Interpreting Ethical Dialogue

Abstract

Our most difficult moral disagreements, both in public discourse and normative theorizing, often reach impasses where neither side can convince the other. This dissertation offers a diagnosis of this situation and a remedial account of moral dialogue.The diagnosis aims to expose the mistaken tendency to view moral judgments and arguments as proceeding outside any particular social or cultural context, instead emphasizing their conceptual and logical properties. Such a “thin” view of the language of moral discourse obscures the interpretative dimension of our ways of talking about actions, agents, and situations, which can always be brought under a variety of descriptions. Our more culturally specific and interest-laden, or “thicker”, ways of making the world around us intelligible often already paint it in an ethical light, and different kinds of language can express different ethical perspectives. Developing this terminology of thick and thin, the hermeneutic account of ethical dialogue I propose is intended as an alternative to the traditional view that moral disagreements are all-or-nothing confrontations where the winner takes all, and systematic arguments are the primary means for a rational search for moral truth. Ethical life should instead be seen as a continuous negotiation of alternative interpretative perspectives against an overlapping social background within changing historical communities. As with texts, not all interpretations are equally plausible, but neither is there always a definitive or “correct” one.This is not just a more realistic picture of ethical language understood as a part of natural language, I suggest, but a morally and politically more fruitful one. Whereas the traditional view tends to drive moral dialogue into an impasse and can even further polarization, the hermeneutic approach offers resources for a situated exploration of the different interpretative perspectives and experiences which can inform our disagreements, hoping to reopen possible avenues of compromise and mutual understanding. While the four chapters illustrate these points using concrete examples of moral, political, and religious disagreements, they also present relatively freestanding contributions to philosophical debates over thick concepts, the fact/value gap, and the epistemology of disagreement along the way.