Abstract
Moral disagreement is widely held to pose a threat for metaethical realism and objectivity. In this paper I attempt to understand how it is that moral disagreement is supposed to present a problem for metaethical realism. I do this by going through several distinct (though often related) arguments from disagreement, carefully distinguishing between them, and critically evaluating their merits. My conclusions are rather skeptical: Some of the arguments I discuss fail rather clearly. Others supply with a challenge to realism, but not one we have any reason to believe realism cannot address successfully. Others beg the question against the moral realist, and yet others raise serious objections to realism, but ones that—when carefully stated—can be seen not to be essentially related to moral disagreement. Arguments based on moral disagreement itself have almost no weight, I conclude, against moral realism.
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Notes
For a helpful survey, see Gowans (2000a).
Tersman (2006, p. xiii), also notes that many different arguments go by the name “the argument from disagreement.”
Nagel (1986, p. 147) expresses similar surprise.
(Enoch 2003, 2007a). The view I argue for there is Robust Metanormative Realism, not Robust Metaethical Realism. So the discussion that follows has to be modified to apply to the view I argue for there. But the modifications needed are not, I think, problematic, and for simplicity here I restrict myself to moral disagreement as a problem for metaethical realism.
With the possible exception of Oddie’s (2005) realism, which is also committed to the causal efficacy of moral facts, a commitment I am rather agnostic about.
Such values are discussed—in the context of a discussion of objectivity—in Raz (2001).
Thick concepts are concepts that involve both normative and descriptive content (such as courageous, kind or cruel), and are contrasted with thin concepts whose content is arguably purely normative (such as good, wrong, and ought).
For a similar diagnosis, see Dworkin (1996, p. 92).
Notice that no such proclamation is implied by realism alone, as one can be a realist without yet specifying what the moral truths are about which one is a realist.
An often-made observation is that the conclusion 5 defeats at least one natural reading of premise 2.
Perhaps there is a way of understanding the argument from tolerance as avoiding this problem. Perhaps, for instance, there is a theoretical virtue that is closely analogous to modesty, and perhaps it is arrogant in this theoretical sense to assume, for instance, that one is right and others—apparently just as intelligent and well-informed—are wrong. Thus understood, it seems to me the argument is really best seen as an argument from the possibility of rationally irresolvable disagreement. I discuss this argument below.
It is perhaps worth emphasizing that our question is not at this point one of political philosophy: even if it is true, for instance, that government should be neutral as between competing conceptions of the good, such a claim remains entirely within the practical domain. If it has any bearing on the question of the truth of metaethical realism, this has to be shown. Rawls (1980, p. 542) seems to acknowledge this point, when—in spite of being very much concerned with (irresolvable) disagreement in the context of his political philosophy—he nevertheless explicitly denies that any skeptical or relativist conclusions about morality follow from such disagreement.
“May” because the move from “We are justified in believing that p” to “p” is neither truth-preserving nor unproblematic.
See, for instance, (Rachels 1999, Chap. 2).
Another problem this argument faces is that it can be applied to just about any other discourse and so—for many metaethical antirealists—throws away the baby with the bathwater.
Carson and Moser (2001, p. 4) suggest that the argument should be seen as an argument for relativism that presupposes the denial of realism.
Hume (1751, p. 98) seems to present a similar worry, stressing that (some) moral truths are so obvious, that disagreement about them seems to be ruled out by the belief in moral truths.
For a closely related discussion, see Brandt (1944), though Brandt carefully restricts his discussion to versions of realism that are in fact committed to the self-evidence of ethical truth.
Loeb (1998, p. 282) hints at this way of completing the argument from disagreement.
I take this to be at least one plausible way of understanding Mackie’s (1977) so-called argument from relativity. A similar argument pervades (Wong 1986), and Gowans (2000a, p. 4) presents a similar argument as the argument from disagreement. Shafer-Landau (2003, Chap. 9) understands the argument from disagreement as an explanatory one, but he combines the argument in the text here with the argument from rationally irresolvable disagreement, discussed below. Some version of this argument was already put forward by Price (Schneewind 1998, p. 382). And at least at times Wiggins (1990, pp. 67, 75) seems to have a similar argument in mind (though at other times he seems to think of other arguments from disagreement, and it seems that he thinks of the most important problem disagreement poses (“the real challenge of relativity”) as a challenge specifically to his subjectivism, not to the realism I discuss).
As Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 220) notes, however, it is not at all clear whether this line of thought can distinguish between ethics and philosophy more generally (metaethics, of course, included) or economics. Also see Railton (1993, p. 283). I return to metaethical (as opposed to moral) disagreement and its significance in Sect. 11 below.
A point emphasized by Shafer-Landau (2003, Chap. 9).
See Tolhurst (1987, pp. 610–611). And see also Thomson’s (Harman and Thomson 1996, p. 68) characterization of the thesis of moral objectivity. There is another line of thought showing that 3 poses a serious threat for the realist: If our moral beliefs are radically disassociated from a supposed realm of moral facts, it becomes hard to see how our beliefs could be about these moral facts. Indeed, if moral beliefs systematically reflect ways of lives, or social conventions, or something of sort, is this not at least some strong reason to think that this is what they are about? This conclusion is, of course, inconsistent with realism. I return to these issues below, in Sect. 6.
Assuming, that is, that in general IBE is a good rule of ampliative inference. This assumption is not uncontroversial. For the best-known critique, see Van Fraassen (1980, 1989). In the text I avoid this complication for four reasons: First, I believe that IBE is a good rule of inference (Enoch and Schechter 2008), but arguing the point will take me too far a field. Second, if the IBE-version of the argument from disagreement can be rejected because IBE is not a good rule of inference, this makes things easier, not harder, for the realist, so there is no dialectical flaw in assuming, in our context, that IBE is a good rule of inference. Third, I believe the argument can be rephrased without using IBE, instead using other inferential mechanisms allowed by critics of IBE (such as probabilistic reasoning). Doing so will require very minor changes in the argument and in the realist responses to it. And fourth, realists—or at least scientific realists—typically rely on IBE in arguing for their realism. So a realist who rejects IBE would be, at the very least, a dialectical oddity.
This way of putting things is not meant to exclude the possibility that we come to believe that a phenomenon calls for explanation by first coming across what seems to be a good explanation of it. Indeed—and I thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion—we may view the sentence “It is a brute fact” as the limiting case of an explanation, an explanation it is sometimes justified to settle for. Then the point I am about to make in the text is that it is quite possible that this null-explanation is the best explanation in the case of moral disagreement.
Williams (1985, pp. 132–133) suggests—after having noticed that disagreement need not be surprising—that in some contexts agreement calls for explanation and in others disagreement does.
Writing thirty years ago, Mackie (1977, p. 37) already treated this line of thought as well-known.
Again see Rachels (1999, pp. 27–29).
In the text I describe this line of thought as rejecting the phenomenon to be explained. But there is an alternative description: No one, it seems, denies that superficially moral disagreement, disagreement about specific moral judgments, is widespread. With this phenomenon as the explanandum, the thought in the text should be seen not as denying the phenomenon, but as suggesting an alternative explanation of the phenomenon—the claim is that what best explains superficially moral disagreement is not genuinely moral disagreement (and so not the denial of metaethical realism) but rather disagreement in factual beliefs.
See Mackie (1977, pp. 37–38).
For a similar point, see Sinnott-Armstrong (2006, p. 38).
One can find such explanation already in Aquinas: see the excerpts from Summa Theologiae in Gowans (2000a, pp. 55–63). For contemporary discussions, see, for instance, Boyd (1988, pp. 212–213), Brink (1989, pp. 204–208), Hurley (1989, p. 292), Railton (1993, p. 283), Shafer-Landau (2003, Chap. 9). See also Darwall et al. (1992, p. 30; though they think these alternative explanations do not seem entirely satisfying); Wong (1984, pp. 117–120) also mentions many possible alternative explanations of disagreement, though he ultimately thinks that they do not suffice to explain at least some important cases of such disagreement.
