ABSTRACT:Expressivists have trouble accounting for disagreement. If ethical or other normative judgments are desire-like rather than belief-like, it is puzzling why we think people often disagree in those domains. While previous expressivists have proposed only straightforwardly descriptive conditions under which disagreement occurs, we argue that disagreement itself should be understood normatively: two or more people disagree just in case their diverging attitudes imply, given a common project of theirs, that at least one of them has reason to change his or her mind.
When theorising about disagreement, it is tempting to begin with a person's belief that p and ask what mental state one must have in order to disagree with it. This is the wrong way to go; the paper argues that people may also disagree with attitudes that are not beliefs. It then examines whether several existing theories of disagreement can account for this phenomenon. It argues that its own normative theory of disagreement gives the best account, and so, given that there is good reason to believe disagreement without belief is possible, there is good reason to think that disagreement itself is normative.
Humeans believe that at least some of our desires give us reasons for action. This view is widely accepted by social scientists and has some following among philosophers. In recent years important objections were raised against this position by Scanlon, Dancy, and others. The foundations of the Humean view have never been properly defended.
In the first part of the paper I discuss some objections to the Humean position. In the second part I attempt to provide an argument for the claim that the Humean view gives us a plausible, even if not exclusive, understanding of our notion of reasons. The particular version of the Humean view I set out to defend is that only desires that the agent is not alienated from, and that are not impulses, are reason giving.
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