Magistrates, Mobs, and Moral Disagreement: Countering the Actual Disagreement Challenge to Moral Realism

Abstract

I defend convergentist realism from counterarguments that appeal to apparently deep and widespread moral disagreement. Pace recent claims by antirealists, I first argue that scenarios such as the prominent “Magistrate and the Mob” case betray cognitive defects in subjects, such as partiality, that we would not find in ideal agents. After this, I defend three reasons to expect cross-cultural disagreement on moral cases even if convergentist realism is true. These defusing explanations concern individual and group moral development and the moral models on which agents rely. While developing my defense of moral realism, I aim for comprehensive engagement with responses to arguments by Doris, Plakias, and others that have been dispersed across several related articles.