An Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism

For those brave souls with the patience of Job and too much time on their hands, here is a rather detailed version of the argument that I've described in recent blogs. This is one segment of a much longer essay.

Dollar, you won't like it. It is a bunch of "egghead" stuff.

Much is lost in translation from pasting it in here. For instance, the orginal includes some 60 explanatory footnotes. Italics for emphasis do not show up.

And I have yet to clean up the original, getting all of the bibliographic material in order, etc.

The thesis for which I argue in this diatribe is that naturalists (atheists) are not warranted in their moral beliefs because they must embrace a theory (Darwinism) that explains our having those beliefs without their being true. The theist, on the other hand, maintains that human moral faculties are "truth-aimed" because they were designed precisely for the purpose of discerning moral truth. Moral beliefs are thus warranted against the background assumption of theism, but unwarranted with naturalism in the backdrop.

AN ARGUMENT FROM EVOLUTIONARY NATURALISM

Edward O. Wilson and Michael Ruse have conspired to tell us that “ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate.”

The sociobiologists tell a familiar evolutionary story to justify this striking assertion. The pressures of natural selection have had an enormous influence on human psychology, including the hardwiring of epigenetic rules. According to Wilson and Ruse, these are widely distributed propensities to believe and behave in certain ways, and such rules have developed through the interaction of human genetics and human culture. “Epigenetic rules giving us a sense of obligation have been put in place by selection, because of their adaptive value.”

Such rules have adaptive value because they incline us towards adaptive behaviors, and a behavior is adaptive insofar as it tends toward reproductive success. The resulting “sense of obligation” is thus in place, not because it detects any actual moral obligations, but because the perceived obligatory behavior is adaptive. Strictly speaking, experiences of, say, moral obligation or guilt are non-veridical: their seeming objects are illusory. Ruse explains,

"The Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity."

The belief in moral objectivity is a useful fiction, and its utility is in the name of reproductive fitness. Evolutionary theory is thus wed to some variety of moral anti-realism. Ruse thinks Darwin’s theory complements Hume’s subjectivism.

Hume, of course, maintained that belief in objective moral properties is, at best, unwarranted, and talk of them is, in fact, meaningless. In a pivotal passage, Hume challenges his reader to produce the moral property of some putatively immoral action, such as willful murder, over and above the natural properties that we perceive. “The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object.” But a closer look does reveal a matter of fact that is the object of experience: one’s own sentiment that is excited by the deed.

"Here is a matter of fact; but ‘tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind" (Hume, Treatise).

The mind has a “great propensity to spread itself on external objects,” so that the subjective feelings which, given our constitution, result from the contemplation of some act, are mistaken for perceptions of objective properties of the act itself. As Michael Ruse sees it, Darwin explained the origins of that constitution.

Religious apologists have sometimes seized upon these apparent implications of Darwin’s theory in order to argue that naturalism—the view that reality is pretty much exhausted by the stuff of the empirical sciences —implies an unpalatable moral skepticism. To take a noteworthy example, C.S. Lewis argued 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.”

Let’s call the combination of naturalism and an overall Darwinian account of the origin of species Evolutionary Naturalism (EN). According to Lewis, on EN, the dictates of conscience are little more than an aggregate of subjective impulses, which, though distributed widely throughout our species, are no more capable of being true or false “than a vomit or a yawn.” “If the naturalist really remembered his philosophy out of school,” then he would realize that his saying “I ought” is on a par with “I itch,” and “my impulse to serve posterity is just the same sort of thing as my fondness for cheese.” Morality is thus an “illusion,” little more than a “twist of the mind.”

Lewis scores an apologetic point when he observes that the very people who defend such a variety of subjectivism are often later found promoting some moral cause. “A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusions, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race.” Elsewhere, writing with these same thinkers in mind, he quips, “We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.” Lewis believes that he has identified a practical inconsistency in such persons: their considered theories entail that morality is an illusion, but they nevertheless live as though there are objective moral facts that are the appropriate objects of our serious concern. Moral skepticism is impracticable, but it appears to be implied by a naturalistic worldview. If this is so, then, all other things being equal, we have some reason to reject naturalism.

An argument—call it the Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism (AEN)—thus emerges from such considerations. Perhaps the following is in the spirit of what Lewis has in mind.

(1) If Evolutionary Naturalism is true then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
(2) If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there are no objective moral facts.
(3) There are objective moral facts.
(4) Therefore, Evolutionary Naturalism is false.

Of course, AEN, even if successful, is not an argument for the existence of God, but only for the falseness of evolutionary naturalism. But it might be employed as an important component of such an argument were one to go on and argue that theism accommodates moral facts in a way that naturalism does not, that, all other things being equal, a worldview that makes sense of moral facts is preferable to one that does not, and so, all other things being equal, theism is preferable to naturalism.

Does AEN succeed? Off the bat, one might note that the falseness of evolutionary naturalism is not thereby an argument for the falseness of naturalism, and the latter is the real target of such arguments. Might one be a naturalist without being an evolutionary naturalist? Does naturalism entail Darwinism? Strictly speaking, it seems possible to affirm the worldview of naturalism without also endorsing the scientific theory of evolution, and so there is no strict entailment. But as Alvin Plantinga, a theist, and Alex Rosenberg, a naturalist, agree, for the naturalist, “Darwinism is the only game in town.” Indeed, Richard Dawkins was recently seen sporting a T-shirt that read, “Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth, The Only Game in Town.” Perhaps Dawkins’ 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” (Dawkins 1986, p. 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" (Dawkins, 1996, p. ). Naturalism sans Darwinism—like Tarzan sans loincloth—is lacking in essentials. It is a worldview at a loss for explanation. While it is conceivable that a critic of AEN might object by driving a wedge between the worldview and the theory, we’ll retain the focus on the evolutionary version of naturalism.

As we shall see, there are substantial objections to each of the three premises. Premise (3) is an assertion of the truth of moral realism, and, of course, there are a variety of extant anti-realist traditions. Anti-realists will tell us either that there are no moral facts whatever, or that the moral facts that obtain are not objective—that is, they are not mind-independent or stance-independent. When C. S. Lewis originally advanced his argument, perhaps the majority of his philosophical detractors would have embraced non-cognitivism, thus denying that there are moral facts. But, at least for the present, I am more interested in those philosophers (of increasing number) who embrace (3), and thus some form of moral realism, but aim to conjoin that commitment to moral realism with evolutionary naturalism.

