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Magistrates, Mobs, and Moral Disagreement: Countering the Actual Disagreement Challenge to Moral Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2022

Gregory Robson Open the ORCID record for Gregory Robson [Opens in a new window]
Gregory Robson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
*
Email: grobson@iastate.edu
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Abstract

I defend convergentist realism from counterarguments that appeal to apparently deep and widespread moral disagreement. Pace recent claims by antirealists, I first argue that scenarios such as the prominent “Magistrate and the Mob” case betray cognitive defects in subjects, such as partiality, that we would not find in ideal agents. After this, I defend three reasons to expect cross-cultural disagreement on moral cases even if convergentist realism is true. These defusing explanations concern individual and group moral development and the moral models on which agents rely. While developing my defense of moral realism, I aim for comprehensive engagement with responses to arguments by Doris, Plakias, and others that have been dispersed across several related articles.

Keywords

Moral realismdisagreementcognitive diversityculturedefusing explanationspartialityDorisPlakias
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 51 , Issue 6 , August 2021 , pp. 416 - 435
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Canadian Journal of Philosophy

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