This book examines the ways in which reasonable people can disagree about the requirements of political morality. Christopher McMahon argues that there will be a 'zone of reasonable disagreement' surrounding most questions of political morality. Moral notions of right and wrong evolve over time as new zones of reasonable disagreement emerge out of old ones; thus political morality is both different in different societies with varying histories, and different now from what it was in the (...) past. McMahon explores this feature of his theory in detail and traces its implications for the possibility of making moral judgments about other polities, past or present. His study sheds light on an important and often overlooked aspect of political life, and will be of interest to a wide range of readers in moral and political philosophy and in political theory. (shrink)

I begin with some familiar conceptions of epistemic relativism. One kind of epistemic relativism is descriptive pluralism. This is the simple, non-normative thesis that many different communities, cultures, social networks, etc. endorse different epistemic systems (E-systems), i.e., different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states. Communities try to guide or regulate their members’ credence-forming habits in a variety of different, i.e., incompatible, ways. Although there may be considerable overlap across cultures in certain types of (...) epistemic norms (e.g., norms for perceptual belief), there are sharp differences across groups in other types of epistemic norms. (shrink)

This paper defends a particular view of explaining reasonable disagreement: the Conceptual View. The Conceptual View is the idea that reasonable disagreements are caused by differences in the way reasonable people use concepts in a cognitive process to make moral and political judgements. But, that type of explanation is caught between either an explanatory weakness or an unparsimonious and potentially self-undermining theory of concepts. When faced with deep disagreements, theories on the Conceptual View either do not (...) have the resources to explain them, or can only explain them by committing to a completely new theory of concepts where all moral and political concepts are a unique type of concept. This paper shows how the Conceptual View can avoid this dilemma by adopting what I dub the ‘Metalinguistic Strategy’ for explaining reasonable disagreement. The Metalinguistic Strategy uses recent innovations in the philosophy of language on metalinguistic negotiation to explain reasonable disagreements whether they be ordinary or deep disagreements as genuine disagreements whilst maintaining our ordinary ideas about concepts. (shrink)

According to one widely held view, a belief is fully justified only if it holds up against the strongest available counterarguments, and we can be appropriately confident that it does hold up only if there is free and open critical discussion of those beliefs between us and our epistemic peers. In this paper I argue that this common picture of ideal rational group inquiry interacts with epistemic problems concerning reasonable disagreement in a way that makes those problems particularly (...) difficult to resolve. By focusing on this idealized context, we get a clearer picture of the epistemic principles at issue. In the end, I argue that the best way to resolve the resulting epistemic conflicts is by appeal to the underdetermination of theory by evidence together with a principle of epistemic conservatism. (shrink)

People tend to contribute more—and think they have stronger obligations to contribute more—to rescuing an identified victim rather than a statistical one. Indeed, they are often disposed to contribute more to rescuing a single identified victim than a greater number of statistical ones. By an “identified victim,” I mean Terry Q., lying injured in the passenger seat of the wrecked automobile on the corner of Main Street and Broadway, or Jessica McClure, the child who fell into the Texas well in (...) 1987 and whose family was sent $700,000 in donations for her. We need not know their names, however, and we can accept a very minimal form of identification. By a “statistical victim,” I mean the person who, extrapolating from traffic records, will be in a similar, serious car accident tomorrow (and may then be identified), or the children who will fall into wells next year if we do not cap them better than we did the well that trapped Jessica. Does this disposition (or perceived obligation) have any normative force? I initially thought there could be no such normative force, but consequentialist and nonconsequentialist arguments, pro and con, have convinced me that reasonable people can disagree with each other. This disagreement poses a problem for political philosophy: how should policy choices take such disagreement into account? (shrink)

This article considers how successfully Watson and Hartley achieve the two main aims of their excellent book, Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: first, developing and defending a distinctive version of political liberalism and, second, showing that this is a feminist political liberalism. I challenge both their general defence of their view and the arguments regarding feminism. Both discussions raise questions about the conceptualisation of reasonable disagreement, so I finish with some further comments about ways in which reasonable (...) disagreement about justice creates internal tensions within Watson and Hartley’s theory. (shrink)

Talbott grounds human rights in a moral epistemology that supports metaphysical immodesty but requires epistemic modesty. Metaphysical immodesty provides prescriptive confidence, while epistemic modesty prevents moral imperialism. I offer some reasons for doubting that Talbott’s moral epistemology yields the desired result. Insofar as Talbott aims for a determinate conception of human rights that could serve as the backbone of a system of international law, Talbott must deal with issues of reasonable disagreement, and for these issues, epistemic modesty provides (...) no guarantee against moral imperialism. In particular, I outline two sources of reasonable disagreement, that no social world is without loss and the complexity of the concept of autonomy, which illustrate how Talbott’s prescriptive confidence borders on moral imperialism. (shrink)

