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Notes
I borrow the term “stance-independent” from Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
There is a third type of argument from disagreement that does not fall neatly into either category, namely semantic arguments from disagreement. See Don Loeb, “Moral Realism and the Argument from Disagreement,” Philosophical Studies, 90 (1998): 281–303 and Folke Tersman, Moral Disagreement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). I set these arguments aside here.
See David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Shafer-Landau, op. cit.
There are a number of competing accounts of the nature of moral intuitions. I take it to be fairly uncontroversial that intuitions are seeming states with propositional content. There is significant debate about how else to characterize them—for example, whether they are a species of belief or are sui generis. Such disagreements are not relevant to the arguments of this paper. I will assume that moral intuitions are fallible (i.e., a mental state can count as an intuition even if its content is false), but beyond this, I will not take a stand on the nature of intuitions.
See A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Pelican, 1971), p. 147.
See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983), John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised ed. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999), and Norman Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy 76 (1970) 256–282.
J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 36.
David Brink, op. cit. p. 204.
Richrd Boyd “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 213.
David Brink, op. cit., p. 197.
Brian Leiter, “Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 9, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 126–151. (My emphasis.) Note that although Leiter attributes this argument to Nietzsche, he also himself endorses the argument.
See, for example, Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), David Enoch “Not Just a Truthometer: Taking Oneself Seriously (but not too seriously) in Cases of Peer Disagreement”, Mind 119 (2011), 953–997, and Derek Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
For arguments of just this sort, see Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Sharon Street “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies, 127 (2006), pp. 109–166, and Matt Bedke “Intuitive Non-Naturalism Meets Cosmic Coincidence,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 90:2 (2009): 188–209.
I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for pushing me on this point.
Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (New York: Hackett, 1981) p. 342.
Roger Crisp, “Reasonable Disagreement,” in The New Intuitionism, ed. Jill Graper Hernandez (New York: Continuum, 2011). For discussion of similar principles, see Sarah McGrath “Moral Disagreement and Moral Expertise,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 3, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Ralph Wedgwood “The Moral Evil Demons,” in Disagreement, ed. Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
McGrath (op. cit.) argues for the weaker conclusion that our beliefs about such questions do not amount to knowledge.
For similarly conciliatory positions regarding disagreement generally, see David Christensen “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News,” Philosophical Review, 116:2 (2007): 187–217, Adam Elga “Reflection and Disagreement,” Noûs, 41:3 (2007), 478–502, Hilary Kornblith, “Belief in the Face of Controversy,” in Feldman and Warfield, op. cit., and Richard Fumerton, “You Can’t Trust a Philosopher,” in Feldman and Warfield, op. cit.
See Christensen, op. cit. p. 198, and Elga, op. cit., p. 489.
For example, see Thomas Kelly “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement,” in Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Vol. 1, eds. Gendler and Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Brian Weatherson “Disagreements, Philosophical and Otherwise,” in The Epistemology of Disagreement, eds. David Christensen and Jennifer Lackey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 54–75.
For a recent argument that reaches a similar conclusion, see Katia Vavova “Moral Disagreement and Moral Skepticism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 28 (2014), pp. 302–333.
This seems to be true regardless of whether we conceive of intuitions as non-inferential moral beliefs, or as non-doxastic seeming states, on the basis of which moral beliefs may be (non-inferentially) formed.
The reader will no doubt have noticed that both premise 1 and 2 contain quantitative terms (i.e., “widespread”, “a significant number”, “many”) that I have deliberately left vague. I’ve done so because I think the prospects for drawing a precise line are, unfortunately, rather dim. If the flawless employment of our best method of moral inquiry would leave each person with only one or two false moral beliefs, or if it would yield mostly false moral beliefs for only 0.1% of the population, I take it that this would not meet the relevant thresholds. If flawless inquiry were to yield moral beliefs that were mostly false for more than half the population, this would clearly be sufficient to satisfy the thresholds. The relevant cutoffs presumably lie somewhere between these two extremes, and how one ultimately understands their nature out would probably depend on issues of vagueness beyond the scope of this paper. In light of this, I offer the following suggestion: the more fundamental disagreement there seems to be in the world, the more worried the realist should be that the relevant thresholds are met, and that the argument goes through. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
I say more in defense of premise 1) in section 5, below.
Enoch, op. cit., p. 980.
Wedgwood, op. cit., pp. 237–244.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Framing Moral Intuitions,” in Moral Psychology, vol. 2 ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), p. 71.
See Alvin Goldman, “What Is Justified Belief?” in Justification and Knowledge, ed. G.S. Pappas (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 1–25.
See Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, “The Generality Problem for Reliabilism”, Philosophical Studies, 89: 1 (1998), pp. 1–29.
Given enough moral disagreement of any sort (fundamental or not), the process forming a moral belief might be held to be generally unreliable.
See, for example, Norman Daniels, op. cit.
Many thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me on this point.
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Horn, J. Moral Realism, Fundamental Moral Disagreement, and Moral Reliability. J Value Inquiry 51, 363–381 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9583-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9583-4