Abstract
Two epistemological critiques of non-naturalism are not always carefully distinguished. According to the Causal Objection, the fact that moral properties cannot cause our moral beliefs implies that it would be a coincidence if many of them were true. According to the Evolutionary Objection, the fact that evolutionary pressures have influenced our moral beliefs implies a similar coincidence. After distinguishing these epistemological critiques, I provide an extensive defense of the Causal Objection that also strengthens the Evolutionary Objection. In particular, I formulate a “Master Causal Objection” featuring the controversial premise that non-naturalism can provide no adequate explanation for moral knowledge. I defend this premise by first narrowing down the range of candidate explanations to conceptual, constitutive, and evolutionary explanations, and then considering and eliminating each of these in turn. My discussion of evolutionary explanations suggests that non-naturalists must refute the Causal Objection in order to refute the Evolutionary Objection.
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Notes
For a discussion of various ways of demarcating ethical naturalism and non-naturalism, see Shafer-Landau (2003, Ch. 3, esp. 58–65).
Thus, I assume that non-natural moral facts are causally impotent.
The target of Street’s dilemma is normative realism, which is wider than ethical non-naturalism along two different dimensions: 1) it encompasses non-moral as well as moral normativity, and 2) it encompasses “value naturalism” as well as non-naturalism (see pp. 135–141). Joyce (2007, 190–209) also criticizes ethical naturalist as well as ethical non-naturalist responses to his own genealogical critique.
In this essay, “appropriate,” when qualifying a causal connection, is meant to exclude deviant causal chains.
We can formulate genealogical critiques so that moral intuitions or moral beliefs are the primary target. A genealogical critique that targets only our moral intuitions is slightly weaker than the formulation that targets our moral beliefs at large, since moral beliefs that are not based on moral intuition escape this version of the critique. Since moral intuition is certainly an important (and arguably the only primary) source of epistemic justification for our moral beliefs, though, even the weaker critique, if successful, would generate a serious epistemological crisis for ethical non-naturalism (viz., the debunking of moral intuition). I will shift between these two formulations of genealogical critiques depending on what seems most helpful in the particular dialectical context.
This story is not a perfect analogy for every version of the Evolutionary Objection. For example, it does not perfectly fit Richard Joyce’s influential statement of the Evolutionary Objection (Joyce 2007, Ch. 2). According to Joyce, it is primarily our moral concepts, not our moral intuitions, that evolution has selected for their beneficial psychological effects. According to Joyce, moral concepts imply categorical reasons for action. Evolution selected for concepts such as “right” and “wrong” because the categorical reasons implied by these concepts reinforced pro-social behavior (with all of its attendant benefits to the individual and the group).
I make no effort to clarify why Gettier-style examples do not qualify as knowledge.
I will treat the non-accidentality as a property of the truth of the belief. But one could make the case that it is primarily a property of the justification of the belief or that it is primarily a property of the belief itself. Nothing here hinges on this fine point.
When I say that the metaphysical position must “offer” a plausible explanation, I am using this term metaphorically to refer to a metaphysical (i.e., logical or evidential) relationship between non-naturalism and the explanation. For non-naturalism to “offer” a plausible explanation, I assume that non-naturalism at least must be consistent with a plausible explanation. By using the term “offer,” I do not imply that non-naturalism is plausible only if some actual defender of non-naturalism has a plausible explanation on hand.
See Schechter (2010, 16–17). After raising a “reliability challenge” to logic that is similar to the explanatory challenge embedded in the Master Causal Objection, Schechter argues that the reliability of our beliefs about logic is not a brute fact. His argument is that brute facts fall into two categories—fundamental laws and accidents—and that “our possession of a reliable deductive mechanism” does not plausibly fall into either one of these.
Here I follow Field (1989, 232): “And [the claim that the reliability of our mathematical beliefs is a brute fact] seems pretty dubious too: there is nothing wrong with supposing that some facts about mathematical entities are brute facts, but to accept that facts about the relation of mathematical entities to human beings are brute and inexplicable is another matter entirely.”
As recent accounts of moral perception have emphasized, there is a kind of indirect causal (or causal cum grounding) connection between our moral intuitions and the moral facts. In particular, we are in contact with some of the natural properties that ground the moral properties. Elsewhere (Crow forthcoming) I explain why none of these accounts can ground a satisfying response to the kind of explanatory challenge raised by Benacerraf and Field. My main point is that each of these accounts presupposes (and thus does not explain) the reliability of the bridge principles with which we link natural properties and moral properties.
In their response to the Causal Objection, Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (2014, 437) also make the plausible point that there is no causal explanation for the reliability of many non-moral conceptual truths. This point suggests that the Causal Objection to ethical non-naturalism might generalize over a substantial class of our non-moral beliefs (i.e., all conceptual truths). Whether it does generalize in this fashion depends, of course, on whether there is an adequate non-causal explanation of these non-moral conceptual truths that does not extend to the moral domain. I do not discuss this issue here.
I have left out all detail that is not is not essential to my main point. In Bengson’s more thorough account, property ensurance is unpacked in modal terms: “a’s having F ensures b’s having G iff: necessarily, if a is F and a constitutes b, then b is G” (Bengson 2015, 18). Bengson (2015, 18–19) also distinguishes property ensurance from property inheritance. In his schema, property inheritance is a species of property ensurance in which the ensured property is identical to the property doing the ensuring. Thus, the fragile glass/vase case is an example of property inheritance, since the property of fragility is the same in both objects. In Bengson’s constitutive explanation, the relevant property of the intuition stands in the ensurance (but not inheritance) relation to the relevant property of the abstracta, since “being not merely accidental” (the ensured property of the intuition) is not identical to the property of “being the way the world is” (the ensuring property of the fact) (Bengson 2015, 31).
While I tailor my critique to Wielenberg’s third-factor explanation, a parallel critique applies to each of the other two.
While proponents of third factor explanations may purport to explain only the weaker explanandum clarified above (the striking fact that our moral beliefs are true) and not the stronger explanandum (which includes their non-accidental truth), I will treat these explanations as putative explanations of the stronger explanandum.
In Wielenberg’s more complete evolutionary story, evolution initially selects for the disposition to believe that only oneself and one’s kin have rights; the rights are then generalized via the application of a Likeness Principle and the influence of Group Selection (see Wielenberg 2014, 137–139).
While proponents of third factor explanations may purport to explain only the weaker explanandum clarified above (the striking fact that our moral beliefs are true) and not the stronger explanandum (which includes their non-accidental truth), I will treat these explanations as putative explanations of the stronger explanandum.
Bedke (2014, 112) develops a critique of third-factor explanations in these terms.
In Joyce’s complete story, there are two kinds of pills—one that makes you believe that Napoleon won Waterloo and one that makes you believe that he lost—and you come to believe that your friend slipped you one of the “lost” pills.
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Crow, D. Causal Impotence and Evolutionary Influence: Epistemological Challenges for Non-Naturalism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 379–395 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9625-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9625-1