  Conciliationism has been met with criticism from theorists who instead favor “steadfastness” in the face of peer disagreement. And the fact that conciliationism is thus a contested doctrine also raises the self-defeat worry that it can be turned against itself as it may then seem to call for its own abandonment. But an advantage of conciliationism in the present context is that it allows moral skeptics to derive skeptical conclusions from moral disagreement without having to assume that the parties are in ideal circumstances. After all, two persons could be in equally favorable epistemic situations even if their situations could be improved. At the same time, however, the conclusions a skeptic may, via conciliationism, hope to derive from such disagreements are correspondingly modest. They seem at best to entail that the parties currently lack justified beliefs or knowledge and do not rule out that knowledge is in principle attainable. As Richard Feldman puts it, the skepticism we get from conciliationism is “a kind of contingent real-world skepticism” which does not address, for example, “whether it is possible for us to know about the existence and nature of things in the external world” (2006, 217).