Contextualism, Moral Disagreement, and Proposition Clouds

Abstract

According to contextualist theories in metaethics, when a moral term is used in a context, the context plays an ineliminable part in determining what natural property will be the semantic value of the term. Furthermore, on subjectivist and relativist versions of these views, it is either the speaker’s own moral code or her moral community’s moral code that constitutes the reference-fixing context. One standard objection to views of this type is that they fail to enable disagreement in ordinary conversations. Chapter 3 develops a new response to this objection on the basis of Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies’s notion of proposition clouds. It is argued that, because we live in a multicultural society, the conversational contexts we face will fail to disambiguate between all the things we could mean. This is why we can at best put into play proposition clouds when we make moral utterances. All the propositions in such clouds are then available for rejection and acceptance on behalf of our audiences. The norms of conversation then guide us to make informative contributions to the conversation—accept and reject propositions in a way that leads to coordination of action and choice.