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Moral disagreement and shared meaning

Merli, David Allen
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1069810158

Abstract Details

2003, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Philosophy.
In order to have genuine disagreement, interlocutors must share terms, meanings, and concepts. Without this, their dispute is merely verbal; it rests on linguistic confusion. This is true of all conversation, but many philosophers have thought that moral discourse poses special problems. Moral discourse seems to contain intractable disagreements and lacks the sorts of authority and deference relations that are typical in straightforward empirical disagreement. This yields a potent philosophical puzzle: how is it that moral evaluators can share a subject matter while thinking such different things? I argue that noncognitivist attempts to make sense of disagreement fail. The noncognitivist is obliged to provide an account of the mental states at work in moral discourse. These accounts either fail to identify a distinct species of moral evaluation, or to provide for genuine incompatibility between competing moral judgments, or to avoid circularity. Thus one of the most important motivations for noncognitivist accounts is undermined. I show how naturalistic moral realism can be defended against popular arguments against its ability to make sense of univocity. This criticism has been revived in recent work by Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons. I develop three objections to their so-called ‘Moral Twin Earth’ argument, and conclude that it has no force against moral realism. I then show that naturalistic realism faces a different problem accounting for univocity. This problem results from the fact that the path of moral inquiry is underdetermined: there is no fact of the matter about the referents of speakers’ terms. I argue that common realistic appeals to the resolution of moral dispute are not sufficient, because they fail to note a distinction between different readings of the convergence claim. The most plausible ways of understanding that claim are of no help to the realist’s semantic requirements. Finally, I consider a rejoinder suggested by recent work in the philosophy of language. Though not compatible with realism’s moral semantics, this rejoinder suggests that moral and non-moral language are on a par. I offer some reasons for doubting this claim, and suggest that moralizing poses unique interpretive challenges.
Justin D'Arms (Advisor)
277 p.
Philosophy
metaethics; noncognitivism; realism; expressivism; univocity; univocality; disagreement

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Merli, D. A. (2003). Moral disagreement and shared meaning [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1069810158

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Merli, David. Moral disagreement and shared meaning. 2003. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1069810158.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Merli, David. "Moral disagreement and shared meaning." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1069810158

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1069810158
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.