Abstract
Street has argued that the meta-ethical realist is faced with a dilemma. Either evolutionary forces have had a distorting influenced on our ability to track moral properties or evolutionary forces influenced our beliefs in the direction of tracking moral properties. Street argues that if the realist accepts the first horn of the dilemma, the realist must accept implausible skepticism regarding moral beliefs. If the realist accepts the second horn of the dilemma, the realist owes an explanation of the fitness producing nature of moral beliefs. As Street establishes the dialectic, the anti-realist’s explanation is better. I will argue that Street’s first horn is question begging then I will grasp the second horn of the dilemma and argue that only the realist can explain the role of moral beliefs in our evolutionary history. My argument will take the form of a dilemma. For our evaluative judgments to be fitness conducive, they must be responsive to the right sort of external world properties. The non-reductive realist can provide such a set of properties. On the first horn of the dilemma, the anti-realist cannot. The realist, unlike the anti-realist, can explain why our evaluative judgments are fitness conducive. The realist has won the explanatory battle. On the second horn of the dilemma, the anti-realist can provide a set of non-normative external world properties that our evaluative attitudes are responsive to. In doing so, the anti-realist has provided the heretofore-missing component of the reductive realist’s project. Again, the realist has won.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The non-opacity clause is intended to prevent the truth of propositions such as Sam believes that “killing is wrong” from counting in determining where a view falls in the taxonomy.
I included “standard” to rule out those propositions involving claims about beliefs or attitudes. A realist is, obviously, not committed to the claim that the truth-maker of the proposition I believe that killing is always wrong is an abstract entity.
This is not to deny that the property of being true cannot have derivative causal powers., e.g. if a proposition is true then the proposition corresponds to a state of the world that has causal powers and these causal powers may play an explanatory role. On this schema, the property of being true is not itself doing any explanatory work.
It is important that my argument not rest on this example alone. I suspect that the reader can, without much difficulty, conjure up a nearly endless list of scenarios in which our moral intuitions vary while we are unable to point to the subvening property responsible for the variation. Diane Jeske has defending a similar claim about the subvening base of obligations to intimates (Jeske 2008)
Note that it is an upshot of this contingent and empirical style of argumentation that the success of counter-arguments from analogy will be highly dependent on the details. While there is not space, here, to consider such counter-arguments, my suspicion is that, due to the relevant detail sensitivity, none will be effective.
At the end of the day, I am largely uninterested in how one classifies the reductive views in question. Reductive views that rely on the rigidifying move end up with the kind of response-independent moral properties I am interested in. If these views do not end up counting as versions of realism then it turns out that there are non-realist views that I am content with.
Disagreement regarding what is intrinsically good is not the sort of disagreement that could be caused by disagreement over non-moral facts. More generally, the realist is presumably committed to the view that, if two individuals had access to all of the moral and non-moral facts, there would be no room for moral disagreement.
References
Enoch D (2011) Taking morality seriously: a defense of robust realism. Oxford University Press
Jeske D (2008) Rationality and moral theory: how intimacy generates reasons. Routledge, New York
Joyce R (2006) The evolution of morality. MIT Press, Cambridge
Leiter B (2001) Moral facts and best explanations. Social Philosophy and Policy 18:79–101
Sinnott-Armstrong W (2008) Moral psychology, volume 1: the evolution of morality. MIT Press, Cambridge
Street S (2006) A Darwinian Dilemma for realist theories of value. Philos Stud 127:109–166. doi:10.1007/s11098-005-1726-6
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank David Enoch, Jason Decker, Richard Fumerton, and Evan Fales for very helpful written comments and Russ Shafer-Landau and Sam Alexander Taylor for our constructive conversations.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Graber, A. Medusa’s Gaze Reflected: A Darwinian Dilemma for Anti-Realist Theories of Value. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 589–601 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9354-7
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9354-7