Abstract
An influential species of evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) against moral realism holds that since cumulative natural selection (likely) shaped the contents of our moral beliefs, those beliefs do not count as knowledge. Critics have taken issue with a range of empirical, epistemic, and metaphysical assumptions that EDAs are said to rely on, which has engendered a complex debate over whether and to what extent the debunking challenge succeeds. However, recently it has been argued that we can reject EDAs without having to enter this thicket of issues. EDAs supposedly fail at the outset, by trading on a glaring misunderstanding about the scope of natural selection explanations. I argue that this objection to EDAs fails, and itself rests on a mistaken view of natural selection explanation and its relation to justification.
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Notes
Mogensen and Hanson do not survey all the details of these defenses of the Positive View, and neither will I. For present purposes, is sufficient to recognize—as Mogensen and Hanson do—that in order for these defenses to succeed it must be argued that reproduction permits an individual to be born to different parents than its actual parents. See the main text for further discussion.
Mogensen (but not Hanson) observes that a variant of the Positive View for traits that are not genetically inherited does appear to hold true. Following Lewens (2001), he points out that selection could make a difference to an organism’s developmental environment in such a way that it develops one trait rather than another: “If an organism, o, acquires a certain trait, T, in the course of ordinary development only if n % of the population already exhibit T, selection for T could explain why o has T by explaining why more than n % of the population exhibit T, as everyone grants that it may” (Mogensen 2016, p. 1807). However, this possibility provides no consolation for EDAs that assume that basic moral beliefs to have at least some genetic component—i.e. they assume that it is not fully culturally determined why we have one moral belief rather than another. As Mogensen himself points out, virtually all EDAs make this assumption (see footnote 1). These EDAs are the target of the Debunker’s Dilemma.
For a more detailed discussion of Birch’s argument and a more general treatment of the role of explanatory presuppositions in (contrastive) natural selection explanations, see Witteveen (2019).
Mogensen’s borrows this example from White (2010), who uses it to illustrate natural selection for beliefs about which “we have no reason to suppose that [selective advantage] has any significant correlation with truth or falsity on the matter” (p. 587). We will see that Mogensen takes the example further.
Hanson also discusses a potential defect (“bad causal origin”) that targets the Individualist Interpretation (Hanson 2017, p. 515). Since we have seen that the Individualist Interpretation fails anyway, I will ignore this point.
Hanson’s uses the terminology of predicative versus quantificational readings. She notes that is equivalent to the individualist versus populational terminology that Mogensen uses, and which I adopt throughout this article.
Note that this is not to say that selection caused these individuals to have those alternative beliefs, for that would be incompatible with the Negative View. The possibility I am pointing to is that of a lineal ancestor having formed (or “mutated to”) an alternative moral belief that was subsequently favored by selection and inherited by its offspring.
An appeal to origin essentialism would not help. Origin essentialism only tells us that individuals necessarily have the parents they do, not that they necessarily have the traits they do.
Note that this is surprising in and of itself. Since Hanson recognizes that the two claims have different counterfactual profiles, it seems odd that she thinks they fail because of identical (and putatively harmless) modal implications.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Jonathan Birch, Daan Evers, Jeroen Hopster, Wouter Kalf and Michael Klenk for their helpful comments on a draft version.
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Funding was provided by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Grant No. 275-20-060).
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Witteveen, J. Evolutionary debunking arguments and the explanatory scope of natural selection. Synthese 198, 6009–6024 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02446-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02446-9