Value Disagreement, Action, and Commitment

Métaéthique seminar 

Abstract

The problem of disagreement is a well-known tool in the arsenal of various moral anti-realist and skeptical views. The fact of persistent disagreement about moral issues among different cultures, or different people in the same culture, is supposed to be evidence that our moral judgments do not track a realm of objective values. Moral realists and objectivists of various stripes have tried to answer these challenges. These philosophers often appeal to claims that the extent of disagreement is exaggerated and that similar forms of disagreement show up in other domains, or that some forms of moral realism or objectivism are immune to these challenges. I will not be concerned at all with these issues in this chapter; I will be concerned with a different challenge raised by the fact of value disagreement, a challenge that has received significantly less attention in the philosophical literature.
Here is a very preliminary way to put the challenge: whether or not disagreement raises doubts about moral realism or objectivity, it should, at least under certain circumstances, lower our confidence in our evaluative judgments. But such lowering of confidence, if taken seriously, seems to leave us with no way to move from our judgments to actions; neither is our usual commitment to morality in particular justified, nor is any particular course of action based on these evaluative judgments justified. The concern here is similar to the concern that theoretical skepticism might lead us to
paralysis, but it turns out to be significantly more intractable, or so I’ll argue. In other words, our topic is not skepticism about the reality of values, but skepticism about rational action based on our evaluative judgment; I will call this kind of skepticism “commitment skepticism”. My claim is that the most promising solution to commitment skepticism is to deny that first step and argue that some form of practical certainty resists the argument from disagreement. I argue that Kant’s view about our awareness of the moral law provides a way of accepting that at least an important core of our practical knowledge can warrant full commitment to action.