Abstract
It is widely supposed that evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) against morality constitute a type of epistemological objection to our moral beliefs. In particular, the debunking force of such arguments is not supposed to depend on the metaphysical claim that moral facts do not exist. In this paper I argue that this standard epistemological construal of EDAs is highly misleading, if not mistaken. Specifically, I argue that the most widely discussed EDAs (including those of Joyce, Kitcher, Ruse, and Street) all make key and controversial metaphysical claims about the nature of morality or the (im)possibility of moral truth that belie their apparently epistemological character. I show that the debunking force of these EDAs derives largely from metaphysical claims about morality and their (alleged) implications for the (im)possibility of moral reduction, rather than from epistemological worries associated with the existence of an (alleged) causal/non-moral explanation of our moral judgments. The paper briefly concludes with a dilemma that I believe confronts all EDAs such as those discussed in this paper: either such arguments are unsound, or else they prove too much, debunking our knowledge of science and the external world, as well as morality.
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Notes
Shafer-Landau’s (2012) characterization of the debunking force of EDAs is typical: “Given moral realism, and given what we know about the origin of our “moral faculties” … there is no reason to think that these faculties are reliable, and plenty of reason to think they are not” (my emphasis). Other recent commentators who (in different ways and from different perspectives) adopt the epistemological construal of EDAs include Enoch (2010), White (2010). Wielenberg (2010), Brosnan (2011), Kahane (2011), Clarke-Doane (2012), FitzPatrick (2015), Fraser (2014), and Nichols (2014).
Putting things this way does not distinguish between “reductive” and “non-reductive” forms of moral naturalism, since even the latter accepts the possibility that the moral may be reduced to the non-moral. What is distinctive about non-reductive naturalism is that it is not necessary that the moral be reduced to the non-moral in order to be counted as “natural”. Cf. Shafer-Landau (2003: 64), who claims there is “very little difference, especially in matters of ontological parsimony, between non-reductive naturalism, and non-naturalism. Both are kinds of property dualism…and both…share a non-reductive metaphysics”. Cf. also Heathwood (2012).
I shall argue for the latter, since the best explanations of at least some of our moral judgments do presuppose the truth of such judgments.
Street’s position is thus broader than moral anti-realism, though it clearly encompasses it.
Joyce refers to the latter two claims as “substantive”.
Joyce (forthcoming a) seems to agree. He notes that “the debunking argument has teeth only if certain metaethical arguments succeed. (…) No one…thinks that genealogical empirical data alone can secure a sceptical victory; at most they battle alongside sceptical arguments of an a priori metaethical nature.” My claim here is that it is these latter a priori arguments that account for almost all of the debunking force that EDAs have against the moral naturalist.
This latter sense of reduction, Joyce notes, is broad enough even to include those normally thought of as non-reductive moral naturalists (2006: 187).
Strictly speaking, the first of these claims is conceptual, the second metaphysical. However, the metaphysical claim depends crucially on the conceptual one. Thanks to Charles Pigden for making me clarify this.
It is not clear whether Joyce regards this conclusion as equivalent to his conclusion (2006: 223) that “no moral judgements are epistemically justified,” but they seem close enough.
I do that elsewhere, in “Evolutionary debunking arguments, moral naturalism, and companions in guilt.”
See Lewontin (1995: 129), who states that “…calling a story a “hypothesis” does not make it more scientific. We should reserve the notion of “hypotheses” for assertions that can be tested.” Richardson (2007: 12) is blunter: “Speculation is just that: speculation. And we should regard it as such.” Cf. Fodor (2008). However, for a useful corrective to blanket criticisms of “just so stories” from an otherwise fairly harsh critic of evolutionary psychology, see Buller (2005: 86–92). Cf. Joyce (2006: 133–39).
In a précis of his book, Kitcher (2011b) writes: “Since the evidence is often insufficient to favor a single scenario, the explanation of full ethical life cannot always be “how actually” but must sometimes settle for “how possibly”. When the clues are too scanty to say how a particular type of advance was made, it is important to demonstrate how it might have happened—for otherwise suspicion will linger, whispering that one of the perspectives I want to reject is the only option, that we cannot manage without divine revelation or philosophical discovery.”
With respect to one particularly important instance of apparent progress relevant to Harman’s burning cat example—the recognition that inflicting wanton cruelty is wrong—Kitcher (2011a: 183) notes that “its history is obscure—even the epochs and societies within which it occurred cannot be identified.”
Cf. Kitcher (2006: 176): “In ethics as in mathematics, an appeal to intuition is an epistemology of desperation.”
Isolating the explanatory question in this way is directly relevant to whether Kitcher’s EDA indeed depends, as I have claimed, on specifically metaphysical doubts about the existence of moral facts or the possibility of moral truth.
The evaluative nomologically supervenes on the natural just in case there cannot be, consistent with the laws of nature, any change in the evaluative facts without a change in the natural facts. Given that this is a comparatively weak form of supervenience, widely agreed upon by naturalist and many non-naturalist evaluative realists alike, its effective denial implies a very strong claim.
Thanks to Tristram McPherson for this formulation and for very helpful discussion about supervenience in this context.
It may also beg questions against non-naturalist moral realists, since it suggests that the only possible version of that position would have to be broadly Platonist, holding that the moral facts exist in a distinct realm outside of space and time. Many non-naturalist moral realists, of course, reject this conception: even if they deny moral facts reduce to natural facts, they wish to avoid a position that would rule out the possibility that moral facts supervene on natural facts. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me to see this.
Although I have tried, in my discussion of Kitcher, to argue that EDAs fall well short of establishing premise 1, I certainly do not claim here to have shown that it is false.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Sondra Bacharach, Richard Joyce, Simon Keller, Anton Killin, Tristram McPherson, Kim Sterelny, and audiences at Victoria University of Wellington and the New Zealand Association of Philosophy meeting (2014) for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Das, R. Evolutionary debunking of morality: epistemological or metaphysical?. Philos Stud 173, 417–435 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0499-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0499-9