ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a distinct way in which ethical disagreement and variations in ethical judgment matter for theories of ethical thought and talk. It shows how the variation poses problems for both cognitivist and non-cognitivist ways of specifying the nature of ethical judgments. The chapter looks at how disagreement phenomena have been taken to undermine cognitivist accounts, but also at how the seeming variation in cognitive and non-cognitive contents between parties of deep ethical disagreement challenge both cognitivist and non-cognitivist accounts of disagreement itself. It also looks at how attributions of disagreement raise problems for variantist cognitivism, before considering non-cognitivist and other non-orthodox attempts to understand ethical disagreement. Though disagreement from contradiction might look promising, any explanation of disagreement in judgments in terms of expressions of these judgments might seem to get the order of explanation wrong.
