Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics
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MD final version.pdf
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565.89 KB
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Author(s)
Knobe, Joshua
Khoo, Justin Donald
Date Issued
June 2016
Journal
Noûs
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
Citation
Khoo, Justin and Joshua Knobe. “Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics.” Noûs 52, 1 (June 2016): 109–143 © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences (“X is wrong”/“X is not wrong”), it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences (i.e., that it has to be the case that at least one of them is incorrect). This inference then plays a key role in a now‐standard argument against certain theories in moral semantics. In this paper, we introduce new evidence that bears on this debate. We show that there are moral conflict cases in which people are inclined to say both (a) that the two speakers disagree and (b) that it is not the case at least one of them must be saying something incorrect. We then explore how we might understand such disagreements. As a proof of concept, we sketch an account of the concept of disagreement and an independently motivated theory of moral semantics which, together, explain the possibility of such cases.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12151
