Theistic Resources
13
Moral Knowledge
So far we have considered matters of moral ontology, specifically, issues of the moral good and the right. Prominently included when discussing values generally was consideration of human value in particular. Here we shift the focus to matters of moral epistemology, for another variant of the moral argument can come from this direction too. Earlier we distinguished the ontological points we were emphasizing from epistemological ones, but here we direct our gaze to the matter of moral knowledge. There’s a variety of ways to approach this, but we will confine our attention mainly to debunking objections against moral knowledge and to the way that theism contains resources to evade their force.1
Evolutionary Ethics
That a substantial challenge to ethics might come from the arena of evolution is ironic in light of the soaring confidence with which many adherents of evolution have held that evolutionary ethics is the best way to understand the import of morality. Many thinkers today still echo great trust in evolutionary ethics to explicate the meaning, content, and justification of ethics, but some of the more rhetorically compelling illustrations of such unflagging confidence hail from Darwin’s own Victorian age.
The more contemporary E. O. Wilson, endorser of “biologicizing” ethics, counsels replacing philosophers with scientists to adjudicate moral disagreements and answer the vexed questions of ethics. His towering confidence in reason and science to curb human aggression and move humanity into ever greater enlightenment led some to respond with more than a modicum of incredulity at his unwavering optimism after the plethora of horrific atrocities to which the twentieth century has borne witness.
Thus the irony: Evolution might be suggested not to help the cause of ethics, but to hurt it. From some of the more unpalatable implications of social Darwinism to the eugenics movements of the twentieth century, it takes little imagination to envision how at least certain rhetoric inspired by Darwinian thought can yield unseemly fruit. This historical and recurring debate among evolutionists is importantly revelatory. The predominantly empirical approach of evolutionary ethicists invariably leads to an impasse, junctures at which the evidence to be adduced to aid us in filling in the substantive content of ethics is genuinely ambiguous. Is there a normative interpretation of evolution when it comes to deriving ethical principles? Even if there is, what is it? Tennyson’s nature red in tooth and claw—cut-throat, scorched-earth competition of the survival of the fittest where the marginalized and oppressed invariably fall through the cracks and are rightly destined to suffer their fate? Or a world in which cooperation, empathy, and prosociality win the day, or something in between such stark alternatives? Arguably there is no shortage of either of these phenomena in nature.
It is genuinely challenging to avoid the appearance of evolutionary ethics being rather Janus-faced, projecting quite different pictures of ethics, and which picture is privileged easily comes from the eye of the beholder. This tension and ongoing dialogue among evolutionists resides at the heart of this chapter because it broaches the fundamental question of where adhering to evolutionary thought, and assigning to it a sort of primacy, will lead. It is not always as obvious as some think.
To answer whether we have good reason to think that we have moral knowledge, we wish to consider an important objection to this idea of moral knowledge from the arena of evolution. Then, in just a brief exploratory way, we will consider whether and how theism might inform the discussion, addressing those objections with its distinctive resources, thus bolstering our confidence that we possess moral knowledge after all.
Moral Justification
To say that we know a proposition is to say at least three things: First, we believe the proposition, and though there is much to say about what belief consists in, let us put that to the side for now. Second, the proposition is in fact true, typically by corresponding with the way reality actually is. We cannot know something false. Of course, we can know that something is false, like twice two is five; but we cannot know that twice two is five. And third, we need to add something to true beliefs that renders them items of knowledge. Some call this additional ingredient justification; others call it warrant. For now, let us call it justification, by which we mean something like sufficient evidence.
For knowledge to be distinctively moral is to delimit the scope of its content. Since morality involves questions of values and principles of conduct—good and bad, right and wrong, vice and virtue—moral knowledge claims might look like this: “Lying for purposes of self-aggrandizement is wrong.” “Torturing children for the sheer fun of it is morally evil.” “Integrity is a laudable virtue.” Judging that we know such propositions, then, and to be correct in our claim, (1) we have to believe them, (2) they have to be true, and (3) we have to be adequately justified in believing them.
We want to focus our attention on the third requirement of moral knowledge—namely, the matter of justification. Legitimate moral knowledge claims must feature propositions adequately evidenced, sufficiently justified to believe. Are we adequately justified to believe in at least some of our moral judgments? Obviously not every knee-jerk and spontaneous moral assessment we make is well evidenced and sufficiently thoughtful, perhaps particularly on deeply vexed and complex moral questions involving a conflict of moral intuitions. But what about what seem to be eminently clear and central moral beliefs that are practically nonnegotiable? It is wrong to torture children for fun, for example. Are we adequately justified to believe such a proposition as that? (Recall our discussion of the nonnihilist criterion for moral realism in part 1.)