It sometimes seems as if proponents of the IBE argument from disagreement are reluctant, for one reason or another, to attribute moral errors on so many matters to so many thinkers, and that this is why they are reluctant to accept alternative, realist-friendly explanations of moral disagreement. As is perhaps clearest in Mackie (1977), however, they are rarely as reluctant to attribute wide-ranging metaethical errors to many thinkers, and it is not at all clear what justifies this discrimination. For this point made as a criticism of Mackie, see Marmor (2001, p. 124). See also the discussion of higher-order arguments from disagreement in Sect. 11, below.
Some writers (Shafer-Landau 1994) suggest that indeterminacy is the key to the explanation of moral disagreement. For relevant discussions see also Brink (1989, p. 202), Wiggins (1990, p. 77), Gert (2002, p. 298). But I am suspicious of such suggestions, for two related reasons: First, if it is genuinely indeterminate whether abortions are morally permissible then both Pro-Choice activists (believing abortions are determinately permissible) and Pro-Life activists (believing abortions are determinately impermissible) are morally mistaken. Instead of having to attribute mistake to one party to the debate, we now have to attribute a mistake to both. It is hard to see this as explanatory progress. Schiffer (2003, p. 259) notices that such indeterminacy will make both parties to the disagreement epistemically at fault, but he fails to notice that this undermines whatever motivation we may have had for the claim that there is no relevant epistemic difference between the disagreeing parties. But see Shafer-Landau (1994, p. 336) for an attempt to deal with this worry. Second, if indeterminacy is to play a key role in the explanation of moral disagreement, it follows that most cases of (genuinely) moral controversies—or the most important ones—must be indeterminate (for otherwise indeterminacy is not as central a factor in the explanation of disagreement as it is thought by some to be). And given the scope of (what seems to me like) genuine moral disagreement, this would leave very little—if anything—as determinate moral truths (or falsehoods). And this is certainly not a victory for the realist. [For instance, Schiffer’s (2003, Chap. 6) version of antirealism asserts that there are no (or hardly any) determinate moral truths]. Thus, indeterminacy can perhaps play some role in accounting for moral disagreement, but not the key role some thinkers attribute to it.
Perspectives, cultures, and ways of life—mentioned in the original IBE challenge to realism—can have a distorting effect similar—and not unrelated—to that of self-interest. So long as the distorting effect is not too strong, skepticism need not follow. And this means that explanations of the kind suggested in the text can capture much of the intuitive appeal of the original argument.
Brandt (1944, p. 487) quotes a passage from Thomas Reid (Essays in the Intellectual Powers of Man, s. VI, Chap. VIII), where Reid already notices this point. Brandt himself is critical of explaining moral mistake and disagreement by resorting to the distorting effect of interests, but only when such explanations are offered by someone claiming the self-evidence of ethical truth.
This is the subtitle of Unger’s book.
Is the correlation between people’s moral views and what they take to be in their interest, or is it between their moral views and what actually is in their interest? What, for instance, if white Southerners thought slavery was in their interest, but in fact slavery was not in their interest, because (say) the availability of slaves gave a strong incentive not to modernize the South’s agriculture? (I thank Shmuel Shilo for this suggestion.) It seems to me that some explanations can be in terms of objective interests, and some in terms of what people take to be in their interest. Explanations in terms of objective interests, though, incur a further liability—they have to supply with a mechanism through which the objective interest can have causal influence on the beliefs of those whose interest it is.
This is compatible with the denial of realism. An antirealist of sorts can argue that yes, moral beliefs are partly shaped by interests, but so are moral truths (because they are constituted, say, by social conventions, themselves shaped by interests). Notice, then, that—as emphasized in the introduction—I do not take the relation between moral beliefs and interests to lend positive support to metaethical realism. The dialectical situation is different: The antirealist suggested disagreement as an objection to realism. So long as the realist can accommodate it—and even if so can the antirealist—the objection fails.
Seeing that inferences to the best explanation do not purport to be deductively valid, the mere possibility of a better alternative explanation is never sufficient to reject them. What is needed is an actually better explanation, not just a possibly better one.
Ontological parsimony is often mentioned as one feature that makes one explanation better than another (Thagard 1978, pp. 76–92).
