## Notes & references To read: - [ ] [My notes on SEP morality and evolutionary biology](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bp4FkigrD8j_hJ0gA_4NKbdQ-mh0u1E1Zt3iXlA9Z6s/edit) ### Louise Hanson on evolutionary debunking arguments https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/moral-sciences-club/the-real-problem-with-yagwxTsbnLH/ https://dro.dur.ac.uk/28484/1/28484.pdf Evolutionary debunking argument (EDA): 1. EB: Our moral beliefs have been shaped by natural selection 2. Natural selection is indifferent to the truth of these beliefs 3. Our moral beliefs have been shaped by forces that are indifferent to their truth (from 1, 2) Moral realism may have challenges, but Hanson will argue that the EDA does not provide an additional challenge to the moral realist. Hanson's claim: EDAs only sound plausible if we equivocate between quantitative and predicative explanation. - Quantitative explanation: why does this classroom contain only children who can read at grade 3 level? - Predicative explanation: why can Sally only read to grade 3 level? Forces indifferent to truth (natural selection) have made it such that the world contains many people who believe moral claim p and not many who don't. But any particular individual may believe P for more or other reasons than just "due to natural selection". So it's not clear the EDA makes the beliefs of particular individuals non-robust to changes the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA). Learning that the beliefs are fitness enhancing should not have any bearing at all on our credence in them. Neutral update. Predicative Reading of (1)-(3) (1) Predicative EB Claim: you, and I, and everybody else, have each individually been caused to accept the moral beliefs we accept by the forces of natural selection. (2) Natural selection is indifferent to the truth of these beliefs (3) Forces that are indifferent to moral truth have made it the case that I have these moral beliefs, and you do, and that other individuals do etc. Quantificational Reading of (1)-(3) (1) Quantificational EB Claim: Natural selection has made it the case that individuals with these moral beliefs exist, rather than individuals with different moral beliefs. (2) Natural selection is indifferent to the truth of these beliefs (3) Forces that are indifferent to moral truth have made it the case that individuals with these moral beliefs exist, rather than individuals with different moral beliefs. > The EB claim is most naturally understood as a claim about the process that led to *there being* individuals who have the beliefs in question, not a claim about the process that led to these individuals coming to have these beliefs > The predicative reading is required to generate epistemic worries about our moral beliefs, but only the quantificational reading is plausible. > Finally, the predicative reading of EB doesn’t have prima facie plausibility on its side. What would it even be for the forces of natural selection to push you, or me, or any other individual, towards certain beliefs? > if the fitness-enhancingness of a moral belief doesn’t bear on whether it’s true, the discovery that these creatures’ moral beliefs are fitness enhancing shouldn’t lower our credence that they are also true (even though it also shouldn’t raise it). > any moral realist is going to hold that we have a way of discerning these mind-independent moral truths - not an infallible way, but a way that is good enough for us to count as often enough having moral knowledge, or at least justified or reliable moral beliefs. > [...] > it is often objected that realists owe - and are unable to supply - a convincing positive story about how this happens. But again, EDAs purport to do something different from that kind of objection: they claim to show that whatever view realists hold about how it is that we discern moral truths, evolutionary considerations show that we can’t be doing that thing.If I’m right, this argument fails to establish this. Even if moral knowledge is deeply implausible on the realist picture - as well it might be! - the claim that our moral beliefs were selected for doesn’t make it more implausible. > the arguments I’ve given in Section 2 are arguments for thinking that explanations of the frequency of our moral beliefs can’t have any bearing on the epistemic status of these beliefs. I don't underrstand this: #todo > a disposition that is in fact fitness-enhancing, doesn’t have to be fitness-enhancing in all possible worlds \- so there is no reason to think that the disposition that underlies my moral beliefs, and yours etc., is one that would produce these particular beliefs in all worlds where they are fitness-enhancing, including worlds in which they were false. My target in this paper has been arguments that take the evolutionary backstory of our moral beliefs to debunk those beliefs (either in the sense of showing them to be likely false, or epistemically defective in a way that would preclude their being knowledge even if true). I’ve argued that the evolutionary backstories of beliefs just can’t do this kind of work. The reason they appear to do so, is that they can sound a bit like the sorts of backstory claims that do have epistemic consequences. But once we appreciate what the evolutionary backstory of our moral beliefs amounts to (namely, an explanation of the prevalence of certain moral beliefs, by explaining why individuals who had tendencies towards them reproduced more, leading to there being more and more individuals with these tendencies), it looks highly doubtful that this is the kind of backstory that can bear on the epistemic status of these beliefs. I argued that this is so even if natural selection can explain the traits of individuals, for even if it can, the sense in which it would do so is not a sense that would be epistemically relevant. debunkers are taking the evolutionary backstory behind our moral beliefs to be a source of additional worries. My claim has been that however bleak the prospects of moral knowledge look for the realist, the evolutionary backstory of our moral beliefs adds no further woes. PH thoughts: 1. Presumably she would concede that, among the population, typical views would be different if the EEA was different. 2. My impression is that the methods of moral philosophy crucially involve reference to central intuitions. I think the EDA proponent is claiming that these intuitions would be different if the EEA was different. That seems plausible to me. 1. I gues LH would deny (2)?