To avoid biting off more than we can chew, assume (for purposes of discussion) that some such moral propositions are true. If they are all false, we clearly cannot have knowledge of them, so game over. But even if some moral claims are true, recall that this is only one of the three conditions that moral knowledge calls for. We have to believe the proposition, the proposition has to be true, and we need to be justified in believing it. What case, then, can be made for such justification? Here we will briefly touch on three attempts.
Deliberative Indispensability
First, David Enoch makes a case for the justification of moral beliefs in terms of what he dubs their “deliberative indispensability.”2 The basic idea is this: Just as something like various inferential patterns—such as abductive inferences to the best explanation—are necessary for our theoretical reasoning, likewise objectivity about the norms of practical reasoning seems ineliminable from our practical deliberation. When engaged in ethical deliberation, for example, we are aiming to get things right, to decide what makes best sense.
The guiding idea is that the similar phenomenology of theoretical and practical reasoning reveals that they share a great deal in common. They are both trying to get to a fact of the matter. At least sometimes, this effort unavoidably makes appeal to one’s own desires. Allowing oneself to settle a deliberation by reference to a desire commits one to the normative judgment that the relevant desire makes the corresponding action the one that makes sense. This bespeaks commitment to normative truth at least of a sort.
This, though, as Angus Ritchie notes, is not yet enough to show a need for objective moral facts. Why think these facts are at least on occasion needed? Well, arguably it is this question of justification that shows itself to be an especially obstinate consideration when it comes to deliberating on our desires. “It is pretty implausible to claim,” Ritchie puts it, “that the only thing I ever do when reflecting on my desires is to discern my own all-things-considered desire. My deliberation also involves considering whether my desires are excessively self-centred or shallow, and how they ought to be weighed against the desires and needs of others. It looks as if I am trying to get something right, and trying to revise my desires in the light of the fact of the matter about what is or is not right.”3
Still, as Ritchie recognizes, there could be objective norms of practical reasoning without such norms being distinctively moral, but at the least, for now, we can say that if we were to reduce all of our moral judgments to sentiments, preferences, and conventions, and regard none of them as robustly objective moral claims, it could not help but affect our first-order moral attitudes. Ronald Dworkin captures this insight when he writes, using the example of abortion, “The claim that abortion is objectively wrong seems equivalent . . . to ordinary discourse, to . . . [the claim] that abortion would still be wrong even if no one thought it was. . . . I mean that abortion is just plain wrong, not wrong only because people think it is.”4
Basic Beliefs
Some might suggest that so far this is less about justification than simply moral realism.5 So another tactic or strategy to account for moral justification is this: Many epistemologists, following a modified foundationalist model of knowledge, suggest that there are certain beliefs that rightly function as the foundation for the rest of our knowledge. These foundational beliefs can be called basic beliefs, which are noninferential, which is to say that we do not infer them on the basis of other beliefs. Beliefs we do thus infer from other beliefs are in our superstructure of beliefs, but the foundational or basic beliefs are known more directly, without the need for discursive inference.
On a classical model of foundationalism, such basic beliefs are self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible; they do not lack justification, but their justification does not come from other beliefs. Suppose I see a cloud in the sky. I am justified to believe it and may well know it, not because I am making an inference (about the reliability of my senses, for example) but simply because the belief was formed within me in the right sort of way.6 A properly basic belief, then, is a basic belief that is formed in some such way, such that it is both noninferential and properly justified or warranted.
