I study philosophy and would identify as a moral anti-realist. Like you, I am generally inclined to regard attempts to refer to moral statements as true or false as (in some cases) category mistakes, though in other cases I think they are better translated as cognitive but false (i.e. some moral discourse is captured by one or more error theories), and in other cases moral claims are both coherent and true, but trivial—for instance, a self-conscious subjectivist who deliberately uses moral terms to convey their preferences. Unfortunately, I think matters are messier than this, in that I don’t even think ordinary moral language has any determinate commitment, much of the time, to any particular metaethical stance, so there is no uniform, definitive way of stating what moral terms even mean—because they don’t mean one thing, and often simply have nothing to do with the sorts of meanings philosophers want to extract out of them. This position is known as metaethical variability/indeterminacy.
Even though I reject that morality is about anything determinate and coherent, I also endorse utilitarianism insofar as I take it to be an accurate statement of my own values/preferences.
So, I suppose you can add at least one person to the list of people who are EAs that share something roughly in line with your metaethical views.
Hi Evan,
I study philosophy and would identify as a moral anti-realist. Like you, I am generally inclined to regard attempts to refer to moral statements as true or false as (in some cases) category mistakes, though in other cases I think they are better translated as cognitive but false (i.e. some moral discourse is captured by one or more error theories), and in other cases moral claims are both coherent and true, but trivial—for instance, a self-conscious subjectivist who deliberately uses moral terms to convey their preferences. Unfortunately, I think matters are messier than this, in that I don’t even think ordinary moral language has any determinate commitment, much of the time, to any particular metaethical stance, so there is no uniform, definitive way of stating what moral terms even mean—because they don’t mean one thing, and often simply have nothing to do with the sorts of meanings philosophers want to extract out of them. This position is known as metaethical variability/indeterminacy.
Even though I reject that morality is about anything determinate and coherent, I also endorse utilitarianism insofar as I take it to be an accurate statement of my own values/preferences.
So, I suppose you can add at least one person to the list of people who are EAs that share something roughly in line with your metaethical views.