“Greg explains why Darwinism can’t account for objective morality, then he answers a question about whether our sins are covered or washed away and takes a follow-up call from a caller about the origin and development of the cosmos.”
This section attempts to bridge the gap between natural selection and moral obligation without bringing God into the picture. It looks at two figures: Joshua Greene and then Philip Kitcher.
8.4.1 “Joshua Greene”
Hare begins with Joshua Green’s book Moral Tribes. The governing metaphor of the book is that of two tragedies, which Greene calls the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of common-sense morality. The tragedy of the commons is a multi-person cooperation problem. Morality is thought to be given to us by evolution to solve such dilemmas by cooperating because we can trust each other to do so at least to some significant degree. Something like the Golden Rule facilitates cooperation, but why be committed to such a rule? Perhaps brotherly affection, or a tit-for-tat agreement. Or they may be friends, or care about reputation, or may fear the other’s built-in irrational desire for vengeance.
But also, we have at least a small amount of care for strangers and a readiness to help them “hard-wired” into us, and Greene claims that such “neighborliness” can be found in other primates and even in capuchin monkeys. The problem is that tribal loyalty and self-interest are stronger. For the first of these (tribal loyalty), Green quotes the anthropologist Donald Brown, whose survey of human cultural differences and similarities identified in group bias and ethnocentrism as universal. For the second (self-interest), he quotes studies on what he calls “biased fairness” in which our perception of reality and fairness is unconsciously distorted by self-interest.
The tragedy of common-sense morality, on the other hand, results from a higher-order dilemma. Imagine different tribes who’ve come to accept different moral pictures. What seems common sensical to one tribe isn’t to another. The point of this parable is that the situation of these tribes is our situation. What we need to find is a metamorality that can adjudicate conflict between us. Once we see the evolutionary forces that gave rise to morality we can “climb the ladder of evolution and then kick it away,” as Wittgenstein says about his method in the Tractatus. Greene argues that the unnatural metamorality we should end up with is utilitarianism. This is because utilitarianism trades only in the currency that is common to all the tribes, and that currency is happiness and its maximization.
The picture raises three questions, deriving from the three arguments in Chapter 1: the arguments from providence, grace, and justification. Consider them in reverse order. Why should I regard the conclusions of this metamorality as binding on me? This is Korsgaard’s so-called normative question. The second question is how can I move to this metamorality, given that I am the mixture of motivations that Green has described? The third question is how can I reasonably believe that moving to this metamorality is consistent with my own happiness, if it does not seem that other people are moving in the same way? This question focuses on the cost of the moral demand, construing it as Green does in a utilitarian way.
The first question asks for a justification. How can Greene justify the claim that we should live under his form of the moral demand? He rules out religion, but the exclusion is unfortunate, because it deprives him of resources for justification that he needs. It’s hard to find accurate figures, but one estimate is that, by 2050, 80% of the world’s population will belong, at the present rate of change, to one of the major religions. Surely we should be looking at the resources of those religions to see if they can help us with common currency.
It is significant here that Greene has distorted the history of utilitarianism by excising its religious roots. He says it was founded by Bentham and Mill, but he ignores Hutcheson, who first writes of the greatest Happiness for the greatest numbers, and especially Paley, whose work preceded Bentham and indeed the success of whose book at Cambridge provoked Bentham to write his own version of the theory. The point is that utilitarianism starts with Christians, and works out the view that, as Butler puts it, benevolence, especially God’s benevolence, seems in the strictest sense to include in it all that is good and worthy. Bentham, but not Mill, is cutting himself off from the roots of his own theory. Indeed, the prizing of benevolence is common currency to all areas of the world in which the five major religions have established a significance presence.
What is Greene’s answer to the normative question? There are various question-begging answers. One is that strengthening our sympathies for distant strangers is the honest response, the enlightened response to world hunger. But the striking thing is that he does not squarely face this question. At one point he implies this: the love of what is good simply because it is good, which Scotus calls the affection for justice. But there is a problem here. There is another abstract principle behind nature’s working, namely, competitive self-replication. Nature is a mixture. We can’t generate a justification of the obligation to follow a universalistic moral demand just from the principles behind nature’s working because we need to know which principles to invoke.
The second question is how can I move to this metamorality, given that I am the mixture of motivations that Green has described? Here again Greene doesn’t provide an answer, and he concedes our brains weren’t designed to care deeply about the happiness of strangers. He thinks Hume’s right that reason is the slave, but he wants to allow more space than Haidt to reason. He wants reason to be able to transcend the emotions, which he regards as automatic processes that tell us what to do.
But if our reasoning process starts from emotional inputs as its premises, and this input is contaminated in the way Greene says it is, how is the processing supposed to give us pure utilitarian theory as its output for how we should live our lives? We are dealing here with a mysterious emergent property. But Hume’s a telling case here. He concedes that if we had a society in which those whom we exploited were not able to harm us because of their weakness, we would not be moved by any abstract principle of justice to end the exploitation, even if they resented it. We might hope to be moved by the calm passions of compassion and kindness, but the reach of our natural endowment of these is, as Greene acknowledges, significantly limited. What is supposed to get us to accept a higher standard?
What creates the problem here is the combination of optimism about the new metamorality with pessimism about the input processed by our reasoning. One solution is to be more optimistic about the sentiments. Frans de Waal has criticized the denigration within sociobiology of human moral capacity, and called this kind of denigration “Calvinist,” tracing the view back to Calvin’s picture of the total depravity of human beings. The roots of morality, he thinks, lie in empathy and reciprocity, and are already present in primate sociality. For de Waal, the philosophical defender of moral sentiments is again Hume, and the enemy is Kant. But de Waal is not consistent in what he says about religion. He concedes that there is no human culture without religion, though humans had social norms before they had our current major religions, and he says that, if we were able to excise religion from society, it is doubtful that science and the naturalistic worldview could fill the void and become an inspiration for the good. This means that, ironically, in terms of the second question, at least sometimes he says we need religion (just as Kant does), even though he is not himself a religious person. It also means that our sentiments in the absence of religion are not sufficient to take us to a morally good life.
The third question asks how I can reasonably believe that moving to this utilitarian metamorality is consistent with my own happiness, if it does not seem that other people are moving in the same way. Something like an argument from providence can be found in both Mill and Sidgwick, Mill in Three Essays on Religion, and Sidgwick at the very end of Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick, though, doesn’t endorse the solution, though the problem it addresses is recognized as a real problem. A utilitarian needs to have something to say about how prudence (understood as the pursuit of one’s own happiness) is consistent with the moral demand (understood as the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number). Without an argument like this it is not clear how Greene can hold his utilitarian metamorality and the pursuing of individual happiness are consistent.
