How to abolish morality? (with Ethan Moore)
Given our recent reading group and moral nihilism and several posts on the topic, I figured it would be a great idea to invite Ethan Moore. Ethan Moore is a fourth-year PhD researcher in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in the final stages of finishing his PhD thesis on the abolition of morality. To my knowledge, that is the first PhD thesis on this topic! It was a pleasure to talk to him and I hope you’ll enjoy the episode too!Ethan’s websiteSome of his publications:* ‘The Prudential “Now What?” Problem’, Acta Analytica (2026). View publication* ‘Ethics Without Morals’, in Philosophers on How to Live: Talking about Morality, Bloomsbury, forthcoming; edited by Jack Symes and Ellie Palmer.* The Amoral Life: A Practical Guide to Moral Abolitionism, Routledge, in progress; edited by Ethan Moore.Transcript* This transcript is generated with the help of AI and may contain minor mistakes. (check time stamps in video if in doubt)[00:03] Walter Veit: All right, welcome. I have not done a podcast episode in a while, but today we have Ethan Moore, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. It is great to have you.[00:13] Ethan Moore: Great to be here.[00:15] Walter Veit: Now, to start, what are you working on?[00:18] Ethan Moore: So I am working on what in academic circles is called the “now what” problem. It is effectively this: moral error theory, which is a term of art for moral nihilism, is the belief that there are no objective moral facts, to put it in the most accessible way. If that is the case, what do we do with moral language and thought afterwards? Even if there are no such things as objective moral facts about what it is right or wrong to do, or what we should and should not do from a moral point of view, this kind of language, motivation and thought is incredibly prevalent in our day-to-day lives. It has a real impact on what people do, or more importantly, on what people restrain themselves from doing. And the question of whether it is useful comes apart from the question of whether it is true or false. So even if there are no moral facts, pretending as if there were, acting as if there were, or perhaps even compartmentalising the fact that there are no such things, can still be useful, even if they are ultimately myths. That is the area I am researching. As the title of this podcast suggests, I take the probably more controversial view that if that is the case, and perhaps even if the error theory is not true, moral language is actually destructive, socially and instrumentally. It gets in the way of many of our goals.[01:50] Walter Veit: It is clearly a very controversial thesis. If some listeners have not heard about any of these debates, they might think: we are trying to abolish morality, morality is harmful, destructive? All of these ideas might require quite a bit of defence. While you might not cover the defences of the error theory yourself, the arguments for why there are no moral facts, could you give a small summary of some of the arguments given in the literature for why people think there are no moral facts?[02:25] Ethan Moore: Absolutely. There are quite a few different arguments. The most popular one is what we call the argument from queerness, which basically means the argument from weirdness. The idea is that moral facts, were they to exist, and also the way in which we would come to know about them, would be incredibly strange, unlike the way in which we come to know any other kinds of facts, and unlike the other kinds of facts we know to exist. So weird, in fact, that it justifies scepticism regarding their existence.The specific features they target, in more abstract terms, are categorical imperativeness and irreducible normativity.The irreducible normativity part is more technical. The most accessible way I can describe it is the way Richard Garner put it. We really understand what it means to value something as a kind of mental activity, or even a social activity. When I value something, I can like, enjoy, prefer or desire that something happen. That is a mental attitude, a mind-to-world direction of fit, as we put it in metaethics. We know that when we eat a cake and enjoy it, the cake being tasty is just an experience the cake triggers in us. And if somebody else eats that same cake and does not enjoy it, they do not make a mistake when they say it is not tasty. They are not failing to detect a property that is in the cake.[04:19] Walter Veit: Even though I frequently have discussions with my wife about this: how can you enjoy this? It is clearly disgusting. I hate this food. Why do you not like this? It is great. So I think there is a general tendency to objectify our experiences and extrapolate them onto the world. That is actually a common phenomenon.[04:45] Ethan Moore: It is a common phenomenon. We often refer to it as projecting. We project our attitudes onto the object itself, as if they were a feature of that object that we are detecting. That is exactly what is going on. But in these cases, if we had a protracted argument debating the various gastronomic sensibilities of different people, we would eventually come to the conclusion that these are just matters of taste. They are just reactions. Equally with what we call institutional rules. Take the fact that I have an institutional duty to turn up to the tutorials I am teaching. Or the rules of chess: I am only permitted to move a knight in an L shape, and not a pawn in an L shape. We understand these really come down to the expectations and demands of audiences, effectively, and we call that intersubjective. So we understand value fundamentally as reactions to things. It is an activity, a valuing. But the idea of something having value is something that, at least, this gets contested. Caveats to everything I am saying: people have disagreed at every stage of this argument.Error theorists broadly believe that the idea of value that is independent of how I feel about it, or how anybody else feels about it, residing in the objects themselves, in the actions themselves, in states of affairs or in people, is peculiar to morality. Morality does not come down to how you or your community feel about it. Value here is not recognised as valuing. It is recognised as detecting some property of actions in themselves. That is the sense in which morality uniquely and peculiarly projects our valuing activity as features of the actions themselves, differently from the cake case, where we turn around and say: come on, these are just desires, enjoyments, preferences and so on.We do not do that in the moral case. We do not retract our imperatives on the basis of someone saying, well, I just do not want to donate to charity, or my community does not care about donating to charity. People say: well, you should care about donating to charity. Your attitudes are wrong. They are somehow misguided. Sorry, I realise I am going on here. The argument is quite complicated.[07:30] Walter Veit: I think people get the basic idea. Now, obviously some people will say: why would you become a moral nihilist? You could just become a moral subjectivist, say, and reconceptualise morality in terms of subjective preferences about how society should be. On that view, it was a mistake to think of morality as being about objective values or rules to begin with; it has always been about these intersubjective states of affairs.When defending the error theory and moral abolitionism on my blog across a couple of posts, you get attacked from all sides: from the objectivists, from the subjectivists, and then from people who say, well, even if Mackie is right, why get rid of morality? It might have all these positive benefits. Plausibly you yourself, like me, encountered Mackie quite early. Perhaps you can tell us how you came across that literature in the first place.[08:43] Ethan Moore: Yes. You are right about being attacked on all sides. Even within the narrow camp of error theorists, who fight off the o… Get full access to Walter Veit at walterveit.substack.com/subscribe
