Conciliationism and Moral Spinelessness: James Fritz

Episteme (2016) page 1 of 18 © Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/epi.2016.44
conciliationism and moral

spinelessness
james fritz
jamie.c.fritz@gmail.com
abstract
This paper presents a challenge to conciliationist views of disagreement. I argue
that conciliationists cannot satisfactorily explain why we need not revise our beliefs
in response to certain moral disagreements. Conciliationists can attempt to meet
this challenge in one of two ways. First, they can individuate disputes narrowly.
This allows them to argue that we have dispute-independent reason to distrust
our opponents’ moral judgment. This approach threatens to license objectionable
dogmatism. It also inappropriately gives deep epistemic signicance to supercial
questions about how to think about the subject matter of a dispute. Second, con-
ciliationists can individuate disputes widely. This allows them to argue that we lack
dispute-independent reason to trust our opponents’ moral judgment. But such
arguments fail; our background of generally shared moral beliefs gives us good rea-
son to trust the moral judgment of our opponents, even after we set quite a bit of
our reasoning aside. On either approach, then, conciliationists should acknow-
ledge that we have dispute-independent reason to trust the judgment of those
who reject our moral beliefs. Given a conciliationist view of disagreement’s epi-
stemic role, this has the unattractive result that we are epistemically required to
revise some of our most intuitively secure moral beliefs.
This paper presents a challenge to conciliationism, a family of views about the epistemi-
cally rational response to disagreement. The characteristic claim of conciliationist views
is that, in the face of disagreement with an epistemic peer about whether p, one must revise
one’s condence in p. More generally, conciliationist views claim that certain sorts of dis-
agreement rationally require us to revise or abandon contested beliefs.
It’s easy to worry about the implications of conciliationism. Intuitively, we are entitled
to condently retain some of our beliefs in the face of disagreement. If a conciliationist
view counsels us to give up our condence in apparently obvious truths of logic, for
example, that view will be at best revisionary and at worst impossible to follow.
Similarly, certain moral commitments seem like worrisome cases for conciliationism. I
am convinced that homosexual behavior between adults is pro tanto permissible; does dis-
agreement require me to abandon this judgment? Common sense says no. In the face of
examples like these, conciliationists often take pains to show that their views do not coun-
sel intuitively implausible belief revision.1 In the cases where steadfast belief seems clearly
appropriate, they argue, conciliationism does not recommend changes in condence. To
1 On my usage, to revise a belief is to either abandon it or lower one’s credence in it.
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james fritz
successfully argue for this conclusion would be to solve conciliationism’s “problem of

spinelessness” (Elga 2007: 494).
This paper argues that, when it comes to moral beliefs, conciliationism cannot satisfac-
torily solve the problem of spinelessness.2 Conciliationists must either individuate disputes
narrowly or widely. On either approach, conciliationists cannot offer a principled and sat-
isfying vindication of our intuitively appropriate condence in the face of moral
disagreement.
1. conciliationism and spinelessness

The characteristic claim of conciliationist views is the claim that, when one disagrees with
an apparent epistemic peer as to whether p, one rationally ought to revise one’s belief as to
whether p. But conciliationists are not solely concerned to defend this conclusion about
the (possibly quite rare3) case of disagreement between apparent peers. Rather, they
seek to explain this result by defending more general accounts of the epistemic role played
by disagreement. In the course of doing so, conciliationists appeal to the following
principle:
Independence When considering how much epistemic weight to give your beliefs, in
order to determine how (or whether) to revise my own belief, I must assess your epi-
stemic credentials in a way that relies only on dispute-independent reasoning.4
Just what does it mean for reasoning to be dispute-independent? This is a crucial question
for conciliationists, and a good deal of this paper will be concerned with candidate
answers.5 But for now, we can leave the answer to the question at a rough, intuitive
level: reasoning is dispute-independent if it is not both challenged by one’s interlocutor
and relevant to the topic at hand.
By forbidding me from appealing to some disputed reasoning, Independence restricts
the epistemically legitimate ways in which I can conclude that my opponent is untrust-
worthy. Prima facie, this seems to require me to take certain opponents quite seriously.
It may even require me to lose condence in cases where, intuitively, I am fully entitled
to retain my disputed beliefs. This is what Adam Elga memorably calls “the problem of
spinelessness” (Elga 2007: 494). Conciliationists usually deny that their views entail spine-
lessness. They do so by arguing that Independence does not require implausible belief
revision.
2 For the purpose of this debate, I’ll assume that moral judgments are beliefs. But it’s worth noting that
some noncognitivists may be able to neatly avoid the worries raised here; they can simultaneously accept
conciliationism about beliefs and reject the conclusion that there are any epistemic requirements on
moral judgments. See especially Kalderon (2005).
3 Audi (2008), Lackey (2010a), and King (2012), among others, argue for the rarity of peer disagreement.
4 Cf. Elga (2007: 490–1) and Christensen (2011: 1–2). Certain conciliationists and anti-conciliationists
alike have apparently accepted that the debate over conciliationism comes down to a debate over
Independence (see Christensen 2011; Kelly 2013). Even Errol Lord, who raises worries about this char-
acterization, acknowledges that there may be no defenses of conciliationism that are not connected to
acceptance of Independence (Lord 2014).
5 For further discussion, see especially Christensen (2011: 18).
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2 at ehttps:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
pisteme http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/epi.2016.44
conciliationism and moral spinelessness
As a rst step in addressing the problem of spinelessness, conciliationists distinguish

between the two following principles. I’ll follow Katia Vavova in labelling the rst one
NIRP (the No Independent Reason Principle) and the second one GIRP (the Good
Independent Reason Principle).
NIRP Insofar as the dispute-independent evaluation fails to give me good reason to be

condent that I am more trustworthy than my interlocutor, I must revise my belief in
the direction of hers.
GIRP Insofar as the dispute-independent evaluation gives me good reason to be con-

