Evolution and Moral Realism: Take 2
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15581910Keywords:
moral realism, evolutionary debunking arguments, human evolution, cooperation, moral naturalismAbstract
A decade ago I offered a defence of naturalistic moral realism against evolutionary debunking arguments. It had two elements. One was rejecting a dichotomy between evolutionary vindication and debunking in favour of a continuum. The second (a) proposed a metaethical principle on the basis of a hypothesis about the evolutionary drivers of moral thinking: a moral principle is true if it is part of a set of moral norms which, if acted upon, would optimise the cooperation profits of a community, and (b) argued that by this criterion, folk moral opinion was quite often approximately true. I still reject the dichotomy, but the rest of the argument was too friendly to realist naturalism in ethics. It mischaracterised the selective history of moral thinking, over-estimating its role as a cooperation amplifier, and under-estimating the epistemic challenges facing individual agents as they develop their moral opinions. The upshot is a shift towards the debunking end of the vindication-debunking continuum.
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