Can we really use persistent moral disagreement to undermine moral realism, or do the most popular disagreement-based arguments end up undercutting their own reliability?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Eric Sampson is Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. His research has focused on morality and metaethics, especially in regards to defending moral realism.
2. Interview Summary
Eric Sampson frames the interview around how “arguments from disagreement” are supposed to pressure moral realism—either by suggesting moral talk is really just attitude-expression, or by casting doubt on whether we have epistemic access to stance-independent moral truths. He sketches moral realism as combining (at least) cognitivism, stance-independence, and an epistemic accessibility claim, and he emphasizes that disagreement can be deployed against each of these in different ways. The discussion then centers on his paper arguing that several prominent disagreement-based objections have a common flaw: once you make their key epistemic principles explicit, those principles end up undercutting themselves.
From there, he walks through versions of this “self-undermining” diagnosis. For conciliationist views (in the style of David Christensen / Adam Elga peer-disagreement principles), the worry is that trying to declare the conciliation principle “special” requires leaning on additional controversial claims—exactly the sort of thing the principle itself tells you not to treat as secure. He then discusses Brian Leiter’s Nietzschean “inference to the best explanation” move: persistent expert disagreement is explained by psychological needs (e.g., certain personalities being drawn to utilitarian vs. Kantian styles), and the conclusion is that there’s no fact of the matter. Sampson argues that this style of reasoning rebounds on itself, because the relevant explanatory/inferential standards (and even metaethics itself) are also domains of entrenched expert disagreement—so the argument’s own method and conclusion become targets of the same debunking principle. He closes this portion by considering “ideal conditions” arguments: if you deny a strong “uniqueness/convergence” thesis, then ideal reasoners could disagree while one still knows the truth; but if you insist on uniqueness, that thesis itself is highly contentious, so again the disagreement-based argument struggles to get traction without controversial extra assumptions.
In the second half, Sampson turns to practical reasons and the internalism/externalism debate, defending a stance-independent (externalist) picture while criticizing sophisticated “idealized internalist” accounts. He uses cases like the “party with hired assassins” to show why internalists are tempted to idealize away ignorance or defective desires, but argues that idealization invites “advice conflicts”: once you “clean up” an agent by making beliefs/desires coherent, there may be multiple equally eligible ideal counterparts, and coherence can be restored in different ways—so there may be no unique ideal advisor to ground what you have most reason to do. The interview then shifts to queerness/parsimony objections to non-naturalist realism, starting from J. L. Mackie’s complaint (from Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) that objective moral facts would be metaphysically and epistemically “weird,” and perhaps implausibly motivating; Sampson unpacks what “queerness” would have to amount to for a parsimony-style argument to go through. He ends on a broader methodological note: philosophy won’t eliminate disagreement, but it remains one of our best tools for thinking carefully about how to live and what to believe.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:35 - Arguments from disagreement
05:01 - General response
06:36 - First argument: conciliationism
08:16 - Defense of conciliationism?
10:49 - Second argument: unreliability of methods
13:01 - Difference in degree, if not kind?
15:27 - Third argument: inference to best explanation
19:52 - Does argument overgeneralize?
23:31 - Fourth argument: disagreement under ideal conditions
27:12 - Uniqueness condition
29:49 - Ideal reasoners
34:25 - Idealizing accounts of practical reasons
38:52 - Actual vs. ideal reasons and decision theory
43:33 - Decision theory not the full story of rationality?
48:07 - No unique ideal counterpart
53:39 - Ways to find a unique counterpart
58:34 - Idealized versions less relevant to your reasons
1:00:24 - The average ideal counterpart
1:03:19 - Just more theory
1:08:00 - Strengths of reasons
1:10:07 - Concern about reasons of ideal reasoners
1:13:00 - Scanlon and strengths of reasons
1:15:53 - Difficulties with counterfactuals
1:17:20 - Value
1:20:09 - Queerness arguments
1:22:52 - Naturalism
1:25:27 - Low priors
1:27:18 - Parsimony
1:35:14 - In defense of parsimony
1:38:36 - Resolving the dispute
1:41:58 - Mark Balaguer and nominalism
1:44:48 - Value of philosophy
1:46:28 - Conclusion
