Evolutionary Naturalism and Moral Knowledge
Evolutionary Naturalism and Moral Knowledge
It is not clear that the resulting account of the origin and nature of human morality does full justice to its subject. For one thing, it is hard to see why anyone who accepts it is warranted in accepting moral realism—the view that there are objective, mind-independent moral facts that we sometimes get right in our moral beliefs. For it would appear that the human moral sense and the moral beliefs that arise from it are ultimately the result of natural selection, and their value is thus found in the adaptive behavior they encourage. But then it seems that the processes responsible for our having the moral beliefs that we do are ultimately fitness aimed rather than truth aimed. This is to say that in such a case the best explanation for our having the moral beliefs we do makes no essential reference to their being true.
If we have the moral beliefs we do because of the fitness conferred by the resulting behavior, then it appears that we would have had those beliefs whether or not they were true. Some writers have taken this to imply that ethics is “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate.”5 This suggests that there are no objective moral facts, though we have been programmed to believe in them. A more modest conclusion might be that we are not in a position to know whether there are such facts because our moral beliefs are undercut by the Darwinian story of their genesis. This is because that story makes no essential reference to any such alleged facts. Thus, our moral beliefs are without warrant. But if our moral beliefs are unwarranted, then there can be no such thing as moral knowledge. And this amounts to moral skepticism.
If the argument developed here succeeds, its significance is in its implications for the naturalist, who maintains that reality is exhausted by the kinds of things that may, in principle, be the study of the empirical sciences. For the naturalist's wagon is hitched to the Darwinian star. Richard Dawkins was recently seen sporting a T-shirt that read, “Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth, the Only Game in Town.” Perhaps Dawkins's shirt reflects his more careful comment elsewhere that, “although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”6 Before Darwin the inference to Paley's Watchmaker seemed natural, if not inevitable, given a world filled with things “that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”7 Naturalism without Darwinism is a worldview at a loss for explanation. Further, to appeal to natural selection to explain libidos and incisors but to withhold such an explanation for human moral psychology is an untenable position. Moral behavior is not the sort of thing likely to be overlooked by natural selection because of the important role it plays in survival and reproductive success.8 But if naturalism is committed to Darwinism, and Darwinism implies moral skepticism, then naturalism is committed to moral skepticism.