Abstract
Moral realism is often taken to have common sense and initial appearances on its side. Indeed, by some lights, common sense and initial appearances underlie all the central positive arguments for moral realism. We offer a kind of debunking argument, taking aim at realism’s common sense standing. Our argument differs from familiar debunking moves both in its empirical assumptions and in how it targets the realist position. We argue that if natural selection explains the objective phenomenology of moral deliberation and judgement, then this undermines arguments from that phenomenology. This results in a simpler, and in some ways more direct, challenge to realism. It is also less vulnerable to the main objections that have been leveled against such arguments. If accepted, our conclusion should make a real difference to the dialectic in this area. It means that neither realism nor its denial is the default, to-be-refuted, position.
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Notes
We know of a few partial, scattered, precedents: Ruse (2009) sometimes seems to make an argument akin to ours, although he can be interpreted in different ways. Jeroen Hopster mentions a closely related argument, but only devotes a single, relatively brief paragraph to it (2019, pp. 848–849). Loeb (2007, p. 476) and Björnsson (2012, p. 376) attribute such an argument to Joyce (2001, Ch. 6; 2006, Ch. 6). But as we explain in Sect. 5.1, there are significant differences between our argument and Joyce’s.
Some advocates of evolutionary explanations have in mind the explanandum as we have just described it. Others are less clear on this score. As we have followed Stanford’s (2018) characterization of the explanandum, we also follow him in assessing to what extent explanations on offer can account for said explanandum.
A related suggestion is found in Dennett (1995). His idea is that morality serves as a “conversation stopper”, contributing to efficient social decision making. Dennett alludes to the objective phenomenology of moral thinking, but his primary emphasis is on we he describes as its “seriousness”—roughly speaking, that moral injunctions have overriding force.
As John Bengson has pointed out to us, one should distinguish the claim that moral practice “feels” objective from the claim that we have a propositional seeming to the effect that morality is objective. For Huemer’s principle to apply, the latter needs to hold. We assume that Dancy and others understand the situation, perhaps treating the objective “feeling” as grounding, or as evidence for, the propositional state.
An alternative formulation of the argument would involve abandoning premise (P3) and instead weakening the conclusion to:
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(C*)
Therefore, in the absence of defeaters, we have at least some degree of justification for believing that morality is an objective domain.
Under this understanding, we would accept (C*), but argue that it doesn’t permit one to infer (C)—since, as we argue, there are defeaters. We suspect that many philosophers who favored the FVA have implicitly assumed something like (P3), and thus take themselves to argue for (C) (and not merely for (C*)).
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(C*)
We thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this possibility.
As we noted in Sect. 2, there are several rival evolutionary explanations of this phenomenon. Though we think that, among all of these explanations, Stanford’s explanation is the most plausible one, none of these explanations assume the morality is experienced as objective because it’s objective. So the truth of any of these theories would serve our proposes equally well.
A caveat: if one holds a naturalistic moral realism, then one’s explanation of the objective phenomenology of morality may be as economic as the evolutionary explanation. Assessing this point would require a detailed statement of the explanation on the part of the (naturalist) realist, which hasn’t been given as far as we know.
In his 2017 Enoch defends a version of the argument from moral phenomenology. There he makes clear that he accepts the description of moral phenomenology on which it rests.
In his 2006 (Ch. 7) Joyce confusingly refers to this skeptical conclusion as an “error theory”. As he clarifies in later work, he does not think that an EDA can establish anything beyond a form of first-order moral skepticism which is, in principle, compatible with realism (2016, 144n3). As noted above, Joyce’s evolutionary hypothesis can serve our argument as well. But Joyce himself sees it as casting doubt on first-order moral beliefs, and not as undermining arguments for metaethical views (2001, Ch. 6; 2006, Ch. 6). This marks an important difference between Joyce’s argument and ours.
Here Joyce differs from Street, who holds that the Darwinian Dilemma applies to naturalist realisms too—see especially Street (Joyce’s 2006, Sect. 7).
Perhaps most relevantly, consider the following excerpt from Joyce’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on moral anti-realism (the only point where evolutionary debunking is mentioned). Considering the counter-intuitiveness of moral anti-realism he comments:
“One noteworthy type of strategy here is the “debunking argument,” which seeks to undermine moral intuitions by showing that they are the product of processes that we have no grounds for thinking are reliable indicators of truth. (See Street 2006; O’Neill 2015; Joyce 2013, 2016.) To the extent that the anti-realist can provide a plausible explanation for why humans would tend to think of morality as objective, even if it is not objective, then any counter-intuitiveness in the anti-realist’s failure to accommodate objectivity can no longer be raised as an ongoing consideration against moral anti-realism.”
Note that Joyce refers here to Street’s argument (and to O’Neill, another paper addressing “causes of beliefs”), and that he regards the role of evolutionary debunking as explaining away the counter-intuitiveness of anti-realist positions. So it is unclear whether he has a first- or second-order form of debunking in mind. Still, as we say in the main text, we readily acknowledge that such formulations bear a kinship with our argument.
Pölzler & Wright (2020) suggests a view fairly similar to this latter option.
Several of the commentators on Stanford’s original BBS paper raise such doubts. See especially Davis & Kelly; Patel and Machery; Stich; Theriault & Young. And see Stanford’s response, especially R2. See also Stich (2018)
We omit the so-called overgeneralization objection, which alleges that skepticism with respect to morality may run rampant, leading to implausible skeptical conclusions about our knowledge of the external world (Vavova 2014, pp. 82–3, Shafer-Landau 2012, p. 22) or of other a priori domains (Bedke, 2009, Sect. 3; Enoch 2011, pp. 175–6). This objection doesn’t seem to us very compelling to begin with, and even if it were, it doesn’t appear to be adaptable to our argument.
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Acknowledgements
For their detailed and extremely valuable written comments on earlier drafts, we'd like to thank Dan Baras, John Bengson, Michael Dale, Stephen Darwall, David Enoch, Ayala Collete Haddad, Uri Leibowitz, Yair Levy, Thomas Pölzler, Russ Shafer-Landau, Kyle Stanford, Preston Werner, Erik Wielenberg, and two anonymous referees at this journal.
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Levy, A., Weinshtock Saadon, I. Evolutionary debunking of (arguments for) moral realism. Synthese 201, 168 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04157-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04157-8