Reasons for Pretending and Pretend Reasons

Abstract

Abstract Thinking about the “what next?” question for moral error theory teaches us why that theory is such a bad idea. We repudiate morality and make it anew, but what we end up doing is remaking what we had before. If we can avoid skepticism about what we remake, then we had no reason to repudiate it. Joyce and others think a Humean understanding of practical reason can be rescued from the flames of their skeptical arguments and that this provides a place where we can adjudicate on pragmatic grounds between the options of abolitionism, fictionalism, and conservationism. But where this thought takes us, the author argues, is not to any form of skepticism but rather to a dubiously coherent understanding of moral value as grounded in desires conceived as prior to and independent of it. The choice between these things can never be anything but a moral one.