"Emptiness in Decay" by H. Adam. CC License.
Darwin’s account of the origins of human morality is at once elegant, ingenious, and, I shall argue, woefully inadequate. In particular, that account, on its standard interpretation, does not explain morality, but, rather, explains it away. We learn from Darwin not how there could be objective moral facts, but how we could have come to believe—perhaps erroneously—that there are.
Further, the naturalist, who does not believe that there is such a personal being as God, is in principle committed to Darwinism, including a Darwinian account of the basic contours of human moral psychology. I’ll use the term evolutionary naturalism to refer to this combination of naturalism and Darwinism. And so the naturalist is saddled with a view that explains morality away. Whatever reason we have for believing in moral facts is also a reason for thinking naturalism is false. I conclude the essay with a brief account of a theistic conception of morality, and argue that the theist is in a better position to affirm the objectivity of morality.
According to the Darwinian account, given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape—i.e., the circumstances of survival—certain behaviors are adaptive. And so, any propensity for such behaviors will also be adaptive. Such explains the flight instinct in the pronghorn, the spawning instinct in the cutthroat salmon and my instinctual aversion to insulting Harley riders in biker bars. Insofar as such propensities are genetic (at least the first two examples would seem to qualify here), they are heritable and thus likely to be passed down to offspring.
Imagine, for example, a time in the early history of hominids when the circumstances of survival prompted an early patriot (and kite-flying inventor, perhaps) to advise, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all be torn apart by ravenous wolves.” Insofar as such cooperation depends upon heritable dispositions of group members, those dispositions will confer fitness.
Darwin speaks of “social instincts” that are at the root of our moral behavior.
These include a desire for the approbation of our fellow humans and a fear of censure. They also include a general sympathy for others. He explains,
In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.[1]
A favored “complex manner” of the origin of such feelings involves an appeal to two varieties of altruism: kin altruism is directed at family members—chiefly one’s offspring—and reciprocal altruism is directed at non-family members and even to strangers. The former is an other-regarding attitude and behavior—particularly concerning one’s own children, but extending in descending degrees to other family members—that does not seek any returns. The advantage, of course, is in the reproductive success. The sense of parental duty that is possessed by, say, a female sea turtle ensures only that she lay her eggs somewhere above the high tide mark. From there, her relatively self-sufficient offspring are quite on their own against daunting odds —something like a one in ten thousand chance of reaching maturity. Those odds are offset by the sheer numbers of hatchlings so that a fraction manage to survive the elements and elude myriads of predators.
Such a numbers strategy would hardly work for the human species, given the utter helplessness of the human infant. Babies tend to suffer an inelegant fate if left untended. The probability that a human infant will die if left to its own resources at, say, just above the high tide mark, is a perfect 1. And those same odds would prevail for each of ten thousand similarly abandoned babies. (Word would spread quickly in the wild: “Hey, free babies!”) Human parents possessed of no more parental instinct than sea turtles would find that their line came to an abrupt end. Thus, a strong sense of love and concern is adaptive and heritable, and has the same function—a means to reproductive success—among humans that hatchling self-sufficiency and sheer numbers have among turtles.
Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, is rooted in a tit-for-tat arrangement that ultimately confers greater reproductive fitness on all parties involved. Consider, for instance, the symbiotic relationship that exists between grouper and cleaner shrimp. Though the shrimp would certainly make a nice snack for a hungry grouper and is busily flossing the fish’s teeth from the inside, the benefit of long-term hygiene (Whiter teeth! Fresher breath!) outweighs that of short-term nourishment, and so the fish is programmed to pass on the prawn. The shrimp, of course, benefits from a delectable meal of the gunk otherwise responsible for halitosis in grouper.
Similarly, there is benefit to be gained from cooperative and altruistic behavior among humans. For example, Darwin observes,
A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.[2]
And membership in such a victorious tribe has its advantages. To attempt a metaphor, when a baseball team functions like a well-oiled machine, say, with a Tinker, Evers and Chance infield, the likelihood that all of the members will sport World Series rings is increased.
Thus, the human moral sense—conscience—is rooted in a set of social instincts that were adaptive given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. Of course, there is more to the moral sense than the instincts that Darwin had in mind. All social animals are possessed of such instincts, but not all are plausibly thought of as moral agents.[3] According to Darwin, conscience emerges out of a sort of “recipe.” It is the result of the social instincts being overlain with a certain degree of rationality. He writes,
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.[4]
Wolves in a pack know their place in the social hierarchy. A lower ranked wolf feels compelled to give way to the alpha male. Were he endowed with the intellectual powers that Darwin had in mind, then, presumably his “moral sense” would tell him that obeisance is his moral duty. He would regard it as a moral fact that, like it or not, alpha interests trump beta or omega interests. And our grouper, if graced with rational and moral autonomy, might reason, “It would be wicked of me to bite down on my little buddy here after all he has done for me!”
Of course, such a “recipe” is precisely what we find in the human species, according to Darwin. We experience a strong pre-reflective pull in the direction of certain behaviors, such as the care for our children or the returning of kindness for kindness, and, on reflection, we conclude that these are our moral duties.
It is not clear that the resulting account of the origin and nature of human morality does full justice to its subject. For one thing, it is hard to see why anyone who accepts it is warranted in accepting moral realism—the view that there are objective, mind-independent moral facts that we sometimes get right in our moral beliefs. For it would appear that the human moral sense and the moral beliefs that arise from it are ultimately the result of natural selection, and their value is thus found in the adaptive behavior that they encourage. But then it seems that the processes responsible for our having the moral beliefs that we do are ultimately fitness-aimed rather than truth-aimed. This is to say that, in such a case, the best explanation for our having the moral beliefs that we do makes no essential reference to their being true.
If we have the moral beliefs we do because of the fitness conferred by the resulting behavior, then it appears that we would have had those beliefs whether or not they were true. Some writers have taken this to imply that ethics is “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate.”[5] This is to suggest that there are no objective moral facts, though we have been programmed to believe in them. A more modest conclusion might be that we are not in a position to know whether there are such facts because our moral beliefs are undercut by the Darwinian story of their genesis. This is because that story makes no essential reference to any such alleged facts. Thus, our moral beliefs are without warrant. But if our moral beliefs are unwarranted, then there can be no such thing as moral knowledge. And this amounts to moral skepticism.
