![]() | The End of Morality: Taking Moral Abolitionism Seriously Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Humanities; Psychological Science; Philosophy; Social Psychology; Epistemology; Ethics Philosophy; Philosophy of Psychology; Philosophy of Science; According to the moral error theorist, all moral judgments are mistaken. The world just doesn't contain the properties and relations necessary for these judgments to be true. But what should we actually do if we decided that we are in this radical and unsettling predicament--that morality is just a widespread and heartfelt illusion? One suggestion is to eliminate all talk and thought of morality (abolitionism). Another is to carry on believing it anyway (conservationism). And yet another is to treat morality as a kind of convenient fiction (fictionalism). We tend to think of moral thinking as valuable and useful (e.g., for motivating cooperative behavior), but we can also recognize that it can be harmful (e.g., hindering compromise) and even disastrous (e.g., inspiring support for militaristic propaganda). Would we be better off or worse off if we stopped basing decisions on moral considerations? Richard Garner is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Ohio State University, USA. He is the author of Beyond Morality (1994). He has written articles on metaethics, the philosophy of language, and Chinese philosophy. Richard Joyce is a Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is author of The Myth of Morality (2001), The Evolution of Morality (2006), and Essays in Moral Skepticism (2016), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on metaethics and moral psychology. He is also the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy (2018). |
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