Content area
Full text
J Value Inquiry (2009) 43:447455
DOI 10.1007/s10790-009-9164-x
Andrew Sneddon
Published online: 2 June 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Here is a version of the familiar argument from disagreement. The successes of science are best explained by invoking a realist understanding of these successes.1 Moral realism is warranted only if the same pattern applies to ethics and ethical successes are best explained by invoking a realist understanding of them. One hallmark of scientic success is convergence of explanation: scientists with quite different cultural backgrounds can typically agree in assessing scientic explanations.2 Ethics does not exhibit this hallmark of success. Instead, ethics is beset by fundamental disagreement among interlocutors who suffer from no epistemic disadvantage. On the basis of fundamental disagreement, the analogy between ethics and science is undermined: moral realism is not warranted.
This argument roughly captures an important focal point of discussion in contemporary meta-ethics.3 Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interdisciplinary work between philosophers and psychologists about moral psychology. Working within this trend, John Doris and Alexandra Plakias have made a tentative version of the above argument on empirical grounds.4 Doris and Plakias present empirical evidence in support of the fourth premise, that ethics is
1 John Doris and Alexandra Plakias, How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 2008), p. 311.
2 Richard Boyd, How to be a Moral Realist, in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, ed., Essays in Moral Realism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 185 and cited by Doris and Plakias, op. cit., p. 311.
3 See Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); see also John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), Boyd op. cit., and Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994).
4 See Doris and Plakias, op. cit. See also Alexandra Plakias and John Doris, How to nd a Disagreement: Philosophical Diversity and Moral Realism, in Sinnott- Armstrong, ed., op. cit.
A. Sneddon (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, 70 Laurier East Street, P.O. Box 450, Stn. A, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canadae-mail: [email protected]
Normative Ethics and...