Abstract
According to one influential response to evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, debunking arguments fail to undermine our moral beliefs because they fail to imply that those beliefs are insensitive or unsafe. The position that information about the explanatory history of our belief must imply that our beliefs are insensitive or unsafe in order to undermine those beliefs has been dubbed “Modal Security”, and I therefore label this style of response to debunking arguments the “modal security response”. An alternative position, that our beliefs can be defeated if we accept those beliefs are not explained by the relevant facts, I call “explanationism”. In this article, I argue against Modal Security in favour of explanationism. First, I present two examples from the literature that appear to support explanationism, and I argue that these examples imply that the modal security response is fundamentally misguided about the nature of epistemic defeat. I then consider a recent response from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras, who claim that examples of this kind fail because they are either incoherent or involve a failure of modal security. I argue that, due to their position on the failure of evolutionary debunking arguments, Clarke Doane and Dan Baras are committed to the existence of coherent, sufficiently simple examples that can help us arbitrate between explanationism and modal security. I then construct such an example and argue that it clearly indicates that we should reject Modal Security in favour of explanationism. This implies the modal security response to debunking arguments fails.
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Notes
This understanding of sensitivity and safety coheres with Clarke-Doane (2020a, p. 10). Later, Clarke-Doane clarifies that safety also involves not easily being wrong about our belief in P “in every case similar enough to P” (2020a, p. 115). This is discussed below.
For this paper it is sufficient to understand evidence as the kind of thing that can give agents reasons for and against belief.
The term “defeat” describes a previously justified belief becoming unjustified. The current debate concerns undercutting defeat, so when I describe a belief being defeated or undermined, I mean this kind of defeat specifically (CD&B, 2021).
I assume here that we are also epistemically justified in accepting the relevant explanatory disconnect, because the Modal Security response grants the truth of the debunker’s genealogical claim for the sake of argument.
Any adequate explanatory account of defeat will have to be more sophisticated than simply entailing our belief in P is defeated iff we accept that it is not explained by, and does not explain, P. See (Locke, 2014; Luttz, 2018; Korman, 2019 & Korman and Locke 2020 & 2021) for more sophisticated accounts. As these commentators argue, all these more sophisticated versions imply that our moral beliefs are defeated by the genealogical premise of debunking arguments. Thus, the additional bells and whistles of these accounts do not change that the explanatory disconnect implied by debunking arguments (and the other examples I will consider further down, based on this debate) is sufficient to defeat our beliefs. Hence, the differences between these and the simpler relation I have specified above are irrelevant for the purposes of this article.
Relatedly, in none of the examples considered in this paper is there a third-factor explaining both the agent’s belief in P and P, and so these beliefs are defeated even assuming that such a third-factor relation can allow for justification (Enoch, 2010). This possibility is irrelevant to assessing the modal security response to debunking arguments, according to which our (explanatorily basic) moral beliefs can be justified entirely in virtue of their modal security, regardless of the presence of such a third-factor.
The term ‘explanatory concession’ is borrowed from Korman and Locke, who use it to mean something slightly more specific (2020, p. 316).
This is not to be confused with other kinds explanationism; see Lycan (2005) for a discussion of the different roles that explanation can play in epistemology.
Debunkers typically claim that this is not true of the evolutionary explanations of other faculties, like our capacity for perceptual or mathematical beliefs (Ruse, 1986, p. 254; Joyce, 2005, p. 182).
Clarke-Doane takes himself to be explaining how our moral beliefs could be reliable given the debunker’s genealogy. But Clarke-Doane acknowledges that if there is no such explanation of the reliability of our moral beliefs then our moral beliefs become unjustified (2015, p. 84). Thus, by explaining how our moral beliefs may be reliable in spite of the debunker’s genealogy Clarke-Doane thereby shows that they might still be justified.
These basic principles must be necessary in order to fix the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral (Rosen, 2020, p. 206).
Clarke-Doane also argues for the sensitivity of our non-basic beliefs, but that argument is irrelevant for the purposes of this paper (2020a, p. 106).
If evidence that defeats our belief must give us reason to doubt our belief, and reason to doubt our belief is thereby reason to doubt its sensitivity or safety, then it follows trivially that if evidence defeats our belief it also gives us reason to doubt it’s sensitivity or safety (CD&B, 2021, p. 175). To avoid this result, CD&B specify that their position requires that undercutting defeaters provide a direct reason for doubting the sensitivity or safety of our belief (2021, p. 176). When I consider whether an agent has reason to doubt the modal security of their belief, I will therefore be talking about direct reasons. See CD&B (2021, p. 175-6) for an illustration of direct and indirect reasons. The latter disjunct in the definition is used to avoid counterexamples involving evidence which undermines our belief by giving us indirect reason to doubt its sensitivity or safety; a wrinkle that is irrelevant for this article (2020a, p. 116-7).
