Modest Quasi-Realism and the Problem of Deep Moral Error

Simon Blackburn's quasi-realist program seeks to accommodate the deeply embedded assumptions of commonsense morality, one of which is the thought that one's current moral conviction on some topic might be mistaken. Some errors in moral belief are due to mistaken (non-moral) factual beliefs, which present no particular challenge to the moral quasi-realist. More worrisome is the thought that one may be mistaken at the level of one's current moral standards. The challenge of making sense of first-person affirmations of the possibility of deep moral error represents a hard challenge to the quasi-realist. Although Blackburn has addressed the issue of deep moral error, this chapter aims to offer a more detailed irrealist expressivist treatment of moral error than has hitherto been offered by Blackburn or by other expressivists. This will advance the cause of quasi-realism and that of moral expressivism generally.