Moral Relativism and the Argument from Disagreement

The argument from disagreement for moral relativism—the view that mutually inconsistent sets of moral judgments may hold true relative to different societies—is as old as the hills. It is the argument that since different societies have unsettleable (i.e., rationally irreconcilable) disagreements over moral judgments, universalism (the view that there is one set of moral judgments which holds true for every possible society) is false, while relativism is true. Recently Nicholas L. Sturgeon has shown that the argument is problematic and perhaps incoherent. 1 Here I will defend the standard formulation of the argument by making certain steps clear and thereby showing that they are not incoherent. Afterward I will offer a new formulation of the argument which attempts to steer wholly clear of the potential confusion. I. Meeting Sturgeon’s Challenge Sturgeon’s piece is a powerful criticism of some prevalent formulations of the argument from disagreement for moral relativism, chiefly those of David Wong, Philippa Foot, and Gilbert Harman. 2 I will not attempt to determine the extent to which those particular forms of the argument from disagreement may be defended against Sturgeon’s criticisms. Rather, I will simply defend the general form of the argument, as I presented it in the second sentence of this article. Sturgeon’s criticism runs as follows: [D]efenders of relativism regularly appeal to nihilist construals of moral assertions, as opposed to strictly relativist construals, particularly in acknowledging the force of their opponents’ intuition that unsettleable moral disagreements are genuine. My story about how to become a relativist is an attempt to make sense of this duality of vision; and without it, relativism is again vulnerable to the objection that it must deny the genuineness of many disagreements that everyone, including the relativist, does regard in this way. 3