CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 82Philosophical Ethics and TheorySyntax, Semantics, Linguistic VariationEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics

Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics

Open access
Khoo, Justin, Knobe, Joshua·2018·Noûs
DOI 10.1111/nous.12151
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences (“X is wrong”/“X is not wrong”), it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences (i.e., that it has to be the case that at least one of them is incorrect). This inference then plays a key role in a now‐standard argument against certain theories in moral semantics. In this paper, we introduce new evidence that bears on this debate. We show that there are moral conflict cases in which people are inclined to say both (a) that the two speakers disagree and (b) that it is not the case at least one of them must be saying something incorrect. We then explore how we might understand such disagreements. As a proof of concept, we sketch an account of the concept of disagreement and an independently motivated theory of moral semantics which, together, explain the possibility of such cases.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/nous.12151

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Khoo and Knobe (2016) tried and failed to find an effect of cultural distance on non-moral disagreement.

    “However, (Khoo and Knobe 2016) tried and failed to find any such effect.”

    From Faultless Disagreement as Evidence for Moral Relativism (2022) · cites this paper as Khoo and Knobe 2016

    Experiment 3’s Methods (§2.4.1) show that Khoo and Knobe tested a non-moral disagreement involving an extraterrestrial speaker. Its Results (§2.4.2) found no significant difference between rejection and incorrectness ratings for that vignette. But they did not vary cultural distance in the non-moral conditions, so this was not a failed test of cultural distance’s effect on non-moral disagreement. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • The results show quite clearly that respondents take cultural distance to be relevant.

    “However, these results show quite clearly that respondents take cultural distance to be relevant.”

    From Faultless Disagreement as Evidence for Moral Relativism (2022) · cites this paper as Khoo and Knobe 2016

  • There is reason to doubt that the results depend on idiosyncratic undergraduate relativism.

    “So there is reason to doubt that these results depend on idiosyncratic undergraduate relativism.”

    From Faultless Disagreement as Evidence for Moral Relativism (2022) · cites this paper as Khoo and Knobe 2016

  • The results suggest that ordinary speakers endorse the possibility of faultless moral disagreement, at least in contexts involving extreme cultural distance.

    “But prima facie, they suggest that ordinary speakers endorse the possibility of faultless moral disagreement, at least in contexts involving extreme cultural distance.”

    From Faultless Disagreement as Evidence for Moral Relativism (2022) · cites this paper as Khoo and Knobe 2016

  • Both studies found a striking relation between cultural distance and intuitions of faultlessness.

    “Importantly, both studies found a striking relation between cultural distance and intuitions of faultlessness.”

    From Faultless Disagreement as Evidence for Moral Relativism (2022) · cites this paper as Khoo and Knobe 2016

