Truth and Error in Morality

Call a ‘predicative’ moral sentence any sentence that predicates some moral property of an object, act, character, person, etc. According to the moral error theory, all such sentences are false. The argument for this rather striking conclusion is simple and compelling. The standard version requires only two basic premises: the first about meaning, i.e., that moral sentences say something about what is the case; the second about the world, i.e., that the world is not, after all, the way predicative moral sentences say it is. If this is correct, predicative moral sentences (or other potential truth bearers, such as beliefs, utterances, propositions, etc.) are false. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.