If one doubts that this strategy to de-trivialise modal security succeeds, then explanationism would be consistent with Modal Security. But the question of whether evolutionary debunking arguments succeed would remain open. We would just need another way of describing the point of contention between debunkers and modal security theorists, which CD&B take to be whether explanatory concessions can defeat when we lack any direct reason for doubting the sensitivity or safety of the belief (CD&B, 2021, p. 176). So if Modal Security is in fact trivially implied by the truth of explanationism, then the arguments of this paper should instead be viewed as being against whatever non-trivial account of defeat does in fact capture the point of contention between the debunker and the modal security theorist.
Though Clarke-Doane argues that the genealogical premise of debunking arguments
does not imply that our moral beliefs are insensitive (2020a, p. 107 & p. 145), he also argues that debunking arguments could not undermine those beliefs even if they did, on pain of general scepticism (2020a, p. 145). Thus, debunking arguments could only work by showing that our moral belief are unsafe, rather than by showing they are insensitive. This position still entails the truth of Modal Security, and so the arguments of this paper apply equally against this more specific position as well.
Some authors argue against one core grounding relation in favour of a plurality of grounding-like relations (Fine, 2012; Wilson, 2014; Clarke-Doane, 2020, p. 182). But this would not give us reason to accept pluralism about the determination relation, any more than the typical view of determination as being instanced by both causation and grounding (and potentially other relations), should imply determination pluralism (Shaffer, 2016, p. 96; Roski, 2021, p. 14141-2). The explanationist can therefore accommodate grounding-pluralism by allowing all and only those grounding-like relations that are determinative to be relevant to epistemic defeat.
Are there reasons for accepting pluralism about determination itself? Clarke-Doane argues for logical pluralism, according to which there are a plurality of entailment-like relations and no categorical (or “objective”) truth about what is “entailed” by what (forthcoming). Depending on one’s view about the relationship between entailment and determination, one might therefore be moved to accept a plurality of determination-like concepts as well. This argument is controversial, but we can briefly consider its potential ramifications.
Firstly, it would not threaten my endorsement of explanatory realism because, as Clarke-Doane argues, pluralism about an area is consistent with realism about that area (2020, p. 13-34). Secondly, the most natural way for the explanationist to accommodate this kind of pluralism would be the position that, if we deny our belief bares any determination-like relation with the facts, then our belief is unjustified. This would imply there are a plurality of different relations that are relevant to epistemic defeat, but this would just be a natural consequence of the logical pluralism that motivated the position. If there are a plurality of entailment-like relations, then an acceptable account of justification will presumably have to allow justification on the basis of correct inferences in line with each entailment-like relation. Thus, a plurality of different relations would be relevant to epistemic defeat. On the other hand, if we are not justified in forming inferences in line with each entailment-like relation (given logical pluralism) then the explanationist could simply specify only those corresponding determination-like concepts as being relevant to justification.
A final point is that, as Clarke-Doane argues, there seems to be as good reason to accept modal pluralism as there are other kinds of pluralism (2020, p. 181). As such, we should expect any issues that arise for explanationism from determination-pluralism to arise also for Modal Security from modal pluralism. If modal security can somehow escape worries stemming from modal pluralism, perhaps by specifying the type of specific modal-like relation that is relevant to defeat, then why think the explanationist cannot respond to determination pluralism in the same way? I thank a reviewer at Erkenntnis for raising this issue.
Of course, this issue does not arise for those forms of realism that take moral facts to be causal, like some forms of naturalism.
Clarke-Doane argues that only a small fraction of our mathematical beliefs could be vindicated in this way (2020, p. 76–84). If so, it may be best for the explanationist to adopt mathematical anti-realism in order to avoid scepticism regarding these beliefs. Assessing the prospects of this strategy is unfortunately outside the scope of this article.
Notably, given this understanding of explanation, the absence of an explanatory relation would not entail that our beliefs are either insensitive or unsafe. If we replaced this evolutionary explanation with a non-truth involving evolutionary explanation, we would lose any reason to think that our logical beliefs were determined the facts. But presumably, an analogue of the modal security response could then be used to show that we did not have reason to doubt the sensitivity or safety of those beliefs. As such, this understanding of explanation does not collapse the distinction between explanationism and modal security.
The modal security response implies debunking arguments fail even granting they establish some such explanatory disconnect, and so this is not in dispute in the current context (Clarke-Doane, p. 107–111). See (McCain 2014, p. 127–8) for a possible alternative understanding of the explanatory relation which more straightforwardly allows for non-causal explanations.