Intractability may be understood in more than one way. It may be understood descriptively, as just noting that no party to the debate is likely to convince the other. This is the sense intended in the text. But it may be understood normatively, as applying to a disagreement when it is rationally irresolvable. I discuss this kind of intractability below, in Sect. 9. Gowans (2004, p. 143) suggests an argument from disagreement that is a version of the IBE argument, with the explanandum being apparently rationally irresolvable disagreement.
A hint at this argument can be found in Gowans (2000a, p. 17).
Street (2003, Chap. 2), for instance, argues that much of the agreement we see on basic normative matters is more readily explained by evolutionary considerations than by the hypothesis that there are objective normative truths. Tersman (2006, p. 52) also mentions the possibility that agreement can be explained by things other than convergence on the truth.
I think—but I am not sure—that something like this argument underlies Williams’ (1985, Chap. 8) disanalogy between ethics and the empirical sciences. And Tersman (2006, pp. 46–47, 53, 104–105) argues, in different contexts, that perhaps disagreement can be taken not so much to refute realism as to undermine one major way of arguing for realism.
For a related point, see Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 223).
This may be one place where the argumentation is not straightforwardly generalizable to other, non-moral, discourses. The argument in the texts just referred to is specific to moral (or normative) discourse. Perhaps for other discourses explanatory indispensability is the only consideration that can justify a commitment to realism. If this is so—and I have yet to see an argument with this as its conclusion—then the point in the text does not carry over to other discourses.
To repeat, the realist still has available to her the move of rejecting premise 5.
As it stands the objection is constrained in scope to just inter-social or inter-cultural disagreement. It may be possible to apply a similar line of thought also to intra-social disagreement, but doing this will complicate matters because of the need to take into account also the social aspect of meaning, division of linguistic labor, and so on.
Tersman’s (2006) discussion is—following Davidson in this respect—not sensitive to this distinction.
For powerful presentations of this and related objections to naturalist realism, see Horgan and Timmons (1991), Loeb (1998). For an attempt at a reply, see Brink (2001). Tersman (2006, p. 85) claims that his related points apply to non-naturalist as well as naturalist realist views. But it seems to me that Tersman’s characterization of realism—and in particular, his emphasis on the continuity of moral and natural facts (2006, e.g. 98)—in fact shows otherwise.
At times, Tersman’s (2006, e.g. 130) characterization of realism seems to understand it as inconsistent with such a reply. But it is not clear to me why this should be so.
This is the gist of much of Tersman’s (2006, Chapter 5) argumentation (though he thinks that such reasoning does not refute realism—it merely serves to undermine the support realism could have mobilized from the objective feel of moral disagreement; Ibid., 104–105). Tersman thinks that just about any semantic theory consistent with realism (and indeed cognitivism) falls prey to this objection, which he calls “the argument from ambiguity.” At least with regard to Wedgewood’s suggestion, though, I remain unconvinced.
This is the case, it seems to me, with regard to the metaethical theories of Boyd, Sturgeon and (in a different way) Michael Smith. For a criticism along these lines of Boyd’s and Sturgeon’s optimism regarding the nature of moral disagreement, see Tersman (2006, pp. 99–100) and the references there. For a criticism of Smith’s optimism regarding the convergence in desires of all rational creatures, see Enoch (2007b). And see also Smith’s reply (Smith 2007).
Naturally, much depends on just what “suitable conditions” are. And there is some reason to think that there is no acceptable way of filling in this blank. For a related objection to views of normativity that make use of ideal or hypothetical responses, see Enoch (2005).
The literature distinguishes between many different kinds of internalism. The one in the text is the one Darwall (1983) calls existence-internalism (distinguished from judgment-internalism). As I will not in this paper discuss other internalist theses, in the text I just use “Internalism.”
This is a term Williams (1980) made famous.
The distinction is sometimes drawn between agent- and speaker- or appraiser-relativism (Sturgeon 1994). In these terms, the relativism that the line of thought in the text seems to support is agent-relativism—relativity in the applicability of moral judgments to the actions of different agents (rather than relativity in the truth-values of a moral statement uttered by different speakers). This distinction mirrors the distinction between existence- and judgment-internalism.
