The name is absent

39

the sort of diversity that pluralism implies. The latter is a diversity of moral principles such that
one cannot conclusively rank them when they conflict.

The sort of relativity found in uneven moral progress is not like that. Moral progress
implies that some principles are clearly better than others. Relativity only enters in insofar as one
should judge culpability relative to what the agent can reasonably be expected to know. So it is
appropriate to describe Kropotkin’s view as an alternative to pluralism. If Kropotkin’s view is
right, then slavery was wrong, objectively wrong, in the days of Washington and Jefferson, even
if they could be excused for owning slaves out of ignorance. (The example is counterfactual,
since Washington and Jefferson were aware of moral objections to slavery.)

Is Kropotkin’s View Partially True?

So there are two views of moral competence. We may refer to them as “Fiske’s view”
and “Kropotkin’s view,” acknowledging that what is essential to Fiske’s view, as the term
“Fiske’s view” is being used here, is that it incorporates P&P thus implying irresolvable moral
conflicts. Both views incorporate recursive embedding. Conceivably, there could be other
approaches to moral cognition differing from Fiske’s relational models theory in that they appeal
to mental representations other than the four models, but if they incorporate some version of
P&P, then I will, for the sake of convenience, include them as variations of “Fiske’s view.” It is
also understood, as mentioned earlier, that the phrase “Kropotkin’s view” is mildly anachronistic,
since it refers to a view incorporating ideas from Hauser et al. (2002) in the attempt to put flesh
on Kropotkin’s notion of reason; but the anachronism seems harmless.

Given the controlled empirical evidence for Fiske’s view, should Kropotkin’s view be
taken seriously at all? Yes. For one thing, the psychological data acquired so far merely show, at
best, the psychological reality of the four models. None of the studies mentioned earlier shows

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