Moral Disagreement and Inexcusable Irrationality

American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1):97 (2019)
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Abstract

This essay explores the following position: Ultimate moral principles are a priori truths; hence, it is irrational to assign a non-zero credence to any proposition that is incompatible with these ultimate moral principles ; and this sort of irrationality, if it could have been avoided, is in a sense inexcusable. So—at least if moral relativism is false—in any disagreement about ultimate moral principles, at least one party to the disagreement is inexcusably irrational. This position may seem extreme, but it is argued that it is more plausible than it first appears.

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Author's Profile

Ralph Wedgwood
University of Southern California

Citations of this work

Relativism.Maria Baghramian & Adam J. Carter - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Relativism.Chris Swoyer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Immorality and Irrationality.Alex Worsnip* - 2019 - Philosophical Perspectives 33 (1):220-253.
Moral Knowledge By Deduction.Declan Smithies - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):537-563.

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References found in this work

Political Liberalism.John Rawls - 1993 - Columbia University Press.
Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 1785 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Thomas E. Hill & Arnulf Zweig.
The Nature of Normativity.Ralph Wedgwood - 2007 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 1785 - In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Late Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary. Blackwell.
The Value of Rationality.Ralph Wedgwood - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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