So what does this have to do with our axiomatic moral beliefs? When epistemologists found reasons to alter foundationalism from a classical model to a modified one—largely to avoid the problem of self-referential incoherence—they opened the door to a more expansive range of propositions to qualify as properly basic. And among such properly basic beliefs may well be something like the moral convictions we’ve described. After all, such commitments seem to be about as sure as any of our other beliefs, and in fact we are hard-pressed to identify yet more basic beliefs by which to ground our most central and obvious moral convictions. So arguably we have good reasons to accept, say, the wrongness of torturing children for the fun of it; such a proposition may well qualify as a properly basic belief. As Reid might say, we are more inclined to argue from such a proposition than to argue to it. Recognition of a need for foundational convictions to serve at the base of our knowledge is a point that has resonances with both Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and Lewis’s reflections in The Abolition of Man.7
Phenomenal Conservatism
Third, consider what some recent epistemologists have called “phenomenal conservatism,” the view that if it seems to someone S that p is true, then S is prima facie justified in believing that p. Phenomenal conservatives nominalize how it seems to S as S’s “seemings,” which refers to experienced mental states with propositional content and a distinct phenomenal character.8 Seemings, like beliefs, have propositional content in that, just as S may believe that p, so it may seem to S that p. But whereas beliefs are true or false and are typically corrigible, seemings are veridical or nonveridical and uniformly incorrigible. Moreover, seemings have a forceful phenomenal character: They have a sort of felt veridicality that inclines us to believe their propositional content.9 Seemings are thus causally and epistemically prior to beliefs, providing support for beliefs.
Given phenomenal conservatism, evidence comes cheap, so that the evidentialist demand for evidence as a necessary condition of epistemic justification is easy to satisfy. For as long as it seems to S that p, and S has no defeater of how things seem, S has adequate supporting evidence to believe that p. The application to our moral beliefs is obvious. In moral experience, we experience seemings with moral propositional content (e.g., “It is wrong to torture a child for fun”). In the absence of some defeater, we are arguably justified in holding such a moral belief. The belief remains entitled to its default status.
In sum, considerations concerning deliberative indispensability, proper basicality, and phenomenal conservatism can, to a degree individually but especially severally, plausibly be thought to help supply justification for at least some of our moral judgments. Combined with objective truth and belief, this would be enough to make moral knowledge possible. But this all depends on the absence of defeaters, especially defeaters for our justification, either rebutting or undercutting ones.10
Evolution
An important potential defeater is evolutionary theory. To begin with, what is it we are getting at when we refer to evolution? In Where the Conflict Really Lies, philosopher Alvin Plantinga helpfully illuminates this matter by drawing a few distinctions.
Meaning of Evolution
He identifies a cluster of ideas often associated with evolution: (1) the ancient earth thesis, (2) the progress thesis (life has progressed from relatively simple to relatively complex forms), (3) the thesis of descent with modification, (4) the common ancestry thesis, (5) the claim that there is a naturalistic mechanism driving this process of descent with modification (the most popular candidate is natural selection operating on random genetic mutation), and (6) the naturalistic origins thesis (that life itself developed from nonliving matter without any special creative activity of God but just by virtue of processes described by the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry).
Plantinga employs the locution “evolution” to denote the first four of these theses and “Darwinism” to include the added commitment to natural selection as the underlying mechanism of evolution. The final thesis, the naturalistic origins thesis, he notes, is not really part of the theory of evolution. The notion of evolution as an unguided process, in other words, is what he dubs a “theological add-on.”11
Do not the random genetic mutations on which natural selection is predicated rule out the notion that they could be caused by God? In reply, Plantinga argues that randomness as construed by contemporary biologists does not have the implication of mere chance. He quotes Elliott Sober, for example, an eminent philosopher of biology, who says that there is no physical mechanism that detects which mutations would be beneficial and causes those mutations to occur.12 Their being random in that sense, Plantinga argues, would be compatible with their being directed (caused by God, for example).
Plantinga is of the view that theistic belief is consistent with the claims of evolution and even Darwinism but not of the sixth thesis that the process of evolution is unguided—the idea that no personal agent, not even God, has guided, directed, orchestrated, or shaped it.13 Naturalism says more than atheism, but since it entails atheism, it would preclude the process of evolution from being guided. Such an assumption goes beyond evolution and Darwinism and is an ambitious claim about the nature of reality. Merely to build or bake it into one’s conception of evolution is an unprincipled maneuver.
The naturalistic origins thesis, truth be told, is the likely source of much resistance to evolution by those theists who buy into the misguided notion that evolution commits them to saying that God had nothing to do with the process of human development. To such conjectures they are understandably averse. Plantinga rightly rejects this construal of evolution as entailing an unguided process, opting instead for the choice of leaving as an open question whether the evolutionary process was guided, a matter quite relevant to our assessment of the debunking challenge to morality.
