Abstract

Teaching ethics is always challenging, and it is especially challenging in a pluralistic society. One reason is that the participants in an ethical dispute frequently have different fundamental interests and perspectives, and they may not be fully aware of the extent to which they have, or share, or fail to share certain interests. It is a difficult task simply to sort out the various interests, both conscious and subconscious, that participants in a dispute bring to a table. And, partly because that is such a difficult task, we tend to forget that there are other causes of ethical disagreement, and that one particularly troublesome cause is the different level of commitment people may have to using words to settle ethical disputes in the first place.