Pluralism and Disagreement Can moral motivation pluralism survive meta-ethical disagreement?

Abstract

Meta-ethical pluralism is a recent set of theories claiming that multiple of the currently relevant meta-ethical theories can be correct at the same time. I will focus on a pluralist analysis of moral motivation that claims that speakers have different concepts of moral opinion, and defend this from an objection that it fails to account for meta-ethical disagreement as the parties are speaking past each other. In this paper I develop a way to respond to the objection by claiming that the disagreement can still be accounted for. The disagreement, I claim, is still present as the relevant parties both believe, and intend to communicate, that only one of their answers can be correct at the same time (the claim that pluralism is false). Pluralism can therefore still account for the disagreement, as the presence of disagreement seems to depend on non-pluralists holding beliefs that make their positions incompatible.