Moral Skepticism
Updated 2026-09-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Moral skepticism is an umbrella term for a range of views that deny or call into question various common beliefs about the role of reason in morality: moral knowledge, justified moral belief, moral truth, moral facts or properties, and reasons to act morally. Its opponents are the moral realists, and Pyrrhonian skepticism supplies one of its historical models.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Status review: distinguish the denial of moral knowledge from the denial of moral truth and of moral reasons. - Disagreement assessment: judge whether persistent disagreement undermines the justification of moral belief. - Explanation testing: ask whether moral facts can enter into causal explanation.
Anchor fast decisions
Arguments for moral skepticism usually take the form of explanatory exclusion: if moral facts cannot enter into causal explanations of the world, then our beliefs about them are superfluous or inexplicable. The argument from disagreement, the regress argument, and skeptical hypotheses press from the other side: persistent disagreement and endless regress of reasons both weaken the epistemic standing of moral belief.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- plato.stanford.eduhttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral/verified
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