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1. Introduction
 

2. Dialogue and Other Political Theories
 

3. Dialogue Misconceived
 

4  Why Two Kinds?
 

5. Urgent Dialogue
 

6  Ongoing Background Dialogue
 

7.Conclusion
 

8. Bibliography
 

9. About this paper and the author

DIALOGUE AND MORAL DISAGREEMENT

6. Ongoing Background Dialogue

Now I am left with the task of defending an open, unconstrained background dialogue which would more or less flow perpetually as a permanent fixture in civic life.  I would expect the objections and skepticisms about this view to be of two sorts.  First, one might ask, "Fine, but what's the point?  What is an unconstrained, apparently aimless conversation between two groups with different moralities going to accomplish?"  Second, one might think, "Sure, talk is nice, talking to different sorts of people and expanding one's horizons is nice.  So what's the big deal."  My aim in this description and defense of ongoing background dialogue as part of my two-tiered conception of dialogue is thus going to be twofold.  First, I will try to show how such a conversation might work, and what sorts of fruit might come from it.  Second, I will try to show why such an ongoing background dialogue is important, why it is "a big deal."  In this way, I hope to give this apparently vague, flimsy, and perhaps even somewhat empty notion of background dialogue some substance. 

One of the first characteristics of ongoing background dialogue is that it is based on criticizing the views of the opposing (disagreeing) group by that group's own lights.  To some degree this is part of all dialogue theories, and urgent dialogue especially, in that all attempt to justify social/political decisions to everyone, trying to pursue courses of action which are maximally mutually acceptable.  But in ongoing background dialogue this sort of criticism will be much more direct, as it itself is ultimately the point of dialogue here, rather than trying to negotiate a compromise or a mutually acceptable solution to a thorny social/political problem.  Of course we will also attempt such criticism by one's own lights in urgent dialogue, but the amount of time and effort we can expend in exploring each other's ethical belief-framework and gaining mastery of it is limited in that case.  Here much more work can be put into meeting each other where we are at morally, as there is not the same pressure of an imminent decision needing to be made.  If our attempts at accommodation, compromise, and above all maintaining respect in the urgent dialogue are successful at all, it seems that we will be freed to at least some extent to engage in an amicable, mutually beneficial attempt to understand each other more. 

But, if one were going to attempt to criticize another's morality by his own lights, how exactly would one go about it?  Three possible kinds of simple criticism are available—reason-based criticisms, fact-based criticisms, and value-based criticisms. Reason-based criticisms work because few if any of us are self-consciously conventionalist in our own moral thinking in our everyday lives.  When posed the question "Why should you do X?" or "Why is Y wrong?", few would respond that that is merely the way our society does things.  Most people would respond to such a question with some kind of argument which they think supports the conclusion that the act in question is either good or bad.  Furthermore, most of us think our own systems of moral views are reasonable and rational.  One way to criticize the other's morality, then, would be to challenge these arguments by pointing to weaknesses or outright contradictions in her reasoning about morality.  It is perhaps worth noting that this kind of criticism requires no objective moral facts or even a shared moral foundation (although it seems like the criticizing party would at least have to be able to understand the other's morality enough to point out flaws in her argument about it.)  This sort of criticism works on groups just as well as on individuals.  We need not comment on any of another group's fundamental values or declare any of their views or practices to be right or wrong, we would only need to point out inconsistency in their justification of those views and their application of them. 

A similar kind of criticism would be fact-based criticism.  These criticisms take advantage of the fact that many of our moral judgments are undergirded by what we consider to be factual non-moral claims.  To disprove one of these factual claims would call that moral view into question.  Take, for example, the belief that "race"-based slavery is morally acceptable.  In the history of such slavery in this country, the practice was defended by its supporters over and over again by claims about the relative inferiority of the one group to the other in intelligence or some other attribute, the natural suitability of one for slavery.  Without even questioning the morality of slavery itself, it certainly seems that by casting doubt upon or outright disproving that non-moral claim one could get supporters of this kind of slavery to seriously reconsider their views. 