If the argument developed here succeeds, its significance is in its implications for the naturalist, who maintains that reality is exhausted by the kinds of things that may, in principle, be the study of the empirical sciences. For the naturalist’s wagon is hitched to the Darwinian star. Richard Dawkins was recently seen sporting a T-shirt that read, “Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth, The Only Game in Town.” Perhaps Dawkins’ shirt reflects his more careful comment elsewhere that, “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[6] Before Darwin, the inference to Paley’s Watchmaker seemed natural, if not inevitable, given a world filled with things “that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”[7] Naturalism without Darwinism is a worldview at a loss for explanation. Further, to appeal to natural selection to explain libidos and incisors, but to withhold such an explanation for human moral psychology is an untenable position. Moral behavior is not the sort of thing likely to be overlooked by natural selection because of the important role that it plays in survival and reproductive success.[8] But if naturalism is committed to Darwinism, and Darwinism implies moral skepticism, then naturalism is committed to moral skepticism.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin asks, “Why should a man feel that he ought to obey one instinctive desire rather than another?”[9] His subsequent answer is that the stronger of two conflicting impulses wins out. Thus, the otherwise timid mother will, without hesitation, run the greatest risks to save her child from danger because the maternal instinct trumps the instinct for self-preservation. And the timid man, who stands on the shore wringing his hands while allowing even his own child to drown out of fear for his own life, heeds the instinct for self-preservation.[10]
What Darwin never asks—and thus never answers—is why a man ought, in fact, to obey the one rather than the other. The best that he offers here is the observation that if instinct A is stronger than B, then one will obey A. What he does not and, I suggest, cannot say is that one ought to obey A, or that one ought to feel the force of A over B. That is, whereas Darwin may be able to answer the factual question that he does ask— why people believe and behave as they do—this does nothing to answer the normative question of how one ought to behave or of what sets of instincts and feelings one ought to cultivate in order to be virtuous. It is, of course, one thing to explain why people believe and behave as they do; it is quite another to say whether their beliefs are true (or at least warranted) and their behaviors right. As it stands, it appears that Darwin has precious little of moral import to say to the timid man.
One could, I suppose, reply on Darwinian grounds that the father who lacks a strong paternal instinct is abnormal, lacking traits that are almost universally distributed throughout the species and are, perhaps, even kind-defining.[11] Darwin refers to the man who is utterly bereft of the social instincts as an “unnatural monster.” Doesn’t this observation lend itself to a normative evaluation of behaviors? Who wants to be a monster, after all? But it is not at all clear that this can give us what is needed. After all, departure from a statistical average is not necessarily a bad thing. If the average adult’s IQ is around 100, Stephen Hawking is something of a freak. And, presumably, the first hominids to use tools (Hawking’s direct ancestors, perhaps?) or to express themselves in propositions were unique in their day.[12] Indeed, the Gandhis and Mother Theresas of the world are certainly abnormal—enough that one evolutionary naturalist refers to them as “variations”—yet we tend to like having them around.
I suppose that the evolutionary naturalist could go on to observe that, not only do we notice that the timid father is different in that his parental instinct was not sufficient to prompt him to rescue his child, but it is a difference that naturally elicits negative moral emotions. We disapprove of him and think him blameworthy. Indeed, perhaps the man later experiences some negative moral emotions himself, such as “remorse, repentance, regret, or shame.”[13] According to Darwin, the sense of guilt is the natural experience of anyone who spurns the prompting of any of the more enduring social instincts, and it bears some similarity to the physical or mental suffering that results from the frustration of any instinct of any creature. Darwin considers the suffering of the caged migratory bird that will bloody itself against the wires of the cage when the migratory instinct is at its height. Indeed, he considers that conflict between the migratory and maternal instincts in the swallow, which gives in to the former and abandons her young in the nest. He speculates,
When arrived at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct has ceased to act, what an agony of remorse the bird would feel, if, from being endowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image constantly passing through her mind, of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from cold and hunger.[14]
Like the moral sense in general, guilt is the yield of a sort of recipe: one part spurned instinct to one part “great mental activity” that permits remembrance and remorse. And so, when our timid man’s own personal danger and fear is past so that the strength of his selfish instinct has receded, the scorned paternal instinct will have its revenge. Also, because we are social animals, we are endowed with sympathies that make us yearn for the approbation of our fellows and fear their censure. The cowardly father is thus likely in for a long bout of insomnia. Further, Darwin may explain that the experience of remorse may result in a resolve for the future, with the further result that the paternal instinct is bolstered and stands a greater chance of being the dominant of two conflicting instincts. Thus, “Conscience looks backwards, and serves as a guide for the future.”[15]
But even if we are assured that a “normal” person will be prompted by the social instincts and that those instincts are typically flanked and reinforced by a set of moral emotions, we still do not have a truly normative account of moral obligation. There is nothing in Darwin’s own account to indicate that the ensuing sense of guilt—a guilty feeling—is indicative of actual moral guilt resulting from the violation of an objective moral law. The revenge taken by one’s own conscience amounts to a sort of secondorder propensity to feel a certain way given one’s past relation to conflicting first-order propensities (e.g., the father’s impulse to save his child versus his impulse to save himself). Unless we import normative considerations from some other source, it seems that, whether it is a first or second-order inclination,16one’s being prompted by it is more readily understood as a descriptive feature of one’s own psychology than material for a normative assessment of one’s behavior or character. And, assuming that there is [16]anything to this observation, an ascent into even higher levels of propensities (“I feel guilty for not having felt guilty for not being remorseful over not obeying my social instincts…”) introduces nothing of normative import. Suppose you encounter a man who neither feels the pull of social, paternal or familial instincts nor is in the least bit concerned over his apparent lack of conscience. What, from a strictly Darwinian perspective, can one say to him that is of any serious moral import? “You are not moved to action by the impulses that move most of us.” Right. So?
The problem afflicts contemporary construals of an evolutionary account of human morality. Consider Michael Shermer’s explanation for the evolution of a moral sense—the “science of good and evil.” He explains,
By a moral sense, I mean a moral feeling or emotion generated by actions. For example, positive emotions such as righteousness and pride are experienced as the psychological feeling of doing “good.” These moral emotions likely evolved out of behaviors that were reinforced as being good either for the individual or for the group.[17]
Shermer goes on to compare such moral emotions to other emotions and sensations that are universally experienced, such as hunger and the sexual urge. He then addresses the question of moral motivation.
