, etc.) (For debate between fictionalists and
abolitionists, see Garner & Joyce 2019.)



Error theory is commonly defined as the view that moral judgments are
(i) truth-evaluable but (ii) always false. But there are various
reasons for preferring to render (i) as a claim about speech
acts--that moral judgments *aim at* the truth (i.e., they
are assertions)--and (ii) as the broader claim that moral
judgments are "untrue" rather than "false."
One might, for example, be drawn to error theory because one thinks
that there is a sufficient amount of indeterminacy, fragmentation, or
confusion surrounding moral concepts that the judgments that employ
them, while satisfying the conditions for being beliefs and
assertions, do not satisfy the conditions for having truth value.
Perhaps, for example, moral concepts are historically derived from a
theistic framework within which they made sense, yet removed from
which they are mere remnants that evoke strong intuitions but, upon
examination, make no sense. (See Anscombe 1958; MacIntyre 1984.) If
this is so, then it may be argued that the concept *moral
wrongness* is just so ill-defined that someone who makes the moral
judgment "Stealing is morally wrong" fails to put forward
a proposition that could be true; but since the speaker and audience
are presumably unaware of this fact, the judgment should still count
as an assertion. (One needs to tread carefully here. The proposal that
moral judgments lack truth value is traditionally associated with
noncognitivism. But the noncognitivist thinks that moral judgments
lack truth value because they are not assertions at all. The error
theorist, by contrast, thinks that moral judgments *are*
(typically) asserted, but that they fail to be true. Failing to have a
truth value is one way of failing to be true. Being false is the other
way.)



Most arguments for moral error theory, however, presuppose that moral
concepts do have a reasonably determinate content, but that there is
simply nothing in the world to satisfy this content. The traditional
form of argument for moral error theory, thus, has two steps. First,
the error theorist undertakes the *conceptual* step of
establishing that in participating in moral discourse we commit
ourselves to the world being a certain way (that it contains certain
instantiated properties, etc.). Then the error theorist undertakes the
*ontological* step of establishing that the world is not that
way. The latter may be achieved (in principle, at least) either
through *a priori* means or through *a posteriori*
methods.



One example of an argument with this structure is as follows. First it
is noted that "*S* morally ought to ph" is true
only if *S* is a moral agent. The further conceptual steps of
the argument then seek to establish that in order to be moral agent,
*S* must have the capacity to perform actions that are morally
blameworthy and praiseworthy, and that these capacities presuppose
that *S* has a certain kind of control over their actions. The
ontological step of the argument then seeks to establish that no such
autonomous control exists in nature; it's an illusion. (See
entry for
 skepticism about moral responsibility.)
 A couple of iterations of *modus tollens* then take us to the
conclusion that "*S* morally ought to ph" is
never true.



The argument just sketched would locate the moral error in a mistake
we make about the kind of creatures we are. The more widely discussed
arguments, however, locate the moral error in a mistake we make about
the kind of world we inhabit. John Mackie (who coined the term
"error theory" in 1977) argues that when we participate in
moral discourse we commit ourselves to the existence of objective
values and objective prescriptions, but there are no such things.
Essentially, Mackie argues that the moral realist is correct about
morality *conceptually speaking*--we are moral
realists--but the moral realist is incorrect about how the world
actually is. Moral facts place demands upon us, but (Mackie asks) how
*could* such demands exist *objectively*? This would
seem to require rules of conduct somehow written into the fabric of
the universe, and nothing in our understanding of the objective
naturalistic world (Mackie goes on) suggests that anything of the kind
exists. Mackie famously calls such properties "queer" (in
what seems now an increasingly anachronistic use of the term).



