Driving the Chariot North: How Experimental Metaethics Has Gone South with Error Theory and Non-Cognitivism

Abstract Many traditional metaethicists think that laypeople believe morality is objective. This has led many experimental philosophers and psychologists to investigate laypeople’s beliefs about moral objectivity. In this literature on folk moral objectivism, it has been proposed that the construct validity of one of its survey-based methods, the disagreement task, could be improved by including dedicated options for error theory and non-cognitivism, the two main non-objectivist theories in traditional metaethics. In this paper, I argue that, if the aim of the disagreement task is understood as capturing laypeople’s implicit metaethical commitments, this proposal involves misunderstandings of traditional metaethics. Both error theory and non-cognitivism predict that laypeople would not select the dedicated options for these theories. In particular, error theory predicts that, if true, laypeople would select the option indicating a belief in moral objectivity, whereas non-cognitivism, by itself, either yields the same prediction or makes no prediction at all.