Is irreducible normativity impossibly queer? – 26 June 2015 1 Is irreducible normativity impossibly queer? * forthcoming in Journal of Moral Philosophy Teemu Toppinen Abstract. I argue that Jonas Olson’s argument from irreducible normativity is not a secure basis for an argument for error theory (section 1) and that a better basis is provided by the argument from supervenience, which has more bite against non-naturalist moral realism than Olson is willing to allow (section 2). I suggest there may be a view which can allow for the existence of irreducibly normative facts while remaining unaffected by the kinds of arguments that work against non- naturalist realism. This view is expressivism. Interestingly, James Dreier has recently suggested that expressivism may not escape these arguments. I very briefly outline (but do not pursue) possible response strategies for expressivists (section 3). I close by discussing Olson’s argument against expressivism. Olson suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that expressivism is a bad fit with a plausible evolutionary explanation of our moral thought. I argue that Olson’s argument does not succeed (section 4). Keywords: error theory; Jonas Olson; moral supervenience; non-naturalism; robust realism; expressivism; quasi-realism; evolutionary debunking The view that Jonas Olson, a Stockholm philosopher, puts forward in his Moral Error Theory is pretty hardcore. 1 Whereas the ‘first wave of Stockholm nihilism,’ represented by death metal bands such as Nihilist and Dismember in the early 1990s, was rather restricted brand of nihilism in that it attacked only traditional and Christian values, Olson advances a view worth the name. On his view, all first-order moral claims – indeed, not just all moral, but all irreducibly normative claims – are uniformly false. This kind of error theory is of course familiar from J. L. Mackie’s seminal work. 2 Olson discusses Mackie’s arguments in some detail, especially in the second part of the book, where he offers a valuable account of the ‘queerness arguments’ in favor of moral error theory, and outlines a ‘debunking’ explanation of the emergence of moral thought and talk in response to ‘Moorean’ arguments for the existence of moral facts. (A Moorean argument of the relevant sort * I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, Jonas Olson, Bart Streumer, Daan Evers, Matti Eklund, Jens Johansson, Aino Lahdenranta, Ninni Suni, and Vilma Venesmaa for helpful feedback, and Frans Svensson for organizing the symposium on Jonas’s book for which this paper was ori ginally written. The funding from the Kone Foundation, which made writing this paper possible, is also gratefully acknowledged. 1 Jonas Olson, Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In what follows, the chapter and page references in the main text will all be to this book. 2 See especially his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1977).