Yet a third kind would be value-based criticism.  Unlike the other two kinds, we are not really pointing out mistakes the other has made in their moral reasoning or in their factual assumptions.  Rather, we are appealing to some other value that they hold which they might have not taken into consideration.  Within this group of criticisms are the most typical and everyday forms of moral criticism: "That's not very kind of you," "Only a coward would do something like that," "Is that really fair to them?," and so forth. 
But what if these three rather simple sorts of criticism fail to resolve the disagreement, as seems quite likely?  Maybe it is not as likely as one might think—it could be that our ethical belief systems are fraught with factual errors and logical inconsistencies which would be caught if we engaged in this sort of moral scrutiny, and it could be that if all those errors were cleaned up, many of the moralities in existence would cease to be attractive.  No one really wants to be wrong or inconsistent in one's moral judgments.  However, simply pointing out mistakes is unlikely to resolve all moral disagreements—while I do not want to claim that moral disagreements are irresolvable, I do not want to claim that they are all that superficial either. 

When the resources of simple criticism have been exhausted, there are some other options, such as the presentation of one's own position, non-argumentative strategies, and interpretation.   Of course, there is no reason why these other methods cannot be introduced sooner into the conversation.  But it seems to make more sense to first address the obvious weaknesses and failures of a particular view through simple criticism.  If we are able to effectively convince someone that his view is faulty because of inconsistency or factual error, the more elaborate and less direct methods of criticism seem somewhat unnecessary. 

The presentation of one's own moral view is an alternative to the method of merely attempting to pick out the faults in the other's view.  Dialogue here is a two-way street.  We are not only trying to understand the other's moral belief system, we are trying to help him reach an understanding of our own.  As we learn more about the other's morality, we gain an understanding of how he might be perceiving our own, and we can take measures to try to ensure that he gets the right picture (or an attractive picture).  Since one of our aims is eventual agreement, we will try to pursue that both by scrutinizing the other's moral beliefs and by attempting to "sell" our own, trying to make our morality, and perhaps even our own culture and our own way of life look good to him.  (After all, it is hard to draw a solid boundary between one's ethics and the rest of one's culture and one's way of life.)  We want to put him in a position of cultural admiration, where one notes that another's way of life and worldview are very different from his own, but nonetheless have a lot of valuable qualities, perhaps even valuable enough for the observer to attempt to incorporate certain elements of that way of life or worldview into his own.  This sort of cultural admiration is quite common—a tourist visiting a foreign country might be very impressed by a particular native trait or custom, and perhaps wish that they did something like that "back home".   I think this could happen in moral cases as well.

For example, a man raised in a fundamentalist Muslim country in which the liberties and opportunities available to women are severely restricted might be inclined to accept that order of things as just being the way things are.  It might seem natural to him.  But if he visits a country in which women are more or less emancipated, he might be struck by the competence with which women can carry out a variety of roles restricted to men in his own country, and he might appreciate the contributions they make to their society.  He might also recognize them as being much happier and psychologically healthier than in his home country.  Similarly, a woman raised in the same repressive country, upon visiting a society which treats women as being equal with men, might be struck by the greater opportunities available to women in that society and the strengths they are able to develop by fully participating in society.  This might be the case even if she were fiercely defensive of her own culture's way of doing things, even if tradition exercises considerable power over her thinking.

Another example of moral-cultural admiration:  an American visiting any one of the many countries in which elderly people are respected more and treated much better than in the U.S. might come to appreciate their way of doing things.  He might admire how aged people can claim considerable authority and respect both in their families and in society, as compared to our own society where they are often granted little respect and in all too many cases end up sent off to nursing homes and largely forgotten. 
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the attempt to present and advertise one's way of life to others by their own lights is a particular defense of polygamy given by some Mormon fundamentalist women—that it is an institution which should actually be appropriated by feminists because it makes it easier for women to have both children and careers.  (Gutmann 1993, p. 175)  Regardless of how convincing such a defense is, it is certainly a rather bold and somewhat ingenious move, given that the most common criticisms of polygamy are based on claims that it degrades women.  Through such a presentation of the institution to outsiders, it is at least somewhat plausible that some fierce critics of polygamy might take a softer attitude towards it, even if they don't fully accept the defense. 

It should be noted that such a strategy of presenting one's own culture to others as favorably as possible in order to gain the approval of outsiders doesn't require that either group have a deep understanding of the other's culture, as interpretation would require.  In fact, one may be very attracted to a certain custom based on a misunderstanding of what that custom means in that culture. 

