Let's begin with moral disagreement. There's an argument from disagreement against moral realism. In short, it says that the kind of disagreement that we find in ethics is unable to be resolved rationally. However, the argument goes, when disagreement has this quality it's indicative that there is no fact of the matter that the two parties are disagreeing about.
Cuneo argues that epistemic realism faces the same challenge. What's the evidence? Consider religious disagreement. The disagreement there is deep in the same way that ethical disagreement is deep. That is, there seems to be no way to resolve this disagreement rationally. Now, Cuneo suggests that this disagreement about religious issues is really itself actually about epistemology, not religion:
"since the predicate 'epistemic rationality' in [the context of religious debate] is probably best understood as one that stands for a constellation of thicker epistemic concepts such as wisdom, understanding, judiciousness, epistemic humility, epistemic honesty, and objectivity, the disagreement in question is plausibly viewed as being concerned with whether religious beliefs exhibit these thicker epistemic merits."
Cuneo's argument is that the religious disagreement is actually epistemic disagreement. He explains that the disagreement is between those who believe that one ought to believe in the authority of holy books over all other evidence, or that "rationality fundamentally consists in obedience to God and religious authorities" and those who maintain "non-theistic epistemological pieties [who] reject all this. According to these views, obedience of disobedience to God plays no role in explaining why we succeed or fail to understand the world aright."
It's hard to buy this claim. It would seem that if this is what it takes to be an epistemic disagreement, every cognitive disagreement at all could be translated into an epistemic one. After all, isn't a disagreement between two scientists who (as they did in the past) wondered whether the evidence supports the existence of black holes be a disagreement over two detailed epistemic accounts of how to deal with empirical evidence? Of course, Cuneo might respond that this just strengthens the point: epistemic disagreement is everywhere.
I think that there's a distinction that should be made at this point: some confusions are philosophical, and others are not. If you are reading this...hell, no one is reading this. But suppose that someone was reading this. That person might, at this point have all sorts of alarms going off: "Oh no," this hypothetical reader says, "he's going to try to distinguish between philosophy and the rest of knowledge. This is going to be a mess." Yes, it is going to be a mess. But here we go anyway. Some disagreement or confusion is philosophical in nature. This disagreement has all the qualities that we claim ethical disagreement to have--it seems to be rationally unresolvable, as evidenced by a long history of open problems where little progress has been made.
(And of course there has been philosophical progress, but there are still many problems where progress hasn't been made, and it's not like that's a controversial statement. What might be annoying to some is that I call this philosophical disagreement, since I might besmirch some issues that have had success. Fine, I'll pick another thing to call it later. For now, philosophical disagreement.)
It's not that shocking that there is this sort of disagreement with these sorts of philosophical problems. These specifically are the hardest, deepest, most fundamental problems that we know of. That's part of the reason why we study them. So it's no great shocker that we disagree in philosophy, and it's not at all like disagreement about which flavor of ice cream is best. The latter has unresolvable conflict because there's no objective matter of fact about which ice cream is the best. In philosophy the reason why there is this sort of disagreement is because philosophical problems are specifically the hardest, most fundamental problems that seem to push at the limits of human knowledge.
Now, I think that religious disagreement of the sort that Cuneo talks about is properly philosophical. This is because the disagreements he is talking about are about the very nature of knowledge and justification: what does it mean to be justified? What does it mean to be rational? I don't need to give an account of the "philosophical" in order to claim that these are paridigmatically philosophical questions.
But this, I think, isn't the case when it comes to ethics. When it comes to ethics I think that there are plenty of non-philosophical questions that can be asked that are properly ethical. "Abortion is evil" Obviously, the meaning of a sentence depends to an extent on the meaning of the words in it, so what it means to be evil will matter when we determine the meaning of this sentence. But the sentence isn't ABOUT good and evil. The sentence is about abortion. OK, OK, OK, hypothetical reader. Yes, that's the sort of stupid thing you expect a really stupid undergrad to make. But is there a more precise way to put this weird intuition that I have? Is there anything here at all?
Let me try again. We know that there are certain typically philosophical questions, and among these we're used to the fact that there is disagreement. Now, I'm going to use an argument here that I'm just ripping off of Justin Clarke-Doane. Consider the disagreement about abortion. Now, the two people disagreeing might be deluding themselves by thinking that they can disagree about abortion with each other without the disagreement coming down to a disagreement about what is good/evil, and that in order to really take this argument down to it's rational roots they would need to advocate a theory of morality. That's fine. But that's not what's in their heads. What's in their heads is that they're disagreeing about abortion and whether you can do it or not. I take this to be a non-philosophical ethical disagreement. Again, they're not having a fight about the theory of good.
This, I think, is a difference between ethics and epistemology. People don't have non-philosophical disagreements about epistemology, but they do have non-philosophical disagreements about ethics. But it's the non-philosophical disagreements that indicate that something weird is going on, because, as I noted, we expect deep and difficult disagreement in philosophy. What's weird about ethics is that there's disagreement that has nothing to do with the theory of good, and this indicates that maybe people are just talking about something completely non-objective.
To elaborate a bit: "Believing what the Torah says is justified." "No, it's not." What is this sentence about? Is it about the Torah? No, I think it's about the nature of justification. Note also that belief in the nature of justification, the second-order stuff, that's not normative even though it's epistemic in a sense. Statements about the nature of justification aren't normative even though justification is a normative concept. I think that's another way of putting the point. They're not having a normative disagreement when they're having a philosophical one; it's not even really an argument about epistemology. It's an argument about philosophy. So maybe I should define philosophy as the second-order claims about epistemology, though maybe I should just dump "philosophical disagreements" for "second-order."
If this is so, then I think that this is a reason why the argument from disagreement applies to ethics in a way that it doesn't apply to epistemology. I'm going to sit with this point for a bit now, and see how I feel about it. Maybe I can make it stronger.
Note that if Cuneo were to read this, he's likely say "this person is massively misguided." Partly because in his version of the argument from disagreement the only role that first-order disagreement has is to indicate the presence of second-order dsiagreement. But I find this confusing: it doesn't seem to me part of any of the other versions of the argument from disagreement that I've read, and in fact it seems odd. Second-order disagreement about concepts is normal, to an extent. What's at issue in the argument from disagreement is what the best explanation of unresolvable conflict is, and the claim is that the best explanation of this is that there is no factual disagreement at all--and this seems true even if there is complete second-order agreement (we might all agree what it means when we talk about best flavor but still have unresolvable conflict here, no?). So I remain a bit puzzled with tihs, and I'm not sure what to do with it.
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