ABSTRACT

According to one way of understanding moral skepticism, to be a skeptic about morality is to hold that all moral claims are either false, incoherent, or something else misleadingly expressed. Constructivism is both compatible with, and in certain cases explanatory of, some of the allegedly dubious commitments to which arguments for moral skepticism appeal. This chapter considers the terms 'moral skepticism' and 'moral error theory' interchangeably. From a constructivist perspective, the functional explanation or rationale proposed for errors of projection and determinacy will differ significantly from the parallel explanation or rationale proposed by standard forms of error theory. Moral thought can survive the case-by-case discovery of local indeterminacy with respect to particular sets of moral claims against the background of moral claims, the correctness of which is perfectly determinate. In this sense, the discovery of moral indeterminacy is potentially 'conservative' with respect to the status of the moral judgments against the background of which the indeterminacy in question is located.