Ethical Progress in the Face of Disagreement

In ethics, as in other disciplines, there is an expectation that systematic research efforts will increase our knowledge and generate compelling answers to the questions that are posed.

This expectation is presumably what motivates, at least in part, the authority ascribed to ethicists when they are consulted as experts in public decision-making.However, the supposition that such progress occurs is in tension with the seeming lack of convergence in the domain.

Ethics has for a long time been dominated by several competing approaches—consequentialism, contractualism, etc.—and despite the emergence of more sophisticated arguments, each still has plenty of advocates.

It is possible, however, that this apparent stalemate conceals more subtle types of convergence, in that the most modern and advanced versions of the approaches are becoming increasingly similar, both with respect to the acts they recommend and the explanations they give of those recommendations.

The project investigates whether the ongoing disagreements in fact do co-exist with such forms of convergence. One task is to develop precise accounts of the relevant types of similarity.

Another is to apply them to two ongoing ethical discussions: those concerning our obligations toward future generations and large-scale coordination problems.

We expect that the study will shed crucial light both on what ethical theorizing can accomplish and on the expertise that ethicists can provide in decision-making contexts.