So let us proceed on the assumption that evolution involves an old earth, progress, descent with modification, common ancestry, and a naturalistic mechanism operating on random mutation. The naturalistic origins thesis is less a function of evolution than a naturalistic supplement to evolution. Such an origins thesis reveals a juncture where discussion has subtly shifted from science to scientism and from evolution alone to something like the conjunction of evolution and naturalism.
Evolutionary Debunking Argument
On the assumption of something like Darwinian evolution, then, the question becomes, Does such a picture provide reasons to cast moral realism or moral knowledge in doubt? Some have argued that the answer is yes, advancing evolutionary debunking arguments (or EDAs) to make their case. Expressed in discursive format, EDAs generally look something like this:
1. Darwinian forces have had a pervasive influence on our moral beliefs [empirical premise].
2. If 1, then our moral beliefs have greatly diminished epistemic status or are completely debunked [epistemic premise].
3. So, our moral beliefs have greatly diminished epistemic status or are completely debunked.14
Before looking at a few salient examples of EDAs, allow us to say a word about the target of such arguments.
One way to effect the transition from an undercutting defeater against moral knowledge to a rebutting claim against substantive moral metaphysics is via a redundancy claim, which has analogies outside of ethics. In the philosophy of mathematics, for example, anti-Platonists try to defeat indispensability arguments for numbers by arguing that we can explain our use of number words and concepts without commitment to numbers, so we can trim our ontology and exclude numbers. Or in philosophy of mind, physicalists like Ted Honderich and Jaegwon Kim try to show that an analysis of behavior shows there is no need or room to postulate distinctively mental states with their own causal power: They are causally effete and thus redundant riders, because physical events do all the work that needs doing. Parsimony then gets us physicalism—or something in its close vicinity.
What an evolutionary naturalist debunker opposed to moral realism might say is that if our moral feelings and judgments can be fully explained without appeal to moral values, then those values are redundant and can be excised from our ontology. Nietzsche’s view was along these lines: Looking out on the world described by Darwinian materialism, he could discern no moral facts, and he offered an account of our moral judgments that does not require there to be any moral facts. If his account is plausible—that we are offering interpretations or imposing moral constructs on the world, and we can explain the origin of moral sentiments in terms of instincts oriented to our survival alone—then it might be claimed that this shows moral facts to be dispensable, eliminable from our ontology.
If we can fully explain why we make moral judgments without appeal to moral values, then they are out of a job in our ontology. This seems to be the way hard-nosed materialists see things. They might agree it is still useful to view people from a “moral stance,” that it is instrumentally useful to treat people as if they are moral beings, while maintaining that this is a useful fiction.15 But here we begin to get into specific formulations of EDAs, so let us turn now to a brief review of the major debunkers. For present purposes it will suffice to focus on two in particular: Michael Ruse and Sharon Street.
The Empirical Premise
Ruse’s 1986 Taking Darwin Seriously presents an account of how Darwinian evolution bears on epistemology and ethics, and its last chapter offers his debunking account. In terms of the empirical premise, Ruse, while rejecting group selection, cites kin selection and reciprocity as the two main ways in which to account for helping and cooperative behavior.16 He lauds kin selection in particular as one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century biology. Ruse points in particular to primatologist Frans de Waal’s study of primates to demonstrate their resemblance to human morality.
