Symbolic Systems Forum - Nadeem Hussain, Philosophy Department,

Nadeem Hussain, Philosophy Department, "The Return of Moral Fictionalism":

ABSTRACT:

I have argued elsewhere that Nietzsche should be interpreted as providing an error theory of existing evaluative discourse and proposing, for some, a fictionalist replacement--in the current jargon: "revolutionary fictionalism". This interpretation gains some support from Nietzsche's historical context: Strauss and Feuerbach's readings of Christianity, Lange's "Standpoint of the Ideal", and the views of early positivists like Mach and Avenarius. Logical positivism involved a rejection of such error-theoretic and fictionalist strategies. The return of naturalism has perhaps not surprisingly brought with it a contemporary resurgence of error theories and fictionalisms about various domains including mathematics, modality and unobservables. Within contemporary metaethics, though, John Mackie has been essentially the lone representative of error theory and no sustained attempt had been made to defend fictionalism--revolutionary or hermeneutic--for ethics and morality. This seems to be changing rapidly. After summarizing some of the benefits of fictionalism, I argue that error theoretic and fictionalist accounts of the evaluative face some serious problems whose difficulty has not been fully appreciated in the current resurgence. These problems are both hard versions of problems that arise for fictionalism in general and, perhaps more importantly, problems specific to the deployment of an error theory and fictionalism for ethical discourse.

BIO:

Nadeem Hussain is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He specializes in metaethics, philosophy of action and 19th Century German philosophy. His other areas of interest include political philosophy and medieval Islamic philosophy. He is currently writing on the role of reasons in practical reflection, the influences of positivism on Nietzsche's metaphysics and epistemology, and fictionalism in both contemporary metaethics and Nietzsche's accounts of valuing.