In this evolutionary theory of morality, asking “Why should we be moral?” is like asking “Why should we be hungry?” or “Why should we be horny?” For that matter, we could ask, “Why should we be jealous?” or “Why should we fall in love?” The answer is that it is as much a part of human nature to be moral as it is to be hungry, horny, jealous, and in love.[18]
Thus, according to Shermer, given an evolutionary account, such a question is simply a non-starter. Moral motivation is a given as it is wired in as one of our basic drives. Of course, one might point out that Shermer’s “moral emotions” often do need encouragement in a way that, say, “horniness,” does not. More importantly, Shermer apparently fails to notice that if asking “Why should I be moral?” is like asking, “Why should I be horny?” then asserting, “You ought to be moral” is like asserting, “You ought to be horny.” As goes the interrogative, so goes the imperative. But if the latter seems out of place, then, on Shermer’s view, so is the former.
One might thus observe that if morality is anything at all, it is irreducibly normative in nature. But the Darwinian account winds up reducing morality to descriptive features of human psychology. Like the libido, either the moral sense is present and active or it is not. If it is, then we might expect one to behave accordingly. If not, why, then, as a famous blues man once put it, “the boogie woogie just ain’t in me.” And so the resulting “morality” is that in name only.
In light of such considerations, it is tempting to conclude with C. S. Lewis that, if the naturalist remembered his philosophy out of school, he would recognize that any claim to the effect that “I ought” is on a par with “I itch,” in that it is nothing more than a descriptive piece of autobiography with no essential reference to any actual obligations.
A familiar objection to my line of argument is that it assumes what is almost certainly false: that all significant and widely observed human behavior is genetically determined as the result of natural selection. Daniel Dennett refers to this assumption as “greedy reductionism.” Dennett observes that all tribesmen everywhere throw their spears pointy-end first, but we should not suppose that there is a “pointy-end first gene.”[19] The explanation rather resides in the “non-stupidity” of the tribesmen. And when C.S. Lewis’s character, Ransom, was at first surprised to discover that boats on Malacandra (Mars) were very similar to earthly boats, he caught himself with the question, “What else could a boat be like?’” (The astute Lewis reader might also have noticed that Malacandran hunters throw their spears pointy-end first, despite being genetically unrelated to humans, just as Dennett might have predicted.) Some ideas are just better than others and, assuming a minimal degree of intelligence, perhaps we have been equipped to discover and implement them.
One might thus insist that perhaps all that evolution has done for us is to equip us with the basic capacities for intelligent decision-making and problem-solving, and the enterprise that is human morality is the product of human rationality; not the mere outworking of some genetic program. If the process that has led to our having the moral beliefs we do has involved conscious rational reflection, then we have reason for optimism regarding our facility for tracking truth. We have no more cause for moral skepticism than we do, say, mathematical skepticism.
The same greedy reductionism might be thought to plague my argument that
Darwinian accounts of human morality are merely descriptive. I have said above that, “unless we import normative considerations from some other source,” we are left with a merely descriptive rather than a normative account. My critic may insist here that we do bring in normative considerations from elsewhere, namely, from moral theory. If there are true moral principles that yield moral directives and values, then, regardless of how one does feel and behave, it will remain the case that he ought to behave in a certain way.
For example, should it prove true that humans have a natural propensity for xenophobia as a part of their evolutionary heritage, we might nevertheless conclude that, say, a respect-for-persons principle requires that they overcome such fear and potential mistreatment of strangers. The mere fact that people have a propensity for a behavior does not entail that it is justified.
I plead not guilty to the charge of greedy reductionism. The argument in no way supposes that well-formed moral beliefs are somehow programmed by our DNA. Richard Joyce considers the belief, “I ought to reciprocate by picking up Mary at the airport.”[20] He then asks, “What does natural selection know of Mary or airports?” Or consider a mother’s belief, “I ought to ensure that my child gets plenty of fruits and vegetables.” There is, of course, no imperative regarding the dietary needs of toddlers that may be read off of the DNA. One might as well suppose that there is a genetically programmed human tendency directed specifically at popping bubble wrap.
But Darwin’s account certainly does imply that the basic predisposition for repaying kindness with kindness or for caring for one’s offspring is programmed, and that such programs run as they do because of the reproductive fitness that is—or was for our remote ancestors—achieved by the resulting behaviors.
Philosopher Mary Midgley speaks of instincts as “programs with a gap.”[21] Consider, for instance, the migratory instinct of the sandhill crane. The basic drive to follow the sun south every winter is genetically programmed. But there is a “gap” that allows for variations in the itinerary. Midgley notes that the more intelligent the species is the wider is the gap so that room is available for deliberation and rational reflection. Less psychologically complex creatures may be strictly determined in their behavior by their genetic hardwiring. As P.G. Wodehouse’s newt-loving character, Gussie Fink-Nottle explains to Bertie Wooster, “Do you know how a male newt proposes, Bertie? He just stands in front of the female newt vibrating his tail and bending his body in a semicircle.”[22] Assuming Gussie’s description is accurate, we may also safely assume that newt courting behavior, unlike that observed in aristocratic British bachelors, is genetically choreographed. In humans, the “gap” allows for countless ideas and beliefs that clearly are the products of culture rather than biology.
Still, the basic programming itself is, on Darwin’s scheme, determined by our genetic makeup, and, therefore, so is the range of rational options in that “gap” of deliberation. Given the perennial problem of tribal warfare, early tribesmen reasoned that thrown spears are far more effective than thrown bananas. But had humans evolved to be non-aggressive herbivores, spears might have been, well, pointless. Had the course of human evolution been such that human infants, like baby sea turtles, were self-reliant, the human maternal instinct might never have evolved as a means to the end of reproductive fitness. Indeed, Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different.
If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.[23]
As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive-bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.
But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness-producing given the circumstances of survival. Given the background belief of naturalism there appears to be no plausible Darwinian reason for thinking that the fitness-producing predispositions that set the very parameters for moral reflection have anything whatsoever to do with the truth of the resulting moral beliefs. One might be able to make a case for thinking that having true beliefs about, say, the predatory behaviors of tigers would, when combined with the an understandable desire not to be eaten, be fitness-producing. But the account would be far from straightforward in the case of moral beliefs.[24] And so the Darwinian explanation undercuts whatever reason the naturalist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs are true. The result is moral skepticism.
