Abstract
According to Mackie, moral judgments are cognitively meaningful but systematically false. Of course, Mackie went on to recommend various substantive moral judgments, and, in the light of his error theory, that has seemed odd to a lot of folk. Richard Joyce has argued that Mackie's approach can be vindicated by a fictionalist account of moral discourse. And Mark Kalderon has argued that moral fictionalism is attractive quite independently of Mackie's error theory. Kalderon argues that the Frege-Geach problem shows that we need moral propositions, but that a fictionalist can and should embrace propositional content together with a noncognitivist account of acceptance of a moral proposition. Indeed, it is clear that any fictionalist is going to have to postulate more than one kind of acceptance attitude. We argue that this double-approach to acceptance generates a new problem – a descendent of Frege-Geach – which we call the “acceptance-transfer problem.” Although we develop the problem in the context of Kalderon's version of noncognitivist fictionalism, we show that it is not the noncognitivist aspect of Kalderon's account that generates the problem. A closely related problem surfaces for the more typical variants of fictionalism according to which accepting a moral proposition is believing some closely related non-moral proposition. Fictionalists of both stripes thus have an attitude problem.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that we are assuming that the tautology is a limiting case of both (purely) moral content and (purely) non-moral content. Hence, even a purely moral proposition M still has a purely non-moral content – albeit the empty, tautologous moral content T. And so M is also equivalent to the conjunction M&T of its purely moral and purely non-moral contents. The purely moral propositions are those that do not “cut across the diagonal” of the moral/non-moral matrix outlined in the main text below. So if M is purely moral so too is ~M. It also follows that the disjunction of two purely moral propositions is also purely moral. Consequently Mv~M is purely moral. Similarly, if N is a purely non-moral proposition, so too is ~N, and hence so too is Nv~N. The logically true proposition is thus a limiting case in that it falls into both pure categories. (Note that we are assuming a coarse-grained notion of proposition here.) Now, we could just stipulate that any purely moral proposition (or a purely non-moral proposition) has to be non-tautologous. However, that strikes us as somewhat ad hoc and unnatural. In any case, the same points could still be made with a suitably amended definition of a hybrid proposition.
- 2.
A referee made the following observation which is well worth clarifying: “Consider ‘Cheney condoned torture if and only if condoning torture is wrong.' Isn't this simply a fusion of two fusions, namely: ‘If Cheney condoned torture condoning torture is wrong' and ‘If condoning torture is wrong, Cheney condoned torture'? And isn't a fusion of two fusions simply a fusion, instead of a hybrid that requires yet another different attitude of enlief?” It is true that the conjunction of two fusions is a fusion, but the two conditionals involved here, C⇒T, T⇒C, are not fusions but hybrids. They both cut across the vertical and horizontal divides. Of course, this does not guarantee that their conjunction is a hybrid. T⇒C is a hybrid, as is ~T⇒C, but their conjunction is equivalent to C, neither a fusion nor a hybrid.
- 3.
This was suggested to us by Michael Tooley, and he cited van Fraassen's constructive empiricism as a promising model.
References
Harman, G. 2002. Internal critique: A logic is not a theory of reasoning and a theory of reasoning is not a logic. Studies in Logic and Practical Reasoning 1: 171–186.
Joyce, R. 2001. The myth of morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kalderon, M. E. 2005. Moral fictionalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mackie, J. L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing right and wrong. London: Penguin Books.
van Fraassen, B. 1980. The scientific image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Eric Chwang, Richard Joyce, Simon Kirchin, Charles Pigden, and Michael Tooley, for their valuable criticisms and comments.
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Oddie, G., Demetriou, D. (2010). The Fictionalist's Attitude Problem. In: Joyce, R., Kirchin, S. (eds) A World Without Values. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 114. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3339-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3339-0_12
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