| s-1
| Are there Moral Facts? |
| s-2
| So far, we have covered how evolutionary ethics relates to the question what we ought to do and why we are moral in the first place. |
| s-3
| A related set of questions about ethics are metaethical questions, which concern the meaning of moral terms, our ways of gaining knowledge of moral facts, and the nature of the moral facts. |
| s-4
| In other words, apart from thinking about how we ought to live, and where our moral sense comes from, we can also ask what it means to affirm a particular answer to that question, how we could come to know the answer, and whether the answer would be a matter of fact or more like an opinion. |
| s-5
| Many books and articles in moral philosophy start with the observation that moral judgments seem to be objectively true and the assumption that this is how non-philosophers also think about morality. |
| s-6
| For example, Michael Smith writes: |
| s-7
| We seem to think moral questions have correct answers; that the correct answers are made correct by objective moral facts; that moral facts are wholly determined by circumstances; and that, by engaging in moral conversation and argument, we can discover what these objective facts are. |
| s-8
| (Smith 1994, 6) |
| s-9
| But as we have seen above, evolutionary theory explains why we would think that moral judgments are objective. |
| s-10
| The philosopher Michael Ruse takes this to show that the apparent objectivity of morality is something like an “illusion” foisted on us by our genes (Ruse [1986] 1998, 253). |
| s-11
| Of course, even if Ruse is correct, this does not show that moral judgments are not objective, but it can make us think whether the objectivity of morality really has to be explained, as many philosophers assume. |
| s-12
| Ruse has also argued that an evolutionary account of morality suggests that there are no moral facts in the first place. |
| s-13
| Anything we want to explain about morality can be explained without mentioning moral facts, or so Ruse argues. |
| s-14
| If moral facts are explanatorily redundant, indeed, moral realists (those who believe there are mind-independent, objective facts about morality, as discussed in Chapter 1) need to say why we should still suppose that moral facts do exist. |
| s-15
| Interestingly, Ruse’s methodological naturalism leads him to embrace a view that goes against the metaphysical naturalist position that moral facts exist. |
| s-16
| Relatedly, Sharon Street, for example, argues that evolutionary explanations of morality show that moral realism is probably false. |
| s-17
| The kind of moral realism that Street has in mind is the view that moral properties exist as objective features of the world (to wit, whether stealing is wrong is independent of whether anyone thinks or feels that stealing is wrong). |
| s-18
| Street starts with the premise that our moral judgments are influenced by evolutionary forces. |
| s-19
| This fact, Street claims, gives rise to a dilemma for moral realists concerning the relation of the evolutionary forces that influenced our moral judgments and the moral facts claimed to exist by moral realists. |
| s-20
| If there is no relation between the evolutionary forces and the moral facts, then it would be an astonishing coincidence if many of our moral judgments were true. |
| s-21
| In light of the coincidence, we have no reason to assume that our moral judgments are true—an unpalatable conclusion for realists. |
| s-22
| Claiming that there is a relation, however, is empirically dubious, according to Street. |
| s-23
| Mirroring Ruse’s claim, moral facts could be purged from what we assume to exist because they do not perform an important explanatory function. |
| s-24
| So, we should reject moral realism. |
| s-25
| Street’s argument illustrates how evolutionary theory can be used to make a case about which metaethical theories we should adopt. |
| s-26
| Both Ruse’s and Street’s arguments rely on the idea that we should only accept that something exists if it plays an indispensable explanatory role and there are means to resist these arguments. [12] |
| s-27
| Both arguments, as presented here, rely on the correctness of the evolutionary explanation of morality they convey. |
| s-28
| In the next section, we turn to the relevance of evolutionary ethics for moral epistemology. |
| s-29
| E.g. Enoch (2010) |
| s-30
| Can We have Justified Moral Beliefs? |
| s-31
| The evolutionary argument by Sharon Street can also be interpreted as an argument about moral justification and moral knowledge. |
| s-32
| Suppose that moral realists assume that there is no relation between our moral judgments and the moral facts. |
| s-33
| It would seem like an incredible coincidence if the realists were right that our moral judgments are nonetheless true. |
| s-34
| There are just too many possible moral truths and too many ways in which evolution could have “pushed” our moral beliefs. |
| s-35
| Street claims that such a coincidence would be too much to believe. |
| s-36
| But what is the problem, exactly, with having beliefs that are only coincidentally true? |
| s-37
| Depending on how we understand “coincidence,” my belief that there is a bird outside my window is coincidentally true because had I looked a little later, the bird would have flown away already. |
| s-38
| Accidentally true beliefs do not seem problematic in every case. |
| s-39
| The question for proponents of Street’s argument is to show why the evolutionary influence on human moral beliefs makes for a particularly problematic case of coincidence. |
| s-40
| The philosopher Richard Joyce argues that the problem has to do with the sensitivity of our moral beliefs to the moral facts (Joyce 2006). |
| s-41
| Given that our moral beliefs are influenced by evolutionary forces, and not by the moral facts, our moral beliefs would be the same even if the moral facts would change. |
| s-42
| But because we should not hold on to such insensitive beliefs, evolutionary explanations of morality show that our moral beliefs are unjustified (because they are not sensitive). |
| s-43
| It is not clear, however, whether and why evolutionary explanations of morality reveal something about our moral beliefs that is particularly troubling from an epistemological perspective. |
| s-44
| The impact of evolutionary ethics on epistemological questions depends on these deeper questions about epistemology. [13] |
| s-45
| Evolutionary explanations of morality, however, provide us with a useful starting point for thinking about these questions. |
| s-46
| See Klenk (2019). |
| s-47
| CONCLUSION |
| s-48
| Evolutionary ethics has helped us to get a much clearer sense of where the human moral sense is coming from. |
| s-49
| While this is a far cry from revealing to us what we ought to do, the research program seems full of promise nonetheless. |
| s-50
| Once we get into the details, we can see that it also raises deep theoretical questions about evolutionary explanations, the relation of descriptive and normative claims, the epistemology of justification and truth, and the general viability of naturalism in ethics. |
| s-51
| Much left to wonder, then, but with some ideas about where to get our answers. |