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 64

  1. Akiba, Ken. 2004. Vagueness in the World. Nous, 38(3), 407-429.
  2. Barnes, Elizabeth, & Williams, J. Robert G. 2011. A Theory of Metaphysical Indetermi- nacy. In: Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Blackburn, Simon. 1984. Spreading the Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  4. Blackburn, Simon. 1993. Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  5. Cappelen, Herman, & Hawthorne, John. 2009. Relativism and Monadic Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  6. Cariani, Fabrizio. 2015. Deontic Modals and Probabilities: One Theory to Rule Them All? In: Charlow, Nate, & Chrisman, Matthew (eds), Deontic Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  7. We would like to thank audiences at the Buffalo Annual Experimental Philosophy Conference and the MIT Conceptual Engineering Workshop for constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We'd like to thank Gunnar Björnsson, Alexis Burgess, Fabrizio Cariani, Brendan Dill, Kevin Dorst, Janice Dowell, Jamie Dreier, Andy Egan, Steve Finlay, Sally Haslanger, Matt Mandelkern, Jack Marley-Payne, Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa, David Plunkett, Mark Richard, Bernhard Salow, Alex Silk, Tim Sundell, Steve Yablo, and two anonymous reviewers for Noûs for many helpful comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the paper.
  8. Dowell, Janice. 2011. A Flexible Contextualist Account of Epistemic Modals. Philosophers' Imprint, 11(14), 1-25.
  9. Egan, Andy. 2007. Epistemic Modals, Relativism, and Assertion. Philosophical Studies, 133(1), 1-22.
  10. Egan, Andy. 2012. Relativist Dispositional Theories of Value. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 50(4), 557-582.
  11. Finlay, Stephen. 2004. The Conversational Practicality of Value Judgment. Journal of Ethics, 8, 205-223.
  12. Finlay, Stephen. 2009. Oughts and Ends. Philosophical Studies, 143(3), 315-340.
  13. Finlay, Stephen. 2014. Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  14. von Fintel, Kai, & Gillies, Anthony. 2008. CIA Leaks. Philosophical Review, 117(1), 77-98.
  15. von Fintel, Kai, & Gillies, Anthony. 2011. Might Made Right. Pages 108-130 of: Egan, Andy, & Weatherson, Brian (eds), Epistemic Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  16. Gibbard, Allan. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  17. Gibbard, Allan. 2003. Thinking How to Live. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  18. Goodwin, Geoffrey, & Darley, John. 2008. The Psychology of Meta-Ethics: Exploring Objectivism. Cognition, 106(3), 1339-1366.
  19. Goodwin, Geoffrey, & Darley, John. 2012. Why Are Some Moral Beliefs Perceived to be More Objective than Others? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 250-256.
  20. Hare, R. M. 1952. The Language of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  21. Harman, Gilbert. 1975. Moral Relativism Defended. The Philosophical Review, 84(1), 3-22.
  22. Heim, Irene. 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst.
  23. Horgan, Terence, & Timmons, Mark. 1990. New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin Earth. Journal of Philosophical Research, 16.
  24. Horn, Laurence. 1985. Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity. Language, 61(1), 121-174.
  25. Huemer, Michael. 2005. Ethical Intuitionism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  26. Huvenes, Torfinn Thomesen. 2015. Epistemic Modals and Credal Disagreement. Philo- sophical Studies, 172(4), 987-1011.
  27. Kaplan, David. 1989. Demonstratives. Pages 481-563 of: Almog, Joseph, Perry, John, & Wettstein, Howard (eds), Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  28. Khoo, Justin. 2015. Modal Disagreements. Inquiry, 58(5), 511-534.
  29. King, Jeffrey C. 2013a. The Metasemantics of Contextual Sensitivity. In: Burgess, A., & Sherman, B. (eds), New Essays in Metasemantics. Oxford University Press.
  30. King, Jeffrey C. 2014. Speaker Intentions in Context. Nous, 48(2), 219-237.
  31. Kölbel, Max. 2004. Faultless Disagreement. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104, 53-73.
  32. Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. The Notional Category of Modality. Pages 38-74 of: Eikmeyer, H. J., & Rieser, H. (eds), Words, Worlds, and Contexts. New Approaches in Words Semantics. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  33. Kratzer, Angelika. 1991. Modality. Chap. 23, pages 639-650 of: von Stechow, Arnim, & Wunderlich, Dieter (eds), Handbuch Semantik. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
  34. Lasersohn, Peter. 2005. Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28(6), 643-686.
  35. Lewis, David. 1979. Scorekeeping in a Language Game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8, 339-59.
  36. Lewis, David. 1989. Dispositional Theories of Value. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 63, 113-137.
  37. Lyons, David. 1976. Ethical Relativism and the Problem of Incoherence. Ethics, 86(2), 107-121.
  38. MacFarlane, John. 2005. The Assessment Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions. Pages 197-233 of: Oxford Studies in Epistemology, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  39. MacFarlane, John. 2009. Nonindexical Contextualism. Synthese, 166(2), 231-250.
  40. MacFarlane, John. 2011. Epistemic Modals are Assessment-Sensitive. Pages 144-178 of:
  41. Egan, Andy, & Weatherson, Brian (eds), Epistemic Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  42. MacFarlane, John. 2014. Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  43. MacFarlane, John, & Kolodny, Niko. 2010. Ifs and Oughts. Journal of Philosophy, 107, 115-143.
  44. Montminy, Martin. 2012. Epistemic Modals and Indirect Weak Suggestives. Dialectica, 66(4), 583-606.
  45. Nichols, Shaun. 2004. After Objectivity: An Empirical Study of Moral Judgment. Philo- sophical Psychology, 17(1), 3-26.
  46. Perry, John. 1997. Indexicals and Demonstratives. Pages 586-612 of: Hale, Bob, & Wright, Crispin (eds), A Companion to Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
  47. Plunkett, David, & Sundell, Tim. 2013. Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms. Philosophers' Imprint, 13(23), 1-37.
  48. Portner, Paul. 2004. The Semantics of Imperatives Within a Theory of Clause Types. In: Watanabe, Kazuha, & Young, Robert B. (eds), Proceedings of SALT 14. Ithaca: CLC Publications.
  49. Sarkissian, Hagop, Park, John, Tien, David, Wright, Jennifer Cole, & Knobe, Joshua. 2011. Folk Moral Relativism. Mind & Language, 26(4), 482-505.
  50. Shafer-Landau, Russ. 2003. Moral Realism: a Defense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  51. Silk, Alex. 2013. Truth-Conditions and the Meanings of Ethical Terms. In: Shafer-Landau, Russ (ed), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 8. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  52. Smith, Michael. 1989. Dispositional Theories of Value. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 63, 89-111.
  53. Stalnaker, Robert. 1978. Assertion. Pages 315-332 of: Cole, P. (ed), Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
  54. Stalnaker, Robert. 1999. Context and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  55. Stalnaker, Robert. 2014. Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  56. Stephenson, Tamina. 2007. Judge Dependence, Epistemic Modals, and Predicates of Per- sonal Taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(4), 487-525.
  57. Stevenson, Charles Leslie. 1937. The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms. Mind, 46(181), 14-31.
  58. Streiffer, Robert. 2003. Moral Relativism and Reasons for Action. Routledge.
  59. Veltman, Frank. 1996. Defaults in Update Semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 25(3), 221-261.
  60. Willer, Malte. 2013. New Dynamics for Epistemic Modality. Philosophical Review, 122(1), 45-92.
  61. Williams, Bernard. 1986. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  62. Williams, J. Robert G. 2008. Multiple Actualities and Ontically Vague Identity. Philo- sophical Quarterly, 58, 134-54.
  63. Yalcin, Seth. 2011. Nonfactualism About Epistemic Modality. Pages 295-332 of: Egan, Andy, & Weatherson, Brian (eds), Epistemic Modals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  64. Yalcin, Seth. 2012. Bayesian Expressivism. Pages 123-160 of: Proceedings of the Aris- totelian Society, vol. 133.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Khoo, J., & Knobe, J.
Affiliations
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
  • Yale University (US)
ORCID
Venue
Noûs
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2016-06-19
Volume
52
Issue
1
Pages
109-143
ISSN
  • 0029-4624 (ISSN-L)
  • 1468-0068
DOI
10.1111/nous.12151
OpenAlex
W2469921234
Cited by
82
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2013: 1
FWCI
51.78
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor (vor)
Locations
  • Noûs (publishedVersion)
  • DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
  • PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Philosophical Ethics and Theory
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Keywords
moral disagreement, moral semantics, moral conflict, moral wrongness, moral epistemology

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review