Most people not only think that it is possible for reasonable people to disagree, but that it is possible for people to recognize that they are parties to a reasonable disagreement. The aim of this paper is to explain how such mutually recognized reasonable disagreements are possible. I appeal to an which implies a form of relativism about reasonable belief, based on the idea that whether a belief is reasonable for a person can depend (...) on the fact that she has inherited a particular worldview from her community. (shrink)

In this response, we first tackle what we take to be the core disagreement between ourselves and Hammersley, namely the justification for our model of social research ethics governance. We then consider what follows from our defence of governance for ethics review and show how these claims attend to the specific concerns outlined by Hammersley.

This book explores the relationship between the law and pervasive and persistent reasonable disagreement about justice. It reveals the central moral function and creative force of reasonable disagreement in and about the law and shows why and how lawyers and legal philosophers should take reasonable conflict more seriously. Even though the law should be regarded as the primary mode of settlement of our moral conflicts,it can, and should, also be the object and the forum of (...) further moral conflicts. There is more to the rule of law than convergence and determinacy and it is important therefore to question the importance of agreement in law and politics. By addressing in detail issues pertaining to the nature and sources of disagreement, its extent and significance, as well as the procedural, institutional and substantive responses to disagreement in the law and their legitimacy, this book suggests the value of a comprehensive approach to thinking about conflict, which until recently has been analysed in a compartmentalized way. It aims to provide a fully-fledged political morality of conflict by drawing on the analysis of topical jurisprudential questions in the new light of disagreement. Developing such a global theory of disagreement in the law should be read in the context of the broader effort of reconstructing a complete account of democratic law-making in pluralistic societies. The book will be of value not only to legal philosophers and constitutional theorists, but also to political and democratic theorists, as well as to all those interested in public decision-making in conditions of conflict. (shrink)

At the center of Rawls’s work post-1980 is the question of how legitimate coercive state action is possible in a liberal democracy under conditions of reasonable disagreement. And at the heart of Rawls’s answer to this question is his liberal principle of legitimacy. In this paper I argue that once we attend carefully to the depth and range of reasonable disagreement, Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy turns out to be either wildly utopian or simply toothless, depending (...) on how one reads the ideal of reciprocity it is meant to embody. To remedy this defect in Rawls’s theory, I␣undertake to develop the outlines of a democratic conception of legitimacy, drawing first on Rawls’s generic conception of legitimacy in The Law of Peoples and second on a revised understanding of reciprocity between free and equal citizens. On this revised understanding, what free and equal citizens owe one another is not reciprocity in judgment, but reciprocity of interests. (shrink)

(1998). Liberal legitimacy, reasonable disagreement and justice. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 1, Pluralsim and Liberal Neutrality, pp. 19-36. doi: 10.1080/13698239808403246.

Reasonable disagreement is one of the most critical issues in contemporary political philosophy, especially within liberal-democratic constitutionalism. In emphasising the role of disagreement in the relationship between discourse and politics, many scholars such as Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy – against the background of the Rawlsian idea of “reasonable pluralism” – defend the thesis of moral disagreement as the core of political deliberation. By refusing the idea of neutrality, these authors maintain that political discourse cannot (...) be established by simply removing our moral disagree- ment on political values. This essay engages the issue of “discourse and politics” by focusing on some relevant topics: the deliberative conception of democracy; the Rawlsian idea of public reason as a forum for deliberation and discourse; the fact of disagreement and its inuence on the deliberative process. In order to investigate such issues, the paper follows three ways. First, it aims at examining John Rawls’ idea of public reason, by presenting it as a tool to resolve reasonable disagreement in the context of constitutional essentials. The second section deals with reasonable disagreement from a liberal point of view, by trying to focus on some critical remarks which Bellamy raises against Rawlsian political lib- eralism. The third section briefly analyses Waldron’s arguments in defence of reasonable disagreement, as a critique of the deliberative model of democracy. From this perspective, Waldron presents deliberative democracy’s failure in considering political dissent and moral disagreement as two problematic aspects of democracy. (shrink)

