5. Urgent Dialogue

Most of our moral disagreements with others in society do not have to be dealt with; rather, they can be and often are ignored.  How I feel about telling white lies or stepping on insects or passing by a panhandler without giving him anything is generally not something that my fellow citizens and I need to be in agreement about.  When I say that such disagreements can be ignored, or that we do not need to be in agreement about the matter, I mean that they do not pose an obvious social problem.  If I feel very passionate about a particular matter, of course, I may find myself personally unable to ignore disagreement on that subject. 

But other disagreements are not so easily ignored or accepted.  These have been described above as "pressing" disagreements.  The clearest examples are political ones, those involving laws and public policy and the actions the state takes.   Obviously disagreement about laws and policies will be of a pressing nature, because there can generally be only one law or one policy for a given society at each level of organization, regardless of how much disagreement there is.  The laws and policies can only be one way, and all the disagreeing parties have an interest in which way that is. 

Furthermore, inaction or a neutral course of action is generally not an option in these cases for two reasons.  The first is that in general we can't go without laws and policies as a society.  If we are in disagreement about what the laws regarding a certain sphere should be, we can't answer the question "What should the laws be?" by not having any at all.  In the case of many institutions, we cannot go without them simply because we disagree regarding the specifics about them.  For example, if the members of society are in disagreement about what the role of a police force should be, how its conduct should be governed, what the limitations on its power should be, etc., it will hardly be an attractive option to anyone who does not want utter anarchy to simply solve the disagreement problem by not having any police force at all.    The second reason is that inaction in most cases will not be neutral from the perspective of at least one of the parties involved; so in that sense, a decision will be forced.  If the issue disagreed upon is whether or not we should go to war against another nation, the hawks will hardly consider not going to war (i.e., not taking action) as being neutral between the two sides.  If the issue disagreed upon is whether or not abortion should be made illegal, there is similarly no neutral course of action.  It seems that many political disagreements will be like this, and we will thus need a form of dialogue which will produce an acceptable conclusion in a reasonable amount of time, the urgent dialogue mentioned above.

Note that urgent dialogue does not necessarily have to be about immediate responses to specific current events and changes in circumstances.  Of course, such issues will require urgent dialogue.  If a boat of illegal immigrants makes it to our shores, disagreement over what to do with them—take them in or send them back—will be pressing not only because there is no clear neutral option but also because we have to do something with them sometime soon.  It makes no sense to put a moratorium on debate about the issue for a year or so to ponder matters more fully, as it might make sense to do with the other sorts of pressing disagreements, ones over general principles and policies and institutions.  Disagreements about how to respond to particular current circumstances will be pressing in this further sense—that they have to be decided very soon—and dialogue about those disagreements will thus be urgent in a further sense as well.  But urgent dialogue, as I am using the term, doesn't necessarily imply that an immediate decision is necessary, only that a decision has to be made at some point, that is, inaction or neutrality is impossible. 

Before going on to try to figure out how dialogue regarding such disagreements should work, we should look at how these disagreements should be understood.  With issues involving laws and individual moral behavior, there are three separate questions whose answers as given by the groups or individuals involved in the disagreement will determine the shape the dialogue will take.  The first is "Is the act right or wrong [according to my beliefs]?", the second is "In an ideal situation, i.e., a society which was not confronted with the problems posed by pluralism and moral diversity, a society in which the vast majority of people more or less shared my worldview, what should society do?", and the third is "Given that there is in fact widespread disagreement about this matter, that a great many people do not share my views on the subject, what should society do?"  In matters of state policy which do not involve individual behavior (i.e., the relevant moral concern is about what the state should do and not about what individuals should do), such as the use of capital punishment or the policy of nuclear deterrence, there will only be two questions—the latter two of the trio just described.  Now, each of these questions are things which each of the parties involved in the disagreement will have beliefs about.  Obviously, a person can think that an act is wrong, but that the state should not get involved.  Most people probably find most forms of lying to be unethical, but most of those people do not think that the state should make lying in general illegal.  Furthermore, someone might think that if the society was relatively culturally homogenous, sharing one's own culture, that certain laws and policies would be appropriate, but given the problem of moral disagreement, they would not be.  One might think that the laws and policies that would be acceptable to and appropriate for people shared one's own views might be too burdensome on people who reasonably disagreed.  For example, some Christians might think that in a Christian society, all offices and businesses should be closed on Sunday, but realize that in a society such as the one we currently have, that would be an unfair imposition on those who do not consider Sunday to be a sacred day.  Many would tend to have such concern about "imposing" their views on those to whom they could not justify those views.  Finally, the fact that there is a pressing disagreement in actuality means that there is disagreement about the third question—there is disagreement about what society or the state should do given that there is significant moral disagreement about the matter.

