What Should Fictionalists Say About …?

Richard Joyce proposes an innovative form of moral fictionalism according to which the moral error theorist can willingly suspend her moral disbelief by distracting herself from the systematic error that, in reflective moments, she believes to afflict moral thought and discourse. In this paper, I ask three questions about the life of ‘distraction fictionalists’. Specifically, I ask what distraction fictionalists should say about (a) the use of self-distraction as a psychological coping strategy, (b) some limitations of the comparison that Joyce makes between his fictionalist response to moral error theory and our response to the paradox of happiness, and (c) certain commonly occurring situations in which transparency and the avoidance of deception are highly valued.