If our pre-theoretical moral convictions are largely the product of natural selection, as Darwin’s theory implies, then the moral theories that we find plausible are an indirect result of that same evolutionary process. How, after all, do we come to settle upon a proposed moral theory and its principles as being true? What methodology is available to us?
By way of answer, consider the following “chicken-and-egg” question. Which do we know more certainly: the belief, It is wrong to stomp on babies just to hear them squeak, or some true moral principle that entails the wrongness of baby-stomping? In moral reflection, do we begin with the principle, and only then, principle in hand, come to discover the wrongness of recreational baby-stomping as an inference from that principle? Or do we begin with the belief that baby-stomping is wrong and then arrive at the principle that seems implicated by such a belief? Pretty clearly, it is the latter. We just find ourselves with certain beliefs of a moral nature, and actually appeal to them as touchstones when we engage in conscious moral reflection. Indeed, if we were to conclude that some philosopher’s proposed moral principle would, if true, imply the moral correctness of recreational baby-stomping, then we might say, “So much the worse for that proposed principle.” As philosopher Mary Midgley has put it, “An ethical theory which, when consistently followed through, has iniquitous consequences is a bad theory and must be changed.”[25] This methodology, which begins with deep-seated, pre-reflective moral beliefs and then moves to moral principles that are implicated by them, is sometimes called reflective equilibrium.[26]
Presumably, reflective equilibrium, employed by bee-like philosophers in those worlds envisioned by Darwin, would settle upon moral principles that implied the rightness of such things as siblicide and infanticide. Thus, the deliverances of the moral theories endorsed in such worlds are but the byproducts of the evolved psychologies in such worlds. But, again, this suggests that our pre-theoretical convictions are largely due to whatever selection pressures happened to be in place in our world. If this is so, then the deliverances of those moral theories that we endorse, to which we might appeal in order to introduce normative considerations, are, in the final analysis, byproducts of our evolved psychology. The account, as it stands, thus never takes us beyond merely descriptive human psychology.
The worry, then, is that our efforts at moral reflection are compromised by features of our constitution that are in place for purposes other than the acquisition of truth. As philosopher Sharon Street puts it,
If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence . . . then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former.[27]
In order to inspire confidence in those initial evaluative judgments of which Street speaks, the moral realist owes us some account of their origin that would lead us to suppose that they are reliable indicators of truth. What we need is some assurance that our original fund is not contaminated. And so our question is, What reason have we for supposing that the mechanisms responsible for those judgments are truth-aimed? What we seek is what Norman Daniels calls “a little story that gets told about why we should pay homage ultimately to those [considered] judgments and indirectly to the principles that systematize them.”[28]
It is just here that the theist may oblige us in a way that the naturalist may not. Robert Adams, for example, has suggested that things bear the moral properties that they do—good or bad—insofar as they resemble or fail to resemble God. He goes on to offer the makings of a theistic “genealogy of morals.”
If we suppose that God directly or indirectly causes human beings to regard as excellent approximately those things that are Godlike in the relevant way, it follows that there is a causal and explanatory connection between facts of excellence and beliefs that we may regard as justified about excellence, and hence it is in general no accident that such beliefs are correct when they are.[29]
The theist is thus in a position to offer Daniels’ “little story” that would explain the general reliability of those evaluative judgments from which reflective equilibrium takes its cue. Certain of our moral beliefs—in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection—are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.[30] The moral law is “written upon the heart,” the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome.
A century ago, the philosopher Hastings Rashdall observed,
So long as he is content to assume the reality and authority of the moral consciousness, the Moral Philosopher can ignore Metaphysic; but if the reality of Morals or the validity of ethical truth be once brought into question, the attack can only be met by a thorough-going enquiry into the nature of Knowledge and of Reality.[31]
We have seen that both the evolutionary naturalist and the theist may be found saying that certain of our moral beliefs are by-products of the human constitution: we think as we do largely as a result of our programming. Whether such beliefs are warranted would seem to depend upon who or what is responsible for the program. And this calls for some account of the metaphysical underpinnings of those beliefs and the mechanisms responsible for them. Are those mechanisms truth-aimed? And are they in good working order? The sort of account available to the evolutionary naturalist ends in moral skepticism. The theist has a more promising story to tell.[32]
Notes:
[1] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2004), 88.
[2] Darwin, Descent, 112.
[3] And, of course, though any two species of social animals have in common the fact that they are prompted by social instincts, the resulting behavior may vary widely. It is not clear, for instance, which of the grazing Guernseys is the “alpha cow.” Wiener dogs seem not to come equipped with the obsessive herding instincts of border collies, and would likely endure derisive laughter from the sheep if they did.
[4] Darwin, Descent, 81.
[5] Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Religion and the Natural Sciences, ed. J.E. Huchingson (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 310-11.
[6] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton & Co., 1986), 6.
[7] Ibid., 1.
[8] Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg, “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life,” Biology and Philosophy 18/5 (2003): 653-88.
[9] Darwin, Descent, 91.
[10] I cannot resist including a personal anecdote here. I once rescued a young man from drowning in the Mississippi River. After I swam out and pulled him to shore, his mother, who had watched helplessly from the beach, explained that she would have saved him herself but she could not go into the water because her toe was infected. She produced the sore toe. I had to agree that it did look very sore.
[11] The Chinese philosopher Mencius seems to have maintained that the possession of at least the rudimentary “seeds” of the virtues (e.g., the feeling of commiseration is the seed of the virtue of jen —“human-heartedness”) are essential to humanity so that anyone lacking them would not be human.
[12] Consider Gary Larson’s cartoon depicting a group of cave men. To the left is a small group huddled around a fire, roasting drumsticks by clenching them in their fists directly over the flames. They are all very obviously in agony. To the right is another fire with only one cook. He has the meat roasting on a stick, and is seated at a comfortable distance. A member of the group to the left has noticed this, and is saying, “Look what Og do!”
[13] Darwin, Descent, 94.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 95.
[16] So if the impulse either to save the child or one’s own hide is a first-order inclination, second-order inclinations would include feelings of, say, guilt or pride regarding the first-order propensities and resulting actions.
[17] Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Books, 2004), 56.
[18] Ibid., 57.
