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Evolutionary debunking arguments and the reliability of moral cognition

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Abstract

Recent debate in metaethics over evolutionary debunking arguments against morality has shown a tendency to abstract away from relevant empirical detail. Here, I engage the debate about Darwinian debunking of morality with relevant empirical issues. I present four conditions that must be met in order for it to be reasonable to expect an evolved cognitive faculty to be reliable: the environment, information, error, and tracking conditions. I then argue that these conditions are not met in the case of our evolved faculty for moral judgement.

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Notes

  1. This qualifier is included so as to allow debunkers of this kind to admit that judgments such as ‘stealing is not morally wrong’ can be epistemically justified. I will elide it from now on.

  2. I will leave unspecified here precisely where the threshold for reliability lies, although this is a substantive issue that requires attention in the fullest analysis (see Goldman 1986, p. 26).

  3. Kahane discusses evaluative beliefs in general, but I restrict my discussion here to moral beliefs.

  4. Elements of Street’s discussion indicate that she might fill in the causal claim in this way (see e.g. 2006, pp. 115, 134).

  5. This is the empirical hypothesis employed in Joyce’s (2006a, pp. 180–181) debunking argument: human beings “come prepared to categorize the world in morally normative terms; moral concepts may be innate, even if moral beliefs are not”.

  6. Primarily, Joyce and Street.

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  1. School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Coombs Building (#9), Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Benjamin James Fraser

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Fraser, B.J. Evolutionary debunking arguments and the reliability of moral cognition. Philos Stud 168, 457–473 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0140-8

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