Kinds of disagreements

1.0 Introduction

Philosophers often use terms in ways that seem to me to be out of touch with reality. This isn’t because they use the terms in ways that are totally divorced from ordinary usage, but because they take some specific way we might use a term in ordinary language and employ it in a narrow sense, then leverage this usage to give the misleading impression that they’ve presented some substantive critique of a particular philosophical position. This is achieved by prompting others to conflate the narrow use of a term with broader usages or with pragmatic implications of a term’s usage in ordinary language. Suppose, for instance, I define lying as “intentionally making a propositional claim about what is true when you believe it to be false, or what is false when you believe it to be true.” Now consider this scenario:

Sam: Alex, did you eat the last slice of pizza?

Alex: (Shakes his head).

Sam: Oh…well then I wonder who did.

Now suppose Alex did eat the last slice of pizza. Did Alex lie? I would say so. Yet as per the definition above, Alex didn’t lie, because lying was defined as an instance of making a propositional claim. So long as we narrowly define “making a propositional claim” to require a specific verbal act of saying or writing something, shaking one’s head is not an instance of “making a propositional claim” and is therefore not an instance of lying.

This would be a very misleading way of describing Alex’s behavior. What many people would want to know in this situation is whether Alex actively misled Sam about whether Alex ate the last slice of pizza. And Alex did. This is some kind of deception, or dishonesty, or whatever. We can get really pedantic about whether we want to call it lying or not, but the point is that some narrow, stipulative use of the notion of lying could be leveraged here to imply that Alex didn’t deceive, or mislead Sam about who ate the last slice of pizza.

Of course, in this case, we have a birds-eye view, and know what really happened. So it’s easy to spot the misleading use of the notion of “lying” here. But that’s just my point: it’s clear enough in this case, but it’s not always so easy to spot similarly tricky uses of language in the arguments philosophers actually make. Here, I want to focus on similar tricks with language that frequently occur in critiques of metaethical subjectivism, the view that moral claims are true or false relative to the moral standards of each individual.

2.0 What are disagreements?

The example I want to focus on here is disagreement. Consider this objection to moral subjectivism:

If subjectivism were true, then there would be no moral disagreements. But there are moral disagreements, so subjectivism is not true.

The reasoning for this argument goes something like this: When people go around saying things like “abortion is wrong,” or “abortion is not wrong,” these statements can be translated as statements like: “I oppose abortion” and “I do not oppose abortion,” respectively. Since each moral claim simply involves a report about the person’s own moral standards, if two people who have different stances on abortion encounter one another and state their positions on abortion, both claims are true:

Alex: “Abortion is wrong” = “I (Alex) oppose abortion.”

Sam: “Abortion is not wrong” = “I (Sam) do not oppose abortion.”

Supposing Alex and Sam are both sincerely reporting their moral attitudes, both statements are true: Alex opposes abortion, and Sam does not oppose abortion. If both statements are true, then Alex and Sam are not stating conflicting positions on the truth of the moral rightness or wrongness of abortion. There simply is no disagreement.

So far so good. But here’s the problem for such a view: when we go out into the world, we observe people arguing about abortion. We see people holding up signs promoting pro-abortion and anti-abortion positions, we see people protesting outside abortion clinics, and we observe people arguing about abortion on YouTube and TikTok. We see politicians enact policies to facilitate or inhibit abortion. We see philosophical articles arguing for or against abortion. And so on. Clearly, the reasoning goes, these people disagree about whether abortion is morally right or wrong.

Yet, if moral subjectivism were true, people cannot disagree. So subjectivism conflicts with our observations about the way people actually speak and interact with one another. So moral subjectivism is false.

3.0 Clarifying the “no disagreement” objection to subjectivism

What is it that subjectivists are unable to do? Subjectivists are unable to disagree with other people about the truth status of propositional claims like “abortion is wrong” because the truth of such claims is indexed to each individual, and thus the truth status of each claim depends on the standards of each individual. If I encounter someone who sincerely says:

It’s okay to torture people for fun.

This person is effectively reporting something about their own psychology. Perhaps this person could be confused or misguided, and they really don’t think it’s okay to torture people for fun. But if we bracket unusual cases like this, along with cases of people lying about their moral values, and we focus exclusively on competent, sincere instances in which people make such claims, there isn’t much room for a subjectivist to say that what the person is saying is false. For comparison, this would be a bit like running into someone who says that they like the taste of chocolate, and claiming that this statement is false.

While technically it could be, it’d be a stretch to suppose we know what people’s taste preferences are better than they do. In any case, the critic of subjectivism may add that people who argue with one another probably aren’t intending to dispute whether other people are accurately reporting their own preferences. Rather, they appear to think the other person’s moral claims are mistaken in some deeper sense.

4.0 Propositional disagreements

These considerations indicate that this “no disagreement” argument construes disagreements as propositional disagreements. A propositional disagreement is a disagreement about the truth status of a propositional claim (i.e., a claim that is truth-apt, or capable of being true or false). Such disagreements construe disagreement as only occurring when two or more individuals maintain contrary positions about the truth status of a given proposition. This would be a proper disagreement:

Alex: It is true that P.

Sam: It is not true that P.

Alex and Sam disagree about whether P is true. Two only “disagree” when they hold different positions on the truth of a given proposition (e.g., “P”). Typically, this will involve one person holding that the proposition is true, and the other that it is false (though there are other possibilities if we want to get fancy with logic).