Papers Concerning Moral Disagreement
This dissertation is made up of three papers concerning moral disagreement. The first paper, "Thinking about Moral Disagreement", asks what metaethical views need to do when they account for moral disagreement. Successful metaethical views will convincingly account all of morality’s core features; including the fact that we seem to disagree a lot about ethics. I make the case that many arguments in the literature for the conclusion that some metaethical view does a good job explaining moral disagreement are too narrow to draw the desired conclusion. I then propose a set of minimal adequacy conditions for accounts of moral disagreement. Accounts should minimally: (1) explain the fact that it seems like we disagree about morality [explain our ordinary existence intuitions]; (2) explain what kind of disagreement moral disagreement is [provide an ontology]; (3) explain all of the basic features of moral disagreement [be extensionally adequate]. Once we get clear on this, it’s not obvious which species of metaethical view is best placed to explain the phenomenon. The second paper, "Impaired Intuitionism", concerns a moral realist response to moral disagreement. Moral realism is the view that there are objective moral facts. Realists are often thought to be badly placed when it comes to accounting for moral disagreement because this commitment makes it difficult to explain why moral disagreements (seem) harder to resolve and more strongly predicted by one’s social and cultural identity than disagreements in other more archetypically objective domains. I argue that if realists adopt a perceptualist epistemology and make use of work on cognitive penetration from cognitive science, they gain the resources to explain these features of moral disagreement in a powerful and explanatorily detailed way. I call the view that adopts cognitive penetration of moral intuitions ‘Impaired Intuitionism’. The third paper, "On ‘Objectivity’ as a Democratic Epistemic Virtue", concerns disagreements in democracies. Some kinds of disagreements that face democratic societies are both existentially threatening and bound up with values/identities. Disagreement about climate change, is a good example. Recent work on motivated reasoning suggests that merely improving basic scientific education for citizens doesn’t cause agreement on issues like climate change. Hannon (2022) suggests that in addition, we need to cultivate an epistemic virtue of objectivity. I argue that this is only true if we adopt a particular conception of objectivity; and not the kind that Hannon seems to have in mind. If we’re going to adopt an epistemic virtue of objectivity in a democracy, it should be strong objectivity. I consider what this means for education in democracies.