I am primarily interested, then, in objections to (1) and (2). One might object to (1) by denying that natural selection is solely (or even partly) responsible for the emergence of “human morality.” Theists are permitted non-supernatural explanations of some things. Might not the Darwinian be permitted non-evolutionary explanations here and there? And (2) moves rather quickly from an account of the origins of human morality to the assertion that its claims to objectivity are false. But why think this? First, such a move might be thought guilty of a well-known fallacy. And should we not at least give an ear to what the evolutionary naturalist may have to say about the possible connections between the workings of natural selection and the truth of our moral beliefs?

AEN and the Genetic Fallacy

Let’s begin with an objection to (2). At first blush, at least, the move there appears guilty of the genetic fallacy. At least in standard cases, the fact that a given belief B is the product of some cause C, entails nothing whatsoever regarding its truth or falseness. And (2) concludes that widespread beliefs in moral facts are false if such beliefs have an evolutionary explanation. But some forms of genetic argument may be correct. Suppose we can show that the explanation of someone’s belief is epistemically independent of whatever would make the belief true.

In a discussion that has direct bearing upon the assessment of AEN, Elliot Sober offers an example of such an ill-formed belief (Sober 1994, pp. 93-113). Consider Sober’s eccentric colleague, Ben, who believes that he has 73 students in his class because he drew the number 73 from an urn filled with slips of paper numbered from 1 to 100. Presumably, there are no esoteric connections between class attendance and such random drawings. Ben’s resulting belief is thus epistemically independent of its would-be truth-maker in that Ben would believe that this was his enrollment regardless of the actual number of students in the class. According to Sober, Ben’s belief is “probably false.”

Might we offer a similar evolutionary argument for moral skepticism? Sober suggests that such an argument is a tall order because one would first have to identify (a) the processes of moral belief formation and (b) the would-be truth-makers for moral beliefs, and then show that (a) and (b) are independent. Call this the independence thesis. A defense of the independence thesis would call for a considerable project in metaethics for which the simple observation that our moral beliefs have evolutionary origins is no substitute.

As Sober sees things, such an evolutionary argument aims to show that “subjectivism” is true. (He identifies subjectivism as the view that “no normative ethical statement is true,” and thus seems to have in mind something more akin to non-cognitivism or error theory.) That is, such an argument would attempt to establish the Wilson-Ruse assertion that ethics is an illusion. But to say that ethics is an illusion is to advance a positive thesis regarding the ontological status of putative moral facts or properties. Presumably, such an argument would call for some positive reason for thinking that the independence thesis is true.

Of course, even the truth of the independence thesis does not entail that morality is an illusion. At best, we might conclude that it is safe to treat moral beliefs as though they are false on the grounds that it is unlikely that beliefs formed independently of their truth conditions will be true. After all, and all other things equal, we should grant the possibility that Ben’s enrollment is precisely 73, and the possibility should be conceded even where we have a compelling argument for thinking that urns and numbered slips of paper have absolutely nothing to do with student enrollment decisions. Ben’s belief about the number of students in his class is “probably false” only because we suppose that he has about a 1 in 100 chance of drawing a number that corresponds to his enrollment. And, assuming the truth of the independence thesis, our moral beliefs are “probably false” in that the odds that truth and adaptiveness would happen to embrace are slim. Sharon Street compares such odds to “setting out for Bermuda and letting the course of your boat be determined by the wind and tides” (Street, 2006 p. 13) Well, bon voyage.

But we need not argue for the falseness or probable falseness of our moral beliefs.
Nor is it necessary to argue for the truth of the independence thesis. It is one thing to suggest that there are positive reasons for asserting epistemic independence; it is quite another to say that we lack any reason for thinking that a relevant dependence relation obtains. We would have a reason for thinking there is such a relation just in case the best explanation for a person’s having a given belief essentially involves the truth of that belief. One might thus argue that belief in objective moral facts is warranted only if there is reason for thinking that a relation of epistemic dependence obtains between our beliefs and their truth-makers.

It seems that a plausible Darwinian yarn may be spun in such a way as to offer a complete and exhaustive explanation of our various moral beliefs without ever supposing that any of them are true. According to this story, some behaviors (feeding one’s babies, fleeing from large predators) are adaptive, and others (feeding one’s babies to large predators) are not. Any predisposition or prompting that increases the probability of the adaptive behavior will thus also be adaptive. A predisposition to make moral judgments or form moral beliefs enforced corresponding behaviors, and so was adaptive for such reasons. Richard Joyce asks, “Can we make sense of its having been useful for our ancestors to form beliefs concerning rightness and wrongness independently of the existence of rightness and wrongness?” The answer, he thinks, is “a resounding ‘Quite possibly’” (Joyce 2006, p.##)

In review of the “whole complex story” of the evolution of altruism and “helping behavior” as well as the predisposition to form moral beliefs, Joyce notes, “It was no background assumption of that explanation that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment” (Joyce 2006, 183). The observation finds support, I think, when we look around at the behaviors of many non-human social animals. Individual animals display the predisposition for social behavior—what Darwin called social instincts—but, presumably, without judgments of any sort regarding the appropriateness of the behavior. We explain their behavior—and the impulse towards the behavior—by appeal to adaptiveness. Moral properties are not included in the cast of characters. Rightness and wrongness do not even come up. On this Darwinian story, conscience is what arises in a social creature once the social instincts are overlain with a sufficient degree of rationality. As Darwin asserted,

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man (Darwin, Descent).

Wolves in a pack know their place in the social hierarchy. A lower ranked wolf feels compelled to give way to the alpha male. Were he endowed with the intellectual powers that Darwin had in mind, then, presumably his “moral sense” would tell him that obeisance is his moral duty. He would regard it as a moral fact that alpha interests trump beta or omega interests. Lupine moral philosophers might even wrangle over the question of whether there are such moral facts, and, if so, whether the legitimacy of the ancient hierarchical social system is one of them. But we need not suppose that the moral realists among them have it right in order to understand the genealogy of lupine morals.

Arguably, given an evolutionary account of human moral beliefs, there is no reason for thinking that a relation of epistemic dependence obtains, and so, given an evolutionary account, belief in moral facts is unwarranted (Joyce, 2006, p. 183). If our moral beliefs are without warrant, then they do not amount to moral knowledge. We might thus modify AEN so that (2) gives way to

(2*) If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral
knowledge.

There is moral knowledge only if there are warranted moral beliefs, and, the suggestion under consideration is that an evolutionary account serves to undercut whatever warrant we might have had for those beliefs.

