Are We Playing a Moral Lottery? Moral Disagreement from a Metasemantic Perspective

If someone disagrees with my moral views, or more generally if I’m in a group of n people who all disagree with each other, but I don’t have any special evidence or basis for my epistemic superiority, then it’s at best a 1-in-n chance that my views are correct. The skeptical threat from disagreement is thus a kind of moral lottery, to adapt a similar metaphor from Sharon Street. Her own genealogical debunking argument, as I discuss, relies on a premise of such disagreement among evolutionary counterparts.In this paper, I resist the threat from disagreement by showing that, on some of the most influential and most attractive theories of content determination, the premise of moral disagreement cannot serve any skeptical or revisionary purposes. I examine and criticize attempts, made by Gilbert Harman and Sharon Street, to argue from disagreement to relativism by relying on a theory of content determination that involves a principle that, within certain constraints, maximizes the attribution to us of true beliefs. And I examine and criticize Robert Williams’s attempt to show there is moral disagreement by relying on a theory of content determination that involves a principle that instead maximizes the attribution to us of rationality. My overall aim is to defend commonsense moral realism via a careful look at the theory of content and concepts.

Moral Bioenhancement: Widespread Harm and Broad Cooperation

<p>A controversial issue in contemporary bioethics has emerged in recent years: moral bioenhancement (MB). Human bioenhancement in general has seen its share of controversy, but it is generally agreed that there is potential to improve human physical and mental capacities through biotechnological interventions such as medicinal drugs and genetic modification. The discussion has turned to whether biotechnological interventions could similarly improve human moral capacities. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued that MB is imperative if humans are to survive into the future, because our current moral capacities do not equip us to address future catastrophic problems, Ultimate Harm, which will be caused by modern advanced scientific progress. I suggest related but distinct reasons why MB is appealing: scientific progress and deficient human moral capacities are jointly responsible for enormous amounts of harm all over the world, Widespread Harm, and MB has the potential to reduce that harm. Human moral capacities are deficient because of their dependence on what I call ‘moral intuitions’; evolved psychological traits that shape our many societies’ varied moral values, resulting in moral disagreement and the disruption of inter-group cooperation. Addressing modern problems requires a broader level of cooperation that is unlikely to be achieved by depending on our current moral intuitions. This is why our moral capacities should be improved. However, typical accounts of MB do not describe interventions that will improve our moral capacities in this way. They are focused on the vague objective of ‘making people morally better’, assuming that this will address human moral deficiency and that this will in turn address the resulting problems. ‘Making people morally better’ means making them more satisfactory to our current moral intuitions, which are the root of moral deficiency, so these MB strategies are unlikely to be effective. An alternative MB strategy, which I propose, instead focuses on the objective of modifying current moral intuitions so that they promote broad cooperation. This will result in improved moral capacities in the sense that our moral capacities will be more practically useful to us. However, because this strategy disregards the importance of satisfying our current moral intuitions, it will be morally unpalatable. This is its main disadvantage over the typical MB strategy, though it is better at handling many common objections. Ultimately, there are a number of practical concerns that cannot be completely satisfactorily responded to even by my new MB strategy, such as the issues of mandatory MB and of fine-tuning our moral capacities. These concerns may mean that MB is too risky, and therefore not the best course of action in response to modern problems rooted in scientific progress and moral deficiency, particularly since we have promising alternatives available such as traditional moral enhancement techniques and further scientific progress. The prospect of MB should continue to be investigated, but it should focus on improving upon our current problematic moral intuitions rather than better satisfying them.</p>