De Waal’s findings provide just the sort of evidence that one like Ruse adduces to bolster the empirical (or causal) premise. Ruse is not insistent that all our behavior is controlled by reciprocity or kin selection but is instead inquiring “whether we have innate tendencies or dispositions inclining us to social thoughts and actions, which later would improve our reproductive chances.”17 Darwinian forces, he is convinced, are responsible for our basic moral inclinations, even though culture still plays a role in developing them.18 He likens this to a skeleton (our biology) and flesh (culture), while he leaves “relatively unexplored the ways in which cultures, under the influence of biology, actually develop.”19
Even more than Ruse, Sharon Street has garnered the most attention of all as a debunker. She begins with our evaluative judgments and works backward. Specifically, she posits that certain kinds of evaluative judgments, such as endangering one’s own survival and causing harm to one’s own kin, would have a very negative impact on one’s success at survival and reproduction. Meanwhile, other kinds of evaluative judgments, such as promoting one’s own survival and caring for one’s own offspring, would have a correspondingly positive impact on survival and reproductive success.20 She argues that the fact that so many of our evaluative judgments correspond to what promotes reproductive success, and the absence of judgments which have the opposite tendency, is evidence “in favor of the view that natural selection has had a tremendous influence on that content.”21
Like others, Street considers the observable behavior of many nonhuman species, particularly the higher primates, to be additional evidence of the influence of evolutionary forces on our evaluative tendencies. She concludes, “We may view many of our evaluative judgments as conscious, reflective endorsements of more basic evaluative tendencies that we share with other animals.”22 However, she argues that the influence of evolutionary forces on our evaluative judgments is indirect in shaping our basic evaluative tendencies.23 Other factors can and do influence the judgments that we actually make, including the crucial and sui generis influence of rational reflection that must also be taken into account.24
Still, in setting the stage for her debunking argument, Street maintains that the influence of evolutionary forces on our evaluative judgments is pervasive through the basic underlying tendencies that we have inherited from our evolutionary past. She also argues that the “truth of some account very roughly along these lines is all that is required for the Darwinian Dilemma to get off the ground,” which will be explained more fully below.25
The Only Etiology in Town
Ruse and Street both seem to gesture toward this nonnegotiable fact: It is inevitable that morality, whatever it exactly amounts to, must invariably find its origin in our evolutionary story. Of that they seem sure, although they admit that the specific and precise mechanisms for how this played out remain a matter of some conjecture, so a strong dose of provisionality is appropriate on that score. Their tentativeness on the specifics, however, does not discourage or dissuade them from using the empirical premise with confidence in their debunking arguments. The reason for the presumption seems to be an assumption that merely possible fine-grained accounts of evolutionary genealogies of morality are enough.
The specific details of how evolution produces the human moral sense largely do not matter to the debunkers because they are interested less in showing how evolution accomplished such a feat than simply that it could have. Philip Kitcher likely speaks for all of them in his characterization of the possibility of an evolutionary genealogy of morality: “The principal reason for taking the possibility seriously lies in the difficulty of thinking of serious rivals.”26 In the introduction to The Ethical Project, Kitcher adds that his position on the evolution of ethics allows only such novel entities that can be justified through accepted methods of rigorous inquiry. “Appeals to divine will, to a realm of values, to faculties of ethical perception and ‘pure practical reason,’ have to go.”27
The main point to emphasize for now is that the reason the debunkers seem sanguine in their contentment with the mere possibility of naturalistic explanations and origins of morality is that there is simply no other operative game in town. Hence, possibilities, even remote ones, that comport with the only legitimate contender—naturalism and Darwinism—are enough to endorse the empirical premise. Getting the specific details of the causal premise right is simply not necessary. In a particularly telling passage, Ruse writes, “We know that evolution occurred, that it was Darwinian in nature, and that humans are part of the natural order. Therefore, in something as important to us as our morality, there is a strong presumption that natural selection will have had a causal influence. Such a presumption may ultimately prove wrong. I doubt anyone expects a definitive case. Nevertheless, we go into our enquiry with a great deal of positive background knowledge.”28
Such debunkers are all assuming not just evolution but evolution and naturalism. As such they import the naturalistic origins thesis into their analysis, and by their own admission they think that naturalists like themselves are hard-pressed to hold on to moral realism and any moral knowledge predicated on such realism. Part of what Ruse considers our positive background knowledge is that nothing like theism is relevant to this discussion, and nothing like divine guidance of the process of evolution is a realistic possibility. At least prima facie, this attitude makes it difficult indeed for naturalists to evade the force of the empirical premise.
The Epistemic Premise
Let us now turn our attention to the epistemic premise, which says that if Darwinian forces have indeed had a pervasive influence on our moral beliefs, then our moral beliefs have greatly diminished epistemic status or are completely debunked. Ruse thinks that the import of the challenge is that we should reject moral objectivism in favor of moral subjectivism. On his view, vice and virtue are relevantly like secondary properties, as David Hume thought.29 The mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, so that the subjective feelings that result from the contemplation of some act are mistaken for perceptions of objective properties of the act itself. C. S. Lewis similarly said that if naturalism is true and human moral beliefs are ultimately the product of our evolution, then the transcendental pretensions of morality are exposed for a sham.
