46:30 - 53:05
As J. P. Andrew mentions, Sharon Street is known for her evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism.
Spencer Case mentions that you don't need to appeal to evolution to motivate this kind of argument. You can appeal instead to just cultural influences – your moral beliefs came from your social environment. (But then you could say that the social environment is the way it is because of evolutionary pressures. So from my point of view it makes sense to press the evolutionary aspect of this argument.)
The general point is this: If you found out that you had been brainwashed to believe something, then upon discovering this you should lose confidence in that belief. If you can fully explain your moral beliefs via a non-truth tracking process, like evolution, then you have reason to doubt the truth of these beliefs. You don't believe that it's wrong to imprison innocent people for crimes they did not commit not because it's true in some robust, objective sense that it's wrong to imprison innocent people for crimes they did not commit; you believe that it's wrong to imprison innocent people for crimes they did not commit because you have been socially and biologically programmed to believe this.
Spencer Case gives an illustration of why this argument fails. 50:30 - "Even if it's true that evolution pushes us in the direction to thinking that randomly harming yourself is bad, finding out that evolution has pushed you in that direction shouldn't make you think, 'Oh, well I just don't know whether it's actually bad for me to stab myself in the eye with this pencil.' No, I know that's bad for me."
So Spencer Case sees anti-realism motivated by evolutionary debunking as having the absurd result that we should be skeptical of the truth of whether randomly harming ourselves is bad.
I agree that it's silly to think we should doubt our self-evident beliefs just because they are evolutionarily convenient.
J. P. Andrew then gives the sort of response to evolutionary debunking I would give, which is something along the following lines:
*Evolution selects for highly accurate beliefs over basic facts of our environment, as high accuracy over basic facts is needed for our survival.
*A certain kind of intelligence is needed to achieve highly accurate beliefs over basic facts, and so evolution selects for this kind of intelligence.
*In the case of humans, the kind of abstract thinking needed for language and planning allows for the abstract thinking needed for mathematics, logic, and reasoning. And so our ability to do philosophy and discover philosophical truths is incidentally selected for. We don't need high level mathematical and logical abilities to survive, but these abilities come bundled together incidentally with those abilities we do need to survive.
*This allows humans to, through reasoning, engage in evolutionarily inconvenient behaviors, like suicide, refusing to have children, or for speaking truth to power at the cost of one's own life (though in cases where folks with less access to resources and/or with lesser genetics tend to be those who choose death or who choose to refuse to have children, then even these "self-deletion" behaviors turn out to be evolutionarily convenient). The point is that evolution can accidentally give us the ability to discover abstract truths that aren't needed for our survival or for the survival of the species. Higher levels of reasoning and abstract truth-tracking that aren't selected for are packaged with lower levels of reasoning and abstract truth-tracking that are selected for.
*In terms of the surface structure versus the deep structure, the surface structure incidentally gives us access to the deep structure.
*By way of analogy: Evolution does not select for heavy fur coats on bison. In fact, a very heavy coat might make things worse for the bison by lowering their speed and endurance. But evolution does select for a thick coat to protect the bison from the cold. And it just so happens that thick coats are heavy. And so evolution incidentally selects for thick coats for bison, and the tradeoff, if there is one, is to the bison's overall advantage. (I credit this analogy elsewhere, though I do not know its origins.)
And so this defeats evolutionary debunking arguments in the following way:
*This theory predicts humans
to be quite bad at arriving at metaphysical truths because possessing
accurate metaphysical beliefs is only very incidentally selected for,
and in some ways may be selected against (e.g. people who are overly
concerned about truth will clash with the false beliefs of their tribes,
potentially leading them to be casted out, losing access to the
material resources the tribe provides). Sure enough, we are quite bad at
arriving at metaphysical truth as seen by our rampant disagreement over
metaphysical truth. So someone could arrive at true beliefs about the
metaphysics of morality despite those truths not being selected for and even being selected against.
*Of course, this brings in a different, better argument against moral realism, which was already the main argument against moral realism: rampant and deep peer disagreement, and cultural disagreement, over a wide array of moral issues. But I'll set that aside for now and focus on evolutionary debunking.
