Moral disagreement and procedural justice: Moral mandates as constraints to voice effects

Procedural voice is a widely used and effective means to reduce or eliminate conflict. Moral disagreements, however, are particularly inflammatory, divisive, and difficult to manage. The current article reports two studies that demonstrated the unique challenge that moral disagreements pose. Specifically, the studies tested the extent to which procedural voice affected justice judgements, group climate, and decision acceptance when people perceived decisions to have moral implications. Results indicated that when people's outcome preferences represent strong moral convictions, outcomes were the primary determinant of perceived fairness and related judgements, irrespective of whether people had voice in the decision‐making process.     

Negationless intuitionism

The present paper deals with natural intuitionistic semantics for intuitionistic logic within an intuitionistic metamathematics. We show how strong completeness of full first order logic fails. We then consider a negationless semantics à la Henkin for second order intuitionistic logic. By using the theory of lawless sequences we prove that, for such semantics, strong completeness is restorable. We argue that lawless negationless semantics is a suitable framework for a constructive structuralist interpretation of any second order formalizable theory (classical or intuitionistic, contradictory or not).     

Validity and quantification in intuitionism

We distinguish three different readings of the intuitionistic notions of validity, soundness, and completeness with respect to the quantification occurring in the notion of validity, and we establish certain relations between the different readings. For each of the meta-logical notions considered we suggest that the most natural reading (which is not the same for all cases) is precisely the one which is required by the recent intuitionistic completeness theorems for IPC.This paper was partly written while the first author, H. C. M. de Swart, was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University for the academic year 1976–1977. This opportunity was given to him by the Niels Stensen Stichting in Amsterdam, the department of philosophy of the Catholic University in Nijmegen and by Princeton University. He is happy to express his appreciation for that opportunity.     

Dummett's intuitionism is not strict finitism

Michael Dummett's anti-realism is founded on the semantics of natural language which, he argues, can only be satisfactorily given in mathematics by intuitionism. It has been objected that an analog of Dummett's argument will collapse intuitionism into strict finitism. My purpose in this paper is to refute this objection, which I argue Dummett does not successfully do. I link the coherence of strict finitism to a view of confirmation — that our actual practical abilities cannot confirm we know what would happen if we could compute impracticably vast problems. But to state his case, the strict finitists have to suppose that we grasp the truth conditions of sentences we can't actually decide. This comprehension must be practically demonstrable, or the analogy with Dummett's argument fails. So, our actual abilities must be capable of confirming that we know what would be the case if actually undecidable sentences were true, contradicting the view of confirmation. I end by considering objections.I especially want to thank Alex George and Philip Kitcher for their help on this paper. I'd also like to thank the members of the Propositional Attitudes Task Force, Jane Braaten, Jay Garfield, Lee Bowie, Murray Kitely and Tom Tymoczko. My thanks also to Peter Godfrey-Smith and the anonymous reviewers of Synthese, one of whom was particularly helpful.     

Ethical intuitionism and the linguistic analogy

It is a central tenet of ethical intuitionism as defended by W. D. Ross and others that moral theory should re?ect the convictions of mature moral agents. Hence, intuitionism is plausible to the extent that it corresponds to our well-considered moral judgments. After arguing for this claim, I discuss whether intuitionists o?er an empirically adequate account of our moral obligations. I do this by applying recent empirical research by John Mikhail that is based on the idea of a universal moral grammar to a number of claims implicit in W. D. Ross’s normative theory. I argue that the results at least partly vindicate intuitionism.     

Conceptions of truth in intuitionism

Intuitionism's disagreement with classical logic is standardly based on its specific understanding of truth. But different intuitionists have actually explicated the notion of truth in fundamentally different ways. These are considered systematically and separately, and evaluated critically. It is argued that each account faces difficult problems. They all either have implausible consequences or are viciously circular.     

Coherence and disagreement

I wish to thank Lars Bergström, Carl Ginet, Joseph Moore, Christian Munthe, Torbjörn Tännsjö, and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The remaining errors are of course my own.     

Relativism and disagreement

The relativist's central objection to contextualism is that it fails to account for the disagreement we perceive in discourse about "subjective" matters, such as whether stewed prunes are delicious. If we are to adjudicate between contextualism and relativism, then, we must first get clear about what it is for two people to disagree. This question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. A partial answer is given here; although it is incomplete, it does help shape what the relativist must say if she is to do better than the contextualist in securing genuine disagreement.

Peer disagreement and counter-examples

Philosophical Studies - Two kinds of considerations are thought to be relevant to the correct response to the discovery of a peer who disagrees with you about some question. The first is general...     

Might-beliefs and asymmetric disagreement

Synthese - What we can call asymmetric disagreement occurs when one agent is in disagreement with another, but not vice-versa. In this paper, I give an example of and develop a framework for...     

Epistemic injustice and deepened disagreement

Philosophical Studies - Sometimes ordinary disagreements become deep as a result of epistemic injustice. The paper explores a hitherto unnoticed connection between two phenomena that have received...     

Elaboration and intuitions of disagreement

Mark Richard argues for truth-relativism about claims made using gradable adjectives. He argues that truth-relativism is the best explanation of two kinds of linguistic data, which I call: true cross-contextual reports and infelicitous denials of conflict. Richard claims that such data are generated by an example that he discusses at length. However, the consensus is that these linguistic data are illusory because they vanish when elaborations are added to examples of the same kind as Richard’s original. In this paper I defend the reality of Richard’s data. I show that, in trying to make their point, Richard’s critics have focused upon examples that are similar in some respects to Richard’s original but which lack a crucial feature of that original. When we ensure that this feature is in place, elaborations which make the data vanish are not possible. Richard’s critics therefore fail to show that the data generated by Richard’s original example are illusory.     

Religious disagreement: internal and external

Philosophers of religion have taken the assumption for granted that the various religious traditions of the world have incompatible beliefs. In this paper, I will argue that this assumption is more problematic than has been generally recognized. To make this argument, I will discuss the implications of internal religious disagreement, an aspect of this issue that has been too often ignored in the contemporary debate. I will also briefly examine some implications of my argument for how one might respond to the existence of religious diversity.