JWS—thanks for this comment; it helps me get a little closer to understanding the anti-EDA position.
You mentioned ‘you could deploy this argument against all human intuitive faculties’. Well, maybe. But I would draw a pretty strong distinction between evolutionary epistemology (including reasons why our perceptions and cognitions are under selection to be roughly accurate in some biologically relevant ways) versus evolutionary ethics (which can’t really run the same kind of veridicality argument for why our moral intuitions should be accurate reflections of some external moral truth).
Long story short, if an animal has the cognition ‘this cliff is steep and I would die if I fell off it’, there are pretty good reasons why evolution would nudge such cognitions to be accurate. But if an animal has the moral intuition ‘my mate deserves punishment if she has sex with another male’, there are pretty good reasons why evolution would favor that intuition, without that intuition carrying any truth-value beyond ‘this intuition tends to promote paternity certainty and protects reproductive success’.
JWS—thanks for this comment; it helps me get a little closer to understanding the anti-EDA position.
You mentioned ‘you could deploy this argument against all human intuitive faculties’. Well, maybe. But I would draw a pretty strong distinction between evolutionary epistemology (including reasons why our perceptions and cognitions are under selection to be roughly accurate in some biologically relevant ways) versus evolutionary ethics (which can’t really run the same kind of veridicality argument for why our moral intuitions should be accurate reflections of some external moral truth).
Long story short, if an animal has the cognition ‘this cliff is steep and I would die if I fell off it’, there are pretty good reasons why evolution would nudge such cognitions to be accurate. But if an animal has the moral intuition ‘my mate deserves punishment if she has sex with another male’, there are pretty good reasons why evolution would favor that intuition, without that intuition carrying any truth-value beyond ‘this intuition tends to promote paternity certainty and protects reproductive success’.