dent that my interlocutor is at least as trustworthy as I am, I must revise my belief in the
direction of hers.6
In these principles, and throughout the paper, I use ‘trustworthy’ as a theory-neutral term
for having the epistemic credentials that conciliationists ask us to look for in others.
Different conciliationists emphasize different epistemic credentials. According to Vavova
(2014: 317) and Christensen (2011: 15), the right sort of dispute-independent evaluation
aims at determining whether an interlocutor is well-informed and likely to have reasoned
correctly from her evidence. Elga (2007: 490), on the other hand, calls attention to the
(dispute-independent) probability that an interlocutor is correct.7 This paper’s argument
applies to both types of conciliationism; on both, we have some dispute-independent rea-
son to take our opponents in certain moral debates to be at least as trustworthy as we are.
Conciliationists usually reject NIRP precisely because it would lead to epistemic spine-
lessness.8 Consider a disagreement with an anti-realist about the external world. She dis-
putes every one of my beliefs about the external world, and so for any proposition p in
that domain, I lack any undisputed reason to think that I am more trustworthy about p
than the anti-realist is. If NIRP is right, this means that I should revise my belief in the
direction of the anti-realist’s. This is an unwelcome result: conciliationists usually do
not consider our beliefs so fragile.
GIRP does not obviously have such counterintuitive results. It only requires me to
revise my belief in two sorts of cases: cases in which I have positive reason to take my
interlocutor to be trustworthy, and cases in which the disagreement reveals that I myself
am not very trustworthy. GIRP explains why a disagreement with a friend is usually more
worrisome than a disagreement with an anti-realist stranger. I have plenty of reasons to
trust my friends’ judgment; I have no reason to trust the anti-realist’s. By accepting
GIRP instead of NIRP, a conciliationist begins to address the charge of spinelessness.
But a crucial question remains: do I have good dispute-independent reason to think that
those who actually reject my beliefs are at least as trustworthy as I am? According to
GIRP, whenever this condition obtains, disagreement requires me to revise my belief –
no matter how justied or dearly held.
6 These formulations are adapted from Christensen (2011: 15).

7 Christensen (2014) discusses implications of focusing (as Elga does) on interlocutors’ apparent accuracy
rather than their apparent rationality.
8 See Christensen (2011: 15–16) and Vavova (2014: 314–15). But contrast Sidgwick (1981: 342),
Feldman (2006), and King (2012: 267–9).
james fritz
The prospect of spinelessness seems particularly likely to arise, and particularly troub-
ling, in the moral domain. Certain moral beliefs are both very intuitively secure and deeply
controversial. For this reason, several conciliationists attempt to explain why their theories
do not recommend spinelessness about moral belief in particular. They treat this conclu-
sion as one of the desiderata for a successful account of disagreement’s epistemic role.
This paper will argue that conciliationism cannot achieve this desideratum. The success
of any given conciliationist proposal depends on what it means to be dispute-independent.
Conciliationists can approach this issue by individuating disputes narrowly or widely. But
on either approach, conciliationism faces serious problems. The next section illustrates the
problems for conciliationists who individuate disputes narrowly.
2. individuating disputes narrowly

Adam Elga, in his seminal “Reection and Disagreement,” defends a version of concilia-
tionism (his “equal weight view”) against the charge of spinelessness. His defense is
straightforward: in most real cases of serious disagreement, we lack good dispute-inde-
pendent reason to trust our interlocutors’ judgment. The reason is that, in most real
cases of disagreement, “one’s reasoning about the disputed issue is tangled up with
one’s reasoning about many other matters” (Elga 2007: 492).
Elga claries this point through an example. Ann and Beth are two “friends who stand
at opposite ends of the political spectrum” (Elga 2007: 492–3) and disagree about the per-
missibility of abortion. Elga takes it for granted that a defensible conciliationism should
not recommend that, in any such case, Ann revise her belief about the permissibility of
abortion.
Elga’s key point, in addressing this example, is the following: even after setting aside
her disputed reasoning, Ann does not consider Beth trustworthy about abortion.9 In
fact, he goes further: even after setting aside her disputed reasoning, Ann will most likely
expect Beth to be quite untrustworthy about abortion. This is precisely because Ann’s rea-
soning about abortion is “tangled up” with other issues. Ann most likely disagrees with
Beth, for instance, about issues like “whether humans have souls” (Elga 2007: 493)
and “the age at which humans begin feeling pain” (Elga 2007: 496). Even after she sets
aside the reasoning behind her belief about abortion’s permissibility, Elga suggests, Ann
need not set aside these beliefs. And by noting that Beth tends to be wrong about “allied
issues” (Elga 2007: 493), Ann can reasonably infer that Beth is untrustworthy about abor-
tion. Elga’s conciliationism therefore does not require Ann to revise her contested belief.
Elga’s proposal, in effect, is that we individuate disputes quite narrowly. He suggests
that Ann only set aside the reasoning behind her belief that abortion is permissible, rather
than setting aside the “cluster” (Elga 2007: 495) of related beliefs disputed by Beth. This
helps Elga to avoid the problem of spinelessness. The more narrowly a dispute is individ-
uated, the more beliefs and reasoning are independent of that dispute. By individuating
disputes narrowly, then, Elga allows me to appeal to closely related beliefs when I assess
my opponents’ epistemic credentials. Some of these related beliefs will likely imply that she
is frequently mistaken. Far from being spineless, I will often be permitted to condently
9 Contrast Enoch (2010: 971–2) and Setiya (2013: 16–17).
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retain my initial belief. After all, it is only challenged by someone who, on my evidence, is
less trustworthy than I am.
Though it certainly seems to prevent spinelessness, individuating disputes narrowly cre-
ates problems of its own. First, it threatens to insulate too many beliefs from epistemic
defeat. According to Elga, most real-world disputes are messy and complicated; they
are usually structurally similar to the case of Ann and Beth (Elga 2007: 493). This
means that, to the extent that Ann is epistemically permitted to steadfastly remain con-
dent in the face of Beth’s disagreement, we may be able to steadfastly remain condent
whenever we engage in a messy, real-world dispute. This ability to blamelessly shrug
off different approaches to complex issues seems, at rst glance, just as problematic as
a frequent call for spinelessness. Even non-conciliationists should grant that a disagree-
ment’s being connected to several “allied issues” is insufcient to render it epistemically
irrelevant.10
A second problem is even more serious: there is no principled way to individuate all
disputes with a uniform neness of grain. Just how wide is the scope of any given real-
world dispute? Elga’s only guidance on this matter is the following: we should individuate
disputes “just coarsely enough so that [your judgment about your interlocutor’s trust-
worthiness] is genuinely prior to your reasoning about the disputed issue” (Elga 2007:
490). But this just pushes the problem back: how narrowly should we construe the dis-
puted issue?
Quite a lot may hang on the answer to this question. Say that we are both baseball fans,
but we disagree about the current standings in the American League East. I think that the
Orioles are at the top, the Yankees are somewhere in the middle, and the Red Sox are at
the bottom of the division. (Suppose, further, that I have not relied on any of these beliefs
in reasoning about the others.) You think that the Red Sox are at the top, the Orioles are
somewhere in the middle, and the Yankees are at the bottom. What is the disputed issue in
this case? Are we engaged in three distinct disputes, one over the place of each team? Or
are we engaged in a single dispute over the state of the division?
Conciliationists who aspire to individuate disputes narrowly cannot afford to leave this
question unresolved or to say that we are engaged in both. In certain evidential situations,
the two construals yield contradictory verdicts about where I should move my credences.
It may be that, if we understand this case to involve three distinct disputed issues, your
apparently mistaken beliefs about the Red Sox and Yankees provide me with dispute-inde-
pendent reason to think that you will be wrong about the Orioles. I could, in other words,
appeal to “allied issues” to write you off as untrustworthy about the Orioles. If we under-
stand the case as a dispute over a single issue, on the other hand, I will not be able to
appeal to beliefs about the Red Sox and Yankees; my beliefs about the Red Sox and
Yankees are not independent of my reasoning about the state of the division. And with
those beliefs set aside, I will have fewer admissible reasons to take you to be untrust-
worthy. It might even be that this dispute-independent evaluation, on balance, suggests
that you are quite trustworthy. I might therefore be required to revise all my beliefs
about the state of the division – including the standings of individual teams.
So the question of how to respond to a dispute may be decided in two contradictory
ways depending on the way we individuate disputes. But in the baseball case, just as in
10 For a thorough discussion of this problem, see Lackey (2010b).
james fritz
the case of Ann and Beth, there does not seem to be any deep truth of the matter as to
whether we are disagreeing about many small issues or one big issue. This is a serious
problem for any conciliationism, like Elga’s, that individuates disputes narrowly. Such
approaches give enormous epistemic importance to a supercial question: what is the
number of disputed issues involved in a given case of disagreement? This question
seems both epistemically irrelevant and difcult to answer in a principled way.
There is an obvious and attractive way for the conciliationist to avoid this problem: she
can individuate disputes more widely. She can, that is, require us to set aside the entire
“cluster” of relevant disputed beliefs when we assess an opponent’s epistemic credentials.
The conciliationist who takes this approach need not rely on an ad hoc approach to count-
ing disputes; indeed, she need not attempt to count disputes at all. Rather, she can simply
require disputants to set aside all beliefs that are both contested and potentially dialectic-
ally relevant. In the next section, we’ll see how conciliationists have resisted the charge of
spinelessness by individuating disputes in this wide-open way.
3. individuating disputes widely

