Philos Stud (2015) 172:883–904

DOI 10.1007/s11098-014-0295-y

Debunking evolutionary debunking of ethical realism

William J. FitzPatrick

Published online: 22 February 2014

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract What implications, if any, does evolutionary biology have for meta-
ethics? Many believe that our evolutionary background supports a deflationary
metaethics, providing a basis at least for debunking ethical realism. Some arguments
for this conclusion appeal to claims about the etiology of the mental capacities we
employ in ethical judgment, while others appeal to the etiology of the content of our
moral beliefs. In both cases the debunkers’ claim is that the causal roles played by
evolutionary factors raise deep epistemic problems for realism: if ethical truths are
objective or independent of our evaluative attitudes, as realists maintain, then we
lose our justification for our ethical beliefs once we become aware of the evolu-
tionary shaping of our ethical capacities or beliefs, which would not have disposed
us reliably to track independent ethical truths; realism, they claim, thus saddles us
with ethical skepticism. I distinguish and spell out various evolutionary debunking
arguments along these lines and argue that they all fail: the capacity etiology
argument fails to raise any special or serious problem for realism, and the content
etiology arguments all rely on strong explanatory claims about our moral beliefs that
are simply not supported by the science unless it is supplemented by philosophical
claims that just beg the question against realism from the start. While the various
debunking arguments do bring out some interesting commitments of ethical realism,
and even raise some good challenges as realists develop positive moral episte-
mologies, they fall far short of their debunking ambitions.

We belong to a species that evolved, like others, through cumulative natural

selection, and our coming to appreciate this fact has changed how we think about
many aspects of human life. But does our evolutionary background provide insight
specifically into the status of ethics? Most of those who see deep connections here

W. J. FitzPatrick (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester, Box 270078, Rochester, NY 14627-0078, USA
e-mail: william.fitzpatrick@rochester.edu

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take evolutionary considerations to support a deflationary metaethics. Whether the

thought is that evolution supports ethical nihilism, skepticism, subjectivist
constructivism, or expressivism, it is often held to provide a basis at least for
debunking ethical realism by undermining the old-fashioned idea that there are
objective and knowable ethical truths—truths that are both independent of our
evaluative attitudes and capable of being known by us. I will argue that this
common debunking claim is mistaken: evolution does not provide grounds for
deflationary metaethics, though it does raise questions that realists need to address
and it helps to bring out some interesting commitments of realism.
Following recent discussions, I will focus on epistemically-oriented evolutionary
arguments, with the aim of disentangling and critiquing various strands of argument
to be found in the current debate. In doing so, I will abstract a bit from the actual
arguments given by particular authors, but I hope to say enough to cover them all in
the end.1 Some of these strands are motivated specifically by evolutionary
considerations while others turn out to be more general arguments with an
evolutionary spin. So while in some cases the evolutionary angle provides a
distinctive epistemic challenge, in others it adds little to already familiar ones. My
aim will be to sort through these and to defuse the main arguments insofar as they
claim that evolution raises distinctive epistemic problems for realism. I will argue
that the most prominent lines of evolutionary argument against realism fail because
they rely on strong claims about the explanation of ‘our moral beliefs’ that are not
supported by the science unless it is supplemented with philosophical assumptions
that are just question-begging in this context.

1 The capacity etiology argument

Consider first a simple argument that does draw essentially on facts about evolution,
concerning the etiology (or causal origins) of our epistemic capacities:

(1) Our basic mental capacities, including those we employ in moral

judgment, are products of natural selection.
(2) Natural selection would not have designed these capacities to be such as
to yield cognitions that reliably track independent moral truths, even if
they exist.2
(3) Therefore, even if independent moral truths exist, the capacities we
employ in moral judgment either do not yield cognitions that reliably
track them, or they do so only accidentally, through a lucky fluke—both
of which raise skeptical problems.

1
For a very helpful reconstruction and critical examination of a variety of current evolutionary
debunking arguments, see Shafer-Landau (2012).
2
Talk of ‘‘design’’ here is metaphorical shorthand for the relevant selection-based account of the etiology
of complex adaptive structures and functions, and ‘‘independent moral truths’’ means moral truths that are
not functions of our evaluative attitudes (desires, approval, values, etc.) but have relevantly independent
grounds.

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The idea here is that as evolved creatures we have natural selection to thank for the
basic mental capacities we employ in moral judgment, whether these are adaptations
for moral judgment or just more general adaptations we’ve come to use also for
making moral judgments. But processes of natural selection would have shaped
these capacities, like any others, ultimately in whatever ways most enhanced the
inclusive biological fitness of hunter-gatherers in ancestral environments, given the
available genetic variation. Natural selection would simply have rewarded whatever
cognitive and emotional traits caused our Pleistocene ancestors to maximize the
relative representation of their genes in the gene pool over generations. Now in
some cases, these traits accomplished this by promoting survival, which they did in
turn through promoting reasonably accurate cognitive representation of the world.
For example, they gave our ancestors capacities for tracking facts about the
location, number, speed, size and color of medium-sized objects in their
environment. So in those cases we can expect natural selection to have given us
cognitive capacities that track independent truths about the world with reasonable
accuracy (Griffiths and Wilkins In Press). But, the argument goes, this does not hold
for the independent moral truths posited by realists.
Realists do not, after all, take these moral truths to have anything in particular to
do with the competitive gene propagation rewarded by natural selection, but instead
see them as grounded in various independent values. There might, of course, be
some overlap between the behaviors prescribed by such values and the behaviors
that tended to maximize a hunter-gatherer’s genetic propagation—for example,
refraining from leaping off cliffs or from arbitrarily betraying coalition partners. But
the point is that these choices would have been rewarded by natural selection not
because of their fidelity to objective moral values, but simply because they
increased biological fitness. Indeed, whenever a behavior tended to increase
biological fitness but failed to accord with objective values—as in the case of
selective cheating, say, or aggression toward weak outsiders—natural selection
would still have favored it or its psychological underpinnings; and natural selection
would not have favored psychological dispositions leading to behaviors consistent
with objective values in cases where those behaviors failed to increase biological
fitness.
So it is not independent moral facts as such that natural selection shaped our
cognitive capacities to track, but simply facts relevant to competitive gene
propagation in ancestral environments.3 This means that even if there are
independent moral truths, natural selection would not have given us capacities
designed to track them as such or otherwise disposed to track them consistently.
And (so the argument goes) this implies that the capacities we employ in moral
judgment are either unreliable, at least with respect to tracking independent moral
truths, or only accidentally reliable through a lucky fluke.
Now there is much that might be debated about the epistemic upshots of this
conclusion or the prospects for dealing with them, but we can spare ourselves some
trouble by noting straightaway that the argument is invalid. To make the argument