Mackie occasionally cashes out his "argument from
queerness" in terms of practical reasons. He writes that
"to say that [objective prescriptions] are intrinsically
action-guiding [which is one way he sometimes describes the
normativity whose existence he denies] is to say that the reasons that
they give for doing or for not doing something are independent of that
agent's desires or purposes" (Mackie 1982: 115). Surely if
someone is morally required to do something (Mackie thinks), then that
person must have a reason to do it. (After all, if one were to deny
this, then what kind of "normative teeth" would moral
properties have? "Yes, I know that *X* is morally wrong,
but I have no reason to avoid moral wrongness, so the wrongness of
*X* is nothing to me" would become, in principle, an
acceptable thing to say.) But since morality often seems to demand
that we do things that we don't want to do, then morality seems
to imply the existence of reasons to do things that we don't
want to do. One could, at this point, simply throw up one's
hands and claim that such reasons would be too weird to countenance.
But one could also go beyond the "argument from queerness"
by instead arguing methodically that a Humean (instrumentalist) theory
of reasons for action--according to which reasons ultimately
depend on our ends--is superior to any form of practical
non-instrumentalism. (See entry for
 reason for action: internal and external.)
 According to such a view, the practical non-instrumentalist is
correct about morality *conceptually speaking*--in
engaging in moral discourse, we commit ourselves to
non-instrumentalist reasons--but the practical
non-instrumentalist is incorrect about how the world actually is: a
Humean theory of reasons for action is more defensible. (It is worth
noting that endorsing Humean instrumentalism about reasons for action
does not in any obvious way commit one to the endorsement of
instrumentalism about other kinds of reasons, such as epistemic
reasons. See Joyce 2019; Cowie 2019.)



If an argument for moral error theory has two steps--the
conceptual and the ontological--then there are two places to
object. If we consider Mackie's argument, for example, then one
kind of opponent will agree that objective values and prescriptions
would be too weird to countenance, but maintain that it doesn't
matter because moral discourse is not committed to the existence of
such strange creatures. Another kind of opponent will agree with
Mackie that morality is committed to the existence of objective values
and prescriptions, but maintain that there is nothing particularly
strange about them.



Error theorists must be prepared to defend themselves on both fronts.
This job is made difficult by the fact that it may be hard to
articulate precisely what it is that is so troubling about morality.
This failure need not be due to a lack of clear thinking or
imagination on the error theorists' part, for the thing that is
troubling them may be that there is something deeply mysterious about
morality. The moral error theorist may, for example, perceive that
moral imperatives are imbued with a kind of mystical practical
authority--a quality that, being mysterious, of course
*cannot* be articulated in terms satisfactory to an analytic
philosopher. Such an error theorist is forced to fall back on vague
metaphors in presenting their case: Moral properties have a
"to-be-pursuedness" to them (Mackie 1977: 40), moral facts
would require that "the universe takes sides" (Burgess
[1978] 2007), moral believers are committed to "demands as real
as trees and as authoritative as orders from headquarters"
(Garner 1994: 61), and so on. Indeed, it may be the vague, equivocal,
quasi-mystical, and/or ineliminably metaphorical imponderabilia of
moral discourse that so troubles the error theorist. (See Hussain
2004.)



Even if the error theorist can articulate a clear and determinate
problematic feature of morality, the dispute over whether this quality
should count as a "non-negotiable component" of morality
has a tendency to lead quickly to impasse, for there is no accepted
methodology for deciding when a discourse is "centrally
committed" to a given thesis. What is evidently needed is a
workable model of the identity criteria for concepts (allowing us
confidently to either affirm or deny such claims as "The concept
of *moral obligation* is the concept of an objective
requirement")--but we have no such model, and there is no
consensus even on what approximate shape such a model would take.



It is also possible that the most reasonable account of conceptual
content will leave many concepts with significantly indistinct
borders. There may simply be no fact of the matter about whether moral
discourse is committed to the existence of non-instrumental reasons
(for example). Thinking along these lines, David Lewis makes use of
the distinction between speaking strictly and speaking loosely:
"Strictly speaking, Mackie is right: genuine values would have
to meet an impossible condition, so it is an error to think there are
any. Loosely speaking, the name may go to a claimant that deserves it
imperfectly ... What to make of the situation is mainly a matter
of temperament" (Lewis [1989] 2000: 93). Lewis's own
temperament leads him to seek to vindicate value discourse, and he
thinks that this can be done by supporting a dispositional theory of
value (of a kind to be discussed in the next section). But since there
is no logical or methodological requirement that we should prefer
speaking loosely over speaking strictly, or vice versa, then this
would leave the dispute between moral error theorists and success
theorists a fundamentally undecidable matter--there may simply be
no fact of the matter about who is correct. (See Joyce 2012.)