Bertrand Russell allegedly once observed, “Everything looks yellow to a person suffering from jaundice.” Actually, I believe the truth of the matter is that people suffering from jaundice look yellow. But suppose that both are right: jaundiced people both appear and are appeared-to yellowly. Jones enters Dr. Smith’s office, complaining of various and vague discomforts. Smith takes one look at Jones and exclaims, “Your skin has a very yellowish appearance!” He diagnoses Jones with jaundice and prescribes accordingly. Later, it occurs to Smith that all of his patients have a yellowish tint, as do his charts, the floor tiles, once-white pills and the nurses’ uniforms. A simple blood test determines that he is suffering from jaundice. Jones would have appeared yellow to him regardless of his actual condition. Has Smith now a reason for supposing Jones is jaundiced is false in the way that, say, a negative blood test would provide such a reason? It seems not. Perhaps Jones is jaundiced. Smith simply lacks any reason for thinking that Jones’ appearance was caused by Jones’ condition, or that the belief that Jones was jaundiced is epistemically dependent upon any medical facts about Jones. And this is to suggest that facts about Dr. Smith’s own condition have now supplied him with an undercutting defeater for his belief regarding Jones’ condition.

As we have seen, Wilson and Ruse (and Lewis, hypothetically) draw the inference that ethics is an illusion—there are no objective moral facts. And they draw this conclusion from a consideration of the evolutionary function of our moral beliefs. We have the beliefs that we do, they suppose, because of their reproductive advantage, and not because of their truth. Thus, they think, Darwinism poses a rebutting defeater for our moral beliefs, as well as for moral realism itself. But it seems to me that the proponent of AEN might back off from the stronger claim that Darwinism entails that there are no moral facts, speaking instead of whether we are warranted in our ordinary moral beliefs. In this way, AEN becomes an epistemological argument for moral skepticism.

Judith Thomson suggests that any red-blooded moral realist should seek to defend the thesis of moral objectivity:

"(TMO) It is possible to find out about some moral sentences that they are true."

Of course, one may challenge TMO either by arguing of putative moral propositions that they are never true or that it is not possible to find out. The former route involves advancing a positive metaethical theory that either denies that “moral sentences” ever express moral propositions (because there just are no moral propositions), or denies that moral propositions are ever true, or else denies that their truth is mind-independent. The latter route simply involves advancing an epistemological argument to the effect that no one is in a position to know whether any moral proposition is ever true. In challenging the warrant of our moral beliefs, AEN takes this route. As Richard Joyce observes, the conclusion that our moral beliefs are “unjustified” is “almost as disturbing a result” as an argument for the actual falseness of those beliefs (Joyce 2006, p. 180).

The suggestion, then, is that Darwinism presents us with an undercutting defeater for such beliefs. And so, instead of (3), perhaps we want

(3*) There is moral knowledge.

And this takes us to our conclusion.

(4) Evolutionary naturalism is false.

What we lack is some reason for thinking that the adaptiveness of a moral belief depends in any way upon its being true. Perhaps, then, the tables may be turned. Instead of Sober’s suggestion that the AEN defender must show that moral beliefs are independent of any truth-makers, perhaps the onus is on those who assert dependence. Why, given evolutionary naturalism, should we suppose the world to include anything more than natural facts and properties and our subjective reactions to those properties?
We’ll return to this question momentarily, and consider some possible replies. But first let us consider a challenge to our premise (1).

AEN and “Greedy Reductionism”

The evolutionary naturalist is saddled with the task of explaining the connection between adaptiveness and truth only if she accepts our first premise.

(1) If Evolutionary Naturalism is true then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.

In fact, (1) is widely rejected. Consider first a homely example illustrating the reason for this rejection.

I once attended a university lecture given by a noted animal ethologist who was convinced that evolutionary psychology applies to human behavior just as surely as it applies to the canines with which she specialized. She had a good stock of examples of how widespread human behaviors betray their evolutionary and genetic roots. Suppose, she said, you are sitting on your sofa in your living room. The front door opens, and in walks a stranger, uninvited. You bristle with fear, anger and resentment, and experience a rush of adrenalin. On the other hand, suppose that, as you are sitting there, a bird flies in through an open window and lights on a curtain rod. While, out of a concern for your new upholstery, you might take measures to shoo the bird outside, you experience none of the emotions triggered by the human intruder. Why the difference? She answered: because of our evolutionary heritage, we have been hardwired to be territorial toward conspecifics—members of our own species—and more tolerant of the company of other species. The difference in the two reactions is thus predicted on a sociobiological reckoning of human psychology.

But is there not a simpler, more straightforward and “cognitive” explanation? In the case of the human intruder it is reasonable to think that harm is intended. As a moral agent, he is presumably capable of understanding and acting upon societal laws as well as the rules of morality and etiquette, and his intrusion likely signals a willful breach of all of these in order to have gained entry. And then there’s that stocking cap.

Arguably, resentment is properly directed only at persons in the event that they cause or intend some harm. I may be unhappy that the wind has toppled a tree, causing property damage. I may lament the fact that termites have made a meal of my guitar collection. But resentment would be misplaced, and would perhaps indicate misunderstanding or emotional immaturity on my part. Lacking such moral agency, the invading bird is incapable of intending harm, and he is likely already showing signs of regret for what seemed at first a good idea. And, in any case, it is easy to imagine that fear, resentment, anger and adrenalin would present themselves in the event that my door is darkened not by an intruding human but by an Alpha Centaurian who, though a person, shares no Linnaean rank whatsoever with me.

I have been instructed more than once that the sociobiological assumptions of an argument such as AEN have been “widely discredited.” Sociobiologists are often accused of forcing genetic and evolutionary explanations for widespread human behaviors and thereby supplanting more plausible cultural or “cognitive” or otherwise non-evolutionary explanations. Daniel Dennett charges Wilson and others with a biological form of “greedy reductionism,” for their apparent assumption that the genes have human behavior and culture reined-in on a sort of leash. As Dennett wryly puts it, the fact that tribesmen have everywhere and always thrown their spears pointy-end first does not suggest a “pointy-end first gene.” Many such traits are instead to be attributed to “the general non-stupidity of the species.” C.S. Lewis’s character, Ransom, in Out of the Silent Planet, was surprised to discover that a boat constructed on Malacandra (Mars) was very much like a human-built boat. “Only later did he set himself the question, ‘What else could a boat be like?’” (The astute Lewis reader might also have noticed that Malacandran hunters throw their spears pointy-end first, as Dennett would have predicted.) Some ideas are just better than others and, assuming a minimal degree of rationality, perhaps we have been equipped to discover and implement them.

