There are no obvious structural connections between knowing correct moral facts and evolutionary benefit.
...
There do not seem to be many candidates for types of mechanism that would guide evolution to deliver humans with reliable beliefs about moral reasons for action. Two species of mechanism stand out.
I haven’t read Lukas Gloor’s post, so I’m not sure whether this counts as “subjectivism” and therefore is implausible to you, but:
Another way to end up with reliable moral beliefs would be if they do provide an evolutionary benefit. There might be objective facts about exactly which moral systems provide this benefit, and believing in a useful moral system could help you to enact that moral system.
For example, it could be the case that what is “good” is what benefits your genes without benefiting you personally. People could thus correctly believe that there are some actions that are good, in the same way they believe that some actions are “helpful”. I think, and have been told, that there are mathematical reasons to think this particular instantiation is not the case, but I haven’t fully understood them yet.
Another way to end up with reliable moral beliefs would be if they do provide an evolutionary benefit.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. However there is no structural reason to think that most possible sets of moral facts would have evolutionary benefit. You outline one option where there would be a connection, however that this is the story behind morality would be surprisingly lucky on our part.
We would also need to acknowledge the possibility that evolution has just tricked us into thinking that common sense morality is correct when really moral facts are all about maximising the number of paperclips and we’re all horribly failing to do what is moral.
It’s only if there is some sort of guiding control over evolution that we could have reason to trust that we were in the ‘jammy’ case and not the ‘evolution tricking us case’?
...
I haven’t read Lukas Gloor’s post, so I’m not sure whether this counts as “subjectivism” and therefore is implausible to you, but:
Another way to end up with reliable moral beliefs would be if they do provide an evolutionary benefit. There might be objective facts about exactly which moral systems provide this benefit, and believing in a useful moral system could help you to enact that moral system.
For example, it could be the case that what is “good” is what benefits your genes without benefiting you personally. People could thus correctly believe that there are some actions that are good, in the same way they believe that some actions are “helpful”. I think, and have been told, that there are mathematical reasons to think this particular instantiation is not the case, but I haven’t fully understood them yet.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. However there is no structural reason to think that most possible sets of moral facts would have evolutionary benefit. You outline one option where there would be a connection, however that this is the story behind morality would be surprisingly lucky on our part.
We would also need to acknowledge the possibility that evolution has just tricked us into thinking that common sense morality is correct when really moral facts are all about maximising the number of paperclips and we’re all horribly failing to do what is moral.
It’s only if there is some sort of guiding control over evolution that we could have reason to trust that we were in the ‘jammy’ case and not the ‘evolution tricking us case’?