Bad News for Moral Error Theorists: There Is No Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1):58-69 (2017)
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Abstract

A ‘companions in guilt’ strategy against moral error theory aims to show that the latter proves too much: if sound, it supports an implausible error-theoretic conclusion in other areas such as epistemic or practical reasoning. Christopher Cowie [2016 Cowie, C. 2016. Good News for Moral Error Theorists: A Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94/1: 115–30.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]] has recently produced what he claims is a ‘master argument’ against all such strategies. The essence of his argument is that CG arguments cannot work because they are afflicted by internal incoherence or inconsistency. I argue, first, that Cowie's master argument does not succeed. Beyond this, I argue that there is no good reason to think that any such argument—one that purports to identify an internal incoherence in CG arguments—can succeed. Second, I argue that the main substantive area of disagreement between error theorists and CG theorists essentially concerns the conceptual profile of epistemic reasons—specifically, whether they are strongly categorical—not the ontological question of whether such reasons exist. I then develop an argument in favour of the CG theorist's position by considering the moral error theorist's arguments in support of the conceptual claim that moral reasons are strongly categorical. These include, notably, criticisms made by Joyce [2011] and Olson [2014] of Finlay's [2008] ‘end relational’ view of morality, according to which moral reasons are relative to some end or standard, hence not strongly categorical. Examining these criticisms, I argue that, based on what moral error theorists have said regarding the conceptual profile of moral reasons, there is a strong case to be made that moral reasons are strongly categorical if and only if epistemic reasons are.

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Ramon Das
Victoria University of Wellington

Citations of this work

Conceptions of Epistemic Value.Timothy Perrine - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):213-231.
Pain for the Moral Error Theory? A New Companions-in-Guilt Argument.Guy Fletcher - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3):474-482.
On Some Arguments for Epistemic Value Pluralism.Timothy Perrine - 2020 - Logos and Episteme 11 (1):77-96.
Companions in guilt arguments.Christopher Cowie - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (11):e12528.

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References found in this work

Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence.Jonas Olson - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives.Philippa Foot - 1972 - Philosophical Review 81 (3):305-316.
The normative web: an argument for moral realism.Terence Cuneo - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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