Abstract
The so-called Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (EDAs) are arguments that appeal to the evolutionary genealogy of our beliefs to undermine their justification. When applied to morality, such arguments are intended to undermine moral realism. In this paper I will discuss Andreas Mogensen’s recent effort to secure moral realism against EDAs. Mogensen attempts to undermine the challenge provided by EDAs in metaethics through the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in biology. The problem with this move is that the proximate/ultimate distinction is misconceived. If ultimate and proximate causes are properly understood to be complementary, such distinction cannot affect EDAs in metaethics. Therefore, I will argue, Mogensen’s argument fails and moral realism is still in danger.
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Notes
By morality, we intend here the human capacity for moral beliefs.
Though one may draw different conclusions in each domain, EDAs can target a wide variety of beliefs, including religious, commonsense, scientific and moral beliefs (see Wilkins and Griffiths 2013). Here I will exclusively focus on the case of morality and more precisely on the cognitivist views of morality which are those assuming that moral beliefs are truth-apt.
This issue has been clearly systematized by Street’s Darwinian Dilemma (Street 2006).
Evolutionism has to be intended here in a very broad sense. Although the majority of EDAs seems to presuppose an adaptationist understanding of evolution (i.e., that natural selection is the only or the most relevant factor in evolution), they are not necessarily committed to it. Kahane underlines that: “It’s important to see that it does not matter here whether any particular evolutionary explanation is true. What matters is that some such story is likely to be true (…). If some evaluative disposition is explained not by adaptation but by the even more random evolutionary mechanisms of genetic drift or exaptation, this would make things worse, not better, with respect to truth tracking. It would make the process even more similar to flipping a coin” (Kahane 2011, p. 111–112). However, my final emphasis on niche-construction relies on an alternative evolutionary view, i.e., the “pluralist” view according to which natural selection is not the only (or the most relevant) factor in the evolution of organisms (e.g., Oyama 2000).
According to Ruse and Wilson, “(…) for even if external ethical premises did not exist, we would go on thinking about right and wrong in the way that we do” (Ruse and Wilson 1986, p. 186).
It may be contested that EDAs do not entail that moral facts do not exist but only that moral facts are superfluous. On this point, one should notice that my aim is just to argue that EDAs show that the explanationist argument fails in securing moral realism. My rejection of the explanationist argument does not rule out that moral realism can be established on other grounds. However, whether there are other ways to maintain that there are moral facts will not be settled here.
It may be objected that this conclusion, i.e., that moral facts do not exist, does not follow from the explanationist argument according to which if moral facts figure in the explanatory account of moral beliefs, then moral facts earn ontological rights (call this argument EXP). That moral facts do not exist would follow only if something like EXP1 obtains: if moral facts do not figure in the explanatory account of moral beliefs, then moral facts do not exist. But it is precisely something like EXP1 to be implied in the explanationist debate since its origin. As Wielenberg underlines, “Gilbert Harman was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to outline a case against moral knowledge based on the claim that human moral beliefs can be explained without appealing to any moral truths. His worry was roughly this: if moral facts do not explain moral beliefs, then they do not explain anything at all, and if they do not explain anything at all, then we should conclude that they do not exist” (Wielenberg 2010, p. 452). This ‘worry’ is implicitly present also in Mogensen’s defense of moral realism, otherwise he would not be so interested in affirming that moral facts can figure in proximate explanations. I thank an anonymous reviewer for having raised this issue.
To escape this problem, a different strategy can be to argue that also the evolutionary process is truth-tracking. But, if so, Mogensen’s argument falls into the standard critique of EDAs just mentioned at the beginning of this paper.
I will return on this point in the final section.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to The Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS) that has funded the research for this paper.
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Severini, E. Evolutionary Debunking Arguments and the Moral Niche. Philosophia 44, 865–875 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9708-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9708-9