Velleman’s (1996) discussion of what may be called quasi-externalism—giving the externalist all she wants consistently with internalism—is the most explicit discussion I know of that fits the pattern in the text. For the attempt to find motivations that are constitutive of agency (motivated also by considerations different than the one in the text), see Korsgaard (2002), Rosati (2003).
A reminder—the text addresses only the kind of internalism defined earlier. Nothing I say here commits me to the inconsistency of realism with other, more plausible, internalist theses. Tersman (2006, Chap. 6) attempts an argument against realism that starts with an exceptionally weak version of (judgment-) internalism. But, first, I am not sure this weak version is really all his argument needs, and second, his argument is not an argument from disagreement at all, as he himself seems to concede when putting the general idea as follows: “cognitivism is implausible since it allows for a community of amoralists” (Tersman 2006, p. 120, footnote 21; and see also p. 131).
A version of this argument can be found already in Ayer (1936, p. 106). For a fairly explicit contemporary discussion of this argument see Sturgeon (1984, p. 49) (though he also presents the IBE version of the argument from disagreement), and Sturgeon (2006, p. 107). In general, and for reasons to be discussed below, often writers put forward the IBE version of the argument from disagreement together with some version of the argument from the absence of method. This, I think, is the case with Mackie (1977).
For a related point, see Chang (1997, p. 21).
There may be some moral truths for which the transition from 1 to 2 can be made plausible without begging the question against the realist. Perhaps, for instance, subjective-ought-statements (that is, roughly, statements about what you should do given what you know) are necessarily knowable. But even if this is so, I see no reason to think that all moral truths are necessarily knowable, and it is this universal generalization that is needed if the argument is to pose a problem for realism.
See in this context Tersman’s (2006, p. 70) useful distinction between different kinds of inaccessibility, and its relevance to the point in the text.
If one wants, one may earn respectability for the claim that there is no method in such cases by introducing a tendentious definition of “method,” one that rules out methods that are not unified enough, or that the status of which is not in consensus, or something of the sort. But such redefinition—here as elsewhere—achieves nothing. Thus understood, premise 1 may be true, but it becomes much harder to justify the transition from it to the conclusion 2.
One method of achieving agreement on moral matters is to eliminate those who disagree with you. Despite its historical credentials, it is not the kind of method intended in the text.
See, for instance Waldron (1992, pp. 158–187) (though at times Waldron seems to think of the argument from the absence of a justified method).
What is meant here by “settling” is, roughly, finding out who is right and who is wrong, or who is justified and who is unjustified. Whether or not there is agreement about how to proceed practically when facing a moral disagreement (say, by a majority vote) is beside the point here.
Some Creationists, for instance, do not accept the scientific method. Of course, they are not often thought of as physicists. But utilizing this fact to save the purported disanalogy between physics and morality here would be cheating. One can always guarantee agreement on method by restricting the group of those who count (physicists, say) to just those who already agree on the relevant method. For an attempt to defend the analogy between disagreement in ethics and in the natural sciences (partly) by noting this point, see Sturgeon (2006, p. 108).
None of this means that disagreement about methods of settling moral disagreements is irrelevant to the metaethical debate. In particular, it may have the role mentioned in Sect. 4.4, that of a further explanandum.
I thank an anonymous referee for making me see this.
Something like this argument can be found, for instance, in Blackburn (1981, p. 177), Shafer-Landau (1994, p. 332), Schiffer (2003, Chap. 6), Lillehammer (2004, p. 97), Goldman (1990), Bennigson (1996) (though Goldman and to an extent also Bennigson at times conflate the argument with other arguments from disagreement).
Railton (1993, p. 281) takes this as reason not to interpret “the” argument from disagreement along these lines.
Many of the metaethical issues generalize straightforwardly to metanormative ones. If this is also true of the argument from rationally irresolvable disagreement (and it seems to me to be so), and seeing that the argument’s premise is a normative claim (about what it is rationally permissible to believe), then this argument if sound entails also an antirealist view about its own premise. Depending on the details of the relevant antirealist view, this may cause a problem in the vicinity of self-defeat. But I cannot discuss this point further here.
