ABSTRACT
A recent version of moral fictionalism, offered by Kalderon (2005a), does not proceed on these lines. Instead there is an intricate argument whose main premise concerns the nature of reasons. It’s based on a series of dilemmas. Here’s a rough outline:
The argument contains a number of technical notions from moral philosophy (more exactly, metaethics). The distinction between cognitivism and noncognitivism will be discussed in the next section. A factualist says that moral discourse is supposed to state facts, and a nonfactualist denies this. An expressivist says that the meaning of moral sentences is to be given by the attitudes or emotions they are generally used to express or arouse. An error theorist (the salient example is Mackie 1977) is a factualist who says that our typical moral beliefs are false.
