Declan O'Gara

Debunking arguments in metaethics are generally viewed as arguments against moral realism. In this paper, I distinguish these kinds of arguments, which I label offensive debunking arguments, from defensive debunking arguments, which are used to defuse specific pieces of evidence. I then argue that moral error theoristscan use defensive debunking arguments to undermine Moorean arguments againstthe view by providing plausible debunking explanations for our moral beliefs. Crucially, these explanations have a much lower burden of proof than in explanations within offensive debunking arguments. Rather than needing to meet a high empirical bar, these explanations merely need to provide a plausible explanation for our moral beliefs on which they are not truth tracking. Not only does this distinctionstrengthen extant responses to Moorean arguments by showing that they have alow burden of proof, but it also helps to show why recent versions of the Moorean objection fail.

J.L. Mackie’s error theory entails that all moral judgments are false. However, Mackie nonetheless maintains that error theorists can continue to engage in moral discourse. In response to Mackie, Simon Blackburn argues that Mackie’s proposal leads error theorists to reinvent a non-cognitivist morality, and that the much more plausible position would be to reject the error theory in favour of non-cognitivism. In this paper, I defend Mackie’s error theory against this objection. I argue that Blackburn makes an unjustified connection between proposed answers to the so-called ‘Now What’ problem and the plausibility of the error theory itself. Moreover, I argue that a revisionary form of non-cognitivism is entirely different from the version of non-cognitivism that philosophers like Blackburn defend, meaning that arguments for revisionary non-cognitivism are not arguments for non-cognitivism in general. This, I argue, undermines a more general objection to the error theory according to which error theorists are guilty of bad faith.

It has long been assumed that the moral error theory faces a ‘Now What’ problem. The error theory says that all moral judgments are false, and the ‘Now What’ problem asks what we should do with our moral thought, talk, and practices in light of this conclusion. Whilst those in the debate often assume that solving the ‘Now What’ problem is an important burden for error theorists to overcome, the aim in this paper is to undermine this assumption. I do so in two steps. I first argue that the ‘Now What’ problem is best understood as a practical problem about what individual error theorists should do, rejecting an alternate framing of the problem which is found in the literature. I then argue that this problem is of little general interest, and respond to the claim that the plausibility of the error theory itself is in some way connected to the ‘Now What’ debate. Whilst the error theory does face many challenges, if my arguments are correct then the ‘Now What’ problem is not one of them.