3
I spell this out more fully in FitzPatrick (2014).

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valid, we could add a further premise, which seems to function as an implicit

assumption in many discussions:
(2.5) If natural selection is responsible for our having certain basic cognitive
capacities, which we employ in some domain of thought, then the only way for
such exercises of those capacities to be non-accidentally and reliably truth-
tracking in that domain would be for natural selection to have made things that
way.
The problem, however, is that this assumption overlooks the alternative possibility
of our taking general cognitive capacities bequeathed by natural selection and
developing them in cultural contexts, through relevant forms of training within
traditions of inquiry into the subject matter in question, and thus making our
cognitive dispositions in the relevant domain non-accidentally reliably truth-
tracking. Indeed, we have plainly done this in countless cases. So 2.5 is false.
To take just one example of how this might work, consider philosophical beliefs we
might have, such as the belief that if water is H2O then this is a metaphysically
necessary truth: water is H2O in all possible worlds where it exists. Now the basic
mental capacities that enable us to sit around worrying about things like metaphysical
modality are part of our evolutionary heritage: they didn’t appear by chance and they
weren’t designed by God; they evolved through natural selection. But natural selection
did not design our cognitive capacities to track truths about metaphysical necessity,
which were as irrelevant to the reproductive success of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers as
the realist’s moral truths would be. Hunter gatherers didn’t fill their time around the fire
pondering metaphysical necessity—or if some did, it’s safe to say they weren’t the
ones enjoying most of the reproductive success! Still, despite the irrelevance of
obscure metaphysical facts to the natural selection etiology of our basic mental
capacities, we’re able to deploy those capacities, in the cultural context of
philosophical training, to think intelligently and often accurately about things like
metaphysical necessity or countless other arcane topics such as differential geometry
and relativistic quantum theory, the facts of which are equally irrelevant to the etiology
of the capacities we use in thinking about them (cf. Railton 2010).
The first point, then, is that we don’t need natural selection to have given us
cognitive capacities designed specifically to track a certain class of truths, on the
model of perceptual adaptations, in order to be in a position now to track those
truths non-accidentally and reliably, and to be warranted in our beliefs. Nor do we
even need natural selection to have given us, as an incidental by-product of some
unrelated adaptation, a ready-made, specialized capacity that happens to be attuned
to the truths in question. Such a thing would indeed be as unlikely as natural
selection’s coughing up the human eye as a fluke by-product of some unrelated
adaptation.4 But again we don’t need any such thing. It’s enough if natural selection

4
Street (2006, pp. 142–143) claims that the realist who grants that our ability to grasp independent moral
truths is not an adaptation but (in part) a by-product of some adaptive capacities C are committed to
thinking that a highly sophisticated and specialized capacity, specifically attuned to independent moral
truths, would have to have arisen as a mere fluke by-product of an unrelated adaptation C. As argued in
the text, this is not so: it is no more true in the case of morality than it is in the case of metaphysics, etc.

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has given us general cognitive capacities that we can now develop and deploy in
rich cultural contexts, with training in relevant methodologies, so as to arrive at
justified and accurate beliefs in that domain.5
We needn’t worry, then, that it would take some ‘miraculous coincidence’ for our
beliefs about metaphysical necessity to match the metaphysical facts simply because
natural selection didn’t hand us a ready-made faculty for doing metaphysics. It’s
enough if natural selection has given us general capacities we can develop and use,
with philosophical training and a little help from Kripke and Putnam, to grasp sound
arguments for conclusions about metaphysics. And similarly for truths in higher
mathematics and physics and, the ethical realist will now add, ethics. We don’t need
either scientifically dubious adaptations for tracking moral truths or improbable by-
product capacities that just happened to come specially attuned to them: it’s enough
if we’ve learned to use our capacities for critical reflection on our experience, and
our reasoning with normative concepts, in the context of traditions of moral inquiry,
to reflect accurately on how it’s good and right to live. Of course, the realist owes a
plausible metaphysical and epistemological account of how this works in the case of
ethics, and these quick remarks are obviously not meant to substitute for that. But
that theoretical burden is nothing new, and the point is that the evolutionary
considerations so far pose no special obstacle to the realist.

2 Are moral capacities specially problematic?

Defenders of the capacity etiology argument might respond as follows. It’s true that
we often use our evolved cognitive capacities in ways that go far beyond anything
natural selection designed them to do, discovering truths of types that had nothing to
do with the ancient biological origins of those capacities. Still, this is not the case
for the domain of moral beliefs and independent moral truths, if there are any.
Unlike in other domains of belief, when it comes to morality we’re just out of luck if
natural selection hasn’t given us ready-made capacities specially attuned to moral
truths; for we cannot now develop sound moral methodologies that would enable us
to track moral truths reliably, as we’ve done in so many other domains. So, the
thought goes, while 2.5 is indeed false, a similar claim limited to moral beliefs is
true, and that is sufficient for the debunking argument to go through.

5
We must also, of course, have enough freedom from any distorting evolutionary influences on our
psychology that we can exercise our cognitive capacities in the way suggested above. This will be taken
up in the discussion of Content Etiology arguments below, which addresses Street’s more central
argument. Note that while I am in the present section criticizing one of her objections to realism (i.e., her
argument that realists have no plausible story to tell about how we could have developed the ability to
track independent moral truths despite its not being an adaptation), I’m not claiming that she herself
endorses the Capacity Etiology Argument. In fact, given her own subjectivist constructivist view of
evaluative truth and her rejection of moral skepticism, she cannot plausibly suppose that the only way for
current exercises of evolved capacities to be non-accidentally and reliably truth-tracking in the moral
domain would be for natural selection to have made things that way. For although her evaluative truths
are constructions rooted in subjective states, these constructed truths were no more the concern of natural
selection than the realist’s independent moral truths.

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Now that would be a problem, but why believe even this more targeted version of
2.5? Perhaps the worry is a sense that in the other examples—from metaphysics,
math and physics—the reasoning deployed is in some way just an extension of a
broader sort of reasoning that our cognitive capacities were designed to be accurate
about, thus explaining its reliability. Facts about prime numbers may have had
nothing to do with the etiology of our mathematical capacities. But those capacities
were plausibly designed to yield accurate thoughts about numbers—for example, in
the course of deciding whether to fight or flee from a hostile tribe. And if we add
that we also evolved capacities for logical reasoning and conceptual sophistication,
it’s unsurprising that we can now draw on these capacities and apply them in
reflecting on numbers to reason accurately about prime numbers, eventually
discovering such arcane truths as that there are infinitely many primes. Similar
stories might be told for physics and metaphysics. But, the argument goes, the same
is not true for morality. Moral reasoning is not similarly an extension of any
reasoning our cognitive capacities were designed to do accurately. It’s just a sui
generis domain of emotion-laden thinking that, if favored by natural selection, was
favored not for accuracy but just for direct contributions to biological fitness. One
cannot, then, appeal to other domains such as math, science and metaphysics as
‘companions in guilt’ (cf. Joyce 2006, pp. 182–184).
The main difficulty with this line of response, however, is that it’s just not true
that moral reasoning cannot likewise be viewed as an extension of forms of
reasoning our capacities were designed to do accurately. At a formal level, we
employ the same logical and analytic abilities in moral reasoning as in other forms
of reasoning.6 And in terms of conceptual content, moral reflection and reasoning is
continuous with broader evaluative and normative thinking that our cognitive
capacities were plausibly designed to do accurately. Since so much of the discussion
in this area is breezily speculative, we may as well hop aboard and add that it was
likely important for our Pleistocene ancestors to understand the application of
evaluative concepts in connection with relevant standards. They needed to make
accurate evaluative judgments about good and bad dwelling places, or hunting
partners, fighters, and mushrooms, and related normative judgments such as that one
ought not to eat the little brown mushrooms or to fight with Big Oog. Moral
judgments obviously go beyond these sorts of things, but just as in the other cases,
they can be seen as an extension of such thinking. They still involve employing
evaluative and normative concepts in connection with standards and ends, though
now conceived as standards and ends defining what it is to live well all things
considered, rather than just narrow standards of edibility or safety.
This is undeniably a major cultural development, requiring abstract thought and
training to make the transition to moral judgments that might reliably track moral
truths. But that’s equally the case for the transition from counting hyenas or