I point this out because this seems to be ignored by most liberal theorists.  Many quickly acknowledge the first point of disagreement about individual ethical behavior as well as the second point about what a society should do if it were made up of individuals who shared a common culture and morality.  But they do not pay much attention to the disagreement about the last point.  Part of the reason for this is that at least some liberals consider themselves to be arguing for principles which determine answers to that question. 

For example, Rawls seems to think that the laws and policies in a pluralistic society generally ought to be supported and defended by arguments from public reason alone—one should not talk in a public forum about one's comprehensive doctrine or conception of the good except in cases where doing so would strengthen public reason. (Rawls 1999, pp. 155-6) According to him, the fair terms of cooperation among the differently-believing groups require that we must justify the laws and policies we want by arguments that they accept. (Rawls 1996, pp. 51, 61-2)  Citizens who disagree with those terms are unreasonable, and any comprehensive doctrines which do not support this reliance upon public reason are unreasonable as well. 

The problem with this is that a great many doctrines held by many citizens today do not meet this standard for reasonableness.  Take this example, depicted in a footnote in Political Liberalism: 
 

"As an illustration, consider the troubled question of abortion...Suppose...that we consider the question in terms of these three important political values:  the due respect for human life, the ordered reproduction of political society over time, including the family in some form, and finally the equality of women as equal  citizens...Now, I believe any reasonable balance of these three will give a woman a duly qualified right to decide whether or not to end her pregnancy during the first trimester.  The reason for this is that at this early stage of pregnancy the political value of the equality of women is overriding, and this right is required to give it substance and force.  Other political values, if called in, would not, I think, affect this conclusion.  A reasonable balance may allow for such a right beyond this, at least in certain circumstances.  However, I do not discuss the question in general here, as I simply want to illustrate the point of the test by saying that any comprehensive doctrine that leads to a balance of political values excluding that duly qualified right in the first trimester is to that extent unreasonable."¹¹ (Rawls 1996, p. 243)

I bring up this passage not to scrutinize Rawls' argument here, but to point out that it appears to label all those who oppose the legalization of first-trimester abortions (and would continue to oppose it even after being confronted with Rawls' argument) as unreasonable.   I think that this poses problems for Rawls; since his theory is only concerned with reasonable doctrines and reasonable citizens, I think it has to require that the "unreasonables" constitute only a tiny minority of the population.  It is hard to see how Rawls' theory could be truly democratic if it is only concerned with accommodating the reasonable, and gives no account of how to accommodate or even deal with the many millions of citizens who will be declared unreasonable.  He can say if he likes that this concept of public reason will be supported by all reasonable doctrines, but it is not clear how "public" public reason will be if the reasonable do not form a large supermajority.  We are still left without a way of handling the many disagreements involving the unreasonable.

Similarly, Ackerman thinks that political disagreements should be argued about only from shared premises. (Ackerman 1989, p. 18)  These sorts of views put a lot of restrictions on the possibility of the state imposing certain moral views on those who disagree with them—it might even make it impossible.  I will question the idea that dialogues about and justifications of laws and policies should be based only on premises held by all citizens shortly.  For now I will just suggest that it is not evident that that is the only fair way. At any rate, it is evident that it is currently not evident to the general population. In some cases it makes very little sense given a certain perspective.  If one thinks that abortion is murder,¹²  one is unlikely to be too concerned about restricting the rights of those who disagree or imposing one's morality upon them.  Murder isn't the sort of thing we are likely to compromise over.  If a group in our society believed that certain other groups were subhuman and advocated killing them, we would not shy away from imposing our morality on them by preventing that group from killing the others simply because according to their own moral belief-framework, they would not be doing anything wrong.