Katia Vavova (2014) has recently argued that, when we individuate disputes widely, con-
ciliationism does not require spinelessness.11 In fact, she thinks that this sort of concilia-
tionism has attractive results: most importantly, it implies that disagreement is not an
epistemic threat to our most intuitively secure moral beliefs. Where her conciliationism
does require revision of moral beliefs, Vavova argues, those revisions are independently
well-motivated (2014: 325).
Vavova’s approach to the problem of moral spinelessness involves several complemen-
tary observations about moral thought and practice. First, she notes that there is negligibly
little actual disagreement about certain moral beliefs. Even if disagreement is a prima facie
threat to some moral beliefs, it is surely no threat to the belief that pain is bad or the belief
that we should not kick puppies (2014: 326). There is simply not enough actual disagree-
ment about these subjects to present a problem. Second, Vavova notes that some “appar-
ent moral disagreements aren’t really disagreements about moral matters” (2014: 313).12
Two people might agree about whether grafti artists should be imprisoned, for instance,
while disagreeing about whether Jones should therefore be imprisoned. Their disagree-
ment would come down to a disagreement about an empirical matter: whether Jones is
11 Elga also argues, in much the same way that Vavova does, that even when we individuate disputes
widely, conciliationism does not require spinelessness (Elga 2007: 496–7; cf. Vavova 2014: 315
n35). But since Vavova argues for the claim at further length, and explicitly draws conclusions for
moral epistemology, this paper will treat her as the standard-bearer for the “wide approach.”
12 Some may want to take this point further than Vavova. Perhaps all apparently moral disagreement
comes down to disagreement about non-moral facts. This suggests another strategy for the concilia-
tionist: argue that there is no truly moral disagreement at all, and that we therefore never need revise
our moral beliefs. But the conciliationist should not be too hopeful about this strategy; it relies on a
risky empirical bet about what people actually believe. A responsible conciliationist should not be
sure, absent some impressive psychological surveys, that (for instance) all parties to the dispute
about homosexual behavior are simply applying the same fundamental moral commitments about sex-
ual behavior to sexual encounters that they understand differently.
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a grafti artist. Conciliating in these cases would not amount to spinelessness about our
deepest moral commitments.13 If conciliationism requires objectionable spinelessness
about our moral commitments, then, it will only be in a restricted class of disagreements:
fairly robust controversies that “aren’t, at root, non-moral” (Vavova 2014: 324).
Even in these crucial cases, Vavova insists, disagreement does not have much defeating
power. Her wide individuation of disputes helps to explain why. When my interlocutor
has a dramatically different moral worldview, our disagreements will not be restricted
to only a few topics; they will arise in clusters of related beliefs. On a wide individuation
of disputes, this means that fewer of my beliefs will be truly dispute-independent. Now,
according to GIRP, a disagreement cannot have defeating power unless it leaves me
with dispute-independent reason to trust my interlocutor. So the more I set aside, the
less a disagreement can call for belief revision. This, Vavova argues, is appropriate: the
disagreement of a reasonable political opponent should be more epistemically worrisome
than the disagreement of a sociopath Vavova (2014: 314–15). A wide individuation of dis-
putes can explain why.
Vavova appears to offer a tidy solution to the problem of spinelessness. When we dis-
agree with people who share our “basic worldview” Vavova (2014: 324), our disagree-
ment takes place against a robust backdrop of shared moral beliefs. This means that we
have plenty of dispute-independent reason to trust our opponents. Conciliationism some-
times calls on us to lose condence in these cases, but this is not intuitively implausible
Vavova (2014: 322). We do not, on the other hand, have good dispute-independent rea-
son to trust people whose moral judgments differ from ours systematically. These dis-
agreements ask us to set aside too much; they “go too deep” Vavova (2014: 323) to
have defeating power.
4. a problem for the wide approach

