Talk:Moral skepticism

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(1)I do not see that the "Argument from Queerness" merits a separate page; it should be included in this article (or perhaps in moral nihilism) under a heading (e.g. "arguments"). (2) Criticisms should be addressed. (3) A distinction needs to be made between nihilism and skepticism; nihilism is a metaphysical claim that moral objects/values do not exist; skepticism is an epistemic claim that one cannot know a moral proposition to be true; nihilists are necessarily skeptics, but not vice versa. Mackie's view is properly "moral nihilism" - though he is also a moral skeptic. Unisonus 01:47, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

what does "useful" mean to the moral skeptic?

The same as it means to anyone else, I think. :-) We can all agree that moral rules are useful, can't we? Evercat 00:58 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I wanted to give a thumbs-up to whoever wrote that line. Obviously encyclopedic writing doesn't allow for much "beauty" but that approached it. ] --[[User:Masmith|Marty] 03:54, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Though Mackie labels his view skepticism, it seems to be of a different kind than first order moral skepticism, which is what this article labels "the weak kind". Perhaps we should split them into the view about ethical knowledge (ethical skepticism) and mackie's view (denying the existence of moral properties). Yesterdog 07:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

The whole family of articles dealing with anti-objectivist moral theories is in a state of disrepair right now. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that Mackie and others didn't quite know how the terminological situation would develop and just tossed words out there, hoping they would work. As the range of possible positions became clearer, certain terms were abandoned and others embraced. At this point, there is some agreement on terms and I think Wikipedia ought to reflect it. Also, each page needs to make clear what other uses of the terms there are. Postmodern Beatnik 14:40, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

If there is now agreement on terms (and I know you said "some"), and you can see it fairly clearly, could you give us a quick tutorial? Even as a philosophy PhD student working in a fairly closely related area, I often find the usage confusing. You might be able to help me, at least, both as a wikipedia editor, working on this and similar articles, and as a philosopher. Metamagician3000 00:32, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Maybe we should make a parent Moral anti-realism article as the starting point (if there isn't one already) and structure the family of anti-realist theories based on whether they are semantic antirealism (non-cognitivisms etc), ontological anti-realisms (constructivism, error-theory, etc.) and the like. Yesterdog 20:22, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Relationship to relativism

I'd like to see some mention of how moral skepticism relates to moral relativism. Does one imply the other? Are they orthogonal? -Ahruman 10:12, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to find consistency in the way the terminology is used. Harman, who is probably the leading moral relativist at the moment, has a position so close to moral scepticism of the Mackie variety that I frankly find it difficult to see what their substantive disagreement really is. Both deny that morality is objective in any ultimate sense, but Harman wants to avoid saying that his is an error theory of commonsense morality. Worse, Harman's theory seems to me to be rather different from most theories that get described as "moral relativism". And even worse, I'm not sure that Mackie's theory is what is popularly understood by "moral scepticism", even though he applies that label to himself and it's probably the theory that philosophers usually have in mind when they use it. What he is really sceptical about isn't the value of morality in some practical sense, it's the ultimate objectivity of morality. I'm doing a lot of reading on this at the moment and will report back with any other thoughts that I have. Anyone else? Metamagician3000 12:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Our meta-ethics article does offer a reasonably plausible taxonomy of these various theories, though I don't think it is totally uncontroversial. Metamagician3000 23:18, 3 January 2007 (UTC)