Abstract
G. E. Moore’s arguments for moral non-naturalism, moral intuitionism, and their pairing in his 1903 book Principia Ethica made the latter a revolutionary treatise in ethics with a perhaps unmatched legacy in metaethics, inadvertently spurring the search for metaethical alternatives to moral realism. The recent rise of evolutionary debunking arguments such as the famous one in Sharon Street’s 2006 paper A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value can be seen as an outgrowth of that search. I discuss a few objections to Street’s argument by two defenders of moral non-naturalism, finding that opting for either of the dilemma’s two horns offers potentially promising avenues for moral realists, however I tentatively conclude that Street’s argument poses a very intriguing and enduring challenge for moral realists and even more so for Moorean metaethicists.
Introduction
G. E. Moore’s revolutionary 1903 book Principia Ethica (henceforth: PE) has proved to be among the most influential 20th century treatises on ethics. He devotes its first four chapters to metaethics, developing his non-naturalism in moral semantics and in moral metaphysics and, less comprehensively, his intuitionism in moral epistemology.
He hoped his discussion of the non-analyticity of good, the autonomy-of-ethics thesis, the naturalistic fallacy, and the open question argument would impel many philosophers to abandon naturalist moral realism in favour of non-naturalist moral realism. However, Moore also faced the inadvertent surge of metaethical alternatives developed by non-cognitivists who took PE to undermine a position so obvious to Moore he did not even argue for it in PE: moral realism. Evolutionary debunkers arguing that the genealogy of our moral beliefsundermines them are likewise part of PE’s legacy.
Sharon Street’s seminal 2006 paper A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value constitutes one of the most influential evolutionary debunking arguments. Her Darwinian Dilemma (henceforth: DD) arguably poses a major challenge for all forms of moral realism. To get her DD going, some preliminary remarks are in order.
Street’s DD consists in moral realists having to opt for either of what she terms the first / second horn of her DD, both options seemingly being too epistemologically unattractive: Opting for the first horn, one denies any relation between a) evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and b) the attitude-independent evaluative truths posited by moral realism. The problem here is that this seems to lead to moral scepticism. Opting for the second horn, one affirms a relation between a) and b). The problem here is that the tracking account moral realists would have to give seems epistemically inferior to an adaptive link account making no recourse to attitude-independent evaluative truths favoured by Street.
Constituting a central sub-question of the compatibility of Moorean and evolutionary metaethics, what I explore in this paper is how PE’s metaethics could be defended against Street’s DD. This being merely a term paper, plus PE, DD and – considering this is a history of philosophy term paper– their relation requiring quite a bit of unpacking, I limit my discussion to a few arguments by two defenders of moral non-naturalism. Tomas Bogardus identifies in DD’s first horn an epistemic principle of nonaccidentality. Of the three inferences in his reconstruction of DD’s first horn, he argues the first to be limited in scope and the other two to be invalid.
William FitzPatrick objects to Street’s claim that the adaptive link account is more parsimonious than the tracking account. He is also more sympathetic than Street is to the byproduct hypothesis and to a related a companions in guilt argument.
I summarise rationalism in moral psychology and the byproduct hypothesis to be the two avenues for replying to Street discussed here I deem most promising but conjecture that Moorean metaethicists seem to face more challenges than other moral realists.
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