Abstract
Moral conflicts and disagreements characterise human encounters on both individual and societal levels. Against Richard Posner’s claim that there can be no profitable reasoning over moral ends across different cultures and time-periods, it is argued that humans in many cases do share enough common moral grounds to allow some moral conflicts and disagreements to be solved, even if others remain unsolved. The resources for this can be found in, for example, language, shared life experiences and human nature.
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Notes
- 1.
Posner thinks that there does exist moral universals, which may be common to all societies, like ‘murder is wrong’ and a few rudimentary principles of social cooperation, such as ‘Don’t lie all the time’, and ‘Don’t break promises without any reason’ (Posner 1998a: 1640). They are just not potent when it comes to solving moral conflicts.
- 2.
Obviously, some words have several different uses. We can stand on a riverbank, yet that is not the place we ordinarily go to deposit our money.
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Eriksen, C. (2020). Moral Conflict. In: Moral Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61037-1_12
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