Abstract

A well-known challenge for contextualists is to account for disagreement. Focusing on moral contextualism, this paper examines recent attempts to address this challenge by using the standard expressivist explanation, i.e., explaining disagreement in terms of disagreement in attitude rather than disagreement in belief. Assuming that the moral disagreements can be explained in terms of disagreement in attitude, this may seem as a simple solution for contextualists. However, it turns out to be easier said than done. This paper examines a number of different ways in which disagreement in attitude can be incorporated into a contextualist framework and argues that each suggestion is problematic. In particular, the purported explanations of disagreement fail to adequately explain intuitive occurrences of disagreement, the robustness of disagreement intuitions and/or locate the disagreement in the intuitively right place.