Abstract
Street’s (Philos Stud 127(1):109–166, 2006) Darwinian Dilemma purports to show that evolutionary considerations are in tension with realist theories of value, which include moral realism. According to this argument, moral realism can only be defended by assuming an implausible tracking relation between moral attitudes and moral facts. In this essay, I argue that this tracking relation is not as implausible as most people have assumed by showing that the three main objections against it are flawed. Since this is a key premise in the reasoning, I conclude that the Darwinian Dilemma against moral realism can be resisted.
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Notes
I will assume throughout the paper that moral cognition involves moral beliefs which are truth-apt, since probably only cognitivist views can employ the debunking argument discussed here (Mason 2010).
The claim that moral cognition is an adaptation does not entail that particular moral beliefs have been selected for. One might think that selection has acted on some general moral rules or principles (Hauser 2006), on a capacity for moral concepts (Joyce 2006) or on some indirect mechanism that tends to produce moral attitudes (Street 2006; Joyce 2013, p. 558). Similarly, the claim that the moral sense is an adaptation does not entail that there is some dedicated cognitive system (Fraser 2014; Joyce 2013).
Street’s argument is not only directed against moral realism, but against all realist theories of value. Here I will exclusively focus on the case of morality.
Street (2006, p. 138) adds extra requirements, but since they are irrelevant for our discussion, I suggest to leave them aside.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments on this section.
Of course, one can come up with other explanations that would vindicate TT. For instance, that moral cognition is the product of a benevolent God that causes us to hold only true moral beliefs. Nonetheless, it is generally granted that TA is the only plausible hypothesis that is in accordance with a broad scientific perspective and with the assumption that evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping our tendency to hold moral beliefs.
Street defines a non-tracking relation as involving an independence of a belief from its truth or falsity. That would suggest that a tracking relation should be defined as the dependence of a belief on its truth or falsity. Yet there can be no tracking relation if moral beliefs are false. Furthermore, moral realism is one of the premises of the argument, so the tracking and non-tracking accounts should be defined by reference to the independent moral facts. For these reason, I exclusively focus on the relation between beliefs and moral truths.
Again, for the process to be off-track one need not assume that truths are completely independent of our beliefs. It suffices if the relation is of the wrong kind. If, for instance, I belief that neuroscientists are evil without having any evidence for it, but merely because an evil neuroscientist has directly stimulated my brain, my belief and its truth would not be independent, but my belief would surely be unjustified. Nonetheless, since these cases are fairly uncommon (and very implausible in the case of morality) I will leave them aside.
An interesting question is whether Street's constructivism is more parsimonious than Moral Realism.
Still, one could press this objection further and argue that many of the non-moral facts postulated by reductionists are not posited by the supporter of the OA, so there is some gain in ontological parsimony. The problem of this rejoinder is that at this point it becomes much less clear whether OA is actually more parsimonious than TA. Once it is granted that moral facts can be reduced to non-moral facts, does TA (which explains our tendencies to produce moral beliefs by appealing to certain non-moral facts) postulate less entities than OA (which requires moral beliefs to have certain effects)?
Alternatively, this intuition of obscurity might be rooted in the queerness of moral facts (Mackie 1977). However, I doubt Street or Joyce are grounding their criticisms on that claim (and, in any case, I provide a response for that worry below).
The same argument, mutatis mutandis, would show that the queerness of moral facts should not be used against TA (see 11).
Note that Street (2006, p. 145) explicitly claims her dilemma also undermines these forms of naturalism.
If one holds a non-reductionist theory, there might be overdetermination problems (Kim 1998). However, this difficulty also affects many others kinds of facts, like mental or biological facts. Thus, if one denied the causal efficacy of moral properties by appealing to these overdetermination problems, one would probably have to deny that all these entities can figure in causal explanations (Shafer-Landau 2003, ch. 4). Accordingly, one would be forced to deny a Tracking Account of mental or biological facts and this is very implausible.
Even Enoch (2010), who endorses robust moral realism but rejects the causal efficacy of moral facts, thinks that there is a grounded correlation between moral beliefs and moral facts, such that they can make a difference concerning survival and reproduction.
And again, it is not obvious that Street’s (2006) own theory does not fall prey to this problem.
Indeed, in my response to the third objection I will explain a bit more in which sense causally relevant moral facts could play an important explanatory role in the evolution of moral cognition.
Recall that in this discussion both TA and OA assume cognitivism, i.e., the claim that moral attitudes involve truth-apt moral beliefs. TA is committed to this claim because it holds moral attitudes represent moral facts, and OA because it is used as a premise in an argument whose conclusion is that moral beliefs are off-track (see Mason 2010).
Although the success of teleological theories in naturalizing intentionality is a hotly disputed issue, there are at least good reasons for taking these theories seriously: they seem to yield the right results in a wide range of cases, can account of misrepresentation and provide a fully naturalistic account of content (Gibbard 1990, ch. 6; Harms 2000; Neander 2012; Sinclair 2012).
Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that my argument does not require teleosemantics to be true. I merely use it in order to show what is wrong in the reasoning leading to the abductive argument.
This framework was first developed by Millikan (1984).
Senders and receivers can be different organisms or different systems within the same organism. In the present discussion, we are mostly interested in the latter.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for helping me clarify the arguments in this section.
Interestingly enough, Sinclair (2012) reaches a similar conclusion, namely that causing certain behaviors and representing certain states of affairs are compatible explanations. Nonetheless, he surprisingly denies that these ideas can be used to defend the Tracking Account.
Likewise, at some point Copp (2008) seems to suggest that the Output Account and the Tracking Account might not be incompatible, but his approach significantly differs from the one suggested here. First, his main purpose is not to defend the Tracking Account but what he calls a ‘quasi-tracking thesis’, which is much weaker (Street 2008, p. 211). Accordingly, he does not directly address Street’s arguments against tracking accounts. Secondly, while he uses his society-centered theory in order to defend the quasi-tracking account, my proposal is much more general and is compatible with any realist approach. Finally, he pursues a very different strategy: whereas my defense appeals to evolutionary theories of meaning, he intends to show that the kind of facts that would enhance reproductive fitness (very roughly, satisfying the needs of the society) are approximately the same facts that would be tracked according to the society-centered account (Copp 2009). So Copp’s reply merely insists on the idea that the content of our moral beliefs coincides to a large extent with the effects that are fitness-enhancing. Unfortunately, this reply might be insufficient for blocking Street’s Dilemma. After all, Street (2006) agrees on this coincidence; her challenge is to provide an explanation of that fact (Enoch 2010) and Copp does not seem to offer one (Street 2008, p. 214).
In relation to the third question, one could object that teleosemantics cannot account for the existence of representational mechanisms that systematically produce false representations. An answer to this worry can be found in Artiga (2013).
In that respect, it parallels Dowell's (forthcoming) use of naturalistic theories of content. She employs teleosemantics in order to defend moral realism from the Moral Twin Earth Argument (Horgan and Timmons 1992a, b) and I use it to defend it from the Darwinian Dilemma. Similarly, our arguments do not require teleosemantics to be wholly correct.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Eduardo García-Rodriguez, Maximiliano Martinez, Miguel Ángel Sebastian, Ljubomir Stevanovic. Moisés Vaca, Rodrigo Valencia, an anonymous referee and the audiences of the Seminario de Biologia (PhiBio) and the Seminario Interuniversitario de Metodologia Filosófica (SIMeFI) for helpful criticisms and suggestions. This work was possible thanks to the Programa de Becas Postdoctorales de la UNAM.
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Artiga, M. Rescuing tracking theories of morality. Philos Stud 172, 3357–3374 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0473-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0473-6