Bennigson’s (1996, p. 414) understanding of what it takes for a disagreement to be rationally resolvable—according to which, roughly, a disagreement is rationally resolvable only if one of the parties can justify her claim on neutral, non-question-begging grounds—is almost as extreme as the understanding suggested in the text. I therefore think that the considerations in the text apply, and that Bennigson’s suggestion that rational resolvability in this sense is necessary for knowledge is implausibly strong. Indeed, Bennigson refers to some unpublished work in which he argues that “our disagreements with various traditional cultures about whether illness is often caused by witchcraft may be at least as difficult to resolve rationally as our ethical disagreements with the Yanomamo.” [Bennigson 1996, p. 437 (footnote 45)]. In fairness to Bennigson it should be noted, however, that he does not think rational irresolvability sufficient for the denial of realism. His argument is more complex, and it uses a further premise to the effect that in ethics—and not in other discourses—the unknowability purportedly entailed by rational irresolvability is highly implausible.
I take this phrase from Wright’s (1992) characterization of Cognitive Command, to which I also briefly return in footnote 95 below.
For an attempt at such a story see Bennigson (1996, pp. 428–429).
Interestingly, Rosen (2001, p. 83) thinks this may be true of rationally irresolvable moral disagreements but not of rationally irresolvable epistemic disagreements. He does not supply with a rationale for this distinction.
Here is Lewis (1982, p. 101) making what I think is a similar point, in the context of defending the law of non-contradiction: “No truth does have, and no truth could have, a true negation. … That may seem dogmatic. And it is: I am affirming the very thesis that Routley and Priest have called into question, and—contrary to the rules of debate—I decline to defend it. Further, I concede that it is indefensible against their challenge. They have called so much into question, that I have no foothold on undisputed ground. So much the worse for the demand that philosophers always must be ready to defend their theses under the rules of debate.”
Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 223) notes that we may have no good reason either to affirm or to deny (his version of) the claim in the text, and if so the argument from irresolvable disagreement fails to give a reason to reject realism.
Nothing like Mathematical Platonism need be implied here.
For a similar point see Moore (1992, pp. 22479–22480). Tersman (2006, Chap. 2) emphasizes the general difficulties in deciding whether a given disagreement is a no-fault disagreement, as well as the specific worry that any such decision will flirt with begging the question. Now, Tersman (2006, p. 34) rightly warns against a tendentious understanding of shortcoming that will include by stipulation the absence of disagreement. So note that this is not the suggestion in the text. The suggestion, rather, is that the realist is entitled to take the disagreement as evidence for the existence of a cognitive shortcoming.
For somewhat similar points, see Bennigson (1996, p. 425, 429) and Gowans (2000a, p. 18). The argument in the text shows that in order to decide what force to give the argument from rationally irresolvable disagreement you have to already have decided (though perhaps provisionally) the debate over realism one way or another. Perhaps this is why Wright (1992) introduces his Cognitive Command (from which I borrow talk of cognitive shortcomings as features of some but not other disagreements) not in the context of giving an argument for or against realism, but rather in the context of characterizing the realist-antirealist debate.
Here is a closely related point: It is sometimes said in an attempt to capture the idea of a no-fault disagreement that moral disagreement survives the elimination of all mistakes of reasoning and all false non-moral beliefs. But this way of understanding what “no-fault” comes to begs the question against the realist. For what reason (that does not already presuppose the denial of realism) is there to distinguish between moral and non-moral false beliefs? If not being rationally at fault requires elimination of mistaken beliefs, it also requires—unless we already reject metaethical realism—the elimination of mistaken moral beliefs, and then it seems clear that there can be no no-fault moral disagreement. And if we decide not to take moral mistakes as establishing a rational fault, then perhaps no-fault moral disagreements are possible, but why believe that this shows anything about metaethical realism? Perhaps, for instance, scientific disagreement can survive the elimination of all non-scientific mistakes, but surely this does not support the rejection of scientific realism. Lillehammer (2004, p. 99), for instance, counts reliability on both sides among the necessary conditions for no-fault disagreement, but does not notice that this raises the problem discussed in this footnote in an especially troubling way.
I thank Josh Schechter for discussions on this point.
Because I reject premise 1, I can afford not to discuss Tersman’s (2006, Chap. 4) discussion of Wright’s dilemma (for the realist), one horn of which is premise 1, the other a commitment to some sort of inaccessibility of moral truths.