Another way of trying to combat moral disagreement is by turning to non-argumentative strategies.  These are generally emotionally-loaded appeals which do not say anything new to the other that he doesn't already know, but say it in a different (often "louder") way, attempting to give the other an especially vivid "picture" of the situation or practice in question.  In the abortion debate, pro-lifers often use visuals, such as pictures of aborted fetuses, in trying to persuade others of their view.  Such a method isn't really an argument—presumably, the ambivalent or pro-choice person whose mind they are trying to change had an idea of what abortion involved at least in some sense.  Similarly, the symbol of the coat-hanger used by pro-choice groups functions not as an argument but as a way of saying something which nearly everybody already knows in a more powerful way:  when abortion is illegal, women end up turning to drastic, life-threatening measures in order to deal with unwanted pregnancies.  Examples like these are abundant—think of pictures of severely malnourished children, a soldier's recounting of his traumatic personal experience in war, and so forth. 

These sorts of strategies, which often involve the use of visual images, symbols, and personal stories, work mainly against some form of ignorance.  We know some things abstractly, in cool and objective scientific language or in statistics, yet being made aware of them in a more real and concrete sense is often enough to shock us into changing our mind.  This is how "putting a human face" on a problem works.  Of course, these sorts of strategies, while quite valuable, work only in cases where one group is guilty of this sort of quasi-ignorance and the other criticizing group is able to pick up on that.  The ability to sense that sort of moral ignorance requires a pretty extensive understanding of the group's morality. 

I think the most promising and widely applicable strategy for confronting moral conflict together is that of interpretation.  How can interpretation be applied to moral matters?  I can think of at least five ways: to the disagreement itself, to a practice, to a value, to a principle, or to our individual moral judgments.  It is worth noting that all five are quite interrelated—the disagreement will be about practices, values, principles, and moral judgments; our practices will be determined by and understood in light of our values and principles; our values are what we "see" in making moral judgments and give content to our principles; our principles reflect our values, are extrapolated from our individual moral judgments and are used to make further moral judgments. 

How we interpret the disagreement itself will affect how we are able to deal with it.  If the disagreement is shocking enough, so much that we cannot make sense of how the others can act the way they do, we might tend to interpret it as being a fundamental moral disagreement—the other side is just different from us morally, and the difference goes all the way down.  In such a case the prospects not only of coming to moral agreement but of peaceful coexistence and harmonious society-sharing as well are likely to be quite grim.  It seems unlikely that we would be able to get enough of a grasp on how their morality works (what they value, what principles govern their conduct) to be able to criticize them from their own perspective.  However, it seems plausible that many of the moral conflicts we have, perhaps even some of the more shocking ones, really are not about fundamental differences but about different ways of weighting and looking at different parts of a shared group of fundamental values.  Furthermore, it seems as if considerable progress could be made just by trying to get both groups involved to see that—to see their opponents not as people advocating evil but rather as people advocating at bottom the same goods as they themselves are in a slightly different scheme.  So those in disagreement would try to cast their disagreement in terms of the same values, and thus interpret it as a different ordering of the same values.  Of course, in cases where the disagreement really is fundamental, this strategy will not prove useful. 

In the second chapter of Law's Empire, Dworkin discusses the interpretation of practices and institutions.   He uses the example of the institution of courtesy.  Each institution, he argues, involves a set of specific rules dictating what ought to be done.  In the case of courtesy, one of the rules might be that peasants ought to tip their hats to nobility.  At first, these rules just are, they are just the way that things are done—there is no room for sensible questioning of them.  Yet, with time, people will begin to impose meaning on the institution, will see a principle as overseeing the institution, and will see the practice as having a point.  In the case of courtesy, say, the initial point of the practice is thought to be a expression of respect towards one's social superiors.  But once such a conception of the "purpose" of courtesy arises, the practice opens itself to massive changes.  For at that point one can make arguments about what the best ways of expressing respect are, what the nature of respect is, whom respect is really owed to and on what grounds it is owed, and so on.  So interpretation of a practice opens the way for its alteration—perhaps new expressions of courtesy will be used, or courtesy will be shown to different groups of people.  Eventually the modifications might be such that courtesy will lose the importance it once had and will end up being paid relatively little attention; in this case, the interpretation and reinterpretation of the practice will stagnate until it becomes a mere set of fixed rules again.  (Dworkin 1986, p. 49)

Interpretation of social practices, under Dworkin's view, is constructive.  He thinks that interpretation is a matter of ascribing purpose or value to a practice which would make it as good as it could be as a practice of its kind.  In other words, interpreting courtesy means putting the best possible spin on what the purpose of the practice of courtesy is.  Obviously to a degree this is quite subjective, being dependent upon the intentions of the interpreter (since evaluating which understanding of courtesy is the best is going to be caught up with what he wants the practice to do), but it cannot be entirely so.  After all, since courtesy is a social practice, he cannot be overwhelmingly concerned with what he thinks courtesy should mean (or really means)—he has to have an understanding of what his fellow citizens do mean by it on a particular occasion. (Dworkin 1986, p. 63)  This is similar to the linguistic distinction between what a sentence means and what a speaker means by that sentence. 

