Abstract

Moral debate and moral education within pluralistic democratic societies would be more productive if we shared a common understanding of moral objectivity--that is, of the nature and development of sound moral judgment. Achieving such a shared understanding of moral objectivity today would require critical dialogue among the advocates of competing religious, philosophical, political, and cultural traditions to effect some convergence of their incommensurable moral points of view. Accordingly, my primary objective is to identify processes through which, standards or evidence against which, and conditions under which the relative merits of incommensurable moral traditions could be appreciated and assessed. ;I structure the thesis as follows. In chapter two, I review the arguments of framework relativists who conclude from their rejection of foundational justification that incommensurable conceptual schemes cannot be rationally evaluated. In chapter three, I summarize MacIntyre's account of a process of dialectical enquiry through which incommensurable schemes of belief can be evaluated in a non-circular and non-foundational way. In chapter four, to address questions outstanding in MacIntyre's account, I reframe dialectical enquiry as a search for wide reflective equilibrium. Together, chapters three and four constitute a general response to framework relativist arguments against the possibility of cross-framework evaluation. ;In chapter five, I reconstruct MacIntyre's understanding of dialectical debate between rival moral perspectives and his arguments for the rational superiority of his own tradition, the ethics of virtue. In chapter six, I begin by uncovering tensions within MacIntyre's metaethical position related to its lack of an adequate characterization of intrinsic moral value. I then draw from the conceptual resources of Mahayana Buddhism to argue that intrinsic moral value is apprehended in immediate cognitive-affective responses--"reasons of the heart"--that arise prior to the differentiation of self and other. I end the chapter by indicating how a Mahayana metaethics resolves the tensions internal to MacIntyre's position. In chapter seven, I explore how nondualistic apprehensions of intrinsic value can figure in critical dialogue among incommensurable moral perspectives, outline three general conditions of productive critical dialogue, and then discuss forms of moral education through which those conditions could be promoted in pluralistic democracies