Liberalism is a distinctively modern political conception. Only in modern times do we find, as the object of both systematic reflection and widespread allegiance and institutionalization, the idea that the principles of political association, being coercive, should be justifiable to all whom they are to bind. And so only here do we find the idea that these principles should rest, so far as possible, on a core, minimal morality which reasonable people can share, given their expectably divergent religious convictions (...) and conceptions of the meaning of life. No longer does it seem evident—as it did, let us say, before the seventeenth century—that the aim of political association must be to bring man into harmony with God's purposes or to serve some comprehensive vision of the good life. The causes of this transformation are various, and not all of them lie at the level of moral principle. But a change in moral consciousness has certainly been one of the factors involved. As Hegel observed, modern culture is inherently a reflective one: notions of principle are essential to our self-understanding and thus to the stability of the social forms in which we participate. Modern culture has no room for a dichotomy between “in principle” and “in practice.” It is worth determining, then, what new moral conceptions have been responsible for the emergence of modern liberalism. Not only will we thereby better understand how we have become who we are, we will also have a surer grasp of the principles that sustain our political life. (shrink)

Most philosophical discussions of disagreement have used idealized disagreements to draw conclusions about the nature of disagreement. I closely examine an actual, non-idealized disagreement in dinosaur paleobiology and show that it can not only teach us about the features of some of our real world disagreements, but can help us to argue for the possibility of reasonable real world disagreement.

Apparently, people who are aware of the relevant facts and experiences in a belief forming situation, sometimes reasonably disagree about whether to believe and why. This study argues that such disagreements are possible, and that some purportedly fully informed reasonable disagreements are genuine, including cases involving disagreement about which beliefs about God are reasonably taken to be properly basic, given the facts of religious diversity and cases in which phenomenologically similar religious experiences properly ground a variety of religious (...) beliefs. Drawing on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, it also argues that Tradition-Based Perspectivalism - roughly, the view that foundational beliefs about what is reasonable to believe and why, are tradition-based and perspectival in nature, originating in and appropriately grounded only from the perspective of some tradition of inquiry or other - is true, and that its truth provides additional support for the claim that fully informed reasonable disagreement actually occurs. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge the claim that each party in the original position will have a first-ranked preference for an identical set of principles of justice. I maintain, by contrast, that the original position allows parties to choose on the basis of different conceptions of rationality, which in turn may lead to a reasonable disagreement concerning the principles of justice selected. I then argue that this reasonable disagreement should not lead us to abandon contractualism, but (...) rather to reconstruct it in the form of a two-stage process, where parties first build individual preference rankings for alternative conceptions of justice and then work towards a reconciliation of the divergent conceptions that are chosen in the first stage. Finally, I claim that threshold prioritarianism is a strong candidate for selection in this reconciliatory stage, since it manages to address both the legitimate complaints of parties that would prefer a conception of justice focused on the most disadvantaged positions in society and the legitimate complaints of parties that would prefer a conception of justice in which less or no special weight is assigned to the worst-off positions. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge the claim that each party in the original position will have a first-ranked preference for an identical set of principles of justice. I maintain, by contrast, that the original position allows parties to choose on the basis of different conceptions of rationality, which in turn may lead to a reasonable disagreement concerning the principles of justice selected. I then argue that this reasonable disagreement should not lead us to abandon contractualism, but (...) rather to reconstruct it in the form of a two-stage process, where parties first build individual preference rankings for alternative conceptions of justice and then work towards a reconciliation of the divergent conceptions that are chosen in the first stage. Finally, I claim that threshold prioritarianism is a strong candidate for selection in this reconciliatory stage, since it manages to address both the legitimate complaints of parties that would prefer a conception of justice focused on the most disadvantaged positions in society and the legitimate complaints of parties that would prefer a conception of justice in which less or no special weight is assigned to the worst-off positions. (shrink)

On the standard version of political liberalism, the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justifiable to all reasonable persons. Correspondingly, reasonable disagreement about the moral doctrines underlying a law makes that law not justifiable to all reasonable persons. In this paper, I argue that political liberals are committed to understanding reasonable disagreement as being rational, rather than praiseworthy disagreement between morally reasonable person because other conceptions of reasonableness commit (...) them to an incoherent triad of claims. (shrink)

This paper is part of a broader argument that seeks to offer a justification for political authority. It aims to investigate the role of truth in political argument and to place the problem of reasonable disagreement. The argument focuses on the possibility of political deliberation, that figures as a stage of political decision-making. It has to do with a confrontation between incompatible substantive beliefs which, however, all seem to be reasonable. How can citizens holding incompatible beliefs engage (...) in an enterprise of justifying them to one another? That is the question. (shrink)

