Moral disagreements are legion. People disagree about whether threatening kidnappers with torture is morally permissible, about whether one ought to give to charity, and about whether killing and eating animals is morally wrong. In fact, disagreement makes for a significant part of our everyday moral discourse and thinking. But what exactly is a moral disagreement? What properties do moral disagreements have? How can they be analyzed? These are the questions Stephan Padel strives to answer in this book. The book consists of two parts: Part 1, the critical part, develops and defends four conditions of adequacy for any plausible account of moral disagreement and tests the leading metaethical theories against these conditions. The result is: none of the current theories is able to meet each of the conditions. This is why Part 2 develops and defends a metaethical framework that is specifically designed to accommodate the phenomenon of moral disagreement and its features. The theory, dubbed ”Sentimentalist Realism”, is shown to meet each of the conditions of adequacy defended in Part 1. It is thus the most convincing metaethical view in the context of moral disagreement. The book ends with a brief defense of Sentimentalist Realism against several objections unrelated to moral disagreement and thus argues for the view’s overall plausibility.

Stephan Padel taught philosophy at Saarland University and now develops concepts for gamified digital trainings and serious games for an internationally operating agency.