De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism

Disagreement and Attitudinal Relativism

Relativism and Disagreement

It has often been proposed that claims about what is funny, delicious, or likely are “subjective,” in the sense that their truth depends not only on how things are with the objects they explicitly concern, but on how things are with some subject not explicitly mentioned. This thought is supported by the striking degree to which we differ in our judgements about these matters. If there are wholl...

De-idealizing the Democratic Civil Peace

1 In the liberal concept of a " democratic civil peace " , an idealistic understanding of democratic stabilization and pacification prevails: Democracy is seen to guarantee political stability and social peace by offering comprehensive representation and participation in political decisions while producing outcomes broadly in accordance with the common interest of society. This contrasts with t...

Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement [version of June, 2007]

I begin with some familiar conceptions of epistemic relativism. One kind of epistemic relativism is descriptive pluralism. This is the simple, non-normative thesis that many different communities, cultures, social networks, etc. endorse different epistemic systems (E-systems), i.e., different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states. Communities try ...

Idealizing Morality

Implicit in feminist and other critiques of ideal theorizing is a particular view of what normative theory should be like. Although I agree with the rejection of ideal theorizing that oppression theorists (and other theorists of justice) have advocated, the proposed alternative of nonideal theorizing is also problematic. Nonideal theorizing permits one to address oppression by first describing ...