How to abolish morality? (with Ethan Moore)

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How to abolish morality? (with Ethan Moore)

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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 ...

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