Recently, (November 22, 2017) the international criminal tribunal at the Hague sentenced Ratko Mladic to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war. The charges arose in connection with events in the former Yugoslavia through the first half of the 1990s. For example, in July 1995 troops under Mladic command overran UN established safe areas in Srebrenica and Zepa. More than 8,000 Moslem Bosniaks who had sought sanctuary there were murdered on his orders. Not long ago I discussed in this blog the "error" theory of meta-ethics, the view that ethical statements try to assert some moral realities, but they inevitably fail because there are no such realities. One argument sometimes advanced for the error theory is an argument from dissension about morality. T he underlying idea is this: when a subject is important to a lot of human beings for a long time, and thus comes under intense study, we would expect di...