Ruse recognizes that the traditional concern with subjectivism is that it lacks authority to be prescriptively binding. Morality is thought to be more objective than that. Ruse’s answer is that the Darwinian explanation handles this issue not by explaining how morality actually does have binding authority but rather by explaining why there is this misleading appearance. Ruse writes, “The point about morality (says the Darwinian) is that it is an adaptation to get us to go beyond regular wishes, desires, and fears, and to interact socially with people. How does it get us to do this? By filling us full of thoughts about obligations and duties, and so forth. And the key to what is going on is that we are then moved to action, precisely because we think morality is something laid upon us.”30 His argument is that Darwinism accounts for the true nature of our moral experience by revealing to us that we have previously been mistaken about it.
Street distinguishes between basic evaluative tendencies and full-fledged evaluative judgments, arguing that relentless selective pressure has had a direct and tremendous influence on our basic evaluative tendencies and these, in turn, have had a major—though not necessarily overriding—indirect effect on our actual moral beliefs or full-fledged evaluative judgments. All our basic moral judgments are formed within an evolutionary framework, which leaves room for reason, but only as a slave of the passions. Hers is a Humean constructivism, as we saw earlier in the book.
In Street’s formulation, there is a dilemma for the value realist based on whether there is a relation between evolutionary forces, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths affirmed by the realist, on the other.31 Starting with the assumption that there are attitude-independent, evaluative truths, the first horn in Street’s dilemma says that there is no relation between these truths and evolutionary forces, while the second horn says that there is. Either way, argues Street, the realist is stuck in the unfortunate position of having no reliable knowledge of the independent evaluative truths. Given this predicament, Street argues that we are forced to give up realism altogether and adopt antirealism with respect to evaluative truths.32
It is telling that the best-known proponents of EDAs, naturalists all, take their import to be a rejection of moral realism. Ruse becomes a moral subjectivist, and Street adopts a version of constructivism.33 They abandon the notion that morality is objectively (robustly) true, and thus knowledge of such truths becomes impossible. There are, of course, plenty of naturalist-leaning thinkers who want to argue that the evolutionary debunking case against moral realism is not decisive, but because of the delimited scope of our project we are not going to discuss those defenses of secular moral realism here. We are rather going to spend the rest of this chapter on the matter of whether theism—supernaturalism, a theistic hypothesis—might help defuse debunking concerns.
Might Theism Help?
Erik Wielenberg has noted that more work by theists addressing debunking objections should be done, and this is our intent here. By theism, again, is meant belief in a self-subsistent, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and personal deity. Note that the arguments so far considered have been predicated on the conviction that Darwinism gives an “entire analysis” of our moral sentiments, such that nothing more is needed. But the insight of Plantinga’s earlier point is that this is to import into Darwinism an absence of teleology, which is underdetermined by Darwinism. Ruse and Street (and Joyce) are smuggling in their naturalistic convictions that a theist would have grounds for resisting.
If there are principled grounds for resisting aspects of EDAs, it may go to show that theism provides an effective answer to debunking. This is not enough, by itself, to make the moral argument for God, but if, ultimately, the theistic answer is more persuasive than the naturalistic one, then that would strengthen a moral case for God’s existence to at least some degree. For now, let us simply ask, What are some of the resources from theism that might help answer the debunking challenge?
Four Variants of Debunking
To help structure our discussion, let us review four variants of debunking by quickly enumerating and articulating them using Paul Rezkalla’s succinct and perspicacious taxonomy.34 First, there is the cosmic coincidence issue: Evolutionary pressures are thought to distort our moral beliefs, not enable them to discriminate between what is true and what is not. Second, the truth and inclusive fitness problem: Truth-tracking is thought to be incidental to fitness-tracking; perhaps sometimes they overlap, but such cases are rare. To illustrate such challenges, Street uses the analogy of someone trying to sail to Bermuda by simply allowing the wind and waves to guide their vessel. Very rarely, the boat may end up in Bermuda, but most of the time that obviously will not happen. Likewise with our moral judgments shaped by the evolutionary process privileging fitness.
Third, a justification problem: If our beliefs are formed by an unreliable process, they lack justification or warrant; and if our moral beliefs are formed in this way, we lack moral knowledge—even if moral realism is true. And fourth, a contingency problem: Had evolution played out differently, morality for us could look quite different from how it does. Sometimes this is called the problem of Darwinian counterfactuals, because this very question was raised by Darwin himself when he imagined this scenario: “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brother, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.”35
To tackle such objections from a supernatural perspective, it bears emphasis that the central-most relevant feature of a theistic picture that gets added to the mix is a rejection of the natural origins thesis—and a corresponding affirmation that the process of evolution could have been directed by God after all and, as a result, be more goal- or telos-driven than would otherwise be plausible to believe. This directedness of the process of evolution may well prove to be just what is needed to avoid the problems of debunking.
