David Hume’s famous argument against believing miracle reports exemplifies several key issues relating to the emergence of modern naturalism. Hume uncritically assumes the universal and unproblematic nature of core conceptions such as ‘supernatural’ and ‘laws of nature’. Hume’s argument also presents him with a dilemma. He relies upon the weight of testimony to establish his case against believing miracle reports, but must also contend with the weight of testimony, across different times and cultures, to the existence of the supernatural. Hume resolves this by an appeal to historical progress accompanied by a dubious racial theory. These enable him to discount testimonies emanating from the past and from other cultures. ‘Hume’s dilemma’ has not gone away and, if anything, is even more acute since the traditions and beliefs of non-Western cultures are now more difficult to dismiss on the basis of dubious historical accounts of Western exceptionalism. This dilemma amounts to a tension between the ethics of belief and the demands of epistemic justice.

This chapter shifts the focus from principle to pragmatic concerns. It starts by considering a number of pragmatic maxims that apply to the enforcement of morality. These maxims limit the relevance of the more abstract principles discussed in this book and will suggest to some that a better approach would start first with the maxims and consider principles only when necessary. This chapter indirectly defends the principles-first approach adopted in this book by outlining what would be lost if this rival maxims-first approach were pursued. The chapter then turns to the problem of overcriminalization, to which the ethical environmentalism defended in this book may seem to be especially vulnerable. This problem points to the importance of identifying alternative enforcement methods to the criminal law, and the importance of comparative assessments of legal and social enforcement mechanisms. The chapter concludes by discussing the social fact of intractable disagreement over the content of morality in modern societies, and the limits, as well as the benefits, this fact presents to the project of ethical environmentalism.

This chapter examines the idea of ’dialogue’ as a way of conceptualising the relationship between the courts and the legislature in a system of ’weak-form review’. Tracking the trajectory of dialogue theory in Canada and in the UK, this chapter outlines the promise and perils of dialogue. By highlighting the iterative and interactive dynamic between courts and legislatures when seeking to uphold rights, the metaphor of dialogue held out the promise that it could transcend the Manichean narrative. However, the chapter argues that the idea of dialogue overpromised and underdelivered. It failed to take us beyond the Manichean narrative and ultimately provided a misleading and distorted understanding of the constitutional relationships between the branches of government in a constitutional democracy.

This chaptercomments on the relationship between moderation and civility and argues that the latter can work as an effective antidote to a festering climate of fear, rage, and intimidation.

This chapter describes how romantic partners navigate the disagreements that necessarily result from their interdependence and how partners recover when they intentionally or unintentionally hurt each other. Specifically, it reviews the ways in which goals and desires conflict to produce disagreements and how disagreements provide a diagnostic situation in which people make inferences about their partner’s thoughts, feelings, and commitment. Next, it describes typical conflict topics, how conflicts tend to be experienced, and typical conflict prevalence over the course of a romantic relationship. Next, the chapter covers how people manage interpersonal conflicts and highlights specific conflict behaviors that are typically destructive (e.g., hostility, withdrawal) and specific conflict behaviors that are typically constructive (e.g., intimacy, problem solving), as well as how the adaptiveness of conflict behaviors can change depending on the situation. Finally, this chapter reviews how partners can recover from destructive conflicts and other relationship transgressions by accommodating rather than retaliating, sacrificing, and forgiving.

The third chapter draws upon the procedures of ordinary language philosophy discussed in Chapter 2 to offer a critique of contemporary democratic theory. A significant point of contention between deliberative and agonistic democratic theorists is over the purpose of political argumentation. While deliberative democrats maintain that the goal of political debate is to reach agreement, many agonistic democratic theorists claim that arguments can foster relations of adversarial respect. This chapter demonstrates how the deliberative versus agonistic democracy debate is operating at cross-purposes. Behind this debate is the skeptical concern that if political argumentation cannot come to an agreement, then the enterprise is either irrational or prone to relativism. Drawing upon Cavell’s insight that human understanding rests upon agreement in forms of life, I examine how democratic discourse involves agreements at two levels: at the level of opinions and at the level of the discourse itself. This chapter clarifies what is at stake in the deliberative-agonistic democratic theory debate. Cavell helps us reimagine democracy by fostering a culture in which minority communities do not have to phrase their grievances within the language of hegemonic cultures.