[19] Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 486.
[20] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 180.
[21] See Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (London: Routledge Press, 1979).
[22] Taken from P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves (New York: Penguin, 2000), ch. 2.
[23] Darwin, Descent, 82.
[24] Here’s why. This would imply, for instance, that human mothers are possessed of a powerful maternal instinct for the prior reason that it is true that they have a moral duty to care for their children. But, given naturalism, the simpler explanation for the maternal instinct is just that it confers reproductive fitness. Why think that moral facts have any role to play—particularly when we observe similar instinctual behavior in animals that are not plausibly thought of as moral agents? Further, to what mechanism could the naturalist plausibly appeal to explain how reproductive fitness “tracks” moral truth? For more on this, see Sharon Street’s excellent paper, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 109-166.
[25] Mary Midgley, “Duties Concerning Islands,” in Christine Pierce and Donald VanDeVeer eds., People, Penguins and Plastic Trees (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1986), 157.
[26] Reflective equilibrium involves more than this one-way move from particular beliefs to general principles. In actual practice, it begins with those pre-reflective beliefs, moves from there to systemizing principles, and then back to other particular beliefs that are entailed by the principles. There is always a standing possibility that an entailed beliefs is incompatible with one or another of the beliefs with which one began. In that case, adjustment and revision is called for. The goal is to arrive at a set or system of principled beliefs that is internally consistent and plausible.
[27] Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value. Philosophical Studies, 127 (2006), 125.
[28] Norman Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy 76/5 (1979): 265.
[29] Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70.
[30] For the purposes of this argument, the appeal to “design” leaves open the question of whether the process responsible for the appearance of moral agents was evolutionary in nature. Daniels’ “little story” requirement is satisfied whether the tale involves special creation or directed evolution.
[31] Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1907), 192.
[32] As always, I wish to thank David Werther for his many helpful comments on and criticisms of earlier versions of this essay.
Darwinian counterfactuals, ethical nonnaturalism, and theism
The nonnaturalist has a ready reply to the argument from Darwinian counterfactuals. For he might wish to maintain that certain natural properties bear a necessary relation to the moral properties that they exemplify, regardless of any evolutionary possibilities. But nonnaturalists who are also metaphysical naturalists seem to have problems of their own in the face of such Darwinian counterfactuals. How is it that unguided human evolution on earth has resulted in just those moral beliefs that accord with moral verities? As Gould has argued, everything about us, even our very existence, is radically contingent. If we were to rewind the reel, it’s highly unlikely evolution would again attempt the experiment called Homo sapiens. The Dependence Thesis in the hands of the nonnaturalist seems highly improbable. A sort of moral fine tuning argument is suggested. The theist may have an advantage just here. For, on theism, as Santayana put it, the Good is also nature’s Creator.
The theist, like the nonnaturalist, is in a position to say why there is a necessary connection between certain natural properties and their supervenient moral properties. Adams, for example, suggests theistic Platonism, so can account for why nobody could exhibit Hitler’s qualities without being depraved and an affront to God’s nature. But the theist also has an account of the development of human moral faculties—a theistic genealogy of morals—that allows for something akin to Street’s “tracking relation”: we have the basic moral beliefs we do because they are true, and this is because the mechanisms responsible for those moral beliefs are truth-aimed. The theist is thus in a position to explain the general reliability of those considered judgments from which reflective equilibrium takes its cue. Certain of our moral beliefs—in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection—are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.
Humean skepticism or Reidean externalism?
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Linville reads Hume as a skeptic across the board, not just in ethics. His ethical views were part of a seamless whole that includes his discussion of the beliefs of common life. In each discussion—causality, substance, personal identity—he aims to show both that the belief in question is without any epistemic credentials and that relevant human propensities explain the belief without making any assumptions about the truth of the belief. From a Humean perspective, we lack positive reasons to accept either the dependence or independence thesis. His is a variety of epistemological moral skepticism, so it resembles AEN.
Reid countered Hume by common sense. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher but casting out a devil, as Chesterton put it. There is no set of premises more certainly known from which such beliefs follow. Hume is right: the beliefs of common life are not endorsed by reason, but, instead, are the inevitable by-products of our constitution. But Hume is mistaken in inferring from this that such beliefs are, therefore, without warrant. Why, after all, trust the rational faculties to which Hume appeals, but not trust the faculties responsible for our commonsense beliefs? Both come from the same shop, and Reid thought the shop was God’s creation.
Reid thought the commonsense beliefs that arise spontaneously and noninferentially given our constitution are warranted even though they fail to measure up to the exacting standards of epistemic justification assumed by foundationalists after the Cartesian fashion. These days we say such beliefs are properly basic. A belief is properly basic just in case the faculty through which it is acquired is functioning as it ought. Plantinga puts it this way: a belief is warranted just in case it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is truth-aimed and functioning properly in the environment for which it was designed. This account accommodates those perceptual, memorial, testimonial, and even metaphysical beliefs that are the guides of common life and, closer to our purposes, are among the fund of native beliefs with which we begin in theory assessment. Even closer to our purposes, such an account accommodates those moral beliefs employed in reflective equilibrium.
Reid appealed to a set of “first, or ‘self-evident’ principles” of morality discerned through faculties that he thought were wrought in the same shop as reason and perception. Just as there is no reasoning with the man who, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is convinced that his head is a gourd, neither is there advantage in engaging in moral argument with a man who fails to recognize self-evident principles of morality.
There are moral principles to which we should “pay homage,” as Norman Daniels puts it. We pay such homage when we utilize them as data for the construction of moral theories or as a kind of court of appeal in assessing them. But our confidence in these constitutional beliefs is wisely invested only in the event that we have reason to believe the faculties responsible for them to be truth-aimed. Reid’s theism provided him with such a reason; the moral faculties were forged in the same shop as our other cognitive faculties. They are designed by God for the purpose of discerning moral truth. “That conscience which is in every man’s breast, is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned.”
Epistemological arguments and the Dependence Thesis
Linville has been arguing that AEN provides an epistemological argument for moral skepticism, to show that our moral beliefs lack warrant because the mechanisms responsible for our moral beliefs appear to be fitness-aimed, rather than truth-aimed. If our best theory of why people believe P doesn’t require that P is true, then we lack good grounds to believe P is true. This much resembles an argument by Gilbert Harman.
