The Return of Moral Fictionalism

Abstract

Fictionalism has made a comeback over the last two decades as one of the standard responses to ontologically problematic domains. It has been applied to mathematics, modality, unobservables, identity claims, and existence claims. Moral discourse has struck many as potentially ontologically problematic, but within contemporary analytic metaethics there has been no sustained defense of moral fictionalism. Very recently moral fictionalism has also finally begun to return. On the dust cover of Richard Joyce’s new book, The Myth of Morality— a sustained defense of moral fictionalism—David Lewis writes: ‘‘Moral fictionalism is an idea whose time has come.’’ In one sense, Lewis is right: in addition to Joyce’s book there seems to be quite a bit of interest in moral fictionalism though much of it expressed merely in conversation or still in the publication pipeline. The appeal of fictionalism often lies, I suspect, in its ability to look like a relatively less problematic alternative to both traditional noncognitivism and moral realism: we can do without the noncognitivist’s problematic account of moral language and we can do without the realist’s problematic metaphysics. In this paper I will not argue that moral fictionalism cannot work. Instead I will argue (i) that a correct understanding of the dialectical situation in contemporary metaethics shows that fictionalism is only an interesting new alternative if it can provide a new account of normative content: what is it that I am thinking or saying when I think or say that I ought to do something; and (ii) that fictionalism, qua fictionalism, does not provide us with any new resources for providing such an account.