Brink (2001) thinks there is just no good reason to believe either that irresolvable disagreement is possible or that it is not.
I therefore concede here a point central to Gowans’ (2000a, p. 16) version of the argument from disagreement—that an apparently rationally irresolvable disagreement is at least some prima facie evidence against realism.
Notice again how unhelpful it would be to invoke indeterminacy. The problem was to explain how it is that at least one of two well-informed, well-reasoning, intelligent individuals is nevertheless mistaken. Invoking indeterminacy makes things worse, because it makes the disagreement pointless, perhaps even silly (like a disagreement about a borderline heap, with one party insisting that it is, and the other that it is not, a heap). And now we need to explain how it is that two well-informed, well-reasoning, intelligent individuals nevertheless participate in such a silly disagreement, apparently committing themselves to the (probably determinately) false belief that their view is determinately correct.
Seeing that others disagree, should we not at least take back some of our confidence in our moral judgments? Perhaps so, but this has nothing to do with an argument from disagreement to antirealism. What this thought shows is that we should—in morality as elsewhere—update our beliefs in accordance with the evidence, and that the evidence sometimes includes the fact that others have different beliefs. No realist should reject this. For some discussion of this point in the context of moral disagreement, see Shafer-Landau (2006, pp. 221–224). Also see footnote 108 below.
Loeb (1998, p. 285) understands “the traditional argument from disagreement” as something along the lines in the text, though he ties it also to the IBE-version of the argument from disagreement. Brandt’s (1944) discussion is very similar in these respects. And Schiffer’s (2003, pp. 245–252) discussion of the “argument from irresolubility” eventually boils down to the general epistemic challenge of accounting for a priori moral knowledge.
“The Epistemological Challenge to Metanormative Realism: How Best to Understand It, and How to Cope with It” (unpublished manuscript).
Tolhurst (1987) argues that moral disagreement forces the realist to posit such a faculty.
This is especially clear in Schiffer’s (2003, p. 248) discussion, where claims about irresolvable disagreement ultimately rest on claims about the impossibility of moral knowledge.
Disagreement may have other epistemological implications, ones that pose a challenge of much more general scope than merely metaethical realism, for instance in the context of the implications of what has come to be called “peer disagreement”. For my view on the epistemic significance of such disagreement, and for many references, see my “Not Just a Truthometer: Taking Oneself Seriously (But Not Too Seriously) in Cases of Peer Disagreement” (unpublished manuscript).
Notice that the discussion above—if successful—also casts doubt on the availability of antirealist arguments that are based on combining the effect of more than one of the arguments from disagreement.
Dworkin (1996, p. 114) argues that there is more disagreement in philosophy than in morality.
For a somewhat similar point see Swinburne (1976). Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 220; 2006, pp. 218–221) notices that arguments from disagreement can be applied in philosophy in general, and in metaethics in particular, so that there is something self-defeating about the antirealist’s employment of this argument from disagreement. But Shafer-Landau does not notice that this may render the arguments from disagreement themselves self-defeating in the way described in the text. Tersman (2006, p. 112) notices that a key premise in his favorite argument from disagreement—the one he calls “the latitude idea”—applies to much in philosophy as well as to ethics. But he does not proceed to discuss the self-defeat worry this fact may give rise to.
Schiffer’s (2003, Chap. 6) version of an argument from irresolvable disagreement is an especially clear case, except the conclusion is the denial of determinate truth. But an argument that undermines the determinate truth of its premises or conclusion seems just as disturbingly self-defeating as one that undermines their truth.
This is perhaps clearest with regard to the IBE-arguments from disagreements. Disagreement about which explanation is best is, of course, a normative disagreement, and it is hard to see what features distinguish between it and paradigmatic moral disagreements.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts I thank Hanina Ben-Menahem, Alon Harel, Andrei Marmor, Joshua Schechter, Sharon Street and Ruti Weintraub. The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Israel Science Fund.
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Enoch, D. How is Moral Disagreement a Problem for Realism?. J Ethics 13, 15–50 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-008-9041-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-008-9041-z