Harman’s so-called “problem with ethics” is that moral facts, if such there are, appear to be explanatorily irrelevant in a way that natural facts are not. According to Harman, we need not suppose that over and above such natural facts about Hitler as his monomania and anti-Semitism there is a moral fact of Hitler’s depravity. Nor must we appeal to his actual depravity in order to explain our belief that he was depraved. Harman may thus be viewed as arguing in his own manner that we have no reason to believe that the best explanation for our moral beliefs involves their truth. We have no good reason to think that the causes of those beliefs are dependent on whatever would make them true.
Sturgeon has replied first by noting that moral facts are commonly and plausibly thought to have explanatory relevance. Both Hitler’s behavior and our belief that he was depraved are handily explained by his actual depravity, and this is in fact the default explanation. Sturgeon follows the method of reflective equilibrium, a method employed in both science and ethics, which begins with certain considered judgments, and with the assumption that our theories, scientific and otherwise, are roughly correct, then moves dialectically in this way between plausible general theses and plausible views about cases, seeking a reflective equilibrium. Sturgeon notes that, whereas he allows for the inclusion of moral beliefs among the initial set, Harman does not. But he argues there’s no non-question-begging justification for singling out moral beliefs as unwelcome in the initial set while allowing those of a scientific or commonsense nature.
Sturgeon’s approach invokes the supervenience of moral properties on natural properties. On standard accounts, if some moral property M supervenes on some natural property (or, more likely, some set of natural properties) N, then it is impossible for N to be instantiated unless M is also instantiated. In all worlds in which Hitler believes and acts as he did, his depravity would supervene on such properties and be instantiated; he couldn’t have had those properties without being depraved. Harman, by denying this, tacitly assumes there are no moral facts or properties, which is of course the point at issue.
Sturgeon’s appeal to reflective equilibrium is crucial in his reply to Harman. Brink goes to some length to argue that Harman fails to demonstrate any explanatory disanalogy between the scientific and moral cases. Linville finds Sturgeon’s reply successful. Sorley once said the true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics. He thought that holding off on ethics until the task of worldview construction was complete would result in an artificially truncated worldview, and that moral ideas would be given short shrift. The exclusion of moral experience seemed arbitrary. Harman seems to be following in the tradition Sorley criticized. Harman’s results are achieved only by begging the question against the moral realist.
But even Sorley would in principle admit that the initial “ethical data” must prove to be compatible with everything else that is included in our final interpretation of reality. In fact, the same year Sorley delivered the Gifford Lectures, George Santayana published Winds of Doctrine, in which he complained that Bertrand Russell’s then-held moral realism was the result of Russell’s “monocular” vision. Santayana said Russell didn’t look and see that our moral bias is conditioned and has its basis in the physical order of things. Eventually Russell abandoned his moral realism, crediting these very arguments. AEN suggests following Santayana’s advice, and bearing in mind Sharon Street’s worry: “If the fund of exhaustive judgments with which human reflection was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence…then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter is always just a subset of the former.” What we require is some assurance that our original fund is not contaminated. So, what reason have we for supposing that the mechanisms responsible for those judgments are truth-aimed, that the Dependence Thesis is true?
Santayana suggested that if God exists and has fashioned the human constitution with the purpose of discerning moral truth, then we have reason to embrace the Dependence Thesis. But neither Russell nor Santayana was a theist. Moral realists need to give an account of moral beliefs that would lead us to suppose that they are reliable indicators of truth. Quine offers such a story with a Darwinian spin to inspire confidence in our ability to acquire knowledge of the world around us. Natural selection is unkind to those whose behaviors stem from either false beliefs or profound stupidity. We should expect our cognitive faculties to be truth-aimed and generally reliable given such selection pressures.
Plantinga has challenged such stories with what he calls “Darwin’s Doubt.” The connection between fitness-conferring behavior and true belief might not be so certain as Quine suggests. If Plantinga is correct, then evolutionary naturalism is saddled with a far-ranging skepticism that takes in much more than our moral beliefs. Despite Plantinga’s many ingenious examples in which adaptive behavior results from false beliefs, many people just find the link between true belief and adaptive behavior plausible. And in any event the moral and nonmoral cases appear to be significantly different.
The core of Street’s paper is her “Darwinian Dilemma” she poses to value realists like Sturgeon. Our moral beliefs are fitness-aimed. Are they also truth-aimed? Either there is a fitness-truth relation or there is not. If not, and evolution has shaped our basic evaluative attitudes, moral skepticism is in order. If there is a relation, then it is either that moral beliefs have reproductive fitness because they are true (the “tracking” relation), or we have the moral beliefs that we have simply because of the fitness that they have conferred (the “adaptive” link account). Adaptive link leads to constructivism. The moral realist needs a tracking account, but Street thinks fitness following mind-independent moral truths is implausible. A tracking account of paternal instincts would have to say more than that the behavior tends toward DNA preservation—something like the instincts were favored because it’s independently true that parents ought to care for their offspring. Nonnaturalists have the worst deal in light of the causal inertness of moral properties on their view. Ethical naturalists have a better time at it, but why not just eschew realism and go with an adaptive account?
A dilemma similar to that urged by Street comes from another consideration of Darwinian counterfactuals. Sturgeon thinks moral terms rigidly designate natural properties. If justice picks out some natural property or properties, we might expect an ethical naturalist to conclude that moral judgments if true are true in all possible worlds. But Linville writes that to insist that our moral terms rigidly designate specific earthly natural properties to which human sentiments have come to be attached appears to be an instance of what Judith Thomason has called metaphysical imperialism.
Sturgeon dialogued with Gibbard, who argued for expressivism. Sturgeon’s reply is that perhaps our ancestors called bargaining outcomes just because they really were. But is this so? The bargaining situation Gibbard had envisioned involved a cast of characters who were self-interested individualists. In such a situation, there was pressure in the direction of equitable arrangements. But imagine a different set of initial conditions—like lupine bargainers. If justice supervenes on certain natural facts, these will essentially include facts about the psychological constitution of the respective bargainers. It seems to Linville that the most plausible explanation is that such counterfactual moral beliefs are formed as the result of selection pressures that are themselves in place due to the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape—contingencies that are morally indifferent. While ethical naturalists in those worlds no doubt argue for the supervenience of the moral on the natural, the efficacy of moral explanations, and the existence of corresponding moral facts, we should, Linville thinks, regard them as mistaken. If the moral beliefs of the actual world have also taken their cue from predispositions that were fitness-conferring, then it is hard to see why our own ethical naturalists are in any better position so to argue.