I am not averse to the idea of having constraints, limiting the kinds of acceptable talk and reasons to be used in a dialogue.  But it seems to me that these constraints ought to be the sort of thing that almost all those involved (ideally all those involved) would find acceptable.  How can the dialogue work if things are otherwise?  As a matter of fact there is massive disagreement about whether or not the constraints advocated by such theorists would be fair—many consider such constraints to be too stringent.   Furthermore, it seems that we ought to be wary of jumping to the conclusion that a group is uninterested in dialogue or unwilling to consider the concerns of the other citizens just because it finds the constraints unbearable.  At least we ought to examine the constraints as well. 

For example, consider the previously mentioned constraint which limits what can be said to that which can be drawn from common premises, a constraint which apparently hopes to secure neutrality among rivals.  Ackerman mentions the concern about the quantity of shared premises dwindling as more and more groups become involved—it seems possible that it might shrink to zero. I would add the concern that the shared premises might eventually include only unhelpful points of common belief.  "Torturing small children for purposes of amusement is wrong" is probably a moral claim which most groups would accept; however, it is unclear at least at first glance how agreement about the wrongness of torturing children for fun will help us settle important political or moral questions. 

But I would like to direct my concern to another possible problem with this concept of shared premises:  Can our disagreements be meaningfully talked about, much less resolved, by recourse only to beliefs held in common?  It seems that would only be helpful if the source of our disagreements were in logical errors made by the parties involved.  In other words, if we are appealing only to shared premises, if I can present an argument for my view with those premises (which would have to be shared by you as well), the only legitimate move for you to make would be to nit-pick my argument for fallacies and slips in reasoning.  It doesn't seem that this is how much moral or political dialogue actually goes or should go. 

I suppose that might not be the only possibility.  It might be the case that both sides of the disagreement can make a valid argument from some of the shared premises to contradictory conclusions.  But that demands that our corpus of common knowledge be inconsistent, and I do not think we want to require that, as it seems to me that we would hope that such inconsistencies would be eradicated. 

A more likely exception is this:  our collections of beliefs are enormous, and so it is possible that we have not thought through the implications of all of them.  Someone might construct an argument from some of those beliefs to a particular conclusion in a way that we had not quite considered before.  If those beliefs were common ones, this would be a legitimate move in the discussion.

Still, it is not quite clear that the heart of most substantial policy disagreements can be plausibly described or defended using only shared premises.  It might be the case that we agree about certain concepts (that of human rights, for example) or values (that of family, for example), but we disagree about how those concepts fit together and how those values ought to be ranked.  (These differences in ranking will entail differences in the premises of the arguments for each of the rival views.)  For example, in the abortion controversy, it is likely that both parties value life or potential life and autonomy over one's own body; the locus of the disagreement is rather in the questions of what should be done when these values seem to be in conflict.  In the euthanasia/physician-assisted-suicide controversy, it is likely that both parties value life and freedom-from-suffering and personal dignity and autonomy, but disagree about what should be done in the case of a conflict.  To move away from bioethical questions, it seems that in the case of affirmative action disagreements, both parties generally value judgment-based-on-one's-qualifications and trying to correct or ameliorate the cumulative effects of past injustices, and yet disagree about how these should be reconciled or weighted relative to one another.  How we could carry on debates over these issues by only using shared premises seems difficult to comprehend.  Each seems to boil down to a difference in values or in the ranking of values or in concepts, which will result in a difference in premises. 

So, the liberal dream of settling political disputes by reference to shared public reason alone seems implausible, and the realm of the political seems to be the site of some of the fiercest moral disagreements.  Thus liberal solutions which ascribe all disagreement to the strictly private moral realm will not be helpful.  However, this leaves us with a dilemma as we are forced to balance the need to come to a solution within a reasonable amount of time due to the nature of a pressing disagreement with the desire to make the solution as acceptable as possible, as fair as possible. 

It seems more justifiable to leave the matter of what it is fair to ask under the conditions of moral diversity, as well as the matter of what should the conversational constraints be, to the judgment of the individuals or groups involved.  It should be up for discussion how much one can ask of others.  I don't mean strictly that it ought to be settled by conversation what the constraints on the conversation should be—that would lead to an absurdity.  But the constraints should be determined in practice, in the midst of the dialogue, as all parties who want to remain in it must subject themselves to some degree to the implicit requirements their rivals place on them.  After all, success in the dialogue by any standards will require being able to keep one's hearers' attention and not alienating them but rather appealing to them. 

