Abstract
There has lately been substantial interest in scrutinizing our evaluative attitudes in light of our evolutionary history. However, these discussions have been hampered by an insufficiently expansive vantage. Our history did not begin ex nihilo a few million years ago with the appearance of hominins, or apes, or primates—those are very recent chapters of a much larger story that spans billions of years. This paper situates the mechanisms underlying normative thought within this broader context. I argue that this historical perspective creates difficulties for metaethical nonnaturalists. The expanded scope enables the story to be anchored in negative claims about value, making room for novel epistemological and metaphysical challenges that are more threatening than extant evolutionary debunking arguments.
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Notes
Here, I have neglected bioenergetic constraints on plausible origin-of-life scenarios (e.g., Lane 2015). However, a discussion emphasizing pre-biotic metabolism would hardly challenge the continuity between living and non-living things, but would rather serve to illustrate it.
Dennett (2017, ch. 3) explores a similar idea, but under the general heading of ‘reasons’. Since the normativity of biological reasons is in doubt, my terminology seems preferable for our purposes.
Comparative discussions such as this require caution. Since contemporary animals have continued to evolve over millions of years, they are not identical to ancestral forms. Nevertheless, comparison with modern forms can be illuminating, since a trait’s conservation across lineages (e.g., nerve nets throughout cnidarians, neurons in both cnidarians and mammals) evinces that trait’s presence in their last common ancestor.
Contra Bogardus (2016), the image of recognizable patterns of normative thought untainted by what I’m calling ‘mechanisms of biological valuation’ is not possible for humans.
Enoch (2011, chs. 2-4) is a notable exception. I address his positive argument for nonnaturalism in [citation removed].
I return to this issue in Section 10.4.
Thanks to Jake Monaghan for suggesting this to me.
Nonnaturalists might insist that their necessary, eternal normative principles are fundamental, and can’t be explained further. Perhaps we must tolerate some degree of fundamentality in some places. But the putative fact that the universe had embedded within it dormant principles to govern the conduct of intelligent creatures is striking, and seems to call out for an explanation. The incurious maneuver of instructing critics to cease asking questions is always available to those who want to sweep theoretical weaknesses under the rug.
Thanks to Alex King for encouraging me to frame this point this way.
This is an important difference between normativity and mathematics, because it appears that mathematical description has been apt at every moment in history. This makes it questionable whether mathematics is a helpful “partner in guilt” in this context.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
In some ways, views that construe normativity as fundamentally continuous with descriptive phenomena may have an easier time placing value in the context of big history, since they do not require an abrupt rift with everything that came before. Even still, it is possible to challenge views like these along the lines developed above. For example, the continuity between all living things and the continuity of living things with proto-organisms and abiotic chemistry makes it challenging to spell out a naturalistic position that does not slip into pan-normativism. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address this.)
In this paper, I have focused on nonnaturalism because I believe it is most susceptible to the challenges I have raised, and doing so has also helped to (slightly) narrow the discussion. I am also persuaded by nonnaturalists’ arguments that naturalistic approaches fail to deliver accounts of genuine normativity (e.g., Parfit 2011, chs. 29–30). If normativity is not an illusion, then I believe it must be discontinuous in the way that nonnaturalists claim. That is why I think it is the view to beat. But these are matters for another occasion.
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Cline, B. Big History, Value, and the Art of Continued Existence. Philosophia 48, 901–930 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00124-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00124-1