Reasonable Disagreement

Reasonable Disagreement and Metalinguistic Negotiation

“…Independently of Mason, McMahon (2009, pp. 3–4) has recently argued that what is relevant for understanding the cognitive process of how people use concepts to make moral and political judgements is how reasonable people learn to use moral and political terms.…”

Aesthetics is the Grammar of Desire

“…Healy explains that the video cassettes reflect the continual information processing, collecting and overwriting of memory, which in some respects, constitute a life. 8 The temporal dimension of a life is here given a spatial metaphor in terms of a solid block with each unit representing a certain time span. A life conceived as a finite set of rather uneventful memories is reflected in the banal labels on the video cassettes.…”

A Discursive General Will: How Collective Reasoning Strengthens Social Freedom

“…The second moral sense of 'reasonable' is that a reasonable venture will necessarily require concessions that go beyond the sort of concessions the individual would make in purely self-interested bargaining. 29 That individuals be reasonable is a central component of a general will, since the conditions of reasonableness and a general will require that individuals respond to one another with reciprocity and mutuality.…”

“…Given the diversity of perspective and social location of individuals in a community-even one based on equality-conflicting claims can each be legitimate leaving different reasons supporting divergent construals in competition. 55 This sort of disagreement is reasonable in a participatory community and, subsequently, cannot simply be overcome by force of the better argument. 56 As one can infer from previous discussion, a reasonable disagreement evolves from deliberation between reasonable deliberators who present reasonable, equally valid cooperative schemas and then are unable to fully square the possibilities even in the face of reasonable, reciprocal concessions.…”

“…McMahon specifies that reasonable disagreement is disagreement concerning how to interpret the concepts expressed by a shared vocabulary of normative evaluative terms. 57 Individuals may initially proffer normative claims about shared understandings and social arrangements that are consonant with one another but, when fleshed out through assorted perspectives, actually call for conflicting actions. This produces a zone of reasonable disagreement that cannot be immediately diffused.…”