6
Cf. Enoch (2010, p. 428): ‘‘Given a starting point of normative beliefs that are not too far-off,
presumably some reasoning mechanisms (and perhaps some other mechanisms as well) can get us
increasingly closer to the truth by eliminating inconsistencies, increasing overall coherence, eliminating
arbitrary distinctions, drawing analogies, ruling out initially justified beliefs whose justificatory status has
been defeated later, etc’’.

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estimating the path of a thrown rock to doing research on quantum electrodynamics

or modal metaphysics. All of these pursuits require conceptual and analytic
sophistication and the use of methodologies that take us far beyond the mental
exercises that figured into the evolutionary shaping of our capacities. It’s a striking
fact that we can do this so successfully—that the mental faculties that evolved by
helping Pleistocene hunter-gatherers out-reproduce their peers turn out to bring with
them the potentiality to penetrate truths about quantum non-locality or non-
Euclidean geometry.7 But given that this has happened, it’s hardly a greater stretch
to imagine that our evolved faculties also enable us, in the right cultural contexts, to
figure out that race-based voting laws or the stoning of rape victims, for example,
are unjust and cruel practices, which are not part of an all-things-considered good
way for a society to behave and ought to be eliminated.
We discover the evil of racist voting laws, for example, by gaining empirical
knowledge about the irrelevance of race to what matters to responsible voting, and
by reflecting on the significance of such facts in light of ongoing experience of
human life and the possibilities of good and harm it offers us, as part of forming a
conception of what it is for human beings to live well. Why should this sort of
intelligent extension of evolutionarily influenced evaluative judgment be thought
any more problematic in principle than parallel extensions in other domains?
Indeed, debunkers such as Street, who despite rejecting realism wish to save moral
knowledge by moving to a subjectivist constructivist account of moral truth,
presumably agree that such extensions are possible and afford us moral knowledge.
So their thought must just be that this is problematic if the moral facts are taken to
be objective or independent of our contingent desires or attitudes, as realists
maintain. But nothing about evolution considered so far supports any special worry
along those lines. The independence or objectivity of the goodness or badness of
potential partners as hunters, or of certain mushrooms as food, was no hindrance to
accurate evaluative judgment about them. Similarly, there is no reason so far why
the independence or objectivity of the badness of racist voting laws should be
thought to pose a special obstacle to our discovering that badness, at least as far as
evolutionary considerations are concerned.
Of course, there may well be special epistemic challenges to be met in
accounting for moral knowledge on a robustly realist model, as many have long
argued. But again the point is that considerations about the evolutionary origins
of basic capacities employed in moral judgment do not pose any obvious
additional obstacle. At most they impose a constraint on realists as we go forward
in developing a positive moral epistemology: any such account must at least
square with our best scientific understanding of the sorts of capacities evolution
gave us to work with, avoiding reliance on capacities we could not plausibly have
developed from such psychological materials. That is a useful result and may
pose an interesting challenge for some realists, but it falls far short of debunking
realism.

7
As Nagel (1986) has remarked, it’s not at all clear such a thing was inevitable or even likely.

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3 Content etiology arguments

At this point the line of objection will likely shift to worries about the etiology of the
content of our moral beliefs. It’s not just that natural selection has not designed our
cognitive capacities to track independent moral truths: the real problem stems from
what natural selection has done in the way of shaping the very content of our moral
concepts and beliefs. Our moral thinking, after all, proceeds from intuitive moral
starting points that are also used in scrutinizing other moral beliefs when we reflect.
But that means that unless our intuitive starting points are roughly accurate, we have
a garbage in/garbage out problem.8 And, the objection goes, we have every reason
to suspect that our starting points are not accurate (in realist terms), due to deep
evolutionary influences on our moral concepts and beliefs—influences that would,
again, have no particular tendency to make our beliefs track moral truths. So even if
there are independent moral truths, we have no reason to be confident we’re tracking
them in our moral thinking: more likely, we’re just reasoning our way to more
consistent garbage of one kind or another (by realist standards). Once this becomes
clear to us, we’re then either stuck with skepticism (we cannot have moral
knowledge even if there are independent moral truths) or we must drop the realist
standard of correctness for moral belief as alignment with independent moral truths.
This broad line of argument—call it the Content Etiology Argument—can be
developed in a few different ways. The most extreme begins by denying any
explanatory role to independent moral truths in accounting for our moral beliefs,
which latter are just the upshots of causal factors, such as evolutionary influences,
operating independently of the truth of the content of the beliefs. There are at least
two versions, which I’ll call the ‘Strong Explanatory Debunking Arguments’.

3.1 The strong explanatory debunking arguments

Consider first the Implausibly Lucky Coincidence Argument:

The implausibly lucky coincidence argument:
(1) Independent moral properties and truths play no role in the explanation
of our moral beliefs.
(2) If independent moral properties and truths play no role in the explanation
of our moral beliefs, then it would be an implausibly lucky coincidence
if our moral beliefs turned out to represent these independent moral
truths accurately.
(3) Thus, it would be an implausibly lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs
turned out to represent these independent moral truths accurately.
(4) If correctness for moral beliefs consists in accurately representing
independent moral truths, as the realist claims, then at least once we
become aware of 3, and in the absence of any independent confirmation
of the truth of our moral beliefs, whatever default justification we may
have had for our moral beliefs is thereby defeated.

