7. Conclusion

Widespread moral disagreement has become a fact of American society, a fact which has been generating confusion, disharmony, and culture wars, and a fact which poses difficult questions about how a society and a state can be shared by those who often do not agree about what is good for the individual, for the society, and for the state. 

Moral diversity creates two sorts of problems.  The first is simply that of social harmony, or the health of a society.  What kind of society is possible among people who hold so many different ethical allegiances, who hold such drastically different conceptions of what goals a life ought to be directed toward and what rules it ought to be governed by?  If our life as a society cannot be the life of a community, where a community is a group which holds at least some religious, philosophical, or ethical commitments in common, what kind of peaceful and productive social existence is possible?  How do we get along with our neighbors with different views?  In many cases, there is apparently no problem at all.  But if our neighbor's philosophy or conduct outrages us—and depending on who we are, different sorts of things will outrage us:  our neighbor's refusal to recycle, his gun collection, his sexual promiscuity—we will have a problem.  How can we do more than merely get along given the diversity in our outlooks?

Then there is the problem of justice.  What sorts of policies should be implemented in the society; what kinds of laws should we seek to live under, given that our fellow citizens have to live under them as well?  Is it possible to have a system of laws and policies which is neutral, which does not discriminate among differing conceptions of the good, which everyone could assent to?  If possible, is a neutral system worth having?  If impossible, how can we better moderate the struggle between different factions for predominance?  It might be thought that the right way to go about choosing between controversial alternatives is to merely allow public opinion to decide the issue—whatever the majority thinks should be embodied in the policies and law of the society is what should be.  But this seems in many cases to turn into "might makes right", or perhaps more precisely, might makes law.  Individual organizations exercise considerable muscle and spend a great deal of money turning public opinion this way or that.  Culture wars flare up, as different groups become convinced that We are being fairly untreated or marginalized or threatened by Them.  Different groups have different ideals about what society should look like, how it should be evolving—so each rival group often seems to be threatening the kind of society and the kind of future the others desire (or, if they are currently in a dominant position, cherish.)  What we end up with is a protracted power struggle among groups with very strong moral/philosophical commitments and political visions.
Several political philosophers have turned to dialogue in their search for a solution to these problems.  Finding ways to live and work with each other, according to these philosophers, is dependent upon our finding ways to speak to each other about the issues which threaten to divide us.  One of the aims of this thesis is to defend that claim, to show how dialogue can be seen as a solution to the problems of moral diversity just described, and to try to show what it might look like in practice.

The version of dialogue proposed here has some important differences from the dialogue theories examined in the third chapter.  Perhaps one of the most striking differences is its emphasis on what is perhaps a radical degree of inclusivity.  This dialogue is inclusive in two ways.  First, it avoids introducing any pre-determined external constraints on any conversation, or setting a standard of plausibility or reasonableness that participants in a conversation must meet.  Rather, it aims to address all moral disagreements, instead of taking some of them off the agenda because the defenders of one view cannot obey a particular set of constraints or meet some standard of reasonableness.  After all, it seems that these more extreme disagreements are the ones most in need of being attended to.  Any moral conflict which is severe enough to pose a real social problem is going to be a conflict in which at least some people on each side are skeptical of the reasonableness of the people on the other side or of the plausibility of their position.

Secondly, this dialogue has not been formed with an eye towards producing a particular result.  Instead, the argument is that dialogue as presented here is what is demanded by fairness and respect for other groups regardless of what the outcome of it may be. It would be counterproductive for a dialogue intended to help address the problems of moral diversity to be designed to produce a particular "right answer" on any controversial moral question—its very purpose is to provide a non-biased mutually acceptable way of coming to a resolution or compromise.  Otherwise, why would the group whose view the dialogue is biased against accept it as a legitimate way of reconciling moral disagreements?

Perhaps the most important difference is that this view involves two tiers of dialogue.  Often, those who advocate dialogue advocate it in one sphere or the other—in politics or among citizen-neighbors.  But I think by including dialogue in both realms we end up with a whole dialogue that is greater than the sum of its parts.  There seems to be a symbiotic connection between urgent dialogue and ongoing background dialogue as I have portrayed them.

On the one hand, urgent dialogue can provide us with a means of coming to difficult political decisions in a way that is not divisive through deliberation and compromise.  Then, groups which morally disagree would be less inclined to see each other as political enemies, since they would in fact be cooperating politically in those processes of deliberation and compromise.  This would bring about a climate in which an ongoing background dialogue could flourish, resulting in increased mutual understanding, which would in turn open the way for a better urgent dialogue.  By using dialogue to address both political moral disagreement and non-political moral disagreement, we could immensely increase the chances of successful resolution of moral conflicts in both the political and non-political realms.