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Nietzsche had the insight that those, like George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), who think they can have morality and moral duty without a religious foundation are deluded. “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality.” Nietzsche thought there are no moral facts, precisely because there are no theological ones. The moral argument takes Nietzsche’s assertion as one of its premises: if there is no God, then there are altogether no moral facts. But contra Nietzsche it also urges that we have, in our moral experience, good reason to suppose that there are indeed moral facts.
Such arguments come in numerous forms—without a lawgiver there’s no moral law, prudential considerations, requirements of moral knowledge—but Kant’s is one of the more sophisticated: If there’s no God, then the moral law makes objective demands that are not possibly met, namely, that the moral good of virtue and the natural good of happiness embrace and become perfect in a “highest good.” But then the demands appear to be empty, and in the face of such an antinomy, we might come to think of moral requirements as null and void. For Kant, though God is not the author of the moral law, he is required as a sort of Director of the screenplay. If death is the end, he also argued morality wouldn’t seem to matter as much as it should.
Linville’s argument will instead focus on this: theists can, where naturalists can’t, offer a framework on which our moral beliefs may be presumed to be warranted. In particular, the naturalist’s commitment to a Darwinian explanation of certain salient features of human psychology presents an undercutting defeater for our moral beliefs taken as a whole. This argument is thus chiefly epistemological in nature, and seldom strays from the discipline of metaethics.
Wilson and Ruse have suggested ethics to be an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate. The pressures of natural selection, on their view, have had an enormous influence on human psychology, including the hardwiring of epigenetic rules, widely distributed propensities to believe and behave in certain ways, which have developed through the interaction of human genetics and human culture. Such rules give us a sense of obligation because of their adaptive value, not because they detect any actual moral obligations. Objectivity in morality is illusory, a useful fiction. Ruse thinks Darwin’s theory complements Hume’s subjectivism.
On Hume’s view, belief in objective moral properties is at best unwarranted, and talk of them is in fact meaningless. The only fact of the matter we find in moral judgments is an object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in ourselves. The mind, as Hume put it, has “a great propensity to spread itself on external objects,” so that the subjective feelings that, given our constitution, result from such contemplation of some act, are mistaken for perceptions of objective properties of the act itself.
Let’s call the combination of naturalism and an overall Darwinian account of the origin of the species evolutionary naturalism (EN); according, then, to one like C. S. Lewis, on EN, the dictates of conscience are little more than an aggregate of subjective impulses which, although distributed widely throughout the species, are no more capable of being true or false than a vomit or a yawn.
An argument—call it the argument from evolutionary naturalism (AEN)—thus emerges from such considerations:
This isn’t an argument for God, but for the falsity of EN. Also, naturalism doesn’t entail Darwinism, but Darwinism seems to be the only game in town. Linville’s primary focus will be to consider objections to the first two premises. He realizes there are plenty of anti-realists out there, but wishes to focus on realists who try to ground their realism in EN. One might object to the first premise by denying that natural selection is solely or even partly responsible for the emergence of human morality. And the second premise might be accused of a common fallacy by moving so quickly from an account of the origins of human morality to the assertion that its claims to objectivity are false. What might the evolutionary naturalist say about the possible connections between the workings of natural selection and the truth of our moral beliefs?
AEN and the genetic fallacy
The second premise initially appears to be guilty of the genetic fallacy; identifying the source of a belief is generally not evidence of its falsity. But sometimes identifying the origins of a belief is relevant to a consideration of its truth, as in cases where it can be shown that the explanation of someone’s belief is epistemically independent of whatever would make the belief true. (Like forming a belief about the number of people in a room by a random drawing.)
Might we offer a similar evolutionary argument for moral skepticism? Sober suggests it’s a tall order because we’d have to identify the processes of moral belief formation and the would-be truth-makers for moral beliefs, and then show such processes and truth-makers to be independent. Call this the Independence Thesis.
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Of course the Independence Thesis doesn’t entail that morality is an illusion, but merely that our moral beliefs are probably false. But we need not argue for the falseness or probable falseness of our moral beliefs. Nor is it necessary to argue for the truth of the Independence Thesis. It is one thing to suggest that there are positive reasons for asserting epistemic independence, and quite another to say we lack any reason for thinking that a relevant dependence relation obtains. We would have a reason for thinking there is such a relation just in case the best explanation for a person’s having a given belief essentially involves the truth of that belief. It seems that a plausible Darwinian yarn may be spun in such a way as to offer a complete and exhaustive explanation of our various moral beliefs without ever supposing that any of them are true.
It was no background assumption of the evolutionary explanation of our moral beliefs that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment. When we look at the animals, we explain their behavior and the impulse toward their behavior by appeal to adaptiveness. Moral properties are not included in the cast of characters. On a Darwinian story, conscience is what arises in a social creature once the social instincts are overlain with a sufficient degree of rationality.
Arguably, given an evolutionary account of human moral beliefs, there is no reason for thinking that a relation of epistemic dependence obtains, and so, given an evolutionary account, belief in moral facts is unwarranted. If our moral beliefs are without warrant, then they do not amount to moral knowledge. Linville thus modifies (2) in AEN to
(2*): If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.
An evolutionary account serves to undercut whatever warrant we might have had for our moral beliefs, and if they lack warrant, they are not items of knowledge.
Wilson and Ruse think Darwinism poses a rebutting defeater for our moral beliefs, as well as for moral realism itself. Linville instead thinks the proponent of AEN might back off from the stronger claim that Darwinism entails that there are no moral facts, speaking instead of whether we are warranted in our ordinary moral beliefs. In this way AEN becomes an epistemological argument for moral skepticism. As Richard Joyce observes, the conclusion that our moral beliefs are “unjustified” is “almost as disturbing a result” as an argument for the actual falseness of those beliefs.
On the suggestion that Darwinism presents us with an undercutting defeater for moral beliefs, (3) becomes
(3*): There is moral knowledge,
and this takes us to the conclusion that
(4) EN is false.
What we lack is some reason for thinking that the adaptiveness of a moral belief depends in any way on its being true. Linville turns the tables on Sober. Instead of Sober’s suggestion that the AEN defender must show that moral beliefs are independent of any truth-makers, perhaps the onus is on those who assert dependence. Why, given EN, should we suppose the world to include anything more than natural facts and properties and our subjective reactions to those properties?
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