The point applies forcefully in our assessment of AEN. The argument, as stated, seems to assume that our “moral beliefs” have an evolutionary explanation. We generally view deception, theft and violence as wrong. We believe that good parents care for the welfare of their children and that kindness calls for reciprocation. We have an urge to help those who need help that we are capable of rendering. We tend to share the belief that basically equitable arrangements are just or manifest the moral property of justness. But, for one thing, it is just implausible to think that any fairly determinate belief has somehow been fashioned at the genetic level and then lodged, intact, within the human brain. Of his belief, “I ought to reciprocate to Mary for picking me up at the airport,” Richard Joyce asks, “What does natural selection know of Mary or airports?” (Joyce 2006, p. 180). It would be like asserting that an unfortunate Tourette’s-like disease resulted cross-culturally and throughout history in some determinate and meaningful combination of ejaculated words: “Peter Piper picked a peck!”

Further, do all of these traits find their explanation in the selection pressures that were at work when we came down from the trees? Isn’t this akin to the suggestion that all human problems stem from the trauma of early potty training? Isn’t it possible that certain moral beliefs are widespread because, like the hunting techniques of Dennett’s tribesmen, they simply make sense? Philip Kitcher writes,

"All that selection may have done for us is to equip us with the capacity for various social arrangements and the capacity to formulate ethical rules. Recognizing that not every trait we care to focus on need have been the target of natural selection, we shall no longer be tempted to argue that any respectable history of our ethical behavior must identify some selective advantage for those beings who first adopted a system of ethical precepts. It is entirely possible that evolution fashioned the basic cognitive capacities—alles ubriges ist Menschenwerk" (Kitcher 1985, p. 418).

Thus, our evolution may have provided us with the intellectual tools required for building cathedrals, playing chess, and drawing up social contracts. But might not these activities be more or less autonomous as far as the genes are concerned?

Let us agree, at least provisionally, that there are extremes to be avoided when seeking evolutionary explanations for human behavior. Thus, “It’s all about the genes, stupid” expresses a form of greedy reductionism. Mary Midgley’s own term for such reductionistic explanations is the “hydraulic approach,” after the simpleminded person who, in seeking an explanation for rising damp, seeks a single place where the water is coming in (Midgley 1979, p. 57).

But extremes tend to come in pairs. Is it reasonable, given a background acceptance of evolutionary theory, to suppose that our evolution has had nothing to do with the distribution of widespread moral beliefs?

For one thing, one might have thought that to appeal to natural selection to explain incisors and libidos, but to exclude the deepest springs of human behavior from such an account would seem rather a tenuous position to hold. Moral behavior is not the sort of thing likely to be overlooked by natural selection because of the important role that it plays in survival and reproductive success (Sommers and Rosenberg 2003, p. 659). Early ancestors who lacked the impulse to care for their offspring or to cooperate with their fellows would, like the celibate Shakers, have left few to claim them as ancestors.

Midgley refers to the wholesale rejection of evolutionary psychology as the “blank paper view”—a notion of humans as “totally plastic” and “structureless.” Stephen Gould, she thinks, assumes a view implying that “newborn babies [are] what bear cubs were once supposed to be—indeterminate lumps of animal protoplasm, needing to be licked into shape by their elders” (Midgley 1979, p. 66). To B.F. Skinner’s claim that the capability for abstract thought arises not from some “cognitive faculty” but from “a particular kind of environment,” she quips, “So why can’t a psychologist’s parrot talk psychology?”(p. 20). To the blank paper view in general, which would deny that we humans come equipped with any innate tendencies whatsoever, she asks, “How do all the children of eighteen months pass the news along the grapevine that now is the time to join the subculture, to start climbing furniture, toddling out of the house, playing with fire, breaking windows, taking things to pieces, messing with mud, and chasing the ducks?” (p. 56). More recently, Richard Joyce has argued forcefully that this tabula rasa view “is obviously wrong.” And that, “broadly speaking, no sensible person can object to evolutionary psychology.” (He also observes that many of the objections are politically motivated and may even evince an unfortunate willingness to treat science as a wax nose, shaped to suit particular political agendas) (Joyce 2006, pp. 5,7.).

Midgley maintains that the standard “nature versus nurture” debate presents a false dichotomy between two implausible extremes, and Joyce adds to this that the dichotomy “is so dead and buried that it is wearisome even to mention that it is dead and buried.” If the extreme version of the blank paper view says, paraphrasing Locke, that there is nothing in human nature that is not put there by experience, Midgley, in effect replies after Leibniz, “except for human nature itself.”

If “instincts” refers to basic predispositions, drives, or “programs,” then humans have instincts, but the more interesting of these are, by and large, “open instincts” or “programs with a gap.” She suggests that the more complex an animal, the greater the “gap” in the program. The gap, where it exists, leaves it to the intelligence—rational reflection and culture in general in the case of humans—of the individual or the species to fill in the details. Migratory waterfowl come equipped with a basic drive to follow the sun south in the winter, but the programming itself need not specify the details of the itinerary. While the dances of bees or the songs of some birds may be due almost exclusively to their programming, so that the precise patterns are genetically choreographed, the dancers and singers displayed on, say, American Bandstand, might be supposed to have a bit more latitude. And this remains true even if there proves to be an evolutionary answer to the question, “Why are people fond of such things as singing and dancing?” (My minister in childhood insisted that dancing is “foreplay set to music.” In this he may have found one point of agreement with the evolutionary psychologists.)

That latitude—the gap in Midgley’s open instincts—would seem to leave ample room for Kitcher’s Menschenwerk, whether it involves composing a piece of 12-bar blues or forging a social contract. Joyce notes that, “By claiming that human morality is genetically ‘programmed,’ one doesn’t deny the centrality of cultural influence, or even imply that any manifestation of morality is inevitable” (Joyce 2006, p. 8). The “development of ethical precepts” of which Kitcher speaks, thus may well be the result of careful deliberation and rational reflection, but perhaps these are in response to proclivities that come with our programming. Such programming may be rather more determinate than a mere capacity for programming. Mammalian mothers are provided with both the capacity for motherhood and a nearly irresistible impulse to nurture offspring.