In essence I am assuming to a less extensive degree what Rawls and Gutmann and Thompson assume—a desire on the part of each citizen to seek out a way to coexist peacefully, to handle disagreements as amicably as possible, and to propose fair terms of cooperation for free and equal citizens.  Although I reject the strict Rawlsian view that the fair terms of cooperation could be only proposing laws and policies which all citizens would agree to, I still think the motivation is important.  I believe that a desire to propose fair terms of cooperation will invoke an attempt to truly understand the positions of those whom one disagrees with, an attempt to find the best possible compromise under those conditions, and an attempt to make sure that the dialogue is as fair as possible to all parties involved.  For the implementation of conversational constraint involves a commitment not only on the part of the speaker to stay within the appropriate limitations of the conversation, but also a commitment on the part of the listeners to not be unfairly restrictive in what they allow the speaker to say.
An essential part of urgent dialogue is going to be compromise and accommodation.  Given that completely converting those with whom one disagrees is often unlikely within the limitations of an urgent dialogue, many deliberations are going to end not in one side totally convincing the other but rather in some form of compromise.

By moral compromise, I mean conceding to act in a way other than the way thought to be the most morally right, or conceding to allow the policies and laws to be other than the way one thinks they morally ought to be.  So such compromise is more serious than the simple defense of autonomy in many liberal theories.  Supporting drug legalization because one thinks that people should be allowed to shape their own conceptions of the good with maximum freedom even though one disapproves of drug abuse is not moral compromise.  It is only moral compromise if one supports drug legalization while thinking that in some moral sense the selling and use of currently illegal drugs ought not to be legalized. 

One might wonder how moral compromise could be possible.  After all, it is not quite the same as compromising over the color one paints the walls in one's kitchen.  To compromise morally means to self-consciously let the wrong thing be done—'wrong' in a much stronger sense than merely not being in accordance with one's preferences. 

David B. Wong, in his article "Coping with Moral Conflict and Ambiguity," argues that such an extensive sort of compromise is indeed possible.  He dismisses Nagel's claim that the appropriate way of accommodating fundamental or "brute" disagreements is a policy of state neutrality, by arguing that the distinction between reasonable (i.e., resolvable in principle) and brute disagreements is too blurry to help us in deciding when to be neutral and when to not be. (Wong 1994, p.15)  He also discusses Gutmann and Thompson's criticism of Nagel's view, which rejects the identification of state neutrality with impartiality, and argues that Nagel puts too much in the category of brute disagreement.  Wong criticizes Gutmann and Thompson as well, however.  He suggests that their methods of fair discussion and deliberation, while a valuable part of accommodation, are insufficient in two ways.  First, it remains unclear what should be done in the case of apparently "brute" disagreements, where deliberation seems unlikely to help the group get very far in eradicating their differences.  Second, even in cases where deliberation will produce agreement, attention still needs to be paid to the question of how the citizens are to "get along with one another in the meantime." (Wong 1994, p. 16) 

Wong argues that compromise is not only possible but necessary in order to sustain social health in the face of such ethical pluralism.  He argues for its possibility in two ways.  First, he points out that we may be able to grant the perspectives of those who disagree with us a great deal of respect.  Serious disagreements often aren't fundamental; rather, they most often involve differences in ranking and weighting of particular principles or of setting different boundaries around categories.  Furthermore, we can often entertain the possibility that we might be wrong about the particular weighting we use or the boundaries we have set, so it seems quite possible that we could be indulgent towards those who take a different stance on those matters, no matter how wide the apparent disagreement is.  Take, for example, the abortion controversy—perhaps the most striking example of moral conflict in the U.S. today.  What we have there is not a brute disagreement about fundamental moral values, but a disagreement about weighting and boundaries.  The two groups often disagree over whether fetuses count as human beings or persons or potential persons or whether they have any other morally relevant status.  It is not too much of a stretch to see some of these boundaries as being blurry and questionable, and thus we might be inclined to take a charitable attitude towards those who disagree with us on that count.  Furthermore, there is also a dispute about how the value of protecting a woman's autonomy and control over her own body should be weighted relative to the value of protecting the life of something which is either a person or will become one if no intervening action is taken.  Surely each of those values is legitimate—other things being equal, we favor supporting a woman's autonomy, her right to choose, and, other things being equal, we favor supporting life and giving fetuses a chance at leading a full[er] human life.  But when these two values come into conflict, it seems that there is much legitimate room for difference of opinion.  Thus, Wong argues, we might be inclined to compromise morally with others because we realize that the case for our own position really is not all that clear. 

