Moral Disagreement and the Significance of Higher-Order Evidence

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the philosophy of disagreement, especially in epistemology where there is an intense debate over the epistemic significance of disagreement and higher-order evidence more generally. Considerations about disagreement also play an important role in metaethics – most prominently in various arguments that purport to establish moral skepticism. This thesis presents five papers that address moral disagreement and the significance of higher-order evidence. The first two papers develop a view about higher-order defeat that is used in the dissertation. The other three papers consider specific arguments from disagreement. The third paper argues that the Argument from Peer Disagreement fails to make a case for widespread moral skepticism; mainly because higher-order evidence only contingently leads to defeat. The fourth paper examines a recent attempt to epistemically account for faultless moral disagreement without giving up on moral realism. The paper argues that this attempt to accommodate faultless disagreement is unsatisfactory. The fifth paper develops a new argument against cognitivism: the Argument from Dogmatism. The argument holds that the conceivability of moral dogmatists, i.e., agents who stubbornly stick to their moral judgments in the face of putative counterevidence, gives us reason to think that moral judgments are not evidence-sensitive in the way beliefs are.