Abstract
Is the cultural evolution of morality fairly contingent? Could cultural evolution have easily led humans to moral norms and judgments that are mostly false by our present lights? If so, does it matter philosophically? Yes, or so we argue. We empirically motivate the contingency of cultural evolution and show that it makes two major philosophical contributions. First, it shows that moral objectivists cannot explain the reliability of our moral judgments and thus strengthens moral debunking arguments. Second, it shows that the reliability of our moral judgments is evidence for theism over metaphysical naturalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Schechter (2018) reviews and critiques different responses that moral objectivists have given to debunking arguments and suggests the most plausible response is to try to explain moral reliability.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
The presumption of intergroup conflict and violence among ancestral humans is notably controversial (Fry, 2005). But the cultural group selection account does not essentially hinge on this presumption because there are various types of intergroup competition that do not involve conflict, as we discuss later.
- 5.
Also see Kitcher (2011, pp. 107–110) for a description of inter-group cultural competition that strongly suggests its contingency.
- 6.
Disagreement exists in moral psychology about the nature of innate content biases. The process discussed here posits weaker biases than the controversial strong biases—namely, innate schematic moral principles—posited by so-called “moral grammar” models (Mikhail, 2011). For empirical reasons why we should think of innate biases as weak biases rather than strong biases, see Sripada (2008). For standard reasons for thinking innate biases cannot adequately explain the determinate content of most human moral norms and judgments, see section 2 of the present paper.
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Acknowledgements
Kind thanks for useful comments on this chapter go to Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt, Michael Rota, an anonymous reviewer, and participants of the conference “Evolutionary Ethics: The Nuts and Bolts Approach” at Oxford Brookes University (Oxford, UK, July 2018).
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Braddock, M. (2021). The Contingency of the Cultural Evolution of Morality, Debunking, and Theism vs. Naturalism. In: De Smedt, J., De Cruz, H. (eds) Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library, vol 437. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68802-8_9
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