Moral disagreement is settled by negotiation, not by evidence

The argument

A second argument for this position looks at how moral questions actually get resolved. Where a dispute is about a matter of fact, proponents note, there is a recognised way to end it: look again, measure more carefully, let the better instrument decide, and the losing side is expected to concede. Moral disputes do not end that way. They end through persuasion, bargaining, legislation, attrition, the replacement of one generation by another, and occasionally force. No procedure exists that both sides accept in advance as capable of deciding the matter, which is why serious moral conflict so often becomes political conflict instead. Holders of the view take this difference seriously rather than treating it as a temporary embarrassment. If there were moral facts of the kind the opposing positions describe, they argue, we should expect to have developed some shared method for finding them, as we have for the facts about matter and life. The absence of any such method after as long as people have been arguing is itself evidence about the subject matter. What we have instead are traditions of reasoning internal to communities, each coherent from the inside, each unable to compel the others. They draw a further observation from the content of codes. Moral rules tend to track the arrangements of the societies that hold them, licensing what those societies need licensed and forbidding what threatens them. Where a form of labour is indispensable, the codes of that place tend to find it tolerable; where it becomes dispensable, condemnation follows rather than precedes. Proponents read that ordering as revealing: a rule that shifts when the interests underlying it shift behaves like an institution rather than like a discovery, and institutions are made.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents reply that the argument proves too much. Questions about what makes a life go well, about the conduct of inquiry itself, or about what counts as a good argument also lack any agreed decision procedure, yet few conclude that they have no answers. They also dispute the ordering claim: moral condemnation of entrenched practices has repeatedly come from people with everything to lose by it, and reform movements have often been led by those whose interests the old rule served. If codes merely followed interest, such people would be inexplicable.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Lacking a shared procedure may show that moral questions are hard, or that the parties disagree about method, rather than that there is nothing to find. [Rejecting P3] The ordering often runs the other way, since condemnation has preceded and helped cause the change in arrangements, and has frequently come from those the old rule benefited. [Rejecting C] Many institutions, from measurement to law, are human made instruments for tracking something that is not, so being institutional does not settle whether morality answers to anything.