WHAT EXACTLY DOES IT MEAN to say that speakers of one language have a different concept of rights than speakers of another?

If their concepts are different, can they still communicate with one another? Is it even true that all speakers of a given language share the same concepts - especially of loaded terms like “rights”? To pursue the issues at the heart of this book, we need answers to these questions.

To do this, I proceed as follows. Section 2.1 aims to motivate the analytical framework within which I will discuss concepts, a framework that draws on the recent work of Robert Brandom. One of the chief goals of the section is to defend the idea that there are always con­ceptual differences between us, even if we speak the same language, but this need not stand in the way of successful communication. This is an uncommon view, but I will show that it overcomes a long-standing objection to conceptual pluralism and is thus uniquely well suited to my larger project in this work. Section 2.2 asks what it can mean, on this picture, for communication to fail, which leads to an account of the various degrees of conceptual distance that can separate speakers or lan­guages from one another. In the final section, I apply these ideas specif­ically to moral pluralism. The understanding of pluralism that I develop emphasizes its contingency, flexibility, and openness to cross-cultural engagement. Each of these factors will be exploited in the chapters to follow.