One problem that I’ve been trying to wrap my head around (for a long time, not just recently), is how we should think about the possibility of ethical disagreement and discussion. This isn’t a unique problem, to me or in ethics, but I find that it attracts a lot of my thinking time, if only because I seem to get badly confused by most of the research on this problem. This also goes for the work that some of my biggest influences have done on this question. I have a real dissatisfaction with the sorts of answer given to the problem(s) of ethical disagreement, and struggle to know to what extent that’s evidence of a failing on my part. I’m specifically thinking of John McDowell, here, because his approach to understanding what concepts are has been pretty fundamental to the way that my thinking has developed in the past few years. Despite this, I can’t help but feel as though his approach to ethical disagreement is basically to disavow that it’s possible, and that when it occurs there’s not really a chance for understanding to emerge. It seems to me that the reality of our lives is that we do engage in pretty rigorous ethical debate, and that we often do understand the positions of the people we’re arguing with, even when we disagree with them at a fundamental level. So, I think that the McDowell approach kind of fails empirically…

I’ve been trying to think through this problem alongside what I think of as a sort of ‘moderate historical relativism’. What I’m trying to really understand is the inconsistencies in how people draw (and use) on the past in order to make ethical claims. We seem generally willing to accept some level of flexibility in how we evaluate history, we might think that some standards don’t apply in certain historical eras, but we still draw on the past in order to construct our ideals, etc. I think that reflecting on these sorts of practices might show us how we attempt to bridge gaps of understanding and conceptual incommensurability, etc. Well, maybe how we bridge those gaps in practice, more so than rigorously.

I’m still making my way through Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, though I’m further through it than I had thought I would be by this point. It is good, though it’s a bit of a different beast from the other books in this series. I have seen some criticism of this volume, due to it’s having a more personal/politically influenced perspective, but I think that that line of argument is slightly exaggerated. At points Hobsbawm’s personal involvement leads to footnotes that can be pretty colourful and interesting; they help to remind you that it’s people who make history, even though we don’t do it in a wholly free manner.