Along these lines, Sharon Street distinguishes between basic evaluative tendencies and full-fledged evaluative judgment (Street 2006). The latter include our specific moral beliefs that might be formulated as moral principles or rules, and they may be explained by appeal to a variety of influences, cultural and otherwise. The former are “proto” forms of evaluative judgment that are unreflective and non-linguistic impulses towards certain behaviors that seem “called for.” She argues that “relentless selection pressure” has had a direct and “tremendous” influence on our basic evaluative tendencies and these, in turn, have had a major—but not necessarily overriding—indirect effect on our actual moral beliefs or full-fledged evaluative judgments.

If such programming and predispositions provide our basic moral orientation, then it is within their scaffolds that all moral reflection takes place. Our reflective beliefs about the duties of parenthood or of friendship, for instance, arise from more basic parental and altruistic drives that predate and are presupposed by all such reflection. While this evolutionary account provides a role for reason, that reason is in effect, to borrow from Hume, the slave of the passions. Those “passions”—Street’s basic evaluative tendencies—are almost certainly not cultural artifacts. Evolutionary theory requires, and the experiences of common life suggest, that they are not. Human mothers sometimes require instruction on how to care for their newborns. But this typically presupposes that they care, and that such caring comes as a part of the mother’s standard equipment.

Bottlenose dolphins off of Australia have been spotted wearing sea sponges on their snouts. The sponges presumably protect them from sharp objects and stinging marine animals while foraging on the bottom. Further, the behavior appears to be passed on exclusively from mothers to daughters. Biologists see here clear evidence of cultural transmission among the dolphins. It is highly unlikely that this behavior is the product of a “sponge-on-the-snout gene.” It is, with apologies to Kitcher, delfinwerk. But it is equally unlikely, I think, that the mammalian drive to nurture offspring, seen in these mother-daughter sessions among dolphins, is also a feature of dolphin culture. Here, it is exceedingly reasonable to suppose that they are “compelled by their genes.”

The sponge trick and the task of mother-daughter instruction are the result of intelligence set to work at solving problems posed, respectively, by the instincts of self-preservation and motherhood. Were the local conditions of survival different, the “idea” might never have occurred. And, presumably, were the circumstances of dolphin evolution relevantly different, mother-daughter sessions of any kind might have been unnecessary, and delphine maternal instincts might have been nonexistent. “Teach your children well,” after all, is a precept happily ignored by the female sea turtle, whose maternal “duties” are discharged along with her eggs.

Similarly, human culture is responsible for great accomplishments that assuredly are not the direct product of our evolution. And these may well include complex systems of moral precepts. Perhaps human social contracts—like sponges on the snout—are Good Tricks in that they solve problems posed by some combination of genetics plus environment plus intelligence. Rationality—Menschenwerk—is certainly employed. But it is an instrumental rationality.

We are now in a position to refine our claim at (1). “Human morality” is a by-product of natural selection in that a fundamental moral orientation—Street’s “basic evaluative tendencies” and Midgley’s “programming”—is in place because it was adaptive for our ancestors given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. Thus, the “program” provides general directives or tendencies. The “gap” allows room for rational reflection regarding our moral beliefs, but their very rationality is conditional or hypothetical: given the program that has been bequeathed to us by our genes, some policies are better than others. The program itself—with the general “moral” orientation that it determines—is precisely as it is due to its adaptive value given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. Even if the gap is positively cavernous for humans, allowing for rational and moral deliberation, it is nevertheless found within the scope of our programming that is directly explained by appeal to natural selection. Moral reasoning would then appear to be means-end reasoning, where the ends have been laid down for us by natural selection.

Counterfactually, had the programming been relevantly different, so would the range of intelligent choices. As we saw, Darwin was of the opinion that the moral sense is the result of a sort of recipe—what you get when you begin with a set of social instincts and throw in a sufficient degree of intelligence. There may be “forced moves” through evolutionary design space, as Daniel Dennett has observed. For instance, given locomotion, stereoscopic vision is highly predictable (Dennett 1997, p. ). But Darwin did not think that any determinate set of moral precepts or dictates of conscience were among them. Consider what he described as an “extreme example” and what I will call a Darwinian Counterfactual.

"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 brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering" (Descent, p. ##).

Given the actual conditions of our “rearing,” we have come to believe that our children and siblings are deserving of our care and respect, and that equitable bargaining outcomes are just. But here we are asked to imagine a world in which the resulting fundamental moral orientation—Midgley’s open instincts—is different. Darwin appears to countenance the possibility of a species that is prompted, even upon reflection, to behave in ways that are inequitable, and, from our standpoint, unjust. If rational and moral reflection takes its cue from a more primitive predisposition, then have we any reason for supposing that such reflection—the product of culture—would inevitably settle upon equitable treatment?

Recall our lupine philosophers who find themselves strongly inclined to think in terms of a social hierarchy and to regard anything like Bentham’s dictum—“Each to count for one, none to count for more than one”—an absolute howler. Lacking opposable thumbs and all, they do not write books. But if they did, one learned treatise might be titled, Our Caste System of Justice, with chapters on “Duties of Obeisance” and “Beta Encounters Alpha: Rules of Engagement.” If humans as a species have come to regard equitable arrangements as fair or just (have they?), then perhaps this is only because their initial programming was wired as it was given the circumstances of human evolution. We have the actual moral orientation that we do because it was adaptive. Had the circumstances been different, some other set would have conferred fitness. Is there any plausible reason to suppose that such a moral orientation is adaptive because its resultant moral beliefs are true? Does this not return us to Joyce’s observation, “It was no background assumption of that explanation that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment” (Joyce 2006, 183)?

Of course, one might reply to this line of argument by insisting that a wedge be driven between Street’s “basic evaluative tendencies” and her “full-fledged moral judgments.” Have we not just acknowledged that the results of such programming are not inevitable? Following Dennett and others, might we not suggest that, with the advent of culture it became possible for us to “snap” Wilson’s “genetic leash” and strike out on our own? Perhaps, then, morality is autonomous, engaging in reflection that is independent of the drives of human nature. Such a reply, however, is just implausible.
Our considered judgments regarding duties of parenthood or kinship or friendship clearly find their wellspring in our psychology, just as beliefs about the sacred duties of Darwin’s hive bees or our wolves would find their respective sources in apiarian or lupine psychologies. And these respective psychologies appear to be what they are because of the circumstances of evolution in each case.

There is reason, then, to accept AEN premise (1).

(1) If Evolutionary Naturalism is true then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.