Regarding the cosmic coincidence of moral truth and our moral judgments, evolution need not have been a purposeless process in which such coincidence or correspondence was a matter of infinitesimal likelihood. God’s purposeful control over evolutionary processes could ensure the intended destination be achieved. Regarding truth and inclusive fitness, theistic evolution allows for a teleological underpinning of the evolutionary story that permits and is even conducive to the tracking hypothesis.
As for the contingency problem, teleology can continue to help a great deal. A purposive account of the universe can both do justice to our pre-philosophical moral commitments, unlike the departures from moral realism we see among the debunkers, and explain the human acquisition of epistemic capacities that track moral truth. It avoids the explanatory gap that comes from asking how human beings, developing in a physical universe that is not itself shaped by any purposive force, come to have the capacity to apprehend objective moral norms. To close this gap, an account is needed of the coincidence between our moral judgments and moral truth. Again, supernaturalism may well be a plausible prescription.
Theistic Resources
So how might theism accomplish this feat? Maybe something like this: God knew that our possession of moral knowledge would be objectively valuable, which gives him good reason to make this happen. Desiring this state of affairs, and knowing how to bring it about, God had the power to make it happen and took actions to do so, and this intrinsically valuable state of affairs of our possession of moral knowledge was the result.36
Tomás Bogardus has argued that the heart of EDAs is the worry that our moral faculties have been selected for adaptiveness and not truth, and that this should be a concern especially for naturalists. Escape hatches that can circumvent the challenge, like appeals to divine help or direct rational intuition, are either a bad theoretical or a bad practical concomitant for a naturalistic worldview, whereas such appeals fit naturally into and figure centrally in a theistic perspective.37
As Angus Ritchie puts it,
A theistic explanation of the emergence of moral knowledge need not conflict with a version of the theory of natural selection. The theist need not deny that the processes described by evolutionary biology explain the generation of human convictions about ethics, and their capacity to reason about these convictions and refine them. All that the theist needs to add to the account given by evolutionary biology is the claim that the world is providentially ordered so that the interaction of the quasi-teleological process of natural selection and of the spandrel-like features it generates yield an outcome which enables human beings to apprehend that which is of objective value.38
The theist is in a position to say why there is a necessary connection between certain natural properties and their supervenient moral properties, and an account of the developing of human moral faculties—a theistic genealogy of morals. This account allows for something akin to Street’s “tracking relation”: We have the basic moral beliefs we do because they are true, and this is because the mechanisms responsible for those moral beliefs are aimed at truth. The theist is in a position to offer a narrative that can explain the general reliability of at least those most axiomatic of our moral judgments.
The great eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, recall, appealed to a set of first or self-evident principles of morality able to be discerned through reliable epistemic faculties. There are moral beliefs to which we should pay homage—utilizing them as data for the construction of moral theories or as a kind of court of appeal in assessing them. As Mark Linville and others have insightfully pointed out, our confidence in these beliefs is wisely invested only in the event that we have reason to believe the faculties responsible for them to be truth-aimed.39 Reid’s theism provided him with such a response; the moral faculties were forged in the same shop as our other cognitive faculties, designed by God for the purpose of discovering moral truth. “That conscience which is in every man’s breast,” he wrote, “is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned.”40
On this sort of story, one does not encounter the evolutionary debunking objection as a defeater, because God’s providential ordering of the process amounts to a defeater-defeater, or perhaps, in the words of Alvin Plantinga, a defeater-deflector. A defeater-defeater is used to restore the epistemic credentials of a belief that is facing a defeater, but a defeater-deflector prevents a would-be defeater from becoming a defeater in the first place.41
This, then, could be the start of a broader moral apologetic for theism—one based on moral knowledge predicated on robust moral realism. We have only gestured in the direction of the challenge debunking poses to naturalists, but if the case can be sustained that theism provides better resources for avoiding the force of such objections than those of naturalism, the prospects for an epistemic moral argument for God seem rife with potential.42
1 For another treatment of moral epistemology, see David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 6.
2 David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford University Press, 2011), 54–99. We discussed deliberative indispensability at the end of part 2.
