According to tom regan, can moral disagreements ever be resolved by statistics? can they be decided by appealing to a moral authority?

According to the American philosopher Tom Regan, moral disagreements can not be resolved by statistics. Even though, the author expresses that statistics help to portrait what the majority believes or thinks is right or is wrong, and that this fact is useful because what a number of people think will have more impact than what one only person thinks. This is not the same as to say that because there is a majority of people that believe certain point is wrong or right, make it in fact, wrong or right. Statistics do not help to solve the moral disagreement, because they do not produce any reason behind that moral disagreement.

On the same note, confiding the solution to this conflicts to a moral authority is not only incorrect but it is also dangerous. Moral authority, as Regan writes, is often put to a God. With this approach, the first problem that arises is the fact that the notion of a God is not scientifically proven, therefore some people would not agree that a God is, in fact, a moral authority.

The second problem with God as a moral authority, is that even in the case that the God is accepted as real by everyone, whatever conclusion that the God gives to the audience as the resolution of the conflict, can be misinterpreted by the masses, and therefore altered into something that it is not.

The solution to a moral disagreement has to come from the individuals that are having the disagreement, and the method they use has to be a result of their own illumination and as an independent thought, not directly connected to statistics of a moral authority.