Deep Moral Disagreement and Unthinkable Possibilities
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Some disagreements seem to find no resolution, despite exchange of arguments and lack of obvious epistemic vices. These ‘deep disagreements’ have puzzled philosophers, who have offered different epistemological explanations for their ‘depth’. Deep disagreements that are moral in nature are more rarely discussed. What explains the ‘depth’ in the moral cases? This paper proposes that most deep moral disagreements can be explained by appealing to mutually unthinkable practical possibilities. Specifically, deep moral disagreements are those where each party demands the actualisation of a possibility that is unthinkable to the other party, and what determines the unthinkability is the structural role of value as ‘hinge commitment’, functioning both as background and as excluder. Using as example the debate on abortion, recently reignited in the US by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the paper aims to offer a model to understand deep moral disagreements, where value functions not (only) as topic but as structure.
Author: Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Institution: University of Pardubice
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Awards: G291036901, G3735356012, G4167240886
OpenAlex ID: W4412673796