### 3.3 Non-objectivism



To deny both noncognitivism and the moral error theory suffices to
make one a minimal moral realist. Traditionally, however, moral
realism has required the acceptance of a further thesis: the
objectivity of morality. "Moral non-objectivism" denotes
the view that moral facts exist and are mind-dependent (in the
relevant sense), while "moral objectivism" holds that they
exist and are mind-independent. (Note that this taxonomy makes the two
contraries rather than contradictories; the error theorist and the
noncognitivist count as neither objectivists nor non-objectivists. The
error theorist may, however, be an objectivist in a different sense:
in holding that objectivity is a feature of morality
*conceptually* speaking.) Let us say that if one is a moral
cognitivist *and* a moral success theorist *and* a moral
objectivist, then one is a ***robust***
**moral realist**.



Yet this third condition, even more than the first two, introduces a
great deal of messiness into the dialectic, and the line between the
realist and the anti-realist becomes obscure (and, one might think,
less interesting). The basic problem is that there are many
non-equivalent ways of understanding the relation of
*mind-(in)dependence*, and thus one philosopher's realism
becomes another philosopher's anti-realism. At least one
philosopher, Gideon Rosen, has expressed pessimism that the relevant
notion of objectivity can be sharpened to a useful philosophical
point:



> 
> To be sure, we do have "intuitions" of a sort about when
> the rhetoric of objectivity is appropriate and when it isn't.
> But these intuitions are fragile, and every effort I know to find the
> principle that underlies them collapses. We *sense* that there
> is a heady metaphysical thesis at stake in these debates over realism
> ... [b]ut after a point, when every attempt to say just what the
> issue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude
> that despite all the wonderful, suggestive imagery, there is
> ultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss. (1994: 279. See
> also Dworkin 1996.)
> 



As Rosen says, metaphors to mark non-objectivism from objectivism are
easy to come by and easy to motivate in the uninitiated. The
objectivist about *X* likens our *X*-oriented activity
to astronomy, geography, or exploration; the non-objectivist likens it
to sculpture or imaginative writing. (These are Michael
Dummett's metaphors (1978: xxv).) The objectivist sees the goal
of our inquiries as being to "carve the beast of reality at the
joints" (as the popular paraphrase of Plato's
*Phaedrus* puts it); the non-objectivist sees our inquiries as
the application of a "cookie cutter": imposing a
noncompulsory conceptual framework onto an undifferentiated reality
(to use Hilary Putnam's equally memorable image (1987: 19)). The
objectivist sees inquiry as a process of *detection*, our
judgments aiming to *reflect* the extension of the truth
predicate with respect to a certain subject; the non-objectivist sees
inquiry as a process of *projection*, our judgments
*determining* the extension of the truth predicate regarding
that subject.



The claim "*X* is mind-(in)dependent" is certainly
too coarse-grained to do serious work in capturing these powerful
metaphors; it is, perhaps, better thought of as a slogan or as a piece
of shorthand. There are two conspicuous points at which the phrase
requires precisification. First, we need to decide what exactly the
word "mind" stands for. It can be construed strictly and
literally, to mean *mental activity*, or it can be understood
in a more liberal manner, to include such things as conceptual
schemes, theories, methods of proof, linguistic practices,
conventions, sentences, institutions, culture, means of epistemic
access, etc. Were the moral facts to depend on any of these
anthropocentric things, the anti-realist imagery of humans as
inventors of morality may seem more apt than that of humans as
discoverers. Second, we need to decide what kind of relation is
denoted by "(in)dependent." Consider the following
possibilities, any of which might form the basis of the claim that
goodness *depends on* mental activity (in this case, for
simplicity, Mary's attitude of approval):