The contemporary problem of disagreement has two prominent solutions. The Conciliationists think that after discovering a case of disagreement one should be less certain of one’s original position. Those who favor Conciliatory views tend to think that disagreement is epistemically significant because it causes problems for one’s rationality. The Steadfasters, on the other hand, think that one should maintain one’s belief in the face of a disagreement; thus, disagreement appears a less epistemically significant problem to (...) them. But neither of these solutions address the actual problem of disagreements: that the very same faculties which cause me to trust myself provide you a differing opinion. Therefore, we need a solution for disagreement that responds to the issues it presents to one’s self-trust rather than secondary factors, like the likelihood of peerhood or the truth of the Uniqueness Thesis. Such an account ought to be regulative in nature. That is, it should offer insight to epistemic agents. The best of the regulative accounts can be found in virtue epistemology, because its practical nature is grounded in a holistic appraisal of epistemic agents. In cases of disagreement, to be epistemically virtuous, an agent needs to balance her intellectual fortitude with her intellectual humility and open-mindedness. But in order to balance these virtues when they appear to be in conflict, we need another resource that is able to govern them. For this purpose, I introduce intellectual phronesis. Like its moral counterpart, intellectual phronesis can help one to discern the particularity of situations in order to determine the appropriate response. Accordingly, intellectual phronesis is the ideal tool to adjudicate which intellectual virtue is appropriate for a particular disagreement. (shrink)

The concept of “gradually adaptive frameworks” is introduced as a model with the potential to describe the evolution of belief evaluative systems through the consideration of reasonable arguments and evidence. This concept is demonstrated through an analysis of specific points of disagreement between David Elliott’s praxial philosophy and Bennett Reimer’s aesthetic philosophy. A parallel case of disagreement is introduced from the literature of contemporary epistemology. This case, comprised of a disagreement between Thomas Kelly and Richard Feldman, (...) deals explicitly with the subject of “peer disagreement”. The discussion of this conceptual analysis is used to establish an advocacy position for the central positioning of critical thinking skills in any educative endeavor. (shrink)

Evidentialism as its leading proponents describe it has two distinct senses, these being evidentialism as a conceptual analysis of epistemic justification, and as a prescriptive ethics of belief—an account of what one ‘ought to believe’ under different epistemic circumstances. These two senses of evidentialism are related, but in the work of leading evidentialist philosophers, in ways that I think are deeply problematic. Although focusing on Richard Feldman’s ethics of belief, this chapter is critical of evidentialism in both senses. However, I (...) share with authors like Feldman and Earl Conee, that epistemology has important prescriptive functions, and that a sound, civic ethics of belief is of more than merely philosophic importance. One reason why an ethics of belief might be important to problems of practice is the need we have for tools to more effectively mediate the renewed round of ‘culture wars’ we are experiencing in Anglo-American cultures. I mean especially that grand cultural clash between science and religion, reason and faith, secularist atheism and religious fundamentalism, etc. Let us start with the genealogical question of why there is such a grand cultural debate in the first place, and why the debate especially as played out in public and popular forums and even in the courtrooms seems so volatile and so often to confusedly drag everything—beliefs, values, passions, etc., with it. These are questions that I think Sigmund Freud’s classic Civilization and its Discontents can help us understand. Freud was a major voice in criticism of the stern and often hypocritical Victorian morality, a voice pointing out the price of its sometimes high-handed, guiltinducing curtailments of the satisfactions sought by the individual. But for Freud while there are real differences in the moral demands that different societies or traditions place upon people, there is something inevitable about the conflict itself, for “replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization... (shrink)

This comment raises two worries for Crane’s view of religious beliefs and their contents. First, I argue that his appeal to inferentialism about the contents of dispositional beliefs cannot fully avoid the problem of inconsistent beliefs. For the same problem can be raised for occurrent thought, and the inferentialist solution is not available there. Second, I argue that religious beliefs differ from ordinary beliefs with respect to their justification in cases of peer disagreements. This suggests that noncognitivism about religious beliefs, (...) which Crane opposes, is the correct view after all. (shrink)

