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Should we be moral skeptics?
Skepticism can be applied to one of the most fundamental aspects of human intercourse: ethics
We are awash with moral statements. Just check the news headlines and you’ll see that moral judgment and outrage are everywhere, especially on social media. But what if it turned out that there are no good basis for moral judgments in the first place? Welcome to moral skepticism, the denial that anyone actually possesses moral knowledge.
According to a fascinating essay by Richard Joyce, published in the collection Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present (edited by Diego Machuca and Baron Reed, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), there are fundamentally three types of moral skepticism:
- Non-cognitivism: moral judgments are not beliefs
- Error theory: moral judgments are beliefs, but they are never true
- Justification skepticism: moral judgments are beliefs, but we have no justification for them
Before taking a closer look let’s remember that ever since Plato [1] philosophers have defined knowledge as justified true belief [2]. This means that whenever we make a claim, like “tomorrow there will be an eclipse of the Sun,” for it to count as knowledge it must satisfy three conditions:
