Whenever people get involved in debates about some serious ethical issue, or issue of justice, they presuppose the possibility that some answers are better than others. Otherwise, the debate would be meaningless if you stop to think. If all moral debates were merely subjective, then the debates would simply consist in the participants declaring their own subjective preferences. As if to say: “I like chocolate ice cream, and the other person likes vanilla”. But this is not the way we do it in ethical and moral discussions or debate. We’re not just declaring our favourite flavour of ice cream, or our opinion about the right way to live.
We are trying to persuade. We are trying to convey arguments that have the potential to persuade our interlocutor. This aspect of the moral debate, that it is invariably persuasive and involves dialogue, suggests that the possibility of better and worse responses should be presupposed by the activity of participating of a moral debate itself.
So, the way I teach and, even in books, the way I write about moral and political philosophy, it is not trying to offer a unique answer, as if I were a pastor. But I try to raise questions, set examples and tell stories that invite students, or readers, to think for themselves.
Not because I don’t think that some answers are better than others, but because I believe that the dialogue process and group argumentation is the only way to try to solve the difference between more or less persuasive reports of justice or well-being.