Proposals for allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic have aligned in some ways and conflicted in others. This paper attempts a kind of priority setting in addressing these conflicts. In the first part, we identify points on which we do not believe that reasonable people should differ—even if they do. These are (i) the inadequacy of traditional clinical ethics to address priority-setting in a pandemic; (ii) the relevance of saving lives; (iii) the flaws of (...) first-come, first-served allocation; (iv) the relevance of post-episode survival; (v) the difference between age and other factors that affect life-expectancy; and (vi) the need to avoid quality-of-life judgments. In the second part, we lay out some positions on which reasonable people can and do differ. These include (i) conflicts between maximizing benefits and priority to the worst off; (ii) role-based priority; and (iii) whether patients’ existing lifesaving resources should be subject to redistribution. (shrink)

An individual's beliefs can be seen as rationally related to one another in a kind of web. These beliefs, however, may not form a single, seamless web. There may exist smaller, largely self-contained webs with few or no rational relations to the larger web. Such “webs of faith” make it possible for reasonable deliberators to persist in a disagreement even under ideal deliberative conditions. The possibility of reasonable disagreement challenges the assumption that rationality should lead to (...) consensus and presents an obstacle to the goals of liberal democracy. (shrink)

The problem of peer disagreement is to explain how you should respond when you and a peer have the same evidence bearing on some proposition and are equally competent epistemic agents, yet have reached opposite conclusions about. According to Christensen's Independence Thesis, in assessing the effect of your peer's disagreement, you must not rely on the reasoning behind your initial belief. I note that ‘the reasoning behind your initial belief’ can be given either a token or type reading. (...) I argue that the type reading is false, but the token reading is extremely weak. (shrink)

I defend an inference to the best explanation (IBE) argument for anti-realism about reasons for acting based on the history of intractable disagreement in moral philosophy. The four key premises of the argument are: 1. If there were objective reasons for action, epistemically-well-situated observers would eventually converge upon them after two thousand years; 2. Contemporary philosophers, as the beneficiaries of two thousand years of philosophy, are epistemically well-situated observers; 3. Contemporary philosophers have not converged upon reasons for action; 4. (...) Conclusion: there are no objective reasons for action (IBE from the first three premises). The key premises of the IBE are (1) sentimentalism; (2) non-cognitivism about basic affects; and (3) philosophical arguments for what our reasons for action are always involve arguments that depend on a basic intuitive moral judgment (that can be explained in terms of a basic non-cognitive affect). All these premises are explored in detail, and various objections addressed. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Disagreement is common: even informed, intelligent, and generally reasonable people often come to different conclusions when confronted with what seems to be the same evidence. Can the competing conclusions be reasonable? If not, what can we reasonably think about the situation? This volume examines the epistemology of disagreement. Philosophical questions about disagreement arise in various areas, notably politics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion: but this will be the first book focusing on the general (...) epistemic issues arising from informed disagreement. Ten leading philosophers offer specially written essays which together will offer a starting-point for future work on this topic. (shrink)

Evidence in medicine can come from more or less trustworthy sources and be produced by more or less reliable methods, and its interpretation can be disputed. As such, it can be unclear when disagreements in medicine result from different, but reasonable, interpretations of the available evidence and when they result from unreasonable refusals to consider legitimate evidence. In this article, we seek to show how assessments of the relevance and implications of evidence are typically affected by factors beyond that (...) evidence itself, such as our beliefs about the credibility of the speaker or source of the evidence. In evaluating evidence, there is thus a need for reflective awareness about why we accept or dismiss particular claims. (shrink)

People disagree. Along with doubt, modesty and curiosity, disagreement is one of the most valuable assets reasoning beings can have. Disagreements give us alternatives. Sometimes we need to decide among alternatives. This paper is for such times; it addresses the development of a rational model for the resolution of disagreement. The goal is to reach rational agreement, or to reach the stage at which disagreement can be clearly described and turned over to rational consensus theories. A rarely (...) noticed problem with all such rational consensus models is that they do not provide for generating either rational agreement or clearly described disagreement before turning to procedures designed to produce consensus. One purpose of this paper is to close that gap. (shrink)

We share Nelson and Meyer's (2005) frustration with the dearth of meaningful debate evidenced in the President's Council on Bioethics's (PCB's) Report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity. But we disag...

In this paper, we will object to the hypothesis according to which the epistemic challenge posed by irrelevant influences can be reduced to the one posed by acknowledged epistemic peer disagreement. We will develop our objection considering as a paradigmatic example of an irrelevant influence the desire that acts as a motivational factor in typical cases of self-deception. Furthermore, we will examine the role played by the debunking reasoning in the cases of disagreement in which one of the (...) conflicting persons is self-deceived. (shrink)

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a strong tendency (...) among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]. (shrink)