> 
> 
> *x* is good iff Mary approves of *x*.
> 
> 
> 
> *x* is good iff Mary would approve of *x* (in
> such-and-such circumstances).
> 
> 
> 
> *x* is good iff *x* merits Mary's approval.
> 
> 
> 



The catalog can be made longer, depending on whether the
"iff" is construed as necessary or contingent, conceptual,
*a priori*, or *a posteriori*. To illustrate further the
ubiquity of and variation among mind-dependence relations on the menu
of moral theories, consider the following:


* According to classic utilitarianism, one is obligated to act so as
to maximize moral goodness, and moral goodness is identical to
happiness. Happiness is a mental phenomenon.
* According to Kant, one's moral obligations are determined by
which maxims can be consistently willed as universal laws; moreover,
the only thing that is good in itself is a good will. Willing is a
mental activity, and the will is a mental faculty.
* According to John Rawls (1971), fairness is determined by the
results of an imaginary collective decision, wherein self-interested
agents negotiate principles of distribution behind a veil of
ignorance. Decision-making, negotiation, and agency all require mental
activity.
* According to Michael Smith (1994), the morally right action for a
person to perform depends in part on what advice would be given to
that person by her epistemically and rationally idealized counterpart.
(See also Railton 1986.) Epistemic improvement and rational
improvement are mental phenomena.
* According to Richard Boyd (1988), moral goodness is identical to a
cluster of properties conducive to the satisfaction of human needs,
which tend to occur together and promote each other. Human needs may
not all be mental, but the needs that depend in no way on the
existence of mental activity are surely few.
* According to Frank Jackson (1998), ethical terms pick out
properties that play a certain role in the conceptual network
determined by mature folk morality. "The folk" necessarily
have minds, and the relevant process of "maturing" is
presumably one that implicates a variety of psychological events.



Indeed, it is difficult to think of any serious version of moral
success theory for which the moral facts depend *in no way* on
mental activity. Yet to conclude that the distinction between minimal
and robust realism cannot be upheld would be premature. Many
metaethicists who reject noncognitivism and the error theory, and thus
count as minimal realists, continue to define their position (often
under the label "constructivism") in contrast to a realist
view. (See Bagnoli 2002; Ronzoni 2010; Street 2010, 2012. See also the
entry on
 constructivism in metaethics.)
 The challenge is to pick among the various mind-(in)dependence
relations in the hope of drawing a distinction that is philosophically
interesting and meshes satisfactorily with our preexisting
philosophical taxonomy, such that some success theorists count as
realists and some do not.



Elizabeth Tropman (2018) argues that the best way of understanding
moral objectivity is as follows: The fact that *x* is
*M* (where "... is *M*" is some moral
predicate) is objective if and only if this fact doesn't depend
only on any actual or hypothetical agent's (i) belief or
noncognitive attitude about *x*'s being *M*, or
(ii) noncognitive attitude about *x*. According to this view,
many of the aforementioned examples of moral theories, although making
moral facts dependent in various ways on various kinds of mental
phenomena, will not count as non-objective. Consider, for example, the
utilitarian view that what makes a particular action, ph, morally
obligatory is that it produces maximal happiness. According to this
view, although some agent's (or agents') mental
states--in this case, their happiness--may contribute to
ph's moral status, they do not exclusively determine it.
Other factors also contribute to ph's moral status, such as
how ph compares with other potential actions in terms of happiness
production,. Therefore, on Tropman's view, this form of
utilitarianism would satisfy the requirements for morality to count as
objective.



