The Nature of Moral Disagreement
Three features of contemporary moral discourse that stops us from finding resolutions.
Consider the following moral statements:
- A woman has undeniable rights over her body. The fetus is part of her body. As such, she has the freedom to choose whether she wishes to keep or abort the fetus. Abortion is permissible.
- An embryo is a definable unit of life and has the potential for personhood. As such, killing a fetus against its will is murder. Murder is morally wrong. Thus, abortion is morally wrong.
- No one can rationally will that their mother have an abortion when she is pregnant with them. If one cannot rationally will it to be a universal law, it is impermissible to commit abortion.
I’m not interested in discussing which side is true or false. What I hope to explore is how these moral disagreements tend to resist resolution. For these moral disagreements tend to be irresolvable. They often involve real-world problems: Is war justified? Can we justify state violence? Is paying tax mandatory?
Contemporary moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that there are three important features of moral disagreement today. He argues that these three features doom us from ever finding an end to our moral arguments. Importantly, they have doomed us from ever finding a possible outlet to resolve our disagreements.
For the rest of the article, I shall discuss them in detail.
Conceptual Incommensurability
This is an idea borrowed from a philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. In Structures of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn describes scientific progress as scientists moving from one paradigm to another.
At a particular point in history, a scientific community will adopt a set of principles to practice science. They will use these principles to develop theories and laws of nature. Gradually, those principles will reach their limits. That’s when a crisis occurs.
When that happens, scientists are forced to find a new set of principles to work with. In doing so, they quickly abandon the previous set of principles and adopt a new one. This is a Kuhnian paradigm shift. The process continues until yet another crisis occurs.
The most recent paradigm shift that occurred in Physics is the Einsteinian revolution. It demands us to abandon our previous scientific principles. For instance, that time passes at the same rate for everyone regardless of their frame of reference. It also requires us to abandon the notion gravity is a force. Both principles belong to the older Newtonian paradigm.
The most important aspect of Kuhn’s thesis here is that after a paradigm shift, the scientific community adopts a conceptually incommensurable set of scientific principles. Incommensurability means there is no external set of rules that help scientists determine which principles they should rationally adopt.
Since science evaluates itself based on the principles a paradigm possesses, the scientific community can only determine the success of the paradigm internally. Kuhn argues that, as a result, Newtonian physics will be deemed “good” science to the Newtonian physicists; Einsteinian physics will be deemed “good” to the Einsteinian physicists. Each member will perceive themselves as right, and the other as wrong. And there is no way to settle this disagreement because each member evaluates science based on their subscribe paradigm.
However, this doesn’t mean that these principles and, subsequently, the paradigms are irrational. They are rational in every possible way. They are a product of logic and reason, insofar as if anyone were to adopt these principles, she would be fully convinced of their rationale.
The catch is this: you can only be convinced if you so choose to adopt the paradigm. For instance, anyone who accepts that time is a relativistic quantity would be rationally convinced of Einstein's theory of gravity. If not, no matter how much convincing one does, she cannot be convinced of the theory’s rationale.
MacIntyre argues that the same conceptual incommensurability plagues our moral arguments. Consider two popular ethical theories: utilitarianism and Kantianism.
Utilitarianism believes that an act is permissible (or obligatory) if and only if that act maximizes the net amount of pleasure (or minimizes the net pain) of a population.
Kantianism believed that an act is impermissible if and only if that act cannot be willed as a universal law or that it treats humanity as a mere means (and not an end).
Notice how each of these theories purport radically different evaluative claims. Utilitarianism believes that the ultimate good is in pleasure. Kantianism believes that the ultimate good is in one’s goodwill.
Importantly, there is no rational way one theory could disprove the other based on their basic tenets. For those of us who’ve read Kant, we know that his argument against pleasure is that no one would desire pleasure if it’s not a result of one’s goodwill.
Indeed, the times we are pushed away by any of these theories are when our intuitions are challenged rather than our rationality. Our rejection of these theories is largely emotional and intuitive.
As a result, our moral disagreements usually end up with people talking over one another without ever reaching a common ground of debate.
This applies to the three statements above. One argues based on the “rights of the mother,” another argues based on “personhood of the fetus,” and the last one is Kantian: it argues based on “rationality.”
As an analogy, suppose you’re deciding between two different pans to cook with. You don’t know what you’re going to be cooking. Nor do you know under what conditions you will be cooking. All the information you have is regarding the two pans. Since you do not know what you’re using the pan for, there is really no rational way to decide between the pans.
I could convince you that cast iron is the best because I’ve cooked steak with it, but if your purpose is to cook an omelet, that pan wouldn’t have convinced you of how good it is.
Personally Impersonal
This next observation is related to the previous one. In being incommensurable, each argument is purporting an impersonal value.