A belief being ‘modally insecure’ means that it may be defeated according to Modal Security. If a belief is not defeated according to Modal Security, the belief is modally secure. Similarly, the ‘modal security’ of a belief refers to its being undefeated according to Modal Security, and its ‘modal insecurity’ refers to its being possibly defeated according to Modal Security. A belief “passes” Modal Security if it is modally secure, and “fails” modal security if it is modally insecure.
Lutz’s original example is against sensitivity-based accounts of defeat, and therefore needs to be amended slightly to function as a counterexample to Modal Security.
We can assume that Neora is justified in accepting this explanatory disconnect. See footnote v.
For other such examples see Faraci (2019) and Korman and Locke (2021).
This condition is usually implicit in any potential use of counterexamples, but for the sake of the foregoing discussion it is helpful to make it explicit.
Thus, I am not suggesting we reject Modal Security because there is obscurity in the notion of our beliefs having “easily” been false. Instead, I argue below that we should reject Modal Security because, even assuming this obscurity can be resolved, it will have to be resolved in a way that gives intuitively incorrect judgements about when our beliefs are defeated (based on CD&B’s treatment of evolutionary debunking arguments).
Now, it may be possible for CD&B to resist this argument by abandoning the Modal Security response to debunking arguments and insisting that Neo’s prime beliefs (and, thus, our realistically construed moral beliefs) are modally insecure. One may therefore think I have only argued against the Modal Security response to debunking arguments, rather than against Modal Security (one can certainly endorse the latter without endorsing the former). But again, I think my arguments in Sect. 3 indicate that any example that does satisfy conditions (i)-(iii) will support explanationism over Modal Security. I therefore think that this strategy would ultimately prove unsuccessful, even if it may allow the modal security advocate to avoid the Neo example specifically. See (CD&B, 2021, p. 174) for a relevant discussion.
The scenario need not involve a necessary psycho-physical bridge law connecting Neo’s consciousness and the prime intuitions. We need only suppose that the world in which the computer program can create Neo without these intuitions is as distant as the world in which evolution could have produced us without having the relevant moral intuitions, given the debunker’s genealogy. And, according to CD&B’s response to debunking arguments, this is distant enough to ensure that our beliefs could not “easily” have been different (and are therefore safe). As there is no reason to think that a psycho-physical bridge law would be required in the evolutionary case, we have no reason to think it is required for Neo, either.
See Korman and Locke (2020) for further discussion of this strategy.
In order for Modal Security to be a non-trivial thesis about defeat, it must either be non-trivial that we should only give up our belief if we have reason to doubt it’s reliability, or it must be non-trivial that we only have reason to doubt the reliability of our belief if we have reason to doubt it’s Modal Security. Hence, if one views the connection between having reason to doubt the reliability of our belief and having reason to its Modal Security as being trivial, then the arguments of this paper should instead be taken show that we need not have reason to doubt the reliability of our belief in order to have reason to give them up (as the supposed relationship between the two would need to be non-trivial in order to maintain the non-triviality of Modal Security).
This also demonstrates why the truth-seeker should care about explanatory concessions. Again, see Korman and Locke (2020) for a related suggestion.
This is consistent with the position that our beliefs were justified prior to the relevant explanatory concession. It is our attitude towards the explanatory disconnect, rather than the disconnect itself, that defeats justification for our belief, and so our belief could have been justified prior to our adopting this attitude. And given the discussion in Sect. 3 about the possibility of non-causal explanations, there is no reason to think that a realist should have automatically adopted this attitude prior to evolutionary debunking arguments.
Furthermore, there is good reason to think that some reason can fail to currently justify our belief even if we were previously justified in holding our belief on the basis of that reason. Take the situation described in the new evil demon problem, in which there are two agents with subjectively identical experiences, one veridical and one the result of a manipulative evil demon (Cohen, 1984). The common intuition is that both agents are equally justified, and thus that the beliefs of the manipulated agent are justified. Now imagine the manipulated agent finds out that her so-called reality is created by the evil demon. Presumably, though she was justified in her “perceptual” beliefs prior to this realisation, this justification is now lost. Furthermore, it seems that she is forced to accept that many of her reasons for belief are currently no good; her memory of “seeing” a cup on the table yesterday is not currently a good reason for her to believe that there really was a cup on the table yesterday. As such, the realisation about the evil demon implies that she now has no good reason for her belief that there was a cup on the table, even though she was previously justified in holding her belief on the basis of this memory. This may be because she now realises the reason was never good, or because it used to be good but now (because of her change in attitude) has become bad. Either way, the explanationist can argue that the same thing happens when we make explanatory concessions; they make us realise we lack good reason for holding our belief, even though we were previously justified in holding beliefs for those reasons.
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Noonan, C. Evolutionary Debunking Arguments, Explanationism and Counterexamples to Modal Security. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00700-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00700-8