The attractions of moral non-objectivism are that it ticks a lot of
boxes that its competitors fail to tick. Unlike noncognitivism or
error theory, moral non-objectivism is a form of moral anti-realism
that allows for the existence of moral beliefs, moral facts, and moral
truth, and thus also potentially makes conceptual space for such
things as moral progress and moral knowledge. Unlike moral realism, by
making the moral facts depend on us, moral non-objectivism seems to
have an easier time accounting for a moral ontology that is both
naturalistic and normative.



Given the wide variety of versions of moral non-objectivity,
identifying generic problems is not a straightforward task. One way of
bringing out some potential worries is to see the non-objectivist as
facing a dilemma. Moral non-objectivism comes in both relativistic and
absolutist flavors, and either way one goes poses challenges.



Consider first an absolutist version on non-objectivism. Here we would
have to identify some agent or group of agents whose beliefs or
noncognitive attitudes determine the moral facts. Reasonable
contenders for this role are not going to be actual particular people.
It would not, for example, be a reasonable theory that maintained that
the moral facts for everyone throughout all time are determined by
what Richard Joyce thinks on the matter. (The only plausible contender
for this role might be *God*, but such a theory faces its own
array of problems.) Rather, absolutist non-objectivists are likely to
plump for idealized hypothetical agents. Roderick Firth (1952), for
example, identifies moral properties with dispositions to prompt
responsive attitudes in an "ideal observer"--where
the ideal observer is defined in terms such as omniscience,
disinterestedness, and dispassionateness. (Slightly confusingly for
our purposes, Firth explicitly characterizes this theory as an
*objectivist* one, but this is because he has in mind a kind of
*existential* mind-dependence relation. The moral status of an
action, on this view, doesn't depend on the existence of an
ideal observer's mental activity; rather, it depends on how such
an agent counterfactually would respond. We can consider this as
further evidence of the difficulties in nailing down a fixed notion of
moral *objectivity*.) A structurally similar version of
absolutist non-objectivism is Ronald Milo's contractarian
constructivism (1995), according to which the moral facts are
determined by the choices that would be made by a hypothetical
idealized group of rational contractors. (See also Scanlon 1998.)



The challenge for such theories is to explain why one should
*care* about the moral status of actions. Since the person or
group that determines the moral status of my actions is not
*me*, and is not even someone I've ever met or
necessarily care about, then why should their hypothetical responses
matter to me? Any particular proposed action of mine will have an
infinity of dispositional properties. My proposed action of, say,
stealing a newspaper may have the dispositional property that a
Firthian ideal observer would disapprove of it, while simultaneously
having the dispositional property that a Miloesque idealized group of
rational contractors would choose to refrain from it. But it also has
a myriad of other dispositions to prompt responses in hypothetical
agents: it may also be such that drunken Vikings would heartily cheer
it, be such that zealous medieval samurai would think it dishonorable,
be such that Soviet communists seeking to promote the Workers'
Revolution would regard it as obligatory, and so on. The question is
why I, in trying to decide how to act, should care about any of these
dispositional properties--or (perhaps more pointedly) why I
should care about one of them very much indeed while ignoring all the
others. Simply labeling one of these dispositional properties
"moral wrongness" doesn't make that property
*matter*.



One response to this challenge is to make the idealized judges, whose
beliefs or noncognitive states determine the moral status of
agents' actions, versions of the agents themselves (see Carson
1984). Perhaps I have reason to care about what *I* would think
if I were, say, fully informed and had fully reflected on the matter.
This brings us back to the other horn of the dilemma: the relativistic
version on non-objectivism. The problem is that securing the practical
significance of moral facts in this manner (something that the
absolutist version struggles to secure) comes at a price. If you and I
are quite different people--with different desires, interests,
and goals--then the idealized version of me may have a different
response to a situation than the idealized version of you would have
(see Sobel 1999). In this case, the very same action may be morally
right relative to me and morally wrong relative to you, and
that's all there is to it: there would be no way for you and me
to settle our moral disagreement. Indeed, there may not even
*be* a disagreement, since if when I say "*X* is
morally right" I mean *... relative to idealized
me*, and when you say "No, *X* is not morally
right" you mean *... relative to idealized you*,
then we are not really contradicting each other. (See entry for
 moral relativism.)
 If relativistic non-objectivism makes moral disagreement disappear,
then it very probably also makes the notion of moral *progress*
disappear. If the moral views I held in the past were true
*relative to me then* (though false relative to me now), and my
current very different moral views are true relative to me now (but
false relative to past me), then the best one could say on behalf of
moral progress is that there has been progress *from my current
point of view* (something that will be seen as moral deterioration
from my past point of view). To the extent, then, that we do wish to
accommodate the existence of moral disagreement and moral progress,
relativistic non-objectivism has some explaining to do. (Note that the
version of relativistic non-objectivism just discussed is
individual-relative, but the same problems concerning disagreement and
moral progress would arise if a culture-oriented version of relativism
were examined instead.)



