Marc Bolhoven

Moral disagreement may depend not only on how people evaluate an event, but also on how they interpret what is happening in the first place. Yet moral judgment research has focused primarily on evaluations of tightly controlled scenarios, leaving underspecified how one interpretation rather than another comes to form the basis for evaluation when situations permit multiple understandings. We develop a utility-based interpretive account that distinguishes which “interpretive frames” (i.e., situation-specific representations that organize features into candidate understandings of an event) are psychologically available and which available frame is prioritized. We propose that frames are prioritized through a multiattribute value-based decision, with epistemic, social, and other considerations contributing to a frame's utility. This account distinguishes interpretive moral disagreement from evaluative moral disagreement concerning an assumed shared interpretation and identifies availability and prioritization as two pathways through which interpretive moral disagreement can arise.