Moral deep disagreement, self-stultification and forms of life

Abstract I explore, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the limits of what I call hybrid moral deep disagreement (hybrid MDD for short). This form of disagreement is a state-activity hybrid: it involves repeated disagreeing interactions between parties who remain in a prolonged state of disagreement over a period of time. The Wittgensteinian approach to hybrid MDD, often cashed out in hinge epistemological terms, faces, I suggest, two important challenges: the hinge paradox and the problem of distortion. The hinge paradox emerges when MDD is characterised in terms of differing moral hinges – hinges regarded as constituting the moral reasons appealed to by the disagreeing parties. The worry is that, if hinges constitute moral reasons, disagreeing parties who do not share moral hinges will not be able to recognise each other’s reasons as moral, and will not therefore count as engaged in genuine MDD. The distortion problem, in turn, arises from the fact that certain practices – for instance, trolling in social media – look very similar to hybrid MDD, even though they are in fact distortions of it. Given the Wittgensteinian insistence that practices must be publicly assessable in light of behaviour, this presents us with a serious challenge: how can we account for the difference between hybrid MDD and distorting practices such as trolling without appealing to what is "in the heads" of the disagreeing parties?. The aim of this paper is to show that these challenges can be met by appealing to three notions drawn from Wittgenstein’s philosophy: form of life, understood as a space of possibility and intelligibility; the epistemic requirement of openness, according to which epistemic practices are predicated on the possibility of error and doubt; and nonsense as self-stultification, which emerges when one engages in a practice with a putative purpose, but in a manner that ultimately defeats that very purpose. Using these three notions to address the challenges posed by the hinge paradox and the distortion problem helps us plot the limits of hybrid MDD and to identify when a practice that is seemingly similar to it is, in fact, a distortion.