Promising though it may seem, a wide individuation of disputes cannot solve conciliation-
ism’s problem of spinelessness. The problem for this approach is that, even after setting
aside large “clusters” of our moral thinking, we still have sufcient dispute-independent
reason to trust the moral judgment of a great many people – even those who reject
some of our most cherished moral beliefs. When there are enough such people, concilia-
tionism counsels spinelessness.
This may seem like a preposterous claim. Recall the principle, called GIRP above, that
explains how to use a dispute-independent evaluation:
GIRP Insofar as the dispute-independent evaluation gives me good reason to be con-

dent that my interlocutor is at least as trustworthy as I am, I must revise my belief in the
direction of hers.
Isn’t this an extremely high standard? After all, I know plenty about my own epistemic
credentials. I know far, far less about the credentials of the host of people who reject
13 There is an interesting question as to whether a conciliationism like Vavova’s would require objection-
able spinelessness about non-moral beliefs. But this question lies beyond the scope of this paper. For
some promising rst moves, see Decker and Groll (2013).
james fritz
my most treasured moral beliefs. Most of these people are total strangers. Wouldn’t I need
to know an enormous amount about of personal information about someone before I
could have reason to be condent that he is at least as trustworthy as I am? And isn’t
the disagreement of strangers therefore epistemically irrelevant?
This line of thinking is misleading. Paradigmatic cases for conciliationism can help to
show why. Say that you are at a racetrack, watching the end of a horse race. You watch
horses A and B cross the nish line, and you form the belief that horse A narrowly won.
Now, say that a total stranger beside you expresses the belief that horse B won. Intuitively,
the disagreement of this stranger has some defeating power. Perhaps not very much;
depending on the details, you may only be required to reduce your condence a bit.
But the notion that this person’s disagreement just cannot rationalize a change in your cre-
dence level, merely because you know your own track-record so much better than his, is
clearly mistaken.
How can the conciliationist explain this? First, she must interpret the phrase “reason to
be condent that my interlocutor is at least as trustworthy as I am” somewhat loosely,
such that you could have some dispute-independent reason to be condent that the stran-
ger at the racetrack is just as perceptually trustworthy as you are.14 Let’s grant that such
an interpretation can be offered.
A further question remains: what could give you this reason for trusting the stranger?
Well, plausibly, you are warranted in making certain assumptions about strangers based
on what you know people are generally like. In other words, justied beliefs about the
base rates in a population can underwrite justied beliefs about the epistemic credentials
of individuals in that population. We all have a history of interactions that justies us, for
instance, in thinking that the vast majority of people are fairly reliable when it comes to
perceiving medium-sized objects. We have even better reason to think this of people that
bother to go to racetracks. So even when your interlocutor at the racetrack is a total stran-
ger, you still have some dispute-independent reason to expect that he is a reliable perceiver
of the ends of horse races. The conciliationist should say that this provides some (dispute-
independent) evidence that the average person at the racetrack is just as trustworthy about
horse races as you are.
Of course, this line of thought only threatens moral spinelessness if we have dispute-
independent reason to suspect that total strangers are, to some extent, likely to be just
as trustworthy about morality as we are. But, plausibly, we do have such a reason: the
enormous backdrop of moral beliefs that almost all people share. Vavova herself argues
that, when it comes to most cases, people are in broad moral agreement. And this
seems right. Although the practical importance of reaching moral consensus tends to
draw our attention toward areas of dispute, most people probably share the vast majority
of their moral beliefs. Nearly everyone agrees that pain is bad and that we shouldn’t kick
puppies. Nearly everyone agrees that we should generally keep our promises, that it is gen-
erally better to compliment someone than to stab her, that we are morally permitted to
either start walking with the left foot or the right, and so on. The consensus extends to
a huge subset of the moral propositions that we are capable of entertaining.
When we note that other people generally seem to be right about a wide range of moral
questions, we gain reason to believe of any given stranger that he will be right about a
14 Christensen explicitly endorses this looser interpretation (2011: 16; cf. Christensen 2007: 212).
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wide range of moral questions. As a result, when we enter into moral disagreements, we
have inductive support for the belief that any given stranger will be right about the con-
tested matter at hand. Compare: when we note that other people generally perceive the
ends of horse races well, we gain reason to believe that any given stranger at the race
track generally perceives the ends of horse races well. And this belief, in turn, gives us
some reason to trust any given stranger at the race track about the outcome of the
horse race at hand. A robust background of agreement in some domain, in other
words, is just the sort of thing that generally provides dispute-independent reason to con-
sider one’s opponents trustworthy about a disputed case in that domain.15
So our background of moral agreement gives us dispute-independent reason to trust
strangers about the subject matter of moral disputes. Now, this may not mean that any
single person’s disagreement will call for much belief revision. But, as in the horse race
case above, the numbers matter.16 When enough people independently arrive at beliefs
that contradict mine, and those opponents are to some extent independently credible,
my condence should drop dramatically.
To see why this result is so troubling, consider a case of actual disagreement. Suppose
(as seems likely) that an enormous amount of people now and throughout history have
believed that homosexual behavior is pro tanto morally impermissible. Conciliationism
tells me to assess these people’s epistemic credentials in a dispute-independent way.
Even after setting aside all relevantly disputed beliefs, however, I have some reason to
trust these people. Specically, I have evidence that they believe the truth about most
everyday moral questions. This means that, if my opponents are sufciently numerous,
Vavova’s conciliationism will call on me to reduce my condence in the permissibility
of homosexuality. But this would be just the sort of spinelessness that conciliationists
want to avoid; in this case, reduced condence is certainly not “independently warranted”
(Vavova 2014: 302).
This section made an initial case for the conclusion that any conciliationism that indi-
viduates disputes widely will recommend moral spinelessness. Even after we set aside a
great deal of our moral thinking, our agreement about common-sense moral matters
gives us dispute-independent reason to trust our opponents about moral questions that
are controversial. The conciliationist who wants to individuate disputes widely must resist
this claim. The next section explains why this task will be so difcult.
5. strategies for the conciliationist

