A Wittgensteinian take on moral vs. deep disagreements

Abstract

The notion of deep disagreement was originally introduced by Fogelin to describe situations where disagreement about the truth-value of a proposition proceeds from a clash of viewpoints (Fogelin, Informal Logic 7, 1985). Fogelin and others conceived of this notion in a Wittgensteinian fashion, i.e., as disagreements generated by a clash of what Wittgenstein called “hinge propositions” and “forms of life”. Thus, the notion of deep disagreement has inherited the theoretical traits that some scholars of Wittgenstein’s work attribute to the notion of hinge propositions and forms of life. In this paper, we take inspiration from Wittgenstein’s remarks to explore whether genuine moral disagreements align with the inherited definition of deep disagreements. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible tension between the notion of deep disagreement inspired by later Wittgenstein, and a conception of moral disagreements, conceived as not straightforwardly factual disagreements, that can be tracked in Wittgenstein’s work from the Tractatus to On Certainty.