Dworkin claims that a social practice can only be interpreted by one who engages in it in some sense.  On pp. 54-55 he says:

    I shall argue, finally, that the techniques of ordinary conversational interpretation, in which the interpreter aims to discover the intentions or meanings of another person,  would in any event be inappropriate for the interpretation of a social practice like courtesy because it is essential to the structure of such a practice that interpreting the practice be treated as different from understanding what other participants mean by the statements they make in its operation.  It follows that a social scientist must participate in a social practice if he hopes to understand it, as distinguished from understanding its members.
And on p. 64:
    A social scientist who offers to interpret the practice must make the same distinction.  He can, if he wishes, undertake only to report the various opinions different individuals in the community have about what the practice demands.  But that would not constitute an interpretation of the practice itself; if he undertakes that different project he must give up methodological individualism and use the method his subjects use in forming their own opinions about what courtesy really requires.  He must, that is, join the practice he proposes to understand; his conclusions are then not neutral reports about what the citizens of courtesy think but claims about courtesy competitive with theirs.  (italics his)
In a footnote he makes the clarification that the social scientist need not actually join the practice, (Dworkin 1986, p. 422) he only has to do so virtually, in order to see himself as one of the many practitioners attempting to understand what the practice really means. 

I would argue that one's fellow citizens, even those who are not social scientists, could play such an interpretive role in the practice as "virtual" practitioners.  Especially if our own interpretive attitudes have started to languish, and we are merely in the rut of following particular social rules with little reflection, a cultural outsider would still have reason to try to interpret our practice, to try to figure out what we were doing even though we ourselves might not care.  Then, if we found ourselves in dialogue with this outsider, being confronted with his interpretation of our practice and the recommended modifications deriving from that interpretation, we would be encouraged to start interpreting our practice more conscientiously ourselves in response to the outsider's interpretation.  Such an outsider would not necessarily need to engage in the practice himself, but he would need to have a very profound understanding of the culture whose practice he is trying to interpret, an understanding deep enough to allow him to view the practice as one of its practitioners.  Even if interpretation of a practice among its adherents is still lively, and there is no need for an outside challenge to ignite it afresh, interpretations of outsiders still might be very valuable.  Their different perspectives might enable them to come up with more creative and revolutionary interpretations, and they will be less likely to take particular practices and understandings for granted.  Thus, in general, their interpretations will be quite liberal, and even if they are too liberal to be outright accepted by the adherents of the practice, the adherents' own perspective will certainly be enhanced by those interpretations.  The outsiders might be able to expand the boundaries of what a given practice might mean. 

Similarly, those who disagree morally might try to find different ways to interpret the values and virtues that the other holds.  One might offer new understandings of what real wealth is, what true courage calls for, what the value of family is, what justice calls for, etc.  For values and virtues in this way are quite similar to institutions and practices.  We start out with a few "given" exemplars of each, from which we (as individuals and as a society) form concepts of what the real essence of the value or virtue is.  Note that the process is not strictly social—it makes perfect sense in a society to say "That's not real courage!" or "Our government is fundamentally unjust."  Such claims are neither mere expressions of personal opinion nor utterances of an official majority definition—the disagreement is not a merely linguistic one about the appropriateness of a particular word. 

In this kind of interpretation criticism from cultural outsiders seems quite beneficial as well.  Different groups might come to ascribe different essences to related families of practices.  For example, most cultures have some notion of courage, some notion of justice, some notion of honor, some notion of wealth.  But these concepts often have quite different instantiations from one society to the next.  Nonetheless, they are often similar enough so that each culture can recognize the versions of courage upheld by other cultures as such.  For example, many Native American groups considered the practice of "counting coup", that is, getting close enough to one's enemy in combat to strike him with a weapon held in one's hand, (or even better, one's bare hand itself) as a great display of courage, perhaps even as the most important measure of courage.  Even though the examples of courage in our society are rather different, (our martial standards of courage are different; furthermore, we have an understanding of courage which goes far beyond the martial concept—take the familiar notion of "having the courage to take a stand for what one believes in") we still are able to see the practice of counting coup as an exemplar of courage for another society.  Consider also the traditional Japanese ritualistic suicide practice of hara-kiri, a practice considered to be an profound display of honor.  Although the practices we would label as honorable would most likely be quite different from that one, we are still able to recognize it as honor.

