Evaluative disagreement and knowing the good

Abstract The seemingly widespread existence of evaluative disagreement, and its peculiarly intractable nature, poses a practical problem for us as people who have to live together. It has also sometimes been thought a philosophical problem for the metaethical realist: if you and I disagree about some evaluative claim, the realist is committed to saying that (at least) one of us must be wrong—but if evaluative reality is just out there for us to discover, why would so many of us be getting things so wrong? Even more worryingly, evaluative disagreement appears to resist resolution through rational means, suggesting that what lies behind our respective claims is not a receptivity to evaluative reality but rather just our own personal evaluative orientations. In this paper, I argue that the appearance of a problem here arises from an overly simplistic picture of evaluative knowledge. Fleshing out our understanding of such knowledge with a richer model reveals that the fact that one of us has gone wrong is one of the less interesting features of the situation, and helps to explain why such disagreement is distinctively resistant to resolution through ordinary rational argument. In the final section of the paper, I suggest that this richer model also points us towards new strategies for dealing with disagreement as a practical problem.