Moral deep disagreements and imaginative resistence

Abstract

According to a recent discussion, the responses that epistemic pairs give in situations of disagreement present certain asymmetry, whether they are disagreements involving relatively innocuous or mundane beliefs, or those that occupy a more central place within our belief systems. The former are conciliatory, the latter, blunt. In this paper I consider one type of fundamental disagreement, moral disagreements, whose responses are even more radical. My hypothesis is that this degree of radicality is explained by the fact that these disagreements are influenced by a series of mental states which, to borrow an expression from Hume, we characterize as "imaginative resistance".