*There are what we might call evolutionarily convenient beliefs (ECBs). These are beliefs like: I should get married, I should have children, I should promote marriage and having children to others, I should do all that I can to survive, I should do all that I can to help my children survive, and so on.
*While normally evolutionarily
convenient beliefs would be worth doubting (because these beliefs may
be caused by evolution and not caused by the truth of the belief
interfacing with our ability to discover its truth), it would be silly
to doubt self-evident truths like that pain is bad even if those self-evident beliefs are evolutionarily convenient.
*In general, if evolutionarily convenient
beliefs have independent support, then you can lean on that support for
justification. You can, for example, have children not because evolution commands it of you, but because you believe that this would maximize the happiness in the world and thus make the world a better place. You can take evolution's prodding as a recommendation, and then it's your own critical reflection on the goodness and badness of things that leads you to making your own decision to have children.
*The difference is that if someone were to ask you why you had children, if you did so purely out of instinct, you wouldn't be able to give much of an answer. But if you did so with purpose and principle in mind, then you would be able to give a sophisticated answer.
*There is objective good and bad in the sense that people can be just as mistaken about the goodness and badness of things as they can be mistaken about scientific facts.
*In fact, it’s even easier to see the truth of these value facts than it is to see the truth of scientific facts because the value facts are self-evident. If someone says that my pain does not have the qualities it does, then they are certainly incorrect.
*And if I base my morality on these value facts that are verified independently of evolution, then it’s not true as that my morality is based purely on evolutionarily convenient beliefs.
*Intrinsic goods and evils (i.e. value facts) are not intuitions, judgments, interpretations, evaluations, or theories – they are data. I agree with Sharon Rawlette that this makes sense of where we get our notion of badness from. That is, the theory that badness is evaluative and not data fails to explain how it's even possible that we would have a notion of badness in the first place. On the other hand, if we view badness as fundamentally phenomenal – and I believe we can directly see that intrinsic badness is phenomenal, that the badness of our pain is something directly experienced and not imposed as an evaluation on our experience – then this explains where we get our concept of badness from. Phenomenal goodness / badness is a precondition necessary for evaluations about the extrinsic goodness and badness of things. We couldn't evaluate anything as good or bad without that precondition.
*So evolutionary debunking arguments, just like in epistemic cases, do not work against self-evident beliefs, and the pain of a burn is self-evidently bad.
*Another option I see is to say that truth for basic facts like how to procure food, clothing shelter, and how to get along with your tribe, is actually not that fundamentally different from truth for more abstract facts like whether God exists. And so evolution, by selecting us to discover basic truths, actually does select us to discover more abstract truths. For example, because we are selected to care deeply about survival, and because our survival does not depend on God in any tangible way, and because we are selected to observe our environment, and we don't see God anywhere, we are selected to observe that God is apparently hidden. While peer disagreement would normally be an obvious counter to the idea that we are selected to grasp philosophical truths, even theists often admit that God is apparently hidden (or at least that God is more hidden than what we can imagine, or at least that it makes sense why someone who has yet to search for God would think that God is apparently hidden) and try to come up with theories as to why God would be apparently hidden in this way. The data of God's hiddenness cannot be ignored.
*I think you can, and should, give an evolutionary explanation for why there is intrinsic badness in the first place. Intrinsic badness leads to aversion behavior that increases survival. But note what's at stake here: whether our ECBs, including value and moral beliefs, should always be doubted. They should be doubted until we find reasons for thinking they are true independent of the evolutionary explanation. That is, if I have an alternative explanation for why I believe an ECB, then that could be the real explanation for why I believe the ECB. And if that explanation involves the truth of the ECB interfacing with my ability to discern its truth, then we have a truth-tracking explanation for my ECB. If the theory that my ECB is explained in this truth-tracking way is superior to the theory that my ECB is explained in a non-truth-tracking way, then the debunking argument fails. The origins of the reasoning process that allows us to discern truth must itself be best explained in a truth-tracking way. And it is: if we were terrible at interfacing with reality on the whole, then we wouldn't have survived. Plus, if we allow for self-authenticating beliefs, like self-evident beliefs, then it's self-evident that our reasoning process is truth-tracking at least in some cases.
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