This was a typically well-articulated piece on your part.
However, I don't recognize a granular enough view of what kind of moral skepticism is being discussed in your arguments. It's not that I find my arguments to be super granular, to be clear, but the moral skeptic doesn't need to write off the possibility of moral empiricism in practice; they just reserve the right to dissent on what the results will mean to the extremely rarefied conversations that take place in meta-ethics. You can analogize moral experimentation to scientific experimentation, but the moral skeptic (of my nontrivial branch) says right off that something is janky in the framing (again, only to the extent that the results of moral experimentation will be said to settle meta-ethical arguments between realists and skeptics).
Early in our discussions on twitter, it seemed that you conceived of moral skepticism and moral non-cognitivism as completely overlapping. Starting from that base, you've described error theory as a gray area. But error theory (which is a form of cognitivism) is a leading form of moral skepticism.
Among philosophers subscribing to error theory, virtually all have categoricity as one of their sticking points with realists. It's true that many of them also (mistakenly in my view) list the irreducibility of the normative as a general concern, but even if you got past this, you'd have a widespread belief among moral skeptics that categoricity is a big problem left to address. Throw in that philosophers are starting to explicitly separate these two considerations (François Jaquet's paper on Prudential Parity Objections), and we're left noticing that leaving categoricity out of the discussion leaves a huge chunk of moral skepticism aside.
The thing about scientific experiments and normative action-guidance is that there's enough rough similarity to do the comparison. This isn't the case with categorically overriding considerations. There is nothing like this in science. Half the time when we debate it seems like you're willing to leave categoricity aside and accept some kind of more minimal moral realism, the other half it seems like you want to rescue categoricity and go robust. If you took the minimal route, we could just chalk our disagreement up to something foundational about the meaning of moral discourse and agree at least that moral experimentation could be productive.
As we seem to agree on a great number of other, actually pressing things, it does make me curious what's under the rock of our respective approaches.
This was a typically well-articulated piece on your part.
However, I don't recognize a granular enough view of what kind of moral skepticism is being discussed in your arguments. It's not that I find my arguments to be super granular, to be clear, but the moral skeptic doesn't need to write off the possibility of moral empiricism in practice; they just reserve the right to dissent on what the results will mean to the extremely rarefied conversations that take place in meta-ethics. You can analogize moral experimentation to scientific experimentation, but the moral skeptic (of my nontrivial branch) says right off that something is janky in the framing (again, only to the extent that the results of moral experimentation will be said to settle meta-ethical arguments between realists and skeptics).
Early in our discussions on twitter, it seemed that you conceived of moral skepticism and moral non-cognitivism as completely overlapping. Starting from that base, you've described error theory as a gray area. But error theory (which is a form of cognitivism) is a leading form of moral skepticism.
Among philosophers subscribing to error theory, virtually all have categoricity as one of their sticking points with realists. It's true that many of them also (mistakenly in my view) list the irreducibility of the normative as a general concern, but even if you got past this, you'd have a widespread belief among moral skeptics that categoricity is a big problem left to address. Throw in that philosophers are starting to explicitly separate these two considerations (François Jaquet's paper on Prudential Parity Objections), and we're left noticing that leaving categoricity out of the discussion leaves a huge chunk of moral skepticism aside.
The thing about scientific experiments and normative action-guidance is that there's enough rough similarity to do the comparison. This isn't the case with categorically overriding considerations. There is nothing like this in science. Half the time when we debate it seems like you're willing to leave categoricity aside and accept some kind of more minimal moral realism, the other half it seems like you want to rescue categoricity and go robust. If you took the minimal route, we could just chalk our disagreement up to something foundational about the meaning of moral discourse and agree at least that moral experimentation could be productive.
As we seem to agree on a great number of other, actually pressing things, it does make me curious what's under the rock of our respective approaches.
Hmm, I'm not sure if you're commenting on the right post. What paper are you looking for?