A good way to understand “impersonal” here is to contrast it with something personal. If someone were to ask me to get him coffee, I would then ask, “why?” He would then say: “Because I’m your boss.” As such, my obligation to get him his coffee is based on my personal relationship with him. If he were no longer my boss, that obligation ceases.
Thus, impersonal values consist of values that are not dependent on relations, and they apply to everyone. MacIntyre writes:
“Its use presupposes the existence of impersonal criteria — the existence, independently of the preferences or attitudes or speaker and hearer, of standards of justice or generosity or duty.”
If we refer to the above three statements, they all refer to something impersonal. The first refers to “rights” that everyone possesses; this then extends to the mother. The second refers to “personhood”; again, which everyone, including the baby, possesses. The third refers to “rationality.”
These values should apparently apply to everyone. Regardless if you’re my boss, my mother, or my lawyer, we should all cherish these values. Consequently, to convince us that abortion is permissible on the grounds of “rights” would assume that we share one’s values of “rights.”
But we don’t.
Because these values are derived from incommensurable moral systems, these values are also incommensurable. Consequently, if we’re appealing others to our values, we’re doing so on personal grounds. For instance, one might say, “it’s commonsense that a fetus is a person,” or “it is undeniable that everyone has a basic right to their bodies.” These are not rational arguments, but arguments of intuition and appeal.
Historical Origins
“It is easy to see that the different conceptually incommensurable premises of the rival arguments deployed in these debates have a wide variety of historical origins.”
This is perhaps MacIntyre’s most important observation. The reason why we end up pitching incommensurable moral arguments with one another is that we’ve neglected each of their historical origins.
Ethical theories emerge as a product of their times. At different points in history, there are different socio-political problems for moral philosophers to deal with. As such, moral concepts and utterances possess very different meanings from one period of history to another.
Let us consider the example of goodness. Goodness is an evaluative utterance. In value theory, we can say something is good in two ways.
First is attributive goodness: something is good as something else. A person is good if he is good as a citizen. A chair is good if it is good as a chair. The first concept of good is teleological and performative. It’s also an attributive good.
Second, something can be good in itself (or, good-simpliciter). This is a Moorean concept of value. Moore argued that goodness is an unanalyzable concept. Contrast this to the above notion of “good.” Moore denies that one can say that a good person is a person who performs a set of roles well. He will also deny that we can evaluate a chair based on the functions it performs. To Moore, goodness is an intuitive notion.
In defending his thesis, Moore applies the open-question argument. He denies that we can simply equate “this chair is comfortable to sit on” with “this is a good chair.” Similarly, we cannot equate “this person is honest” with “this is a good person.” To do so would commit the naturalistic fallacy; we’re equating descriptive claims with evaluative claims.
Again, both arguments are conceptually incommensurable. They are valid and meritable within their systems of argumentation. Similarly, they appeal to something impersonal. In addition to these two aspects, each of these arguments come from very different historical time periods.
Moore’s theory is formulated in the early 20th century when he worked with modern ethical theories, particularly consequentialism. The problem he wishes to address the “subjective” problem of value. At the beginning of the Principia, he wrote:
“My main object in this paper is to try to define more precisely the most important question, which, so far as I can see, is really at issue when it is disputed with regard to any predicate of value, whether it is or is not a “subjective” predicate.”
Moore’s work attempts to define the “good” in objective terms to further develop consequentialism.
On the other hand, attributive goodness is a concept that originated in ancient Greek long before any consequentialist theories emerged. The purpose of developing attributive goodness then is to evaluate each person's roles and duties in society. Ethics then is interested not in defining “good,” but rather defining the “good life.”
As we can see, the historical origins of “goodness” has contributed to their mutual conceptual incommensurability. Because the development of an ethical theory heavily depends on a particular society's socio-political climate at a particular point in history.
If we inquire into the historical origins of moral concepts, we can understand why today's moral arguments and disagreements tend to be incommensurable. Different moral concepts are designed and developed to address very specific ethical issues of a time period. Remove those problems, and these moral concepts become vacuous.
“Rights,” “personhood,” and “rational will” are all moral concepts with strong historical origins. If we inquire into them, we will realize that they have long evolved from their initial meanings. And we’ve inherited a set of moral concepts that are actually devoid of those meanings.
The Nature of Moral Disagreement
MacIntyre argues that to reclaim our moral arguments, we need to inquire into each of their historical origins and the specific social problems they were designed to address. We need to delineate the concepts we use today to understand better what we’re actually disagreeing on.
When it comes to moral disagreements, we seem to be consistently talking over one another, attempting to convince the other side that concepts such as “rights” and “personhood” are universally true when they aren’t (they never were).
We’ve each inherited some moral concepts that are distinct from one another. And we’re blinded by the contingencies these concepts possess. So, unless we realize these contingencies, we are bound to forever talk over one another when it comes to moral debates.
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