Abstract
In metaethics, evolutionary debunking arguments combine empirical and epistemological premises to purportedly show that our moral judgments are unjustified. One objection to these arguments has been to distinguish between those judgments that evolutionary influence might undermine versus those that it does not. This response is powerful but not well understood. In this paper I flesh out the response by drawing upon a familiar distinction in the natural sciences, where it is common to distinguish folk judgments from theoretical judgments. I argue that this in turn illuminates the proper scope of the evolutionary debunking argument, but not in an obvious way: it is a very specific type of undermining argument that targets those theories where theoretical judgments are inferred merely from folk judgments. One upshot of this conclusion is that it reveals a verboten methodology in metaethics. The evolutionary debunking argument is therefore much less powerful than its proponents have supposed, but it nevertheless rules out what is perhaps a common way of attempting to justify moral judgments.
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Notes
The emphasis on structure is important here. As I explain below, there are a few extant accounts that make use of a Not All Judgments response, but they tend to be first-order ethical positions and not methodological accounts examining and explaining the difference between types of judgments.
In lieu of the justification vs. theory debunking distinction, a reviewer asks instead whether something like Joyce’s ‘modest’ debunking would be more appropriate here. As I understand it, a modest debunking argument “will allow the possibility that justification may be (re)instated” once removed, while a much stronger debunking argument would show that the “removal of justification would be permanent; nothing could reinstate it” (2016: 125). I opt for the justification vs theory debunking distinction because my Inference Debunking reading of the debunking project views theories themselves as suspect. I am drawing attention to particular metaethical theories (e.g., the moral fixed points view, and Metaethical Mooreanism), and the way they incorporate folk judgments, rather than looking at whether justification simpliciter can be restored after it has been undermined. For more on justification debunking, and how it differs from theory debunking, see Joyce (2014) and Sinclair (2018).
For a paradigmatic theory debunking argument, see Street (2006). In brief, Street argues that moral realists in particular are unable to square our evolutionary history with the purported connection between our moral judgments and the moral facts. This leaves open the possibility that other metaethical views can win the day. See also Bedke (2009), whose construal of the EDA targets only nonnaturalist versions of moral realism. For a paradigmatic justification debunking argument, see Joyce (2001, 2006). Unlike Street and Bedke, Joyce’s EDA targets all attempts at justifying our moral judgments, realist or antirealist, naturalist or nonnaturalist, and so on.
The content/capacity distinction can then correspond to particular characterizations of an EDA, which will make salient those respective features. See for example FitzPatrick (2015).
An undercutting defeater, rather than a rebutting defeater. EDAs purportedly serve to undermine thinking ‘j is true’, but it does not directly support thinking that ‘j is true’ is false. See Pollock (1986).
Even though the EDA is a capacity etiology argument, it can nevertheless implicate contents in a derivative way (and the reverse isn’t true). One way would be if an impugned capacity always issued contents. I thank a reviewer for drawing this to my attention. Here two things are important: first, the evolutionary influence works on the capacity, not the contents; and second, this derivative effect will only spell trouble for a particular way of interpreting the EDA (i.e., what in §4 I call Folk and Theoretical Judgment Debunking) which I don’t think we have reason to accept.
For example, Derek Parfit writes that while our capacities for first-order moral judgment “were partly produced by evolutionary forces […] these abilities later ceased to be governed by these forces, and had their own effects” (Parfit 2011: 520). For Parfit, some of our judgments are made owing to pushes from our past, while other judgments are made because our abilities for such judgments have been sufficiently modified. Similarly, William FitzPatrick says that “it’s enough if natural selection has given us general cognitive capacities that we can now develop and deploy in rich cultural contexts, with training in relevant methodologies, so as to arrive at justified and accurate beliefs in that domain” (FitzPatrick 2015: 5–6).
In brief, think here of approaches from Singer (2005), de Lazari-Radek & Singer (2012), and Greene (2008): they argue that deontological judgments are produced by an off-track process. This makes clear that they are offering capacity-debunking accounts: in their view, the capacity that produces deontological judgments is not a capacity that tracks moral truth. This view is then accompanied by a positive proposal that is similar to a NAJ, but one that is instead positioned squarely within first-order ethics—namely, the capacity that produces utilitarian judgments is not similarly off-track. In essence, then, if our moral judgments are produced by ‘capacity x’ then they are unjustified, but if they are instead produced by ‘capacity y’ then they can be justified. See footnote 12 for a problem with these attempts.