Moral Bioenhancement: Widespread Harm and Broad Cooperation

<p>A controversial issue in contemporary bioethics has emerged in recent years: moral bioenhancement (MB). Human bioenhancement in general has seen its share of controversy, but it is generally agreed that there is potential to improve human physical and mental capacities through biotechnological interventions such as medicinal drugs and genetic modification. The discussion has turned to whether biotechnological interventions could similarly improve human moral capacities. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued that MB is imperative if humans are to survive into the future, because our current moral capacities do not equip us to address future catastrophic problems, Ultimate Harm, which will be caused by modern advanced scientific progress. I suggest related but distinct reasons why MB is appealing: scientific progress and deficient human moral capacities are jointly responsible for enormous amounts of harm all over the world, Widespread Harm, and MB has the potential to reduce that harm. Human moral capacities are deficient because of their dependence on what I call ‘moral intuitions’; evolved psychological traits that shape our many societies’ varied moral values, resulting in moral disagreement and the disruption of inter-group cooperation. Addressing modern problems requires a broader level of cooperation that is unlikely to be achieved by depending on our current moral intuitions. This is why our moral capacities should be improved. However, typical accounts of MB do not describe interventions that will improve our moral capacities in this way. They are focused on the vague objective of ‘making people morally better’, assuming that this will address human moral deficiency and that this will in turn address the resulting problems. ‘Making people morally better’ means making them more satisfactory to our current moral intuitions, which are the root of moral deficiency, so these MB strategies are unlikely to be effective. An alternative MB strategy, which I propose, instead focuses on the objective of modifying current moral intuitions so that they promote broad cooperation. This will result in improved moral capacities in the sense that our moral capacities will be more practically useful to us. However, because this strategy disregards the importance of satisfying our current moral intuitions, it will be morally unpalatable. This is its main disadvantage over the typical MB strategy, though it is better at handling many common objections. Ultimately, there are a number of practical concerns that cannot be completely satisfactorily responded to even by my new MB strategy, such as the issues of mandatory MB and of fine-tuning our moral capacities. These concerns may mean that MB is too risky, and therefore not the best course of action in response to modern problems rooted in scientific progress and moral deficiency, particularly since we have promising alternatives available such as traditional moral enhancement techniques and further scientific progress. The prospect of MB should continue to be investigated, but it should focus on improving upon our current problematic moral intuitions rather than better satisfying them.</p>

Social Contract, Extended Goodness, and Moral Disagreement

This article discusses the role played by interpersonal comparisons (of utility or goodness) in matters of justice and equity. The role of such interpersonal comparisons has initially been made explicit in the context of social choice theory through the concept of extended preferences. Social choice theorists have generally claimed that extended preferences should be taken as being uniform across a population. Three related claims are made within this perspective. First, though it is sometimes opposed to social choice theory, the social contract approach may also consider the possibility of interpersonal comparisons. This is due to the fact that justice principles may be partially justified on a teleological basis. Second, searching for the uniformity of interpersonal comparisons is both hopeless and useless. In particular, moral disagreement does not originate in the absence of such uniformity. Third, interpersonal comparisons should be accounted for both in social choice and social contract theories in terms of sympathetic identification based on reciprocal respect and tolerance, where each person’s conception of the good partially takes care of others’ good. From the moral point of view, any person’s conception of the good should thus be ‘extended’ to others’ personal conceptions. This extension is, however, limited due to the inherent limitations in sympathetic identification and is a long way from guaranteeing the uniformity assumed by social choice theorists.

Integrated Moral Agency and the Practical Phenomenon of Moral Diversity

The practical phenomenon of moral diversity is a central feature of many contemporary societies and poses a distinct problem to moral theory building. Because of its goal to settle the moral question fully and exclusively and/or to provide better understanding of moral disagreement, traditional first-order moral theory often does not provide sufficient guidance to address this phenomenon and moral agency in deeply morally diverse societies. In this article, I move beyond traditional first-order moral theorizing and, based on multilevel social contract theory (Moehler 2018, 2020a), develop a practically sound notion of moral agency for morally diverse societies. The interrelational and dynamic notion of integrated moral agency developed in this article demands that agents actively exercise their rational and affective capacities, are receptive to the capacities of others, and are aware of the type of moral interaction in which they engage with others. The notion of integrated moral agency helps agents to reconcile conflicting first-order moral directives and to maximally protect agents’ autonomy in morally diverse societies.

Moral Disagreement in Anglican – Roman Catholic Relations

The belief that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches were divided by moral disagreements came to prominence in the early 1980s and affected the direction of ecumenical dialogue. But no moral disagreements go back to the Reformation era, and the perception of moral difference has undergone many changes since that time, especially reflecting differences of social and political setting. A moral agreement or disagreement is difficult to chart with precision. It is not embodied in a formulation of moral doctrine, since moral reason functions on two planes, that of evaluative description and that of deliberation and decision. Disagreement is phenomenologically present as offence, which has its own dynamic of expansion. Addressing offence, a task involving lay, theological and episcopal contributions, is the primary way in which moral agreement has to be sought and defended.