This section will consider several strategies through which the conciliationist might
attempt to reject the core claim of section 4: namely, that our background of moral
15 Is a background of perceptual agreement sufcient to give us reason to trust our opponents in cases
like the horse race one? Some might suspect, instead, that it’s our in-depth understanding of human
perceptual faculties that gives us that reason. But that can’t be right; even in ancient societies that
had no understanding of human perceptual systems to speak of, widespread perceptual disagreements
surely had the capacity to serve as epistemic defeaters. In those societies, a robust background of per-
ceptual agreement gave members sufcient reason to believe that others’ perceptual belief-forming
methods were generally reliable.
16 Elga (2007: 494) and Vavova (2014: 313) agree.
james fritz
agreement gives us dispute-independent reason to trust even strangers about disputed

moral questions. Section 5.1 considers an attempt to argue that, in the context of funda-
mental moral disagreements, our shared common-sense moral beliefs are not dispute-inde-
pendent. Section 5.2 considers several ways to emphasize a gap between common-sense
moral beliefs and controversial ones. Section 5.3 considers attempts to argue that, even
though we have dispute-independent reason to trust our opponents, that reason is ren-
dered irrelevant by a dispute-independent defeater.
In principle, all of these strategies are available not only to defenders of the wide
approach (like Vavova), but also to defenders of the narrow approach (like Elga). But
they are likely to hold less interest for the defenders of the narrow approach. If an argu-
mentative strategy like Elga’s were successful, the argument of section 4 would do nothing
to deate it. Regardless of whether agreement about common-sense moral issues provides
some evidence of others’ trustworthiness, the narrow approach suggests that it is usually
outweighed by stronger evidence of untrustworthiness based in disagreements about
“allied issues.” So the strategies considered in this section are primarily interesting as
attempts to save the wide approach from the argument of section 4.
5.1 Common-Sense Agreement is not Dispute-Independent

Section 4 suggested that we usually have ample dispute-independent reason to trust our
moral opponents: we agree with them about a host of moral propositions. One way to
resist the charge of spinelessness, then, is to argue that even these generally-agreed-
upon moral propositions are not actually dispute-independent. This requires drawing
the boundaries around moral disputes very widely indeed. What could justify such a
move?
Some remarks from Vavova (2014) suggest a way to develop this strategy. She writes
that, when moral disagreements don’t “come down to some non-moral matter,” they
often “go too deep” to be epistemically troubling Vavova (2014: 323). Why? Well, “if
the reason we disagree about abortion turns out to be that we disagree about what mor-
ality requires, then we have less independent ground than we thought” (2014: 323,
emphasis original). The idea, I take it, is that fundamentally moral disagreements are usu-
ally disagreements over quite general principles. In the context of a disagreement that is
really over some basic principle, p, we should not assess our interlocutors’ reliability by
considering whether we agree with them about matters that follow from p. In a disagree-
ment that comes down to whether pain is bad, for instance, I must set aside all my moral
beliefs that presuppose that pain is bad Vavova (2014: 324). In such cases, we have scant
ground from which to evaluate our opponents’ credentials.
This strategy relies on an implausibly systematic picture of moral thinking. To borrow
Vavova’s phrase, we can disagree about what morality requires in a particular case
(or case-type) without disagreeing about what morality requires generally. Two people
who disagree about whether morality requires strong constraints against killing embryos,
for instance, could in principle agree about nearly all other moral matters. Now, granted,
there are certain moral theories that offer only a single fundamental moral principle (e.g.
the principle of utility). When we learn that a person is committed to a principle like this,
we can justiably infer a great deal about her moral thinking. But this is not how typical
moral disagreements work; we are generally not justied in taking our opponents to rely
on very systematic rst-order normative theory. So when I learn that a person disagrees
available
with me about the moral status of some act-type, I should generally not leap to any con-
clusions about the bedrock of this person’s moral commitments.
To see this point, return to the example of homosexual behavior. When I learn that
someone considers homosexual behavior pro tanto impermissible, should I conclude
that our disagreement most likely comes down to a disagreement over some sweeping
principle – like the principle that acts that do not harm anyone else are pro tanto permis-
sible?17 Surely not. It would be more charitable to draw a more modest conclusion: even if
my opponent generally considers acts that do not harm others morally permissible, that
trend in his thinking is defeated in this case. Since we are not justied in drawing conclu-
sions about wide-reaching moral principles whenever we have a fundamentally moral dis-
agreement, then, such disagreements need not always require us to set aside most of our
moral beliefs.
5.2 The Gap Between Common Sense and Controversy

It’s surely an oversimplication to treat all thinking about moral questions in the same
way. Consider an analogy: what if we took near-universal agreement about many math-
ematical questions as sufcient reason to trust any given stranger about math? It would be
ridiculous to say that, because people usually get two-digit addition problems right, we all
have some reason to think that any given stranger will get a calculus problem right.18 This
analogy suggests a way in which the conciliationist might try to protect controversial
moral beliefs: she can carve up moral inquiry into (at least) two epistemically signicant
classes and argue that our opponents’ reliability about the former class gives us no reason
to trust them about the latter class. This section will consider three ways of developing this
strategy.
First, the conciliationist might note that some moral questions are more difcult than
others. The mere fact that most people generally get the easy moral questions right may
give us no reason to expect that they will get the hard moral questions right.
This approach cannot solve the problem of spinelessness. For one, it’s far from clear
that all the relevant controversial moral beliefs are difcult to form well. What’s more,
the difcult moral questions are not, intuitively, the ones which we are most entitled to
retain in the face of disagreement. If we become convinced that moral controversy is
explained by the difculty of thinking clearly about certain moral questions, we thereby
gain a reason to worry about anyone’s ability – including our own – to answer those ques-
tions.19 So conciliationists should not attempt to protect their dearest moral commitments
by appealing to difculty.
On to a second approach. The conciliationist might claim that our controversial moral
beliefs have a different level of generality than do common-sense moral beliefs. Vavova,
for instance, claims that we agree morally on “a lot of the cases” but increasingly disagree
as matters become “more theoretical” Vavova (2014: 326). If this is right, then even if
there is a great deal of moral agreement about particular cases, this agreement may pro-
vide no inductive support for the conclusion that people are trustworthy inquirers into the
principles of normative ethics.
17 Thanks to Justin D’Arms for this example.