3 Angus Ritchie, From Morality to Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2012), 25.
4 Ronald Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 2 (1996): 98.
5 This despite “indispensabilism,” which has been defined like this: If a belief-forming method is indispensable to the project of practical deliberation, then that method is a source of basic epistemic justification. Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett argue that indispensabilism should be rejected. See their “Deliberative Indispensability and Epistemic Justification,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 10, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford University Press, 2015), 104–33.
6 This is how Plantinga would characterize it. Some years back, Quinn demurred, arguing that in such instances there were inferences, after all, just very fast ones.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Harper & Row, 1969); C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (HarperOne, 2001).
8 William Tolhurst, “Seemings,” American Philosophical Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1998): 293–302; Blake McAllister, “Seemings as Sui Generis,” Synthèse 195 (2018): 3079–96. McAllister observes that “such language is ubiquitous in contemporary epistemology” (3079).
9 Tolhurst, “Seemings,” 298–99.
10 It is useful to bear in mind a distinction between sorts of defeaters. Rebutting defeaters show the belief in question to be false. For example, looking through the window and seeing that the sky is clear is evidence for the belief that it is not raining outside. So this perception is a rebutting defeater of the belief that it is raining. Undercutting defeaters, in contrast, show the belief in question to lack justification, though it still may turn out to be true. For example, suppose I see a horse in the room but then find out that you slipped me a pill that makes me see horses. I now have an undercutting defeater for my belief that there is a horse in the room—even though it may turn out that there really is a horse in the room. Still, I lack justification to believe it. So in the next section let us lay out one of the more important potential defeaters of moral justification and thus of moral knowledge.
11 Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), 8–10.
12 Elliott Sober, “Evolution Without Metaphysics?,” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, ed. J. Kvanvig (Oxford University Press, 2011), vol. 3.
13 Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 12.
14 Thanks to John Fraser for this formulation.
15 As Richard Joyce does. Thanks to Angus Menuge in personal correspondence from January 21, 2022, for invaluable insights here.
16 Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously (Basil Blackwell, 1986), 201, 218.
17 Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, 230.
18 Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, 234–35.
19 Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, 245n5. Like Ruse, Richard Joyce offers a book-length treatment of the evolutionary genealogy of our moral faculties and beliefs in his Evolution of Morality (MIT Press, 2007).
20 Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127, no. 1 (2006): 114.
21 Street, “Darwinian Dilemma,” 117.
22 Street, “Darwinian Dilemma,” 117.
23 Street, “Darwinian Dilemma,” 120.
24 Street, “Darwinian Dilemma,” 113–14.
25 Street, “Darwinian Dilemma,” 121.
26 Philip Kitcher, “Biology and Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (Oxford University Press, 2006), 172.
27 Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Harvard University Press, 2011), 3–4.
28 Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, 224.
29 Unlike objective primary properties like shape or weight, secondary properties are mind-dependent attributes of objects like color, taste, or sound perceptions.
30 Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, 253.
31 Street, “Darwinian Dilemma,” 121.
32 Street, “Darwinian Dilemma,” 141.
33 Joyce adopts an error theory and fictionalist account of morality.
34 Paul Rezkalla, “Theism and Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Against Moral Realism,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12, no. 3 (2021): 41–52.
35 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871; repr., Prometheus Books, 1998), 102.
36 Angus Ritchie, From Morality to Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2012), 163–64.
37 Tomás Bogardus, “Only All Naturalists Should Worry About Only One Evolutionary Debunking Argument,” Ethics 126, no. 3 (April 2016): 636–61.
38 Ritchie, From Morality to Metaphysics, 174.
39 Mark Linville, “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Blackwell, 2012).
40 Thomas Reid, Inquiry and Essays (Hackett, 1983), 355.
41 Andrew Moon, “Debunking Morality: Lessons from the EAAN Literature,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (2017): 208–26.
42 Between Ruse’s and Joyce’s debunking arguments, by the way, came Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) in his 1993 Warrant and Proper Function. The debunking objections share the same basic premise as Plantinga’s that natural selection favors adaptive behavior, except that the debunkers tend to delimit their target to moral beliefs. Plantinga’s EAAN provides a crushing defeater of belief in the conjunction of evolution and naturalism, effectively debunking the debunkers! Plantinga’s argument also brings to mind both C. S. Lewis’s argument from reason in the third chapter of Miracles and Victor Reppert’s more recent up-to-date extensions of Lewis’s argument(s). C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947; repr., HarperOne, 2001); and Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (InterVarsity, 2003).