These latter two features are brought out best by FitzPatrick. He writes: “the basic mental capacities that enable us to sit around worrying about things like metaphysical modality are part of our evolutionary heritage: they didn’t appear by chance and they weren’t designed by God; they evolved through natural selection. But natural selection did not design our cognitive capacities to track truths about metaphysical necessity … [But] we’re able to deploy those capacities, in the cultural context of philosophical training, to think intelligently and often accurately about things like metaphysical necessity or countless other arcane topics such as differential geometry and relativistic quantum theory, the facts of which are equally irrelevant to the etiology of the capacities we use in thinking about them” (FitzPatrick 2015: 887). See also Toner (2011), who suggests that our capacity for moral judgments has been “co-opted… for purposes other than natural selection” (Toner 2011: 529). Cf. Copp (2008) and Brosnan (2011). Vlerick and Broadbent (2015) suggest something similar regarding evolutionary influence on epistemic reliability and justification, which is more general than justification regarding moral judgments.
To be sure, there are some extant proposals that make use of an NAJ response regarding first-order ethics. In footnote 10, I referenced arguments that say if our moral judgments are produced by ‘capacity x’ then they are unjustified, but if they are instead produced by ‘capacity y’ then they can be justified, e.g. Singer (2005), de Lazari-Radek & Singer (2012), and Greene (2008). The claim here is that deontological judgments are off-track because they respond to morally irrelevant features (like emotions, or proximity to victims, etc.), but utilitarian judgments can be on-track because they do not. But as Berker (2008) convincingly shows, such ‘argument[s] from morally irrelevant features’ beg the question at a crucial juncture, because “what’s doing all the work in the argument from morally irrelevant factors is… [an] invocation, from the armchair, of a substantive intuition about what sorts of factors out there in the world are and are not morally relevant” (2008: 326). That is, it is the invocation that some factors are ‘morally irrelevant’ that allows one to conclude that some capacity for moral judgment is off-track. Berker’s counterargument is that there is no non-question-beginning way to show this. Thus, relying on an ‘argument from morally irrelevant features’ cannot be of help here.
The existence of folk sciences and their accompanying folk judgments is well-established. There is an “emerging consensus about the existence of many folk sciences across all cultures that lead both to real successes at understanding the world and to misconceptions” (Keil, 2010: 828). Since by and large people are not trained physicists, biologists, or psychologists (let alone polymaths trained in all three disciplines), we do not often rely on our own robust theoretical knowledge of physical objects, plants and animals, and so on when navigating our environments. Instead, we rely on folk sciences in order to make judgments about these phenomena. While there is no exact label for this type of thinking, I use the phrase ‘folk science’. Others refer to ‘intuitive theories’ or ‘naive theories’ (see Carey, 1985; Carey & Spelke, 1996; Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996; etc.), or “framework theories” (see Band et al., 2007).
For his part, Jackson does not appear to be drawing upon the common folk/theoretical distinction within the natural sciences. And while he doesn’t spell out how we should understand folk morality in particular (in terms of, say, the necessity of folk judgments being implicit and absent explicit characterization for the relevant domain), he is nevertheless committed to the existence of folk moral judgments. Indeed, for Jackson such judgments are necessary in order to engage in moral philosophy at all. He suggests that our folk moral judgments are those pre-philosophical judgments that are “part and parcel of having a sense of what is right and wrong, and of being able to engage in meaningful debate about what ought to be done” (Jackson, 2000: 130). Note how this echoes the earlier characterization of folk sciences, which are said to arise informally and yet are heavily relied on for navigating our environments.
I offer some suggestions of what this corrective might look like at the end of §4.
For example, if you learn that that the only reason you believe that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun is because you were hypnotized to think so, you should not think that your belief is true. You should instead think that your belief is unjustified. But if you later learn, via a more truth-sensitive belief formation process, that Mercury is the closest planet to Sun, then you should think that your belief is true. Your initial unreliability would not necessarily preclude your later reliability.
There are other responses to EDAs that might look like Inference Debunking. For example, Bogardus (2016) argues that EDAs show how only moral beliefs based on some representational intermediary are unjustified, but since one need not go in for representationalism the scope of debunking is far narrower than debunkers suppose. According to Egeland, (2022), EDAs have an undermining effect when one’s motivating reason for a particular moral belief is undercut by a normative reason which that person also genuinely possesses. The novelty of Inference Debunking, however, is the way in which it cuts across the pre-philosophical to post-philosophical divide, and by doing so it makes salient that there should be a measure of independence between our folk moral judgments and our theoretical moral judgments.
There is some evidence from the social sciences that suggests non-philosophers understand moral judgments in this way. See Goodwin & Darley (2008).
A vehicle’s speed in MPH is equal to RPM x tire diameter x π × 60 (i.e., minutes in an hour) / 63,360 (i.e. inches in a mile).
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Scarfone, M. Evolutionary Debunking and the Folk/Theoretical Distinction. Philosophia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-024-00725-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-024-00725-5