It is time, then, to return to the question that we raised just before our assessment of (1). If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, is there any reason to suppose that there is a relevant dependence relation between (a) the processes of belief formation and (b) the would-be truth-makers for such beliefs? We can sharpen the question by simply asking, is there reason to suppose that the belief-producing mechanisms of our moral beliefs are truth-aimed? Is there a plausible defense of the dependence thesis available to the naturalist?

Epistemological Arguments and the Dependence Thesis

I have characterized AEN as an epistemological argument for moral skepticism. The aim is to show that, on evolutionary naturalism, our moral beliefs are without warrant. This is because the mechanisms responsible for our moral beliefs appear to be fitness-aimed, and such an account of those mechanisms seems not to require our thinking that they are also truth-aimed. As Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg have put it, “if our best theory of why people believe P does not require that P is true, then there are no grounds to believe P is true” (Sommers and Rosenberg, 2004, p. 667). In this, AEN resembles a much-discussed argument urged by Gilbert Harman (Harman 1974, p##).

Harman’s so-called “problem with ethics” is that moral facts, if such there are, appear to be explanatorily irrelevant in a way that natural facts are not (Harman 1977). Hitler’s behavior, for example, may be fully explained by appealing only to certain natural facts about him, such as his anti-Semitism, monomania, and will to power. According to Harman, we need not suppose that, over and above such natural facts, there is a moral fact of Hitler’s depravity. Nor must we appeal to his actual depravity in order to explain our belief that he was depraved. “You need only make assumptions about the psychology or moral sensibility of the person making the moral observation” (1977, p. 6). Harman may thus be viewed as arguing in his own manner that we “have no reason to believe that the best explanation for our moral beliefs involves their truth.” We’ve no good reason to suppose that the causes of those beliefs are dependent upon whatever would make them true.

Nicholas Sturgeon has replied first by noting that moral facts are commonly and plausibly thought to have explanatory relevance. Both Hitler’s behavior and our belief that he was depraved are handily explained by his actual depravity, and this is, in fact, the default explanation. He observes, “Many moral explanations appear to be good explanations… that are not obviously undermined by anything else we know.” “Sober people frequently offer such explanations of moral observations and beliefs,” and “many of these explanations look plausible enough on the surface to be worth taking seriously” (Sturgeon 198?, p. 239)

Citing Quine’s naturalized epistemology—what he elsewhere refers to as the method of Reflective Equilibrium (Sturgeon 1992, p. 101)—Sturgeon notes, “We cannot decide whether one explanation is better than another without relying on beliefs we already have about the world” (1992 p. 249). Reflective equilibrium, a method employed in both science and ethics, begins with certain considered judgments, and with the assumption that our theories, scientific and otherwise, are roughly correct, then moves “dialectically in this way between plausible general theses and plausible views about cases, thus seeking a reflective equilibrium.” Sturgeon notes that, whereas he allows for the inclusion of moral beliefs among the initial set, Harman does not. But, he argues, there is no non-question-begging justification for singling out moral beliefs as unwelcome in the initial set, while allowing those of a scientific or common sense nature.

In particular, Harman’s argument requires us to consider the conditional, If Hitler had done just what he did but was not morally depraved, we would, nevertheless, have believed that he was depraved. But this calls for our entertaining the possibility

(H) Hitler would have done just what
he did even had he not been
morally depraved.

(H), in turn, presupposes that there is a possible world in which Hitler does what he does but is not morally depraved. One will seriously entertain such a counterfactual only in the event that one accepts

(H’) There is a possible world W in which Hitler’s natural properties are
identical to those that he possesses in the actual world but in
which Hitler is not depraved.

But Sturgeon’s own moral theory invokes the supervenience of moral properties upon natural properties. On standard accounts, if some moral property M supervenes upon some natural property (or, more likely, some set of natural properties) N, then it is impossible for N to be instantiated unless M is also instantiated. Thus, we appear to have this implication:

(S) For every world W, every natural property N and every moral
property M, if M supervenes upon N in W, then for all worlds W*, if N
obtains in W* then M obtains and supervenes upon N in W*.

Allowing that there is a world that includes N but not M requires either denying that M actually supervenes upon N or holding that (S) is false. And so (H’) and (S) together entail that there is no possible world in which Hitler’s having the personality and displaying the behavior that he did constitutes depravity. To get off the ground, Harman’s argument tacitly assumes that there are no moral facts or properties, which, of course, is the very point at issue.

Further, Harman must be understood to suppose that we would have believed that Hitler was depraved even if, despite having done all of the things that we know him to have done, he was not, in fact, depraved. One should be prepared to grant this point only if one has already granted that our whole moral theory is “hopelessly wrong” (Sturgeon 1984, p. 251). But the fact that our theory would be wrong were this possible is no reason for either abandoning the theory or embracing the possibility. Thinking otherwise provides a recipe for skepticism of a more global variety. Thus, “We should deny that any skeptical conclusion follows from this. In particular, we should deny that it follows that moral facts play no role in explaining our moral judgments” (p. 251).

Sturgeon’s appeal to Reflective Equilibrium thus plays a crucial role in his reply to Harman. We begin moral reflection with a fund of considered judgments that may serve as the initial data for the construction of ethical theories. And, Sturgeon suggests, these beliefs are “not obviously undermined by anything else we know.” Since all theorizing has these same humble origins, how can one non-arbitrarily single out a particular domain of beliefs for suspicion? Indeed, David Brink goes to some length in arguing that, “Harman fails to demonstrate any explanatory disanalogy between the scientific and moral cases” (Brink 1989, 185). A scientist’s belief that a proton has just passed through a cloud chamber might be explained merely by appeal to her background beliefs and theoretical commitments. For example, her theory has it that the appearance of a vapor trail is evidence of proton activity, and so, of course, when she sees, or believes that she sees, a vapor trail, she forms the belief in the proton. But here we are required to be realists about protons only if we have assumed that the scientist’s theory is “roughly correct.” Indeed, my conviction that I have a head and my belief that other heads contain other minds are best explained by the actual existence of such heads and minds only on the assumption that a common theory of life is generally on the right track. But, again, why extend this courtesy in these cases while being decidedly discourteous in the case of morality?

