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ata comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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Should that be "The error theorist can't hold that a statement like 'Murder is not wrong' is true"?
(Also, it's not clear to me that classifying error theory as cognitivist is correct. If it claims that all moral statements are based on a fundamentally mistaken intuition, so that "Murder is wrong" has no more factual content than "Murder is flibberty", then is it not asserting that moral claims are not coherent enough to actually be proper beliefs (even false ones)? (And if classifying a metaethic as cognitivist requires only that it implies that moral claims feel like proper beliefs, not necessarily that they actually are proper beliefs, then that would include emotivism too in most cases.))
No. The error theorist may hold "murder is not wrong" and "murder is not right" to be true. Ey just has to hold "murder is wrong" and "murder is right" to be false, and if ey wants to endorse the "not" statements I guess a rule that "things don't have to be either right or wrong" must operate in the background.
ata,
In this case, I managed to say it correctly the first time. :)
If you're not sure about this stuff, you can read the first chapter of Joyce's 'The Myth of Morality', the central statement of contemporary error theory.
I can see how an error theorist would agree with "Murder is not wrong" in the same sense in which I'd agree with "Murder is not purple", but it's a strange and not very useful sense. My impression had been that error theorists claim that there are no "right" or "wrong" buckets to sort things into in the first place, rather than proposing that both buckets are there but empty — more like ignosticism than atheism. Am I mistaken about that?
Error theorists believe that when people say "Murder is wrong", those people are actually trying to claim that it is a fact that murder has the property of being wrong. However, those people are incorrect (error theorists think) because Murder does not have the property of being wrong - because nothing has the property of being wrong.
It's not about whether or not there are buckets - error theory just says that most people think there is stuff in buckets, but they're incorrect.
I smell a peculiar odour of inconsistency.
(That means, add some modifier, as "morally", to the second "wrong", else it sounds really weird.)
Exactly.