8
Cf. Street (2006, p. 124), Schafer (2010, p. 475).

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(5) Therefore, if the realist is right in holding that correctness for moral
beliefs consists in accurately representing independent moral truths, then
we’ve lost our justification for our moral beliefs once we’ve become
aware of 3, lacking any independent means of confirming their truth:
realism saddles us with skepticism.9
The claim behind premise 1 is that there is plausibly a complete non-moral
genealogy for all moral beliefs in the following sense: any moral belief can be fully
explained—leaving out nothing of explanatory interest—entirely in terms of causal
factors operating according to principles that are insensitive to independent moral
properties or facts as such, even if they exist (Joyce 2006; Kitcher 2011). That is, we
were caused to have our moral beliefs by factors having nothing to do with
independent moral properties or facts: our moral beliefs were caused neither by such
properties or facts nor by our grasping evidential relations other facts bear to them,
as such, but simply by ‘morally blind’ forces of one kind or another. That’s the
thought, and if this is right, then there will be problems for the realist, as the
argument brings out.10
An example from Joyce (2006, p. 179) helps to illustrate the point. Suppose you
found out that your belief that Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo is entirely the
product of a pill someone slipped you, which causes such a belief to be formed,
completely independently of any historical facts; there’s also a pill that causes the
belief that he won, and you just happened to have been given the ‘lost’ pill. Surely
this should undermine your confidence in your belief that Napoleon lost the Battle
of Waterloo. For it would be a pure coincidence if your belief happened to match
the historical facts, which played no role in the etiology of your belief. But the same
holds for moral beliefs on a realist picture of the moral facts if 1 is true and our
moral beliefs are simply the products of causal forces that are blind to independent
moral properties and facts as such.
Before critiquing this argument, consider also a related variant:
The explanatory superfluity argument:

9
Note that by making the defeater turn not simply on 3 but on our awareness of 3, the argument clearly
applies even to epistemic internalists. Cf. Bedke (2009). Also, although the conclusion is here put in terms
of defeated justification for moral beliefs, one might also focus directly on the undermining of moral
knowledge by the element of coincidence (regardless of what is said about justification): either way, the
argument would show that moral realism leads to moral skepticism. It would thus be insufficient in
responding to the argument simply to try to save justification without addressing the further problems for
knowledge posed by coincidence here. See my critique of pure ‘‘third factor’’ approaches in FitzPatrick
(2014).
10
In fact, Joyce’s and Kitcher’s appeal to a complete non-moral genealogy for moral beliefs goes even
further than the claim in the text above, since it is not restricted to denying a role for independent moral
truths: their claim is that moral truths (independent or otherwise) play no role in the explanation of our
moral beliefs—at least unless the moral truths in question are reducible to the sorts of facts that enter into
the true causal explanations they posit. If they do not so reduce, then the more general version of the
argument would equally pose a threat to antirealists such as Street who wish to preserve moral
knowledge: for if her abstract, constructed moral truths are just as explanatorily marginalized with respect
to our moral beliefs as the realist’s independent truths are, then she will face the same coincidence worry.

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The Explanatory Superfluity Version begins with the same first premise but
then continues along a different track:
(1) Independent moral properties and truths play no role in the explanation
of our moral beliefs.
(2a) If independent moral truths play no role in the explanation of our moral
beliefs, then they are explanatorily superfluous.
(3a) Thus, independent moral truths are explanatorily superfluous.
(4a) If independent moral truths are explanatorily superfluous, then we should
not posit them—just as we don’t posit truths about witches, given a
complete and exhaustive genealogy of beliefs about witches that makes
no appeal to witch truths.
(5a) Therefore, we should at best remain agnostic about the existence of
independent moral truths, and thus also about whether any of our
particular moral judgments are true (at least by realist standards). We
should give up any claim to moral knowledge (at least on a realist
construal of it).11
Again, consider a parallel with Napoleon beliefs. Suppose you discovered that all
your beliefs about Napoleon, even regarding his very existence, were solely a
product of a pill that produces beliefs independently of any Napoleon facts: as Joyce
puts it, ‘‘without this pill you would never have formed any beliefs about Napoleon
at all’’ (Joyce 2006, p. 181). Surely you would then have to give up your beliefs
about Napoleon and at best remain agnostic about whether there are any (positive)
Napoleon facts at all. The claim, then, is that we’re in a similar position with respect
to our moral beliefs and moral truths, with various causal factors producing all our
moral beliefs independently of any moral facts.

3.2 Critique of the strong debunking arguments

Now notice that one could in principle run both of these arguments without any
appeal to evolution at all, if there were some independent support for premises 1 and
2. Someone might, for example, appeal simply to familiar psychological,
sociological and historical causes as determining all our moral beliefs independently
of any moral facts, with no mention of evolution.12 Still, many believe that
evolutionary considerations provide compelling new support for the first two
premises.

11
This way of running the argument comes from Joyce (2006, Chap. 6), though as noted in the previous
footnote, he goes even further, dropping the qualification ‘independent’ throughout. One assumption, of
course, is that the moral truths posited by the targeted views are not reducible to facts involved in the
‘non-moral’ genealogy of our beliefs (e.g., facts about natural selection history). If they were, then the
argument would not provide grounds for eliminating them from our ontology.
12
Bedke (2009), for example, presses a version of the Implausibly Lucky Coincidence argument that
appeals simply to causal determinism, physicalism about mental states, and causal closure of the physical,
though it is limited specifically to targeting forms of intuitionistic non-naturalist realism that deny any
causal efficacy for moral facts and properties.

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Joyce (2006, Chap. 6), for example, argues that natural selection gave us our
basic moral concepts—such as fairness, harm, cheating, guilt, generosity, loyalty,
etc.—along with dispositions to make certain moral judgments employing them.
These psychological adaptations then combine with cultural and other causal
influences to produce our moral beliefs. As always, the principles by which these
concepts and dispositions were bequeathed by natural selection had nothing to do
with independent moral truths: they were given to us not to help us form accurate
beliefs about moral truths, but simply to enhance the fitness of ancestral humans by
producing adaptive behaviors. Thus, our moral beliefs can all be explained entirely
by causal chains tracing back to evolutionary influences having nothing to do with
independent moral truths, which latter therefore play no role in the explanation of
our moral beliefs, thus giving us premise 1.
Now it should be admitted that some such debunking story is a possibility, and it
will naturally be attractive to those who have already rejected realism for other
reasons. But this is nothing new. We’ve always known that there are stories,
evolutionary or otherwise, according to which moral properties and facts play no
role in the etiology of our moral beliefs. The mere availability of some such story
does not by itself actually debunk the realist alternative: it simply provides a rival
account of our moral beliefs, which will succeed in its debunking ambitions only if
it is actually correct. Those attracted to it will of course cite virtues such as greater
parsimony (it explains our beliefs without having to appeal to real moral properties
and facts), and this may contribute to their own justification for believing it, given
the rest of their views and commitments. But this can hardly be expected to have
offensive force against realists. Greater parsimony is a theoretical virtue only where
the world is obligingly austere, and that is exactly what is at issue in this debate. The
realist’s position (at least for the realist I am defending) is precisely that the world
does contain objective values that figure crucially into our having at least some of
the moral beliefs we hold, in which case greater parsimony in explaining our beliefs
exclusively in other terms is not a virtue at all: it is just a misrepresentation.
Debunkers therefore cannot expect to gain ground against realism simply by
proposing a story that, if true, would cause problems for realism, and then claim that
simply because of greater parsimony we should all accept it as true and get on board
with the strong debunking arguments. They must instead make a positive and non-
question-begging case for the actual truth of their debunking story and so for
premise 1. The question, then, is whether that case has even really begun to be
made: does the scientific evidence concerning evolution really support such a strong
explanatory claim as premise 1 if we don’t supplement it with an implicit prior
rejection of realism to begin with? It is not hard to see, I think, that it does not, and
that the Strong Evolutionary Debunking Arguments just beg the question against
realism from the start.13
Let us grant that natural selection provided ancestral humans with moral concepts
and dispositions to employ them in fitness-enhancing judgments. What follows with

