Bart Streumer, “Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgments” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Feb 1, 2018 · 1h 2m

It’s intuitive to think that statements of the form “lying is wrong” ascribe a property—that of wrongness—to acts of the type lying. In this way, one might think that statements of this kind are much like statements of the form “Bill is left-handed,” which also seems to attribute a property—left-handedness to Bill. But what about a statement like “Bill is a Wookie?” As there is no property of being a Wookie, the statement seems then to be false. What’s called the error theory is the view that statements that attribute moral properties are always false, because no such properties exist. In…