Either moral realism or moral nihilism. Everything else is a joke. Morality is either real or bullshit. Every in-between theory ends up being a disguised form of one of these or is incoherent.
As for moral theory, I see moral theories as tools. Consider an analogy: Quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics are, as of now, incompatible with each other. They describe the world in incompatible ways. Sociology, psychology, and economics describe human nature and behavior with incompatible models. But when we want to understand the world, we use different models from different theories or even different fields for different purposes, despite these models not all being compatible with one another. Why can’t moral theory be the same? For some questions, deontology provides the most illuminating model. For others, virtue theory does. We don’t have one good master moral theory, but we don’t have one good master social scientific theory or theory of physics either.
Either moral realism or moral nihilism. Everything else is a joke. Morality is either real or bullshit. Every in-between theory ends up being a disguised form of one of these or is incoherent.
As for moral theory, I see moral theories as tools. Consider an analogy: Quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics are, as of now, incompatible with each other. They describe the world in incompatible ways. Sociology, psychology, and economics describe human nature and behavior with incompatible models. But when we want to understand the world, we use different models from different theories or even different fields for different purposes, despite these models not all being compatible with one another. Why can’t moral theory be the same? For some questions, deontology provides the most illuminating model. For others, virtue theory does. We don’t have one good master moral theory, but we don’t have one good master social scientific theory or theory of physics either.