13
Cf. FitzPatrick (2008, 2011, 2014), for discussions of Street and Joyce related to the arguments that
follow.

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respect to our current moral judgments? Very little, in fact. First of all, as Railton
(2010) notes, paraphrasing Wittgenstein: there’s nothing preventing intelligent
creatures from using crude tools to make refined ones. Even if a crude version of the
concept of fairness, for example, first arose through natural selection operating on
hominin psychology, nothing prevents our having refined it in cultural contexts, as
we developed sophisticated reflective conceptions of fairness. And we can then use
our refined concepts to make judgments quite different from those that early humans
were evolutionarily shaped to make.
Most importantly, unless we have already rejected realism at the start, it remains
a wide open possibility that these current refined employments of moral concepts
often express moral truths, and that these judgments are not merely caused by
‘morally blind’ factors but are instead often guided by our recognition of the
relevant moral properties and facts as such, yielding moral knowledge. Nothing in
real science rules out this possibility, of course, since the sciences don’t even
address it. And the point is that if this is how things in fact turn out to be, then
independent moral properties and truths would indeed figure into the proper
explanation of at least many of our moral beliefs after all, in which case premise 1
would be false: we wouldn’t actually have a complete, true and fully adequate non-
moral genealogy of our moral beliefs, in the sense defined earlier.14
Joyce might object that while the realist picture is possible it would require a
highly unlikely coincidence: how convenient for the realist, he might complain, that
concepts originally given to us independently of any role in arriving at moral truths
just happen to be refinable into concepts we can use to grasp moral truths! But in
fact there is nothing far-fetched here. We should fully expect natural selection
operating on intelligent social creatures to give rise to proximate adaptive
psychological mechanisms concerned with promoting cooperation, social harmony
and stability (along with nastier ones for selective cheating, less friendly treatment
of outsiders, and so on). These social concerns, even if they evolved originally in the
service of genetic propagation, overlap significantly with the subject matter of
morality on any plausible account (cf. Copp 2008). So it’s no surprise that natural
selection might in this context give us basic versions of concepts such as fairness,
cheating, wrong, and guilt, that also turn out to be refinable into concepts that figure
into moral truths about proper human social relations. Given this overlap, there is no
reason to look askance at these concepts just because of their evolutionary origins. If
there is something wrong with our moral concepts, that will have to be shown by
independent arguments revealing them to be bad concepts, as in the case of the

14
Some defenders of realism, such as Enoch (2010, 2011) and Wielenberg (2010), have instead focused
on resisting premises 2 or 4a; indeed, they may feel compelled to accept premise 1 by a version of ethical
non-naturalism that insists that moral properties and facts are entirely causally inefficacious. I think this is
a mistake, and that realism probably cannot be salvaged if premise 1 is granted. I argue against such pure
‘‘third factor’’ or ‘‘pre-established harmony’’ approaches to saving realism in FitzPatrick (2014).
Fortunately, this isn’t a problem because as argued in this section, realists have no good reason to accept
premise 1 to begin with.

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concept of witch or vital force; it won’t be established just through generic claims
about evolutionary origins.15
I’ve claimed, then, that despite the evolutionary origins of crude versions of
moral concepts we might nonetheless employ refined concepts today to arrive at and
express moral knowledge. More specifically, on the realist picture I’m advocating,
we hold many of our moral beliefs for good reasons, recognized as such, and not
merely due to extraneous causes having nothing to do with the truth of the content
of the beliefs. These reasons are at least often the very things that make the beliefs
true, and it’s our grasping precisely that fact about them that explains our holding
these beliefs, just as with beliefs in other domains.16
It may help to consider a parallel with mundane, non-moral evaluative beliefs.
Suppose I have a computer that crashes frequently and runs slowly, and is therefore
a bad computer, as I correctly believe it to be. Why do I believe that it is a bad
computer? Not simply due to extraneous factors that cause me to have this
evaluative belief for reasons having nothing to do with its badness—at least not in
ordinary cases. Instead, if I’m competent and informed, I believe what I do because
I am aware both of its bad-making properties and of their bad-makingness: I see that
it runs slowly and crashes, and knowing about computers I understand that these are
bad-making properties in a computer, inconsistent with the standards of excellence
for computers; I therefore judge that this computer, by virtue of possessing such
properties, is a bad computer, and this judgment is based on these good reasons I am
prepared to give in defending it. In such a case, then, we may say that I believe the
computer is a bad computer because it is a bad computer and, being competent, I’ve
grasped that evaluative fact by grasping the reasons why it’s a bad computer, as
such. And that is to say that the evaluative properties and facts come straightfor-
wardly into the ordinary explanation of my evaluative beliefs in such cases.
Now the standards for moral excellence in connection with human beings and
action are obviously not fixed in the same ways that standards for artifacts are fixed,
but these background differences don’t vitiate the comparison I wish to draw here.
For it is entirely plausible for a realist to maintain that however exactly the moral
standards are fixed, the explanation of at least many of our moral beliefs, in ordinary
cases of moral knowledge, is structurally similar: we hold at least many of the moral
beliefs we do because they’re true and, being morally competent, we’ve grasped
that they’re true, by grasping the reasons why they’re true, as such. Indeed, this

15
The same is true for theological concepts. Perhaps the concept of the divine is a bad one that should be
discarded, but that cannot be shown just by arguing that it is an extension and refinement of a cruder
concept that originally arose for purely evolutionary reasons. Someone who believes in God today based
on an argument from cosmological fine tuning needn’t abandon that belief simply because he’s told that
our ancient ancestors believed in gods for reasons having nothing to do with theological facts.
16
I do not mean to imply that all good reasons for moral beliefs must be truth makers for those beliefs.
Some moral knowledge may well be testimonial (e.g., I know that X is on balance wrong because Bob
says it is and he is trustworthy about such things). But at least many of our moral beliefs had better be
based on making-reasons, if we are to have the kind of knowledge the realist I’m defending thinks we
have, and even cases of testimonial knowledge must trace back to something non-testimonial (e.g., Bob’s
knowledge of the reasons why X is wrong).