In any case, exposure to different understandings of the values and virtues we ourselves cherish will lead to further reflection on our part of what the best expressions of those values and virtues are, and it might even open up an avenue to agreement, if one side can convince the other that a particular value or virtue really does require what they claim it does. 

The last and most prevalent sort of interpretation is that involving principles and individual moral judgments.  Most individuals engage in this sort of interpretation themselves as a self-reflective practice.  We judge the morality of particular choices and actions by seeing how they fit with the ethical principles that we hold; and our principles gain their substance from the individual moral judgments which fall under their domain.  Furthermore, we often might modify our principles once we are shown that they might lead to a particular moral decision which we intuitively think is wrong, or that they might conflict with other principles that we hold.  In any case, the frequency of conflict between moral principles forces us to reflect upon how we are to negotiate the competing claims which different principles make on us, how we are going to rank the principles, which ones should "trump" others.  Again, it seems like such interpretation performed by those who are coming from a different moral perspective will be a valuable asset indeed.  For moral outsiders are unlikely to take certain judgments and principles for granted as we might tend to if all the fellow members of our moral/cultural community make the same judgments and share the same principles. 

In short, external interpretation of a particular culture's ethical disagreements, practices, values, principles, and judgments goes quite far in deepening the understanding each of the disagreeing parties has of the other's moral system as well as its own; furthermore, such sorts of interpretation offer many possible roads leading towards a greater degree of agreement if not total agreement. 

Now that I have shown how ongoing background dialogue might look in practice, I will turn to the second question I intend to tackle in this chapter:  why is ongoing background dialogue so special; what makes it so important?  I will here discuss four main reasons:  its value in improving social harmony and mutual understanding, its value in improving the chances of success in urgent dialogue dealing with pressing disagreements, its value in putting us all under moral scrutiny and thus strengthening all of our moralities, and its value in possibly moving towards moral convergence.

Ongoing background dialogue could do a lot in improving social harmony among groups divided by serious moral disagreements in various ways.  First of all, it requires the groups to be at least on speaking terms with one another—constant communication seems to help function as a barrier to cultural warfare.  How many of our current "hot" disagreements would cool down considerably if the opposing sides were frequently in conversation with each other?  It seems plausible that a great many would.  Secondly, ongoing background dialogue does a lot to promote mutual understanding.  Since it requires a relatively deep acquaintance with the other's cultural and moral belief framework, those engaged in ongoing background dialogue will learn a lot about each other and their distinctive worldviews.  They will come to an understanding of why their opponents actually have the views that they do, what their motivations actually are.  This makes the sort of dismissal and demonization which is part and parcel of most contemporary serious moral conflicts nearly impossible. 

Urgent dialogue could benefit immensely from this ongoing background dialogue.  After all, as our dialogues with each other can bring such a greater degree of mutual understanding when they are not so severely restrained by time limitations and perhaps even some necessary constraints on the dialogue itself, this understanding would prove quite useful when we do come to a pressing disagreement where a decision has to be made.  Our deepened understanding will make it easier to hit upon constraints which will seem fair and acceptable to everybody, and our expectations of those who disagree with us will also become much more fair and accurate as we get to know them better.  Insofar as the constraints we have are pragmatic ones without some special inherent justification, it makes sense that they could be flexible in this way, changing to fit the nature of the disagreement and the relationship between the disagreeing parties.  We would also be much more able to justify our positions to each other than we were before.  Furthermore, our exploration of each other's moralities, and possible discovery of ways in which they relate might provide information that would be quite helpful in determining what an appropriate compromise would be.  Coming to a compromise, after all, would be much easier if we truly understood what the concerns and motivations of those who disagree with us were. 

