A Dilemma for Moral Fictionalism

This article is forthcoming in Philosophical Books.Mark Kalderon has defended an interesting form of moral fictionalism in his 2005 book. In this paper I challenge his view by pressing a dilemma stemming from the question of what the fictionalist should say is expressed by acts of making an ethical claim. On one horn of the dilemma, they express attitudes of pretense; on the other horn of the dilemma, they express desire-like mental states. I argue that the first-horn is not plausible on phenomenological grounds. I argue that the second horn is not clearly an improvement over contemporary quasi-realist versions of expressivism