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seems central to our claim to have not merely justified true moral beliefs but
genuine moral understanding.
Consider, for example, our belief that it is seriously wrong to deprive girls of
educational and career opportunities simply because they are girls—something
practiced and sometimes enforced with brutal violence by the Pakistani Taliban.
Why do we believe this? Some will no doubt claim that a fully adequate and
exhaustive explanation of our belief can be given simply in terms of sociological,
psychological, or historical causes utterly insensitive to any moral properties or
facts. But no one with realist leanings who is serious about this moral belief should
accept such a claim. Instead, we do better to begin with first-personal explanation in
the case of a morally competent agent. If asked why we believe that such practices
are morally wrong we will cite reasons that we take to support the truth of the
belief, not merely psychological or sociological causes for it that operate
independently of such reasons. Such practices, we’ll point out, are unjust, cruel,
demeaning, and sexist, violating human rights and dignity by depriving these girls
of central human capabilities and goods, based on arbitrary considerations. We cite
these reasons as wrong-making features of these practices, against our background
view of the standards of moral excellence for human beings and action. And in
cases like this what is plausibly happening is that we are correctly grasping the
wrong-makingness of these factors, and this is precisely what leads to our moral
judgment: we believe the Talibanic practices to be wrong because they are wrong
and, being morally competent, we’ve recognized this evaluative fact by grasping the
reasons why they’re wrong, as such. And that is to say that the moral properties and
facts come straightforwardly into the explanation of such moral beliefs. So again, if
this is right then premise 1 is just false.
Let me be clear that my point here is not that this realist picture is obviously
correct: at noted earlier, premise 1 could be true, and all our moral beliefs might be
exhaustively explained simply by way of non-moral evolutionary, psychological
and sociological accounts. It’s possible, for all I’ve shown, that our reasons for
thinking Talibanic treatment of girls to be wrong are just post hoc rationalizations
for a belief we’ve been independently caused to have, and similarly for all our moral
beliefs: they might all conform to the social intuitionist model championed by Haidt
(2001). Or perhaps some fit that model and the rest conform to another debunking
model according to which our moral beliefs are held for the reasons we give, but
our taking those considerations to be good reasons for those beliefs (e.g., our taking
the cruelty of Talibanic practices to be wrong-making) is always just a mental state
caused independently of their actually being good reasons, so that the fact that
certain features are actually wrong-making has nothing to do with our believing that
they are. This is all possible, but the relevant question is whether the debunking
arguments have provided anyone who hasn’t already rejected realism for other
reasons with any good reason to believe it. I claim they have not.
It’s not that these debunking models have no application. In fact, realists
themselves might make liberal use of both of these debunking models to explain
all manner of false moral beliefs—as with psychological or sociological explana-
tions of what causes people to arrive at false moral beliefs about the immorality
of interracial marriage or of homosexuality, or the acceptability of gender

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discrimination.17 But the issue is whether such debunking models apply across the
board, to all our moral beliefs, as against the realist’s factive model for at least
many of our more informed, reflective moral beliefs. For that is what is needed to
support the claim in premise 1 that gets the strong debunking arguments going. And
there is simply no scientific support for such a sweeping claim, given that the
sciences don’t even engage with the possibility that some of our moral beliefs are
caused by our apprehension of moral facts as such. It’s just not true that ‘‘the
empirical data concerning human evolution’’ support anything approaching premise
1 (Joyce 2006, p. 188).
Of course, the debunking models would be compelling across the board if there
were no moral truths to be discovered, leaving us nothing but evolutionary,
psychological, sociological or other similar causal factors to appeal to in explaining
beliefs. But it would obviously be question-begging in the course of an argument
against realism just to deny from the start that there are moral truths. So if debunkers
are to avoid just begging the question against the realist they need to acknowledge the
open possibility that there are moral truths of the sort realists posit. And if it turns out
that there are, then there is every reason to expect that they do enter into the explanation
of at least many of our moral beliefs, in just the way I’ve suggested in the case of our
beliefs about the wrongness of Talibanic treatment of girls. And if those moral truths
are relevantly independent of our attitudes, as the realist claims—e.g., if the wrongness
of shooting girls to keep them from attending school is objective and independent of
our contingent attitudes toward it—then premise 1 is false.
What, then, is the ‘best explanation’ of our moral beliefs? My point has been that this
is itself just as controversial as the original issues that divide realists from antirealists.
Aspiring debunkers cannot get anywhere against realists by making claims about what
really explains, or best explains, our moral beliefs, where those claims are just question-
begging against the realist’s picture from the start. If we are to avoid such question-
begging, then we must recognize a plurality of plausible explanatory models and be open
to the possibility that our moral beliefs are a mixed bag, some to be explained using the
factive model I’ve advocated, others to be explained using non-factive causal models
such as Haidt’s or the other debunking model described earlier, and still others using
elements from both factive and debunking models.
For example, some moral beliefs, such as the belief that we should make present
sacrifices to help protect distant, future generations from the harmful effects of
climate change, are poor candidates for explanations appealing to evolutionary
influences, and if we think that they’re true and that we know why they’re true, then
the factive model is plausibly the best explanation. By contrast, in cases where
evolutionary influences provide an attractive theory of error for moral beliefs that
seem on reflection to be false, such as beliefs involving racism, sexism, or
xenophobia, some form of debunking evolutionary explanation is most plausible.
Finally, other beliefs may be overdetermined in the sense that they are to be
explained partly in terms of our having grasped moral truths and partly in terms of

17
Of course, some cases may be mixed, involving some combination of the realist’s model (for what the
agent got right on the way to the belief) and a debunking model (for what caused the belief to go wrong).
Thanks to Andrew Greenlee for this point.

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fortuitous evolutionary influences. This is an important point that is often

overlooked, leading many wrongly to suppose that the realist explanation of a
belief is somehow discredited if there is a plausible evolutionary story for why we
would tend to believe such a thing.
Our moral belief that we have an obligation to care for our children, for example,
may be influenced, and so partly explained, by feelings of parental love stemming from
a psychological adaptation that evolved for obvious Darwinian reasons. But it’s
entirely compatible with this that there’s also a genuine obligation to care for one’s
children, just as we think there is, and that we’ve grasped this fact through sound moral
reflection. So there may be overdetermination in many cases, where there are both
evolutionary influences on belief and also good reasons for holding those beliefs,
which we have understood, just as with other beliefs. Indeed, for reasons given earlier
we should expect there to be many cases of overlap between what evolutionary
influences might lead us to believe and what there is good reason to believe (though
there will also be plenty of divergence). This is not a problem for realists: as long as our
believing what is true is at least partly guided by our recognizing good reasons for the
belief, there will be no problem of merely lucky coincidence in our getting things right;
it is no liability if in some cases this moral recognition wasn’t necessary for the belief
because we would have held it anyway due to evolutionary or other causes.

