Yonatan Shemmer’s research while affiliated with The University of Sheffield and other places

It is often assumed that disagreement only occurs when there is a clash (e.g., inconsistency) between beliefs. In the philosophical literature, this “narrow” view has sometimes been considered the obvious, intuitively correct view. In this paper, we argue that it should not be. We have conducted two preregistered studies gauging English speakers’ intuitions about whether there is disagreement in a case where the parties have non-clashing beliefs and clashing intentions. Our results suggest that common intuitions tell against the default view. Ordinary speakers describe clashes of intentions as disagreements, suggesting that the ordinary concept of disagreement is “wide” in that it extends beyond beliefs.

Dialetheists believe some sentences are both true and false. Objectors have argued that this makes it unclear how people can disagree with each other because, given the dialetheist’s commitments, if I make a claim and you tell me my claim is false, we might both be correct. Graham Priest (2006a) thinks that people disagree by rejecting or denying what is said rather than ascribing falsehood to it. We build on the work of Julien Murzi and Massimiliano Carrara (2015) and show that Priest’s approach cannot succeed: given the same dialetheist’s commitments you may be correct to reject a claim that I correctly believe. We argue further that any attempt to solve the problem by identifying a new attitude of disagreement will also fail. The culprit, we claim, is the attempt to find a pair of attitudes that satisfy ‘exclusivity’—that is, attitudes such that both cannot be simultaneously correct. Instead of identifying disagreement by the kinds of attitudes involved, we propose dialetheists focus on the normative landscape and identify it in part by whether parties have reasons to change their attitudes. We offer our own normative theory of disagreement to help dialetheists with this challenge.

When theorising about disagreement, it is tempting to begin with a person's belief that p and ask what mental state one must have in order to disagree with it. This is the wrong way to go; the paper argues that people may also disagree with attitudes that are not beliefs. It then examines whether several existing theories of disagreement can account for this phenomenon. It argues that its own normative theory of disagreement gives the best account, and so, given that there is good reason to believe disagreement without belief is possible, there is good reason to think that disagreement itself is normative.

According to Parfit one of the main weaknesses of subjectivism is its inability to account for our intuition that future reasons have present authority. Parfit is only partly right about the contours of our intuition however he does have a point: sometimes our future reasons do have authority in current deliberation. Subjectivists who grappled with his challenge have organized themselves along two battle lines: those who think that only current desires are fundamental sources of reasons and those who think that future desires are also fundamental sources of reasons. I belong to the first camp but I believe that focusing on the question of fundamentality obscures the real issue. The key to addressing Parfit’s challenge is to shift our focus to a different question. We should ask ourselves what are the best policies to adopt towards our future reasons. Using resources developed by Bratman and Raz, and building on the insight that we often fail to recognize our true current concerns, I argue that we are sometimes justified in thinking of, and therefore treating, our future reasons as having present authority.

Expressivists have trouble accounting for disagreement. If ethical or other normative judgments are desire-like rather than belief-like, it is puzzling why we think people often disagree in those domains. While previous expressivists have proposed only straightforwardly descriptive conditions under which disagreement occurs, we argue that disagreement itself should be understood normatively: two or more people disagree just in case their diverging attitudes imply, given a common project of theirs, that at least one of them has reason to change his or her mind.

The attempt to vindicate the objectivity of morality tops the list of philosophical obsessions. In this paper I consider the rationality of searching for such a vindication. I argue that the only justification of our efforts lies in our belief in moral objectivity; that this belief can be as well, if not better, explained by wishful thinking and other cognitive biases; that as a research community we have failed to take precautions against such biases; and that as a result we have been making disproportionate, and therefore irrational, efforts to establish moral objectivity.

Parfit and Dancy argue that desires couldn’t be reason giving because if they were they would have to give us reasons for their own retention. The argument is not successful, but it reveals an interesting connection between the humean view of practical reason and our concepts of self governance and self determination. It shows that on the humean view of practical reason the same relations or processes that ground autonomous action and determine what we have reason to do also (partly) determine who we have reason to be. Rationally endorsed desires determine on the humean view which action of ours is autonomous and what we have reason to do. The lesson from Parfit’s and Dancy’s argument is that rationally endorsed desires are also normatively self determining; they provide the normative foundation for their own retention. Commentators have often wondered how, according to humeans, could our practical identity, whose causal history is normatively arbitrary, ground our reasons for action. The humean answer is that parts of our practical identity – namely, our rationally endorsed desires – justify their own retention and are thus normatively non-arbitrary. In this paper I analyze Dancy’s and Parfit’s argument, provide a humean reply, describe the implications of that reply for the humean view and give some examples of normatively self determining desires.

Gibbard argues that we have to accord others a certain fundamental epistemic normative authority. To avoid skepticism we must accept some of our normative principles; since the influence of others was a major factor in the process that led us to adopt them, we must accord others fundamental normative authority. The argument ought to be of interest to a wide range of philosophers, since while compatible with expressivism, it does not assume expressivism. It has rarely been discussed. In this essay I analyse the argument, explain why it is not sound and make a suggestion about the real upshot of the rejection of normative skepticism.

This book presents twelve chapters on constructivism - some sympathetic, others critical - by a group of moral philosophers. 'Kantian constructivism holds that moral objectivity is to be understood in terms of a suitably constructed social point of view that all can accept. Apart from the procedure of constructing the principles of justice, there are no moral facts.' So wrote John Rawls in his highly influential 1980 Dewey lectures 'Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory'. Since then there has been much discussion of constructivist understandings, Kantian or otherwise, both of morality and of reason more generally. Such understandings typically seek to characterize the truth conditions of propositions in their target domain in maximally metaphysically unassuming ways, frequently in terms of the outcome of certain procedures or the passing of certain tests, procedures or tests that speak to the distinctively practical concerns of deliberating human agents living together in societies. But controversy abounds over the interpretation and the scope as well as the credibility of such constructivist ideas. The chapters here reach to the heart of this contemporary philosophical debate, and offer a range of new approaches and perspectives.

Most constructivists believe that the process of norm construction is governed by the principle of practical consistency. The principle of consistency is a thin principle of rationality that prohibits agents from both adopting and rejecting the same goal at the same time. However, according to Yonatan Shemmer, the principle of consistency is too thin to account for the kind of structural restrictions that agents impose on the dynamic process of norm management. To account for these restrictions constructivists must add another principle of rationality - a broad principle of coherence. The broad principle of coherence demands integrity among our goals that goes beyond strict consistency. In his paper, "Constructing Coherence", Shemmer explains why the principle of consistency is insufficient to account for our habits of norm management, offers an account of the broad principle of coherence and explains how constructivists can justify the normativity of this broad principle by showing that it also can be the object of construction. Shemmer discusses two challenges to his account of the construction of the broad principle of coherence: 1.Since on constructivist views the broad principle of coherence governs the construction of norms, it may be hard to provide a non-circular constructivist account of its normativity. 2.Since the broad principle of coherence governs the construction of norms it must have normative priority over particular newly constructed norms. Shemmer explores ways of justifying that priority without conceding a despotism of our past selves over our future selves.