This is a very puzzling position. If the causal story about our moral intuitions identified plausible selection pressures that favored accurate, inclusive mental models of all other sentient beings as being morally worthy of consideration, then we’d have pretty good reasons to trust that our intuitions are roughly consistent with sentientist utilitarianism.
Whereas if the causal story identified selection pressures (such as kin selection) that favored over-weighting the well-being of our own kids relative to all other kids, then we’d have pretty good reasons not to trust the universalizability or impartiality of those intuitions, since they’d be designed to enact selfish-gene strategies.
The details of the causal story seem to matter hugely—just as they do in evolutionary epistemology (where we have very good reasons to expect that our mental models of nearby 3-D shapes in the external world are pretty accurate, whereas we don’t have very good reasons to expect that our mental models of nation-scale economies are pretty accurate.)
Vaughn—thanks for your reply.
This is a very puzzling position. If the causal story about our moral intuitions identified plausible selection pressures that favored accurate, inclusive mental models of all other sentient beings as being morally worthy of consideration, then we’d have pretty good reasons to trust that our intuitions are roughly consistent with sentientist utilitarianism.
Whereas if the causal story identified selection pressures (such as kin selection) that favored over-weighting the well-being of our own kids relative to all other kids, then we’d have pretty good reasons not to trust the universalizability or impartiality of those intuitions, since they’d be designed to enact selfish-gene strategies.
The details of the causal story seem to matter hugely—just as they do in evolutionary epistemology (where we have very good reasons to expect that our mental models of nearby 3-D shapes in the external world are pretty accurate, whereas we don’t have very good reasons to expect that our mental models of nation-scale economies are pretty accurate.)