Conciliationism and Moral Spinelessness

Abstract

This paper presents a challenge to conciliationist views of disagreement. I argue that conciliationists cannot satisfactorily explain why we need not revise our beliefs in response to certain moral disagreements. Conciliationists can attempt to meet this challenge in one of two ways. First, they can individuate disputes narrowly. This allows them to argue that we have dispute-independent reason to distrust our opponents’ moral judgment. This approach threatens to license objectionable dogmatism. It also inappropriately gives deep epistemic significance to superficial questions about how to think about the subject matter of a dispute. Second, conciliationists can individuate disputes widely. This allows them to argue that we lack dispute-independent reason to trust our opponents’ moral judgment. But such arguments fail; our background of generally shared moral beliefs gives us good reason to trust the moral judgment of our opponents, even after we set quite a bit of our reasoning aside. On either approach, then, conciliationists should acknowledge that we have dispute-independent reason to trust the judgment of those who reject our moral beliefs. Given a conciliationist view of disagreement's epistemic role, this has the unattractive result that we are epistemically required to revise some of our most intuitively secure moral beliefs.

A Faithful Response to Disagreement

“…Thus, convictions provide a kind of inertia, but one that can be overcome. Fritz andMcPherson (2019), andFritz (2018).…”

Bad Beliefs

“…Given that disagreement is ubiquitous, if we must conciliate whenever we encounter it, we seem to lose the right to confidence very broadly. Conciliationism thus gives rise to what has been called the problem of spinelessness (e.g., Elga, 2007;Fritz, 2018). Many epistemologists respond to this worry by defending an extremely demanding account of epistemic peerhood, according to which my peers have exactly the same evidence and the same capacities as I do.3 Since each of us has few peers (so defined), we are each under less pressure to conciliate.…”

“…Combined with the so-called independence principle, according to which an agent's reasons for discounting a dissenting peer's opinions must be independent of the dispute itself, the test allows may allow us to hold fast to our controversial opinions. Setting aside the dispute and all the reasons implicated in it, we have no basis for thinking that dissenters would be as likely as we are to come to the right response(Elga 2007;Fritz 2018;McGrath 2008).…”

Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism

“…If conciliationism is true, virtually no one can rationally have a strong opinion about controversial matters. Some have also argued that always changing your views in response to disagreement leads to a problematic spinelessness-a requirement to give up our most deeply held beliefs (see Elga 2007: 494;Sherman 2015;Fritz 2018). Not only does conciliationism seem potentially to lead to problematic skepticism, but there's also evidence that remaining steadfast in the face of disagreement has epistemic benefits.…”