To my mind, Sturgeon’s reply to Harman succeeds. Why, indeed, should our considered moral beliefs be excluded at the outset? Nearly a century ago, in his Gifford Lectures, W.R. Sorley cited “Lotze’s Dictum,” after the 19th century German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze: “The true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics” (Sorley 1935, p. 3). Sorley observed that “the traditional order of procedure”—business as usual in metaphysics—was to construct an interpretation of reality—a worldview—that drew exclusively upon non-moral considerations, such as the deliverances of the sciences. It was not until the task of worldview construction was complete did one “go on to draw out the ethical consequences of the view that had been reached” (1935, p. 1). Sorley thought it likely that such a method would result in an artificially truncated worldview, and that moral ideas would be given short shrift. And the exclusion of our moral experience was simply arbitrary. “If we take experience as a whole, and do not arbitrarily restrict ourselves to that portion of it with which the physical and natural sciences have to do, then our interpretation of it must have ethical data at its basis and ethical laws in its structure” (p. 7). Harman seems to be following that traditional procedure that Sorley criticized, and it manifests that same arbitrariness. Harman gets his results only by begging the question against the moral realist.

But even Sorley would, in principle, admit that the initial “ethical data” must prove to be compatible with everything else that is included in our final interpretation of reality. In fact, in the same year that Sorley delivered his Gifford lectures, George Santayana published Winds of Doctrine. There, he complained that Bertrand Russell’s then-held moral realism was the result of Russell’s “monocular” vision. “We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is moral.” Russell took notice of Sorley’s “ethical data”—“the ideas of good and evil as they appear in man’s consciousness” (Sorley 1935, p. 1), but, according to Santayana, he simply refused to “glance back over the shoulder” to see that “our moral bias is conditioned” and has its basis “in the physical order of things” (Santayana 1935, p ). Indeed, Russell had made frequent appeals to common moral sense—not at all unlike the contemporary appeal to reflective equilibrium—in the course of his arguments. But Santayana would have none of this.

"Mr. Russell…thinks he triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals, supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to recognize was independent of their constitution" (Santayana 1935, p. 145).

Clearly, Santayana thought that human moral beliefs are a function of the human constitution, and the latter had taken its shape as the result of processes with no concern for the truth. An appeal to those very constitutional beliefs hardly offsets this skeptical conclusion. Interestingly, Santayana’s arrows found their mark. Russell eventually abandoned his moral realism, crediting these arguments.

The lesson carries over to our current discussion. While Harman seems not to have provided any good reason for challenging those initial ethical data—the initial moral beliefs with which we are equipped—our vision has been monocular. AEN calls for a glance over the shoulder, and what we see poses a challenge to Sturgeon’s reflective equilibrium despite his assertion that widely held judgments are “not obviously undermined by anything else we know.” An appeal to those considered judgments that tip off the process of reflective equilibrium will hardly assuage Sharon Street’s worry.

"If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence … then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former” (Street 2006, p. 125).

What we require, then, is some assurance that our original fund is not contaminated. And so, we return to our question, what reason have we for supposing that the mechanisms responsible for those judgments are truth-aimed? What reason have we for supposing that the dependence thesis is true?

Santayana suggested an answer to this question that he knew was unavailable to the atheist Russell: if God exists and has fashioned the human constitution with the purpose of discerning moral truth, then we have reason to embrace the dependence thesis. “If the good were independent of nature, it might still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates; his good is not a power” (Santayana 1935, p. 152). Alas, neither is Sturgeon a theist. And so he and other metaphysical naturalists shall have to seek assurance of the dependence thesis in nature itself.

In order to inspire confidence in those initial evaluative judgments of which Street speaks, the moral realist owes us some account of their origin that would lead us to suppose that they are reliable indicators of truth. On some externalist theory of justification, such as a causal theory, one might have, as Norman Daniels puts it, a “little story that gets told about why we should pay homage ultimately to those [considered] judgments and indirectly to the principles that systematize them” (Daniels 1979, p. 265). For the evolutionary naturalist, the account might follow that which is offered on behalf of ordinary perceptual or memory beliefs, or the everyday conclusions that we reach by induction. Quine offers such a story with a Darwinian spin to inspire confidence in our ability to acquire knowledge of the world around us. “Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind,” he suggests (Quine 1969, p. 126). Natural selection is unkind to those exhibiting particular behaviors that plausibly stem from either false beliefs or profound stupidity. Witness the so-called “Darwin Awards,” given posthumously to people who met their fate as a result of bolting jet engines to automobiles or climbing—naked and inebriated—into bear cages. The suggestion, then, is that we should expect our cognitive faculties to be truth-aimed and generally reliable given such selection pressures.

Alvin Plantinga, of course, has challenged such stories with what he calls “Darwin’s Doubt.” The connection between fitness-conferring behavior and true belief might not be so certain as Quine suggests (Plantinga 2000, pp. 218-240; Beilby, 2002, 204-275). If he is correct, then evolutionary naturalism is saddled with a far-ranging skepticism that takes in much more than our moral beliefs. And AEN would merely amount to a particular application of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument. In that case, one might note, after the manner of Brink’s comment on Harman, that there is no significant “explanatory disanalogy between the scientific and moral cases.” But this would cut against the naturalist; not the proponent of AEN who rejects the evolutionary naturalism that apparently yields such untoward results. However, Plantinga’s argument has met with stiff resistance (Beilby 2002). Despite his many ingenious examples in which adaptive behavior results from false beliefs (e.g., Paul’s belief that tigers are cuddly and the best way to get to know them is to run away), many people just find the link between true belief and good behavior plausible. And, in any event, the two cases, moral and non-moral, appear to be significantly different, as Street, Joyce and others have argued.

The core of Street’s paper is her “Darwinian Dilemma” that she poses to “value realists” such as Sturgeon. Our moral beliefs are fitness-aimed. Are they also truth-aimed? Either there is a fitness-truth relation or there is not. If there is not, and if we suppose that evolution has shaped our basic evaluative attitudes, then moral skepticism is in order. If there is a relation, then it is either that moral beliefs have reproductive fitness because they are true (the “tracking” relation), or we have the moral beliefs that we have simply because of the fitness that they conferred (the “adaptive link” account). But the adaptive link account suggests some variety of non-realism, such as the constructivism that Street endorses. The realist requires the tracking account in order to provide an account of warranted moral belief. Here, fitness follows mind-independent moral truths. But the tracking account, which, Street observes, is put forth as a scientific hypothesis, is just implausible from a scientific standpoint. While there is a clear and parsimonious adaptive link explanation of why humans have come to care for their offspring—namely, that the resulting behavior tends toward DNA-preservation—the tracking account must add that basic paternal instincts were favored because it is independently true that parents ought to care for their offspring.