Second, Wong points out that we might be inclined to compromise on moral matters because of the value we place on our relationships with others and the goods we can obtain from those relationships.  We do, it seems, have a reason as social creatures to value amicable relations with our neighbors in and of themselves.  After all, intrasocietal moral disagreement does not involve isolated tribes with bizarre practices in far away countries; it involves the woman next door.  I would also point out that moral disagreements, if not handled peacefully, will threaten most of our associations and communities within society.  This is because, as Gutmann points out, it is not only societies that are multicultural—people are multicultural as well.  (Gutmann 1993, p. 183-4) Many citizens belong to several different cultural groups—ethnic, regional, religious, occupational, political.  We all live at the intersection of several different communities.  An ethnically unified community will contain cultural divides along regional, religious, philosophical, occupational, political, and class lines—the same goes for each of the other sorts of communities.  So it is naïve to expect moral conflicts to fall neatly on the boundary lines between distinct communities.  Therefore, we have a reason to try to resolve or accommodate moral disagreements as amicably as possible, as we desire to preserve relationships and ties within the communities of which we are a member.  Furthermore, such amicable relations are necessary to achieve many of the moral ends we have in common as a society, as well as a variety of other projects. 

Of course, this does not guarantee that compromise will always be possible.  Citizens will have to weigh the value of the goods of compromise against what is at stake in the moral matter in question.  Some things may just be too important to be compromised.  For example, if there were a large cultural minority which believed slavery to be morally legitimate and important to their way of life and hence wanted it legalized, those citizens who consider slavery to be a great evil would be unlikely to be willing to allow it to be legalized as a compromise to improve relations with that cultural minority.  The same holds true for some opponents of the legalization of abortion.  If one really believes that abortion is outright murder, it is hard to see how one could fully accept any sort of compromise which supported its legality.  Of course, a spirit of compromise could still prove beneficial even in such difficult cases.  The pro-lifers might be willing to work with pro-choicers on measures which might make abortion appear less necessary, i.e., measures which protect and expand a pregnant woman's options.  In effect, by working on such projects together, both groups acknowledge the difficulty and immediate intractability of their current disagreement, to some degree accepting the state of disagreement as a legitimate one.  Countless other partial compromises could prove valuable.  Those who oppose the killing of animals for food could work with those who do not on improving the conditions under which such animals are raised and slaughtered.  Those pacifists who believe war to be altogether immoral could work with those who believe a certain war might be just in promoting peaceful diplomatic ways of resolving the impending military conflict, or providing humanitarian aid to civilians whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the war.  In such cases the compromise need not be total—both the vegetarian activists and the pacifists could be pressing their own case in the political system through their legislative representatives (or in some other cases, in the courts) while working with those who disagree with them.  So such compromises are often unstable, although not dangerously so.

In other cases a more complete, stable compromise might be possible. These are more likely to be less "severe" cases, cases which aren't matters of life and death.  Those who believe that the institution of both affirmative action and ethnic quotas is the most equitable and just thing to do might be willing to settle for having the former and not the latter given that many in society strongly disagree with them.  In this case they would simply value social harmony and their relationships with the others more than enacting what they believe to be the best policy.  Of course, if public opinion changes, the policy they are actively advocating may change as well. 

In most cases, whether it results in a resolution of some sort or a compromise of some sort, urgent dialogue will be incomplete.  A group which accepts a resolution after being convinced by its opponents in a certain dialogue may later come to realize other arguments it could have used or fallacies in the arguments they were convinced by, and thus be less inclined to support the course of action which they initially agreed to.  Alternatively, they may have felt compelled to agree to a decision which they did not really like by the exigencies of the situation, and thus feel dissatisfied with it.  In the cases where the dialogue ends with some sort of compromise, there will usually be a certain degree of tension and instability in the compromise.  Furthermore, even if we could resolve all the political disagreements neatly, completely, and permanently, we would still be faced with the all the non-political moral disagreements which those political disagreements were founded upon.  Thus, in any case, we will still have a large body of moral disagreements to deal with.  In order to handle these, I propose another type of dialogue to complement urgent dialogue:  ongoing background dialogue.

¹² This is obviously much stronger than the view that abortion is wrong. [back]