Should the Mathematical Fictionalist Be a Moral Fictionalist, Too?
On the face of it, the same motivations that lead some philosophers to adopt mathematical fictionalism seem also to push in the direction of moral fictionalism. In particular, to the extent that mathematical fictionalists are motivated by epistemological concerns about our ability to know truths about abstract mathematical objects, one might expect them to be similarly worried about our ability to know “queer” moral facts. However, the author argues that existing versions of moral fictionalism fare less well than existing versions of mathematical fictionalism in answering two key questions for fictionalists about a domain D, (1) what is it that the D-discourse is being used to do, and (2) why should we expect D-talk to be useful in this way if we do not believe our D-claims to be true? The author closes by presenting considerations that suggest that the combination of mathematical fictionalism with moral realism might be motivated on naturalist grounds.