Ethical non-naturalists, who hold that moral properties are sui generis and thus distinct from any natural properties, might be thought to have the worst time of it. Unlike the environmental hazards that Quine had in mind—predators, fires, precipices and the like—“a creature cannot run into them or fall over them or be eaten by” non-natural properties. Ethical naturalists, on the other hand, view moral properties as being constituted by natural properties with causal powers, so that it may be more plausible to suggest that creatures could interact with them profitably or unprofitably. But even here, insofar as the naturalist affirms a bona fide version of moral realism, the answers are far less plausible than is had in a straightforward adaptive link account. Why not just say that our ancestors who had a propensity to care for their offspring tended to act on that propensity and thus left more offspring—particularly when, as we noted earlier, we witness such propensities among non-human animals? Do dolphin mothers care for their daughters because they ought to do so? But, of course, Street’s adaptive link account fails to provide what we have sought in this discussion: some defense of the dependence thesis.

Darwinian Counterfactuals and Ethical Naturalism

A dilemma similar to that urged by Street arises if we return to consider the Darwinian counterfactuals. Consider the sorts of worlds that Darwin envisioned.
Had the circumstances of human evolution been more like those of hive bees or Galapagos boobies or wolves, then the directives of conscience may have led us to judge and behave in ways that are quite foreign to our actual moral sense. Our wolfish philosophers defend justice as inequality, and their erudite reasonings take their cue from the fund of judgments bequeathed to them by their genes. Bees and boobies graced with intellect would judge that siblicide and infanticide are morally required under certain conditions. Presumably, those beliefs are fitness-aimed in those worlds. Are the beliefs also true there?

Consider Sturgeon’s version of ethical naturalism, discussed earlier. One might expect that a straightforward implication of Sturgeon’s supervenience thesis would be that such beliefs are false. We learned earlier that there is no possible world in which Hitler (or anyone) has just those natural properties that Hitler actually displays but is not depraved. Indeed, Sturgeon is of the Kripkean conviction that moral terms rigidly designate natural properties. Thus, moral terms function in much the same way as natural kind terms in that they pick out natural properties and track those same properties across worlds. Gold rigidly designates that metal with an atomic number of 79 and thus necessarily refers to all and only substances with that atomic number. We can readily imagine a Twin Earth scenario in which some other metal—of a different atomic number—with all of the phenomenal qualities of gold is scarce and valued, plundered by pirates and prospected by dreamers, and is even referred to as “gold.” But for all of that, Twin Earth “gold” is not gold.

If “justice” picks out some natural property or properties, such as the equity displayed in the distribution of societal goods, then we might expect an ethical naturalist like Sturgeon to conclude that inequitable arrangements are unjust. And this will be true even, say, in those lupine worlds in which such inequities are thought to be just, as surely as “all is not golde that glistereth” on Twin Earth.

But to insist that our moral terms rigidly designate specific earthly natural properties to which human sentiments have come to be attached appears to be an instance of what Judith Thomson has called metaphysical imperialism. In seeking the reference of “good” as used in “this is a good hammer,” Thomson suggests that the natural property that best serves here is “being such as to facilitate hammering nails in in manners that conduce to satisfying the wants people typically hammer nails in to satisfy.” She opts for this property as opposed to the more determinate properties of “being well-balanced, strong, with an easily graspable handle, and so on.” Even though we may find that the latter set of properties coextends with those that “conduce to satisfying the wants that people typically hammer nails in to satisfy,” there are all sorts of “odd possible worlds” in which people typically have quite different wants for which deviant hammers come in handy. There are worlds in which “large slabs of granite” do the best job in this regard. And so we are being metaphysical imperialists if we presume to impose our nail-hammering wants upon denizens of those worlds. She thus fixes upon a property that is less determinate than those that characterize hammers of earthly goodness: it is good insofar as it answers to wants, and chunks of granite serve well in this respect in some possible worlds.

The ethical non-naturalist might very well maintain that the “justice” in such worlds is ill-conceived and that natural selection has had an unfortunate and distorting influence there, alleging that some transcendent principle of justice as equality is among the verities. Perhaps entire species can get their moral facts wrong, as might entire societies. Russ Shafer-Landau, for instance, compares moral laws to mathematical or logical laws, and asks why the former should be any more problematic than the latter (2004, p. 77). If Twin Earth logicians have a penchant for affirming the consequent, then earthly logicians might regard Twin Earth as a veritable mission field. There is certainly nothing “imperialistic” about that. But our ethical naturalist has identified justice as a particular set of natural properties upon which human evolution has, in fact, converged. Whatever circumstances of justice have obtained on earth are contingent and fail to obtain in those Darwinian worlds. It seems that we’ve no more reason to think that earthly justice is normative there than we have for denying that those denizens, who lack C-fibers, ever experience pain.

Should the ethical naturalist allow that such beliefs are true, as well as fitness-conferring, in such worlds? Suppose so. Then it would seem that either the supervenience thesis is false, since the world in question is one in which justice fails to supervene upon the relevant natural properties, or the actual supervenience base is something different from what we might have imagined. Perhaps, for instance, the sacredness of infanticide is in virtue of the fact that it is conducive to fitness, so that truth follows fitness, so to speak. Or infanticide may be fitness-conferring because it is indeed a “sacred duty” in such worlds. Either way, Sturgeon’s own ethical theory will be in for some readjustment along unexpected and, I think, implausible, lines. Whatever we say of the truth conditions of Infanticide is a sacred duty in that Darwinian world will function as a universal acid, bearing implications for the shared moral beliefs of the actual world—if the actual world is similarly Darwinian.

If the truth-maker there is the belief’s conduciveness to reproductive fitness, then, presumably, our own moral beliefs, opposed as they are to those in that Darwinian world, will be true in virtue of their conduciveness to fitness here. This is a dependence thesis of sorts that may guarantee that truth and fitness may be found together. But it is hardly what we were seeking. Did Sturgeon wish to say, implausibly, that the moral properties of an action supervene upon the overall reproductive advantage that it confers?

If, on the other hand, the counterfactual beliefs in those Darwinian worlds are fitness-conferring because they are true, then, given the supervenience thesis, it would seem that the moral properties that obtain in that world supervene upon natural properties found in common with the actual world. Presumably, this would be some natural property that is common to both equitable and inequitable social arrangements and to both the nurturing and the strangling of babies. In that case, the natural properties upon which justice and injustice or depravity and