Virtual morality might be re-described – if hyperbolically – as a deceptive guise of moral nihilism: a recourse to what is deemed to be in the interest of safety or survival at the expense of truth. In its various mutations it is more widespread than the previous discussion has perhaps suggested, as an article by Richard Robinson, written some eighty years ago, confirms. In ‘The emotive theory of ethics’, Robinson (1948) claims that no moral judgments are true, yet he does not reject morality, being in this not unlike those Feuerbachian clergymen who deny the existence of God but claim not to be atheists. Such perversities should, of course, be distinguished from the opinions of moral-sense theorists such as Hutcheson and Hume whose claim that we possess a moral sense is intended as empirical, pointing to objective fact about human nature. That may be mistaken but does not involve deception, hence cannot be denoted a dishonest nihilism.