18 Cf. Rotondo (2015: 262–3).
19 Vavova grants this point Vavova (2014: 325). Cf. Kornblith (2010: 45); Frances (2010: 430, 446).
james fritz
There is a problem for this approach as well. Some of our cherished controversial moral
beliefs are just as ne-grained as our most widely shared common-sense moral beliefs. We
do not simply agree about the rightness or wrongness of act-tokens; we also agree a great
deal about the rightness or wrongness of act-types. And some of the controversial beliefs
about which we should most clearly be steadfast – for instance, the belief that homosexual
behavior is pro tanto permissible – are themselves defeasible claims about the rightness or
wrongness of act-types. The conciliationist, then, cannot protect these beliefs by appealing
to their level of generality.20
Consider, nally, a third approach. Perhaps there is an important difference between
the methods through which certain people form and maintain their common-sense beliefs
and the methods through which they form and maintain their controversial ones. This
may be a tempting way to think about our core example: widespread disagreement
about homosexuality. Consider two classes of people: those who believe that homosexu-
ality is pro tanto permissible (call them the defenders of homosexuality) and those who
believe that homosexuality is pro tanto impermissible (call them the opponents of homo-
sexuality). Now, suppose that the opponents and defenders of homosexuality alike form
and maintain their common-sense moral beliefs in roughly the same way: say, through
appeals to intuition. Suppose further that the defenders of homosexuality form their
beliefs about homosexuality using the same method: they appeal to intuition. But suppose
that the opponents of homosexuality usually form their beliefs about homosexuality
through a different method. Rather than appealing to their intuitions, for example, sup-
pose that they form their beliefs about the moral status of homosexuality by deferring
to religious authority.
If this were an apt description of disagreement about homosexuality, conciliationists
could explain why the defenders of homosexuality need not conciliate with its opponents.
Here’s how. Say that I am among the defenders of homosexuality. In the case as described,
common-sense agreement gives me reason to think that the opponents of homosexuality
are likely to be trustworthy when they appeal to their intuitions. By my lights, appeals to
intuition will be a method that seems to bring the opponents of homosexuality to reach
the right answers about a broad range of moral questions. But all this tells me nothing
about whether they are trustworthy when, rather than appealing to intuitions, they
defer to religious authority. So for all the reason I have to conciliate when strangers dis-
agree with me on the basis of appeals to moral intuition, I may have no reason at all to
conciliate when – as in the case at hand – strangers disagree with me on the basis of reli-
gious authority.21
A sharp difference between moral-belief-forming methods, then, could in principle help
the conciliationist avoid moral spinelessness. But the facts on the ground about actual
moral disagreements do not suggest that this strategy will be generally successful.
That’s because everyday moral methodology is fairly unied. When an opponent’s
20 Vavova’s writing suggests another reason to avoid this strategy: intuitively, our epistemic position with
respect to general moral principles is worse than our epistemic position with respect to particular cases
Vavova (2014: 326; cf. Wedgwood 2014: 36–8). If this is right, the conciliationist would get the wrong
results by blocking the inference from others’ reliability about particular cases to an expectation of
trustworthiness about general principles. Disagreement would threaten beliefs about particular cases
far more seriously than it threatened beliefs about general principles.
21 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this strategy for the conciliationist.
available
controversial belief is related to a particular causal inuence, her common-sense moral

beliefs are often related to that causal inuence in the same way.
To see this, return to the suggestion, made above, that deference to religious authority
is usually involved in moral opposition to homosexuality. Perhaps that is true. But it’s also
true that, among religious opponents of homosexuality, deference to religious authority is
usually involved in the formation of even common-sense moral beliefs. Consider a few
paradigmatic common-sense moral beliefs, like the beliefs that we ought to help the home-
less, that our parents deserve our respect, and that even a stranger’s pain can give us moral
reason to act. Any signicant relation that holds between a religious authority and the
belief that homosexuality is impermissible is likely also to hold between that same reli-
gious authority and these common-sense beliefs. For instance, both controversial and
common-sense beliefs are often learned as, and understood by believers to be, upshots
of particular religious commitments. When asked to defend either sort of belief, a religious
person will often cite the content of a religious text or the testimony of an authority gure.
Finally, an adult religious person will likely sustain both common-sense and controversial
moral beliefs not merely on the basis of a willingness to defer to religious authority, but
also on the basis of a sense that their contents seem true.
When we characterize moral belief-forming methods in a more nuanced way, then, we
do not nd the sort of differences in moral methodology that would straightforwardly jus-
tify steadfastness in the face of widespread moral disagreement. Generally speaking, one’s
opponents will bring the same resources to bear in forming both their common-sense and
their controversial moral beliefs. To the extent that we have good dispute-independent rea-
son to consider these resources successful with respect to the former, we also generally
have good dispute-independent reason to expect that they will be successful with respect
to the latter.
5.3 Defeaters for Trust

