Abstract
Normative realists tend to consider evolutionary debunking arguments as posing epistemological challenges to their view. By understanding Sharon Street’s ‘Darwinian dilemma’ argument in this way, they have overlooked and left unanswered her unique scientific challenge to normative realism. This paper counters Street’s scientific challenge and shows that normative realism is compatible with an evolutionary view of human evaluative judgment. After presenting several problems that her adaptive link account of evaluative judgments faces, I outline and defend an evolutionary byproduct perspective on evaluative judgment. I then argue that a consideration of levels of analysis in biological–behavioral explanation suggests that the realist who adopts the byproduct perspective I outline is not at a prima facie disadvantage to the normative anti-realist on grounds of parsimony. This perspective, I suggest, can enable normative realists to answer evolutionary challenges to their view.
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Notes
By stance-independent I mean independent of any hypothetical or actual psychological attitude. I adopt Street’s use of the term, which follows Shafer-Landau (2003).
Joyce argues that moral judgments express both a belief about a normative standard and a conative acceptance of that standard, the latter of which “denotes a motivation-implicating state” (2006, 109). Why is a mental state with propositional content needed in addition to a strong conative state to generate the requisite motivation for the adaptive behavior? Joyce suggests that Robin Dunbar’s grooming and gossip hypothesis provides a clue: language evolved to facilitate social cohesion within increasingly large groups through the exchange of information about individual reputations. Joyce suggests that language would have been utilized not only to describe, say, failures of individuals to reciprocate helpful action, but to criticize those individuals. So language may have evolved to evaluate and keep score of others’ actions within large groups engaging in complex forms of exchange, much the same way as grooming facilitates social cohesion within small groups of nonhuman primates. While it is not possible to provide an assessment of Joyce’s account here, it is worth noting that Dunbar’s hypothesis has been challenged on both theoretical and empirical grounds. For example, Bickerton (2009) and Barnard (2012) have argued that the grooming and gossip hypothesis does not explain the complexity of language and the conceptual sophistication required for it, and each contends that language evolved for purposes quite apart from social evaluation and cohesion.
Joyce (2006), handling a similar objection from Lahti (2003), suggests it makes little sense to ask why selection didn’t simply strengthen existing motivational tendencies to get us to act in certain ways. He asserts that natural selection did design us to act this way, and evaluative judgment was a way to do it. Joyce frames the question as being about natural selection choosing between two options, namely a desire for a given behavior or a mechanism that facilitates the desire. But the relevant question is about the reliability of evolved evaluative tendencies for cooperative behavior already in place among our ancestors prior to the evolution of evaluative judgment.
ALA appears also to stand in tension with dual process models of social cognition (DPMs), which are prevalent in the social and cognitive psychology literature. DPMs generally distinguish between two levels of cognitive processes that jointly underwrite human behavioral, social, and moral judgments. On one level are cognitive processes marked by speed, unregulated automaticity, and efficiency with respect to the formation of mental representations of, and behavioral motivation in response to, environmental stimuli. Commonly grouped among these processes, which are often dubbed ‘System 1’ (S1) processes, are emotional regulation, attention biases, behavior contagion, and threat and reward sensitivity. According to DPMs, S1 processes are contrasted with ‘System 2’ (S2) processes, which are slow, reflective, and selective with respect to execution. DPM theorists often take S1 processes to be evolutionary old and phylogenetically widespread, and S2 processes to be evolutionarily recent. While Street’s characterization of evaluative tendencies would appear to place them at the S1 level, her view of basic evaluative judgments as reflective endorsements of such tendencies would seem to place them at the S2 level. If that is correct, then basic evaluative judgments would hardly resemble hard-wired processes, but instead would look more like regulated, selective S2 interventions.
It is worth noting that the claim that a given trait is not an adaptation does not entail the view that the trait was never adaptive. While an effect was not the target of selective pressures, it could have been co-opted after its emergence to play some adaptive role at a later evolutionary stage of a population (Gould and Vrba 1982; Gould 1991).
Street briefly considers the byproduct option before summarily dismissing it as implausible: “It is completely implausible, for instance, to suggest that the human eye in its present developed form emerged as the purely incidental byproduct of selection for some other, unrelated capacity. I suggest that it is no more implausible to claim that the sophisticated ability to grasp independent evaluative truths emerged as such a byproduct” (2006, 143). Street’s dismissal not only ignores byproduct accounts of many sophisticated cognitive traits (e.g., Atran 2010; De Smedt and De Cruz 2010; Piattelli-Palmarini 1989), but also plainly begs the question against a byproduct account of evaluative judgment by comparing the evolutionary processes that brought about the capacity for evaluative judgment to those that brought about the human eye.
Joyce (2006) and James (2011) appeal to kin selection to explain initial tendencies in early humans for directing helping behaviors toward non-kin, and they suggest that such tendencies underlie further evolved dispositions for cooperation. James suggests that there would not have been selective pressures for fine-grained kin-detection devices, since early humans would have lived in tightly knit communities consisting largely of individuals related to various degrees, who consequently would have been disposed to cooperate to some degree. Following Joyce, James utilizes this kin selection hypothesis to work up to a more complex explanation of a psychological tendency in early humans to cooperate with those living in close proximity, with ‘false positives’ sometimes prompting the cooperation with non-kin. For their accounts to work, a surprising number of major trait transitions would have had to occur within an improbably short evolutionary timeframe after the spit from humans’ common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos: (1) loss of olfactory sensitivity to close kin; (2) loss of capacity for finer-grained kin detection based on phenotypic clues, a trait that extant primates still possess and, presumably, so too did the last common ancestor before the Pan-Homo split (Parr and De Waal 1999; Silk 2005; Widdig 2007; Chapais 2010); (3) a significant change in group composition from primate social groups composed of kin and non-kin to social groups consisting mostly of kin; (4) despite the evolution of stable breeding bonds and increased biparental care of offspring in early hominid communities, selection would have elaborated the psychological tendencies put in place by kin selection to gradually intensify novel cooperative dispositions toward non-kin. Additionally, according to James, all these rapid transitions likely would have occurred in early humans before the evolution of language. Now, this is not to say that the stories James and Joyce tell are false, but it is to say that their stories appear much less plausible when we take into account probable phylogenetic constraints on kin bias among early hominids and the very short evolutionary time scale on which the trait transitions required for James’s and Joyce’s stories to work—many of which are phylogenetically novel—would have had to occur.
Joyce aims to provide reasons in favor of taking moral judgment to be an adaptation as opposed to an evolutionary byproduct (2006, 133–139), but his discussion slips from the question of whether moral judgment is an evolutionary adaptation to whether moral judgment is innate. That a trait is innate does not entail that it is an adaptation.
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Acknowledgments
I thank audiences at MIT, DePauw University, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Notre Dame, and the 2012 APA Eastern Division Meeting for helpful discussions of early versions of this paper. I am especially grateful to Robert Audi, Matthew Braddock, Justin Horn, Cailin O’Connor, Grant Ramsey, Benjamin Rossi, Christopher Shirreff, Kim Sterelny, Aleksy Tarasenko-Struc, Brandon Williams, and anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on drafts of this paper.
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Deem, M.J. Dehorning the Darwinian dilemma for normative realism. Biol Philos 31, 727–746 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9529-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9529-z