1 Types of Moral skepticism and Nihilism Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen Summer 2021 Introduction Moral skepticism is often defined as a denial that there is moral knowledge, 1 while moral nihilism goes further to deny that there are any moral facts or that there is any moral truth. 2 These definitions, however, are oversimplifications. The purpose of this article is not to examine arguments for or against skepticism or nihilism, but to take up the preliminary work of surveying the forms that moral skepticism and nihilism may take, and to examine how they are related. While skepticism has been historically associated with denials of knowledge claims, the term has also been used for those who deny epistemic justification. Those who deny only certainty, but who allow for uncertain knowledge, have also been called skeptics. More generally, skepticism may be taken to include views that deny some form of epistemic value, where the value may be any of the following: knowledge, justification, indubitability, certainty, understanding, knowing-how, credibility. Specifically moral forms of skepticism doubt some such values in the field of morality, even if they reject more general forms of skepticism. Epistemic values are assigned to various epistemic attitudes, such as: believing, guessing, observing, verifying, doubting, and asserting. Most commonly, these are propositional attitudes, but there are exceptions. One may believe people and not just propositions, one may have doubts about policies, one 1 E.g., (Audi 1999), 585. 2 E.g., (Audi 1999), 588, 790; (Joyce 2013).