So I am a philosophy grad student with a shallow familiarity with this literature. The way I understand the people who object to the evo-debunking, they argue that the evolution stuff is a red herring—basically any causal story about the origins of our moral intuitions would do the same work in the argument, the empirical details don’t matter. The real work is going on in the philosophical side of the argument, and that, they think, doesn’t hold up. Might post again later with some paper recs.
Either way, what matters is just whether there is a good justification to be found or not, which is a matter completely independent of us and how we originally came by the belief. Parfit commits the genetic fallacy when he asserts that the causal origins “would cast grave doubt on the justifiability of these beliefs.”
From personal experience, this seems to be a crux. Those such as Parfit, Geoffrey in the OP and me previously (sort of) think that this would be a counterargument against robust realism (e.g. premise 1 in my Post), whereas yourself, Vaughn, and most academic realist philosophers would agree with the counter.
What matters is just whether there is a good justification to be found or not, which is a matter completely independent of us and how we originally came by the belief.
This is a good expression of the crux.
For many people—including many philosophers—it seems odd to think that questions of justification have nothing to do with us and our origins.
The pragmatist-naturalist perspective says something like:
We are clever beasts on an unremarkable planet orbiting an unremarkable star, etc. Over the long run, the patterns of thought we call justified are those which are adaptive (or are spandrels along for the ride).
To be clear: this perspective is compatible with having fruitful conversations about the norms of morality, scientific enquiry, and all the rest.
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.)
So I am a philosophy grad student with a shallow familiarity with this literature. The way I understand the people who object to the evo-debunking, they argue that the evolution stuff is a red herring—basically any causal story about the origins of our moral intuitions would do the same work in the argument, the empirical details don’t matter. The real work is going on in the philosophical side of the argument, and that, they think, doesn’t hold up. Might post again later with some paper recs.
Yep, this is just what I argue in ‘Knowing What Matters’ (summarized here).
The classic paper in the vein is probably Enoch’s ‘The Epistemological Challenge to Metanormative Realism: How Best to Understand It, and How to Cope with It.’ (iirc, that’s where he develops his famous “third factor” reply to causal debunking arguments.)
From the summarisation on the blog:
From personal experience, this seems to be a crux. Those such as Parfit, Geoffrey in the OP and me previously (sort of) think that this would be a counterargument against robust realism (e.g. premise 1 in my Post), whereas yourself, Vaughn, and most academic realist philosophers would agree with the counter.
This is a good expression of the crux.
For many people—including many philosophers—it seems odd to think that questions of justification have nothing to do with us and our origins.
This is why the question of “what are we doing, when we do philosophy?” is so important.
The pragmatist-naturalist perspective says something like:
To be clear: this perspective is compatible with having fruitful conversations about the norms of morality, scientific enquiry, and all the rest.
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.)