The success of a democratic society depends, Rawls thought, on members having a shared sense of justice, a common basis for reasoning about what is right. Otherwise, disagreements born from conflicts of interest and identity – and associated “distrust and resentment” – will have corrosive effects on social cooperation. But can we reasonably hope for a broadly shared sense of justice? Religious and philosophical pluralism arguably leave hope for an overlapping consensus on a conception of justice sufficient to cabin those corrosive effects. But what about the pluralism of conceptions of justice themselves? I argue that, even on favorable assumptions about people and social cooperation, we should expect serious disagreement about conceptions of justice and the forms of democracy they recommend, as well as conflicts between and among the interests and identities of citizens who endorse those competing conceptions. Even on these favorable assumptions, then, we have reason to worry – as I think Rawls always did – about the fragility of democracy.

Logical pluralism is sometimes motivated by the claim that it affords a more charitable interpretation of important debates in philosophical logic than monism does. This chapter argues that this claim is false. Pluralists are unable to account for important parts of logical and mathematical practice since they are in no position to account for potential rivalry between different logics. This is a problem for the charity-based project because most non-classical logicians formulate their theories of logical consequence as rivals to classical logic. I introduce three approaches to rivalry that focus on semantics, metasemantics, and applications, respectively. I argue in this chapter that neither the semantic nor the metasemantic approach offer a sense of rivalry that is plausible from a pluralist perspective, leaving the applicational approach for the following chapter. I further argue that this supports the conclusion that, at least as far as issues concerning the meanings of logical vocabulary are concerned, the correct logics are ultimately compatible. If we are interested in potential rivalry between the logics, we will have to look elsewhere.

This chapter examines how different democratic decision-procedures – voting, majority rule, compromise, consensus, and public deliberation – relate to claims for recognition and democratic respect. Via a contrast with Rousseau and an explication of majority rule as a principle that regulates political decision-making over time, the chapter challenges the common view that populism is characterized by its unequivocal adherence to democratic principles of popular sovereignty and majority rule. The second part of the chapter discusses compromise as an attitude one can take when making decisions with one’s fellow citizens. Populists regard compromise as a form of betrayal, weakness, and defeat, while this chapter defends it as an important aspect of democratic respect. Political theorists have discussed whether the reasons for compromise are only pragmatic or whether they can also be principled. Populism’s principled rejection of compromise shows why our defense of this practice must be principled. The last part of the chapter connects the spirit of compromise to the notion of solidarity sketched in Chapter 2 and argues that compromise can be seen as a form of solidaristic inclusion of people with whom one profoundly disagrees.

This chapter examines Maritain’s notion of practical consensus amongst diverse views and backgrounds. For the Universal Declaration, this was built around a specific text setting forth rights dishonoured during war. Post-war conditions provided a stimulus for agreement amongst States. The chapter considers the prospects for consensus when moving beyond the mere enumeration of human rights, to their application in contemporary times, confronted with diverse philosophical views about their foundations. Reflecting on Maritain’s economic thought, I argue that those prospects are hampered given economic instrumentalisation and injustice from global capitalist structures. Moreover, efforts to reach political consensus on a regular basis are confronted with power in politics, which tempts some actors to go for broke, gain full control, and avoid compromise. Maritain realised that progress in protecting human rights would be replete with backward steps and new starts. Nevertheless, his hope was that the practically-embodied consensus embodied in the Universal Declaration would develop through progress in a common ethical life, despite divergence in theoretical explanations of that life.

This chapter takes the reader to the innermost chamber of the court: the deliberation room. There, the story untangles the maze of interactions that occur among the adjudicators as they finally decide the merits of the case. What commentators usually describe as the moment of truth is, in fact, a delicate dance of assertions and contestations, argument and counterargument, lunges and sidesteps. Amid the confrontation, judicial bureaucrats work staunchly and discreetly to guide the flow of the debate, broker compromises, and overcome stumbling blocks. The decisions and instructions that eventually emerge from deliberations may well be the truth – but a carefully constructed one. The deliberative practices of the various courts and tribunals, all described in this chapter, are more than simple logistical matters or mere conveyors of content. Rather, they have a crucial impact on the way adjudicators arrive at their decisions and, therefore, on the substantive outcomes of each dispute.

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.