3.3 Does weakening premise 1 save the debunking arguments?

These same considerations show why the aspiring debunker cannot simply weaken
the first premise to avoid the question-begging problem. Suppose premise 1 were
weakened to say only that:
(10 ) A purely non-moral, causal account of the relevant parts of the world is
sufficient to imply our having all the moral beliefs we have, without any
appeal at any point to independent moral truths.
Perhaps this is all some mean by speaking of there being a ‘‘complete non-moral
genealogy’’ of moral beliefs, which needn’t strictly deny that independent moral
truths may also often figure into the etiology of some of our moral beliefs: there
could be overdetermination in every case of true moral belief. This weakening
would thus technically avoid begging the question against realists in the way that
premise 1 did. Does this avoid the problems and save the debunking arguments?
It does not. First, no realist should accept even 1’: for if realism is true, and if our
moral beliefs are largely correct, then 1’ itself posits a truly remarkable coincidence:
somehow a motley set of causal factors, all operating according to principles utterly
insensitive to independent moral truths as such, just happen to have conspired to
push us in just the right ways as to cause us to hold all of the true moral beliefs we
hold. There is no plausibility in such a claim. As before, then, only those who have
already rejected realism for other reasons should find 1’ compelling. So weakening
the first premise in this way will not help the argument to gain traction against
anyone who hasn’t already accepted its antirealist conclusion.
Second, weakening 1 to 1’ takes the fangs out of the debunking argument. Since
the possibility of overdetermination is left open, in all such cases moral truths would

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still have an important explanatory role to play in a fully adequate account of our
moral beliefs that leaves out nothing of explanatory importance, and so they aren’t
explanatorily superfluous after all; nor again would there be any problem with lucky
coincidence, given the real work moral truths would still be doing in guiding our
beliefs. Some may claim that if sufficient non-moral explanations are available then
it is obviously better just to go with those and jettison moral factive explanations,
which simply ‘aren’t needed’. But again, while that is an understandable position for
someone who is already an antirealist to take, it’s hardly something a realist can be
expected to find compelling up front.
As a realist I claim that the moral, factive explanation of my belief that I have
obligations to my children is absolutely needed if we want a true and fully adequate
account of it. And I’m not going to be convinced otherwise without first being
convinced either that my reasons for thinking I have such obligations aren’t really
good ones after all or that somehow my taking them to be good reasons was in no
way responsive to their actually being good reasons, despite how things seem. But
debunkers have shown neither, and so they have not given realists any good reason
to accept the great cost of giving up our fundamental understanding of why we
believe what we do about what we take to be objective moral matters. If that is the
price for the greater parsimony they’re selling, then I for one am not buying.

3.4 A specifically evolutionary debunking argument

Finally, let me turn to a debunking argument (based most closely on Street 2006,
2008) that begins with an explicit appeal to evolutionary influences on the content
of our moral beliefs and does not strictly rely on either 1 or 10 :

(1*) ‘‘Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the

content of human evaluative attitudes,’’ so that ‘‘our system of evaluative
judgments is thoroughly saturated with evolutionary influence,’’ through
the pervasive shaping of our psychological dispositions by natural
selection in ancestral environments (Street 2006, pp. 109, 114).
(2*) This shaping would have been based simply on what promoted
differential reproductive success by ancestral humans, rather than on
successful tracking of independent moral truths.
(3*) It would therefore be an implausibly lucky coincidence if the large
subset of our moral beliefs that reflect evolutionary influence (which is
the bulk of them) turned out to represent independent moral truths
accurately.
(4*) And even if we also have some true moral beliefs arrived at independently
of evolutionary influences and due instead to our grasping of moral truths
as such (as the realist might claim), they’re swamped by beliefs shaped by
evolutionary influences and we have no way of sorting them out, given
our reliance on some moral beliefs in critically evaluating others.
(5*) Thus, if correctness for moral beliefs consists in accurately representing
independent moral truths, as the realist claims, then at least once we
become aware of 3* and 4*, and in the absence of any independent

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confirmation of the truth of our moral beliefs, whatever default

justification we may have had for our moral beliefs is thereby defeated.
(6*) Therefore, if the realist is right in holding that correctness for moral
beliefs consists in accurately representing independent moral truths, then
we’ve lost our justification for our moral beliefs once we’ve become
aware of 3* and 4*, lacking any independent means of confirming the
truth of our moral beliefs: realism saddles us with skepticism.18
This argument needn’t deny that any of our moral beliefs are due to our having
grasped independent moral truths as such, or insist that all of our moral beliefs can
be sufficiently explained without appeal at any point to such truths. Still, it remains
deeply problematic. To begin with, we once again have no compelling reason to
accept the very first premise, 1*, at least in any form strong enough to do the needed
work in a debunking argument.
Even if we grant that evolution gave our ancestors dispositions that influenced
the content of their judgments, nothing follows about how deeply or widely this
influence pervades our current moral beliefs. As we’ve seen, unless we have already
rejected moral realism, it remains an open possibility that at least many of our moral
beliefs—like many of our beliefs in other domains—have been arrived at quite
independently of evolutionary influences. Many of our moral beliefs may spring
from cumulative, ongoing experience of life and value, and on critical reflection on
this experience to discover moral truths. We may have come, for example, through a
wide variety of emotionally laden human interactions informed by decent moral
training, to grasp the dignity of persons and the tragedy of their being deprived of
basic human capabilities, and thus come to understand what is wrong with the
oppressive practices mentioned earlier, and so to have true moral beliefs about
them. The sciences cannot tell us how many of our beliefs fall into this category,
how many are overdetermined, and how many merely reflect blind evolutionary
influences. Everything depends on whether or to what extent we’ve been able to
engage with independent values in the course of our lives, informing our moral
beliefs with that ongoing evaluative experience—a matter about which the sciences
are silent. If we have done so, then there is no garbage in / garbage out problem: we
needn’t accept Street’s claim of pervasive evolutionary influence on our entire fund
of moral intuitions, or anything even close to that (Street 2006, p. 124).19
Again, it is not my purpose here to try to develop a positive realist account of
how this works: there could be many different versions depending on the details of

18
As noted earlier, instead of putting the conclusion in terms of defeated justification, one might instead
put it in terms of the undermining of moral knowledge by the element of coincidence involved, which
equally supports the conclusion about realism leading to skepticism.
19
Schafer (2010, pp. 474–475) correctly points out that it’s not enough, in answering Street’s arguments,
simply to appeal to our current capacities for reflection and reasoning: for such higher-level moral
cognition will not do much good if ‘‘the materials on which this reasoning and reflection operates’’ are so
thoroughly saturated with evolutionary influence that they are largely off base to begin with. My point,
however, is precisely that we are not saddled with this problem because we have no reason to grant Street
such a strong claim about the evolutionary etiology of nearly all of our moral intuitions to begin with:
many may instead spring from more recent encounters with value.

