Faultless Disagreement, Realism and Moral Objectivity
- PDF / 467,705 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 63 Downloads / 182 Views
(0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().,-volV)
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Faultless Disagreement, Realism and Moral Objectivity Manfred Harth1 Received: 19 May 2017 / Accepted: 17 September 2018 Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract The argument from faultless disagreement against moral realism is based on the alleged possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement, CFD. This possibility contradicts the pre-theoretic intuition that moral truth is knowable, in principle, the so-called epistemic constraint on moral truth, EC. In this paper, I discuss the realist’s two options to cope with this argument. First of all, I point out the realist’s strategies to explain the possibility of cognitively faultless error, which is implied by CFD. Then I discuss one promising option to respond to the argument from faultless disagreement: accepting both CFD and EC but blocking the ensuing contradiction by invoking an equivocation as regards the notion of knowability. After pointing out the drawbacks of this solution I discuss the other promising option: rejecting CFD by drawing on an agnostic stance on the part of cognitively blameless thinkers as regards moral propositions they cannot agree on. Yet this option faces the problem that EC has to be denied. In concluding the paper, I outline the prospects of an attractive objectivist shape of moral antirealism, which is also affected by the argument from faultless disagreement.
1 Introduction Arguments from disagreement against moral realism are manifold (see the discussions in, for example, Enoch 2009; Tersman 2006), but we can distinguish between two main types of argument. The ‘‘classic’’ type (e.g. Mackie 1977) relies on the persistency of disagreements between even the most sophisticated and perceptive thinkers with diverging moral views, e.g. the on-going disagreement between those who morally disapprove of medically assisted suicide and its proponents. The more recent type of argument, in contrast, draws on the observation that such disputes appear not to involve any (relevant) mistake; i.e. that they seem to be faultless. So the challenge to the realist is how to deal with such cases of & Manfred Harth [email protected] 1
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita¨t Mu¨nchen, Ludwigstr. 31, 80539 Munich, Germany
123
M. Harth
apparently faultless moral disagreement. A promising reply is to acknowledge their possible faultlessness—in order to be able to explain the striking persistency of such moral disputes—but at the same time to conceive of faultlessness in a certain realist friendly way (see e.g. Ko¨lbel 2004): on the one hand, such moral conflicts are faultless in a crucial sense, viz. cognitively faultless, though, on the other hand, they do involve some kind of mistake, viz. the straightforward mistake to believe something that isn’t true.1 For, on a realist view, it is ruled out that both a belief and its negation are true together, so that one of the parties in the disagreement has to be mistaken. The sense in which such disputes are or might be faultless, then,
Data Loading...