The proposal that moral facts are non-objective--that morality is
something created, not discovered--is often rejected in popular
discussion because people have only crude versions of non-objectivism
in mind, such as views that would make the moral facts for a person be
just whatever whimsically suits them (e.g., "*X* is
morally wrong" = "I disapprove of *X*"). But
no professional philosopher endorses such a view; nobody thinks that
the non-objectivity of morality would be like the non-objectivity of
choosing your favorite ice cream flavor. Serious forms of moral
non-objectivism are sophisticated and subtle. Still, there is a real
worry that if the non-objectivism is too
sophisticated--especially if it looks to the responses of highly
idealized hypothetical agents as being determinative of the moral
facts--then the question of why, on this account, morality would
*matter* to non-idealized non-hypothetical agents comes to the
fore.


## 4. Conclusion



This entry has not attempted to adjudicate the rich and noisy debate
between the moral realist and moral anti-realist, but rather has
attempted to clarify just what their debate is about. But even this
much more modest task is doomed to lead to unsatisfactory results, for
there is much confusion--perhaps a *hopeless*
confusion--about how the terms of the debate should be drawn up.
It is entirely possible that when subjected to acute critical
examination, the traditional dialectic between the moral realist and
the moral anti-realist will crumble into a bunch of evocative
metaphors from which well-formed philosophical theses cannot be
extracted. If this is true, it would not follow that metaethics is
bankrupt; far from it--it may be more accurate to think that
modern metaethics has prospered to such an extent that the old terms
no longer fit its complex landscape.



But for present, at least, the terms "moral realist" and
"moral anti-realist" seem firmly entrenched. With so much
ill-defined, however, it would seem close to pointless to conduct
metaethical debate *under these terms*. This latitude means
that the terms "moral realist" and "moral
anti-realist" are free to be bandied with rhetorical
force--more as badges of honor or terms of abuse (as the case may
be) than as useful descriptive labels. Rather like arguments over
whether some avant-garde gallery installation does or does not count
as "art," taxonomic bickering over whether a given
philosopher is or is not a "moral realist" is an activity
as tiresome as it is fruitless.



Just as important as gaining a clear and distinct understanding of
these labels is gaining an appreciation of what of real consequence
turns on the debate. This seems particularly pressing here because a
natural suspicion is that much of the opposition to moral anti-realism
develops from a nebulous but nagging practical concern about what
might *happen*--to individuals, to the community, to
social order--if moral anti-realism, in one guise or another,
were widely adopted. The embrace of moral anti-realism, it is assumed,
will have an insidious influence. This concern presupposes that most
of the folk are *already* pretheoretically inclined toward
moral realism--an assumption that was queried earlier. But even
if it is true that most people are naive moral realists, the question
of what would happen if they ceased to be so is an empirical matter,
concerning which neither optimism nor pessimism seems prima facie more
warranted than the other. As with the opposition to moral
non-objectivism, the more general opposition to moral anti-realism is
frequently based on an under-estimation of the resources available to
the anti-realist--on an unexamined assumption that the silliest,
crudest, or most pernicious version will stand as a good
representative of a whole range of extremely varied and often
sophisticated theories.