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the realist view. For the moment what matters is just that nothing about evolution
shows that no plausible account can be given: it remains an open possibility that
many of our moral beliefs have been guided by our apprehension of real values
through informed ethical experience and reflection, as I’ve suggested, so that at
most we have a challenge to realists to provide an account of how this works. This is
far from a debunking and is really nothing new, except insofar as there is the further
constraint mentioned earlier to ensure any positive account is consistent with what
we know about the raw materials we have had to work with thanks to evolution.20
Realists should therefore reject 1*, just as we did 1 and 10 . This is not to deny that
there were significant evolutionary influences on the moral belief-forming
dispositions of Pleistocene humans, or even that some such influences have affected
some current moral beliefs to some extent. That much should be granted, and to the
extent that natural selection did shape some of our current moral beliefs, it will
incidentally have pushed some of them in the right direction and others in the wrong
direction. This will involve a certain amount of distortion (e.g., tendencies toward
tribalism and xenophobia), as well as a certain amount of incidental positive
reinforcement (e.g., tendencies to care for our families and friends). But the
distortion here is just another example of an old problem: we’ve always known,
given the amount of moral disagreement, that in addition to whatever true moral
beliefs we have, there’s plenty of ‘noise’—false moral beliefs attributable to all
sorts of cultural, sociological and psychological factors. To be told that some of this
noise is also due to evolutionary influences is interesting but adds nothing really
new to the old problem of how we can have justified moral beliefs despite all the
noise.
There would, of course, be a special problem if we granted that the evolutionary
distortion has been overwhelming. But again, we needn’t do so, both because (i) the
science doesn’t tell us how pervasive the evolutionary influence on our current
beliefs is, and (ii) even where there is such influence we have no reason to suppose
it’s vastly more incidentally distorting than it is incidentally supporting, for reasons
already brought out in the response to Joyce.21 Perhaps debunkers think there’s
something about evolutionary noise that causes special problems: evolutionary
influence on our moral beliefs is somehow so distorting and difficult to expose that it
undermines our ability to develop and employ reflective techniques to home in on
independent moral truths—as claimed in 4*. That worry, however, is unfounded,

20
It’s worth noting that even if realism is false and there aren’t any independent moral truths at all,
there’s still little reason to accept 1*. An antirealist expressivist or an error theorist could just as plausibly
hold that our judgments are still often the result of innovative redeployments of our (evolved) faculties
rather than simply results of thinking along the ruts laid down for us by our evolutionary history. Indeed,
given the degree of variation in moral judgment, we have every reason to believe that such innovation has
been robust. Cf. Kahane (2011, p. 118).
21
As already noted, we should actually expect a significant amount of incidental pushing of our
evaluative tendencies in the right direction, given the social selection pressures on the psychologies of
ancestral humans. This point, which Copp (2008) calls the ‘‘quasi-tracking thesis,’’ is not the primary
response to Street’s dilemma on my view. But it’s an important secondary point to mitigate worries that
whatever evolutionary influence there has been is debilitating. I discuss this and related points in
FitzPatrick (2014).

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because the situation is actually the opposite. When it comes to evolutionary

distortion, the very same Darwinian considerations that raise these worries equally
tell us what to be on the lookout for.22 We might expect, for example, an
overemphasis on loyalty toward one’s in-group and underemphasis on duties toward
distant strangers; we might look for xenophobia, gender inequalities, obsession with
‘purity’, male control of female sexuality, hierarchical social structures, or
excessive conformity to local norms and traditions.
Moral beliefs along these lines can thus be flagged as potentially reflecting
evolutionary distortion and thus subjected to particular scrutiny, exactly as reflective
people have always done in the past, whatever the source of the distortion. If such
beliefs fail to stand up to critical scrutiny in open, informed moral discourse, we
may reject them and thereby make progress. Awareness of evolution may thus give
some people reason to rethink their commitment to blind loyalty to their clan or
ethnic group, for example, in combination with moral doubts raised by informed
scrutiny. But nothing about evolution gives us any serious reason to question our
knowledge that it is morally wrong to torment people with disabilities for
amusement, or to do nothing to address climate change—even if we take these to be
real, independent moral truths.

4 Conclusion

The primary lesson to take away from these debates is that as realists develop a
positive moral epistemology, they are constrained by the need to take seriously the
fact that natural selection, operating on principles having nothing to do with
independent moral truths, gave us the raw psychological materials that we are
somehow able now to develop, train, and deploy to arrive at moral knowledge. As
I’ve emphasized, this is not different in principle from what we find in other
domains. But depending on the details of the proposed realist moral epistemology
there may be some genuine challenges here, and this should be acknowledged.
There will be no special difficulty if ethical conclusions can all be derived simply
through intelligent reflection and reasoning, as with mathematical facts, or through
this together with empirical information, as with scientific facts. But if we think, as I
myself do, that emotions play a significant epistemic role in grasping ethical facts,
then we have a further theoretical commitment: we must hold that natural selection
happened also to provide us with the specific emotional raw materials necessary in
order for us to be able to train our emotional dispositions, in cultural contexts, to
become appropriately sensitive to independent moral properties and facts as such. If
proper appreciation of human dignity, for example, requires the right kinds of
emotional development and training, rather than just familiar extensions of
reasoning as in mathematics, then our ability to gain moral knowledge related to
human dignity depends on our having been given the emotional potentialities and
dispositions that were necessary for us to be able to develop characters capable of

22
Cf. FitzPatrick (2008) and Kahane (2011, p. 118).

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engaging with such moral properties as dignity. And the challenge some will no
doubt raise here is that this may seem just ‘too convenient’ to be plausible. Why
should natural selection operating on hunter gatherers, according to genetically
oriented principles indifferent to objective values as such, have given us emotional
raw materials that turn out to be capable of being developed in ways that put us in
touch with independent values of the sort posited by realists (especially in the case
of realists who take these values to be non-natural)? Aren’t we right back to the
problem of implausible coincidence?
This is an interesting challenge that needs to be taken seriously, and it has to do
specifically with our evolutionary background rather than being just an evolutionary
spin on more general challenges. Though I cannot spell this out here, I believe this
challenge can be met, partly along the same lines as the response to Joyce. It is also
important to emphasize both (i) how much work is done by our deliberate shaping
and training of our emotional capacities in the course of decent moral upbringing
(so that evolution needn’t have given us anything close to reliable dispositions from
the start) and (ii) the fact that had evolution given us very different basic emotional
potentialities the moral facts themselves would equally have been relevantly
different, so that there is no ‘miraculous coincidence’ that evolution gave us just the
right capacities needed to appreciate independent moral facts that would have
obtained even if we were emotionally very different creatures from what we are.23
In any case, the legitimate challenge that remains does not support the antirealist
conclusion ‘‘that things are good, valuable, and required ultimately because we take
them to be’’ (Street 2008, p. 225), and neither do any of the allegedly debunking
arguments we have examined

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Michael Bergmann, Selim Berker, Matthew Braddock, Earl Conee,
Andrew Greenlee, Patrick Kain, Marc Lange, Karl Schafer, Nico Silins, Brad Weslake, and audiences at
Princeton, Cornell, and the Eastern Division APA (2011), for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this
paper and related work.

References

Bedke, M. (2009). Intuitive non-naturalism meets cosmic coincidence. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,
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Recall that the independence of moral facts and properties refers only to their not being functions of
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altogether independent of facts about human nature, such as our fundamental emotional potentialities.

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