Alisabeth Ayars

This essay develops a constitutive account of disagreement in terms of subject matter, or questions, and explores its implications. Whenever A and B agree or disagree, there is some question S that their agreement or disagreement is about. A and B agree about S when they accept the same answer to S; they disagree about S when they accept different answers to S. To accept an answer is to take up a committing attitude to a content. This account allows both doxastic and practical disagreement: if A believes that p and B believes that ~p, they accept incompatible answers to the question whetherp; if A plans for A and B to φ and B plans for A and B not to φ, they accept incompatible answers to the question whetherto φ. My question-relative account of disagreement can screen off spurious cases that make trouble for similar accounts, including cases where plans are jointly unsatisfiable but where no disagreement seems to obtain. Next, I discuss the account’s implications for disagreement involving preferences and credences. Finally, I discuss the account’s implications for the metaethical problem of normative disagreement. Distinguishing genuine from superficial disagreement, I conclude that the expressivist has available an account on which moral disagreement is genuine. (The contextualist might also have such an account, but the relativist probably does not.) If a domain is objective just in case it admits of genuine disagreement, we can therefore say that the expressivist has an objective theory of moral thought and language.