Björkholm, Stina | 2025
Synthese
The key characteristic of deep disagreements is that any attempt to resolve them just reveals new points of disagreement that stem from underlying commitments. Many moral disagreements appear to be like this. Do people have a moral obligation to get vaccinated? Should women always have the right to abortion – or is abortion rarely or never permissible? People who disagree on these issues often accept very different underlying values and commitments. In this paper, I argue that when deep moral disagreements become widespread, they can constitute an obstacle for achieving or sustaining moral progress because the interlocutors of a deep disagreement fail to engage in rational conversation. I develop Fogelin’s (Informal Logic 7, 1985) thesis, influenced by Wittgenstein, that deep disagreements do not occur in normal conversational circumstances. This is primarily done by applying Robert’s (Semantics and Pragmatics 5:1–69, 2012) theory of how questions determine the direction and aim of conversation. I argue that the parties of deep disagreement are unable to include new questions in their discourse context that would provide strategies for resolving the first-order moral question (e.g., concerning abortion or vaccines) that they disagree about. I propose that a possible strategy for resolving such deep disagreements by engaging in conversational pretense, but ultimately argue that this strategy faces a number of worries.