A much-neglected beneficial aspect of dialogue is the role it could play in making all of us more moral people by putting all of us under moral scrutiny by those who come from different moral backgrounds, and by giving all of us more encouragement and opportunity for self-examination and reflection in trying to defend our beliefs and practices and justify our moralities to those who disagree with us.  To some degree we value such moral self-examination in our society, but it certainly is not prevalent.  Ongoing background dialogue could provide us with a reason to have such Socratic conversations, testing each other's ethical beliefs.  In such engagements, we might end up with new understandings of our own beliefs and practices which we would consider far superior to the ones we had before—this would be moral progress by our own lights.  Most importantly, though, such mutual moral scrutiny would go a long way towards ferreting out a lot of faulty moral thinking and moral indifference which flourish in our own society.  Amorality and moral apathy loom large in an atmosphere where often the only firmly held moral conviction is that we shouldn't infringe on anyone else's rights.  I am not trying to disparage the value of political autonomy here; all I am suggesting is that regardless of how well such a principle of noninterference works in establishing political systems, it makes for a rather meager conception of the good life.  Our emphases on individual liberty and the relativity of morality have led us to what I would call "apathetic relativism," not to be confused with any other relativisms.  By apathetic relativism I mean the attitude that any old way one chooses to live one's life is fine; any old way I happen to live my life is fine; anybody's choices are just as good as anybody else's, so it doesn't really matter what kinds of choices I make or what sort of life I lead.  I would argue that whether or not the claims of moral relativism are true, such an attitude is plainly mistaken.  We can have better or worse moralities by our own lights and by our culture's.  Inconsistency, mistaken factual presuppositions, prejudices, a lack of sufficient moral imagination—all these things can make a person's ethical beliefs flawed by one's own standards.  (That is, most of us at least to some degree care about whether or not our moral beliefs and practices are consistent, or whether or not they are based in large part on factual errors.)  There might not be one absolute true "good" morality, but that does not mean there aren't any bad ones!

Finally, I would like to suggest that ongoing background dialogue might possibly lead the way towards moral convergence—that is, greater agreement and similarity between the moralities of different groups.  There is a lot of objection to moral convergence—but I think it is bad only when it is assumed, false, and forced.  Most of the objections center around cases in which one group proclaims that it has the absolute moral truth, or perhaps even more arrogantly, insists that all reasonable people in all cultures know this truth as well.  Such an attitude often makes a handy justification for trying to impose one's morality on another: "You really agree with me even though you don't act like it, or at least if you were thinking rationally and not with a corrupt, uncivilized, or evil mind, you would come to see things my way."  I agree that such an attitude and the practice of assuming that other cultures share our moral standards but are just "sinning" against those standards is quite undesirable.  But what makes it so bad is that there really is not any real, unforced moral convergence in these cases.  I am unaware of any objections to real moral convergence.

Of course one might object that such convergence impossible.  If someone thinks that absolute moral truth doesn't exist, she might think that total agreement will be impossible.  But why would we think that?  Is it not possible, despite all our vast cultural differences, that our shared biological natures, our shared historical roots (in many cases, that is), our relatively similar motivations, interests, and aspirations, might indicate that we are sufficiently alike so that we could understand, scrutinize, and judge each other's moralities well enough to come to agreement on what moral beliefs one ought to hold? 

Another objection might be that freedom and the protection of individual liberties naturally produces divergence among comprehensive moral doctrines and conceptions of the good.  True enough, but why would this rule out the possibility that conversation, the joint project of moral dialogue, might lead to convergence just as freedom leads to moral divergence.  Ongoing background dialogue works toward agreement not by suppressing rival ethical views (hence it does not threaten freedom of conscience), but rather by examining views critically as a collective activity.  One might think of it as analogous to science.  Before a particular matter is investigated scientifically, there might be a wide variety of views about what is going on.  In some cases, there might be a dogmatically enforced agreement, like the Roman Catholic Church's former notorious insistence that the earth was at the center of the universe.  But such an enforced agreement is radically different from the sort of agreement produced by scientific investigation and experimentation, by which individuals test and correct their own views without being coerced to do so.

In short, I think an ongoing background dialogue could be a very powerful remedy to some of the ills caused by moral disagreement.  While urgent dialogue seeks to cope with the important matters at hand that must be decided, ongoing background dialogue can work over time to transform a society in the ways I have suggested.  While urgent dialogue can only involve a small fraction of the population at most, ongoing background dialogue can be something in which every citizen can partake.  While urgent dialogue mainly takes on the form of a deliberation or a debate between two parties in conflict, ongoing background dialogue can work through the relationships of all the citizens with each other, gradually building up mutual understanding and perhaps even areas of moral agreement.

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