Let’s turn, nally, to a strategy that simply accepts the core point of section 4: that wide-
spread agreement gives us dispute-independent reason to consider moral opponents trust-
worthy. Even so, the conciliationist can argue, further dispute-independent considerations
usually outweigh, or otherwise defeat, this reason for trust. We’ll consider two ways of
developing this line of thought.
The rst strategy that we’ll consider bears some similarity to Elga’s appeal to “allied
issues.” It involves an appeal to the sociological fact that certain moral beliefs tend to
be accompanied by other beliefs. Because of these correlations, the fact that someone dis-
agrees with me about certain moral claims makes her statistically likely to disagree with
me in other ways. Given what I know about distribution of moral beliefs, the fact that
a person disagrees with me about abortion may give me dispute-independent evidence
about her views about, e.g., religion, gun control, or environmental policy. This sort of
evidence, the conciliationist might argue, outweighs or otherwise defeats the evidence of
trustworthiness that comes from widespread agreement about common-sense moral
matters.
This strategy cannot justify a steadfast response in the cases that concern us. To see this,
rst note that the fact that you likely disagree with me about a related matter only gives me
a reason to doubt your judgment about p if our disagreement about the related matter is
evidence of something about your thinking with respect to p. In other words, mere
james fritz
correlations between disagreements cannot justify steadfastness. Now, it’s entirely plaus-
ible that some clusters of disagreement are more than mere correlations. When I learn that
you disagree with me about religion or gun control, I may get evidence suggesting that you
were given a poor moral education, that you rely on corrupt sources of moral testimony,
and so on. This is the way in which related disagreements might give me reason to ques-
tion your judgment about abortion. They must support a belief that there is some bad-
making feature of your moral thinking about abortion and other matters alike.
The problem is this: this crucial belief is usually not, on a wide individuation of dis-
putes, dispute-independent.22 So it is usually illegitimate for me to rely on this belief in
assessing your epistemic credentials.23 In a political disagreement with a person on the
opposite side of the political spectrum, for instance, I am not entitled to rely on my belief
(even if justied) that he was raised by a family with mistaken political views. This belief is
surely contested, and it is directly relevant to the cluster of beliefs about which we
disagree.
There is, moreover, good reason for conciliationists who individuate disputes widely to
require us to set aside these contested beliefs. If I can appeal to relevantly contested beliefs
about bad inuences on my opponent’s thinking, I can justify steadfast belief in even some
cases where conciliation seems appropriate. Consider an example: two groups of detec-
tives, who otherwise take one another to have spotless track records, tend to reach contra-
dictory conclusions in neighborhood X. Say that the evidence suggests that this is no mere
coincidence; it is a dispute-independent fact that, for some reason, at least one of the two
groups does detective work poorly in X. Does knowledge of past disagreements in X
entitle Group 1 to treat any new disagreement in X as a case where Group 2’s inquiry
is distorted? If so, they may be justied in steadfastly ignoring Group 2’s judgment. But
this seems contrary to the spirit of Independence. The right conciliationist verdict here
is more cautious. At least one group is biased in neighborhood X, and in the absence
of a dispute-independent tiebreaker, members of Group 1 should respect the possibility
that they are the biased ones.
Conciliationists who individuate disputes widely, then, have good reason to set aside
contested beliefs to the effect that something has gone wrong with their opponents’
inquiry. But the fact that our opponents disagree with us in multiple ways only entitles
us to consider them untrustworthy to the extent that it gives us dispute-independent rea-
son to believe that something has gone wrong with their inquiry. So, on the wide
approach, appeals to other instances of disagreement cannot help to provide a defeater
for our reasons to trust moral opponents.24
22 On a narrow individuation of disputes, such beliefs might well be dispute-independent. But, as noted
in section 2, the narrow approach faces its own distinctive objections.
23 There may be some features that are always understood, in a dispute-independent way, to be bad
inuences on moral inquiry. (Perhaps partiality is one such feature.) But it seems quite unlikely that
such features will always be present in a way that allows conciliationists to write off all their
opponents.
24 This is not to say that the fact that moral disagreements tend to be correlated has no epistemic rele-
vance. The more beliefs I set aside, the less dispute-independent reason I can have to trust any
given interlocutor. But this is not enough to defeat the challenge raised in section 4. There, I argued
that our impressive history of agreement about common-sense moral matters gives us reason to con-
sider other moral thinkers trustworthy. So even if the clustering of moral disagreements with other dis-
agreements sometimes requires us to set aside quite a few controversial moral beliefs at once, it surely
available
Finally, let’s consider an attempt to avoid spinelessness simply by appealing to the exist-
ence of controversy. On this approach, our knowledge of the fact that there is controversy
about p can render irrelevant our inductive grounds for expecting people to get p right.
This idea is initially appealing. Even if humans are generally reliable about a certain
class of moral judgments, that track-record has its limits. And in the context of any
given widespread moral disagreement, we all know that the human population is not
very reliable about the matter at hand; in such contexts, it is a dispute-independent fact
that many people have false beliefs. So even the strongest track record cannot give us suf-
cient reason to expect that our interlocutors’ general trustworthiness will carry over into
controversial cases.
However, this sort of reasoning proves too much. If the conciliationist adopts it, she will
allow objectionably dogmatic belief in even very simple non-moral cases. In the two-person
horse race example, for instance, your knowledge of others’ general perceptual reliability is
a dispute-independent reason for you to take your single opponent’s disagreement seriously.
Can you dismiss this reason by simply noting that, between the two of you, there is contro-
versy? Clearly not. Even though you have very strong reason to think that one of the two of
you is mistaken in the case at hand, your knowledge of others’ general perceptual reliability
continues to give you dispute-independent reason to trust your interlocutor.25
The conciliationist might be tempted to argue that, though the mere fact that there is
controversy in a group of two does not screen off or outweigh evidence of general reliabil-
ity, controversy in a larger population can do so. But this x also has unacceptable results.
Intuitively, widespread cases of disagreement have (ceteris paribus) even more defeating
power than two-person ones. It would be preposterous to say that, although a single stran-
ger’s disagreement about a horse race can require me to reduce my condence, the dis-
agreement of half of the stadium cannot. When I learn that the stadium is split, I know
that I am part of a very widespread controversy – one which divides all the people who
have any beliefs as to which horse won. And yet, clearly, I can have dispute-independent
reason to take my opponents’ judgment seriously in this case.
So conciliationists must allow that, even when I know that p is extremely controversial,
I can have dispute-independent reason to trust people who disagree with me about p. The
mere fact of controversy cannot solve the problem of spinelessness.
6. conclusion
We’ve now considered two ways in which conciliationists can attempt to avoid the charge
of spinelessness. For one, the conciliationist can individuate disputes narrowly. On this
does not require us to set aside any of the moral beliefs whose near-universal acceptance makes the
argument of section 4 plausible.
25 There is another way for the conciliationist to explain the requirement to revise my belief in this
example. Rather than suggesting that I retain dispute-independent reason to trust the perceptual trust-
worthiness of other race watchers, she can suggest that, upon learning of the controversy, I gain dis-
pute-independent reason to consider both my opponents and myself untrustworthy. (Cf. Kornblith
2010: 45.) This is one way of satisfying GIRP; if my opponent and I are untrustworthy to just the
same degree, she is at least as trustworthy as I am. On either interpretation, however, this case illus-
trates the point that the mere fact of controversy does not sufce to justify steadfast belief in the face of
disagreement. (Thanks to an anonymous associate editor for suggesting discussion of this point.)
james fritz
approach, the conciliationist claims that we need not be spineless precisely because
we have dispute-independent reasons to consider our interlocutors untrustworthy.
Approaches of this sort will face two problems. First, it is difcult to imagine what sort
of dispute-independent belief could justify a steadfast response to moral disagreements
like the one between Ann and Beth without doing the same in paradigmatic cases for con-
ciliation. (Recall the disagreement between groups of detectives in neighborhood X.) And
second, such views inappropriately give deep epistemic signicance to supercial questions
about, for instance, how many disputes exist in a given case.
In light of these problems, the conciliationist might instead opt to individuate disputes
widely. On this approach, the conciliationist claims that we need not be spineless precisely
because we lack good dispute-independent reason to consider our opponents trustworthy.
Approaches of this sort fail because they cannot plausibly go wide enough. To truly lack
good dispute-independent reason to trust our moral opponents, we would have to set
aside even our shared history of common-sense moral agreement. It’s hard to see what
could motivate such a move. Even on an approach that individuates disputes widely,
then, we have reason to trust our moral opponents.
But just how bad is this result? Perhaps, even if the conciliationist accepts the conclusion
that we have some reason to expect that any given stranger will be trustworthy about moral
questions, she can argue that this will not require objectionable spinelessness. After all,
according to GIRP, we need only revise our beliefs to the extent that we have good reason
to trust our opponents. Is our shared backdrop of moral beliefs a good reason to trust our
opponents? If not, moral disagreements with strangers never call for conciliation. And even
if agreement is a good reason to trust our opponents, it might be good reason only to trust
them a little. If so, moral disagreements with strangers only call for tiny reductions in con-
dence. Surely, this would not amount to objectionable spinelessness.
Conciliationists would go a long way toward solving the problem of spinelessness,
then, if they could condently claim that widespread moral agreement simply does not
give us good reason (or gives us negligibly little reason) to trust others’ moral judgment.
But any claim to this effect is likely to be objectionably ad hoc. As we’ve already seen,
there are reasons to think that moral agreement can be powerful enough to be epistemi-
cally signicant. For one, the extent of moral agreement is vast and impressive.
Moreover, a background of impressive agreement is just the sort of thing that, in other
domains, can give us sufcient reason to conciliate. For example, it can require us to
lose condence in our perceptual judgments even when, as in the horse race case, only
a single stranger disagrees.
These considerations amount to a provisional case that, whatever the right story is
about the epistemic weight of background agreement, we all have plenty of reason to
take certain moral disagreements seriously. If a single stranger’s perceptual disagreement
can call on us to revise our beliefs, the massive, widespread disagreement over homosexu-
ality’s permissibility plausibly can as well. The conciliationist who wants to avoid this con-
clusion must offer a positive proposal about the epistemic weight of agreement. Given the
considerations above, there is reason to worry that any such story will have to take a
gerrymandered, unprincipled approach to the epistemic signicance of agreement across
different subject matters.26
26 Thanks to Declan Smithies and Tristram McPherson for encouraging me to make these points explicit.
available
Could the conciliationist shrug off the charge of spinelessness in a different way?
Perhaps conciliationists can grant the surprising result that we should all become less
condent in a few deeply held moral commitments, like the commitment to homosexual-
ity’s permissibility. How bad would this be?
Well, nothing like moral skepticism is lurking here; indeed, this paper has insisted that
an enormous amount of our everyday moral thinking is totally safe from disagreement’s
defeating force. But to the extent that conciliationists were right to worry about spineless-
ness in the rst place, they should also be worried about this local sort of spinelessness.
First, the threat of belief revision is not contained to a handful of cherry-picked examples:
conciliationism seriously threatens the justication of unpopular moral beliefs generally,
from abolitionism in the 19th century to beliefs about the moral status of animals
today. Second, a local spinelessness might be even more strikingly counterintuitive than
wholesale moral skepticism. I would, granted, be very surprised to learn that my moral
beliefs are globally unjustied. But I would be far more surprised to learn that, though
most of my moral beliefs are adequately justied, my belief about homosexuality’s permis-
sibility is not. If I know anything at all about morality, I know that homosexuality is pro
tanto permissible; I cannot imagine losing condence in this belief without also losing
condence in all my moral thinking.
In addressing the problem of spinelessness, conciliationists attempt to show that, wher-
ever their theory calls for belief revision, that belief revision is intuitively plausible. But
when it comes to certain cases of moral disagreement, conciliationists are not in a position
to claim that their theories can deliver this result.27
references
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Essay in Moral Epistemology.’ In Q. Smith (ed.), Epistemology: New Essays, pp. 225–48.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Christensen, D. 2007. ‘Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News.’ Philosophical Review, 116:
187–217.
——— 2011. ‘Disagreement, Question-Begging, and Epistemic Self-Criticism.’ Philosopher’s Imprint,
11: 1–22.
——— 2014. ‘Conciliation, Uniqueness, and Rational Toxicity.’ Noûs, 50: 1–20.
Decker, J. and Groll, D. 2013. ‘The (In)signicance of Moral Disagreement for Moral Knowledge.’ In
R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 8, pp. 140–68. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Elga, A. 2007. ‘Reection and Disagreement.’ Noûs, 41: 478–502.
Enoch, D. 2010. ‘Not Just a Truthometer: Taking Oneself Seriously (but not Too Seriously) in Cases
of Peer Disagreement.’ Mind, 119: 953–97.
Feldman, R. 2006. ‘Epistemological Puzzles about Disagreement.’ In S. Hetherington (ed.),
Epistemology Futures, pp. 216–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frances, B. 2010. ‘The Reective Epistemic Renegade.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
81: 419–63.
27 I am grateful to participants at the 2016 meeting of the Ohio Philosophical Association at Otterbein
University for insightful questions and comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I’d also like to thank
Justin D’Arms, William Taschek, John Hurst, Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer, Jenni Ernst, and Juan
Garcia for helpful conversation. Special thanks to Declan Smithies and Tristram McPherson for
their encouragement and invaluable help throughout the revision process.
james fritz
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King, N. 2012. ‘Disagreement: What’s the Problem? Or A Good Peer is Hard to Find.’ Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, 85: 249–72.
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Disagreement, pp. 29–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lackey, J. 2010a. ‘A Justicationist View of Disagreement’s Epistemic Signicance.’ In A. Haddock,
A. Millar and D. Pritchard (eds), Social Epistemology, pp. 298–325. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
——— 2010b. ‘What Should We Do When We Disagree?’ In T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds),
Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Vol. 3, pp. 274–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Philosophy, 92: 365–77.
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Studies in Metaethics, vol. 3, pp. 87–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Oxford University Press.
JAMES FRITZis a graduate teaching associate in philosophy at the Ohio State University.
His research interests are primarily in metaethics and epistemology.
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Episteme (2016) page 1 of 18 © Cambridge University Press

conciliationism and moral

1 On my usage, to revise a belief is to either abandon it or lower one’s credence in it.

successfully argue for this conclusion would be to solve conciliationism’s “problem of

1. conciliationism and spinelessness

As a rst step in addressing the problem of spinelessness, conciliationists distinguish

NIRP Insofar as the dispute-independent evaluation fails to give me good reason to be

GIRP Insofar as the dispute-independent evaluation gives me good reason to be con-

6 These formulations are adapted from Christensen (2011: 15).

2. individuating disputes narrowly

9 Contrast Enoch (2010: 971–2) and Setiya (2013: 16–17).

10 For a thorough discussion of this problem, see Lackey (2010b).

3. individuating disputes widely

4. a problem for the wide approach

GIRP Insofar as the dispute-independent evaluation gives me good reason to be con-

5. strategies for the conciliationist

agreement gives us dispute-independent reason to trust even strangers about disputed

5.1 Common-Sense Agreement is not Dispute-Independent

5.2 The Gap Between Common Sense and Controversy

17 Thanks to Justin D’Arms for this example.

controversial belief is related to a particular causal inuence, her common-sense moral

5.3 Defeaters for Trust

Kalderon, M. E. 2005. Moral Fictionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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