"Evaluative Disagreement and Knowing the Good" 

Abstract: 

The seemingly widespread existence of evaluative disagreement, and its peculiarly intractable nature, poses a practical problem for us as people who have to live together. It has also sometimes been thought a philosophical problem for the metaethical realist. For if you and I disagree about some evaluative claim, the realist is committed to saying that (at least) one of us must be wrong. But if evaluative reality is just out there for us to discover, why would so many of us be getting things so wrong? Even more worryingly, evaluative disagreement appears to resist resolution through rational means, suggesting that what lies behind our respective claims is not a receptivity to evaluative reality but rather just our own personal evaluative orientations. In this talk, I shall argue that the appearance of a problem here arises from an overly simplistic picture of what evaluative knowledge looks like. A richer account of such knowledge reveals that the fact that one party to the disagreement must be wrong is one of the less interesting features of the situation, and helps to explain why such disagreement is distinctively resistant to resolution through ordinary rational argument. This picture also points us towards new strategies for dealing with the practical problem of disagreement.

Bio: Claire Kirwin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. She has written about topics in ethics, metaethics, and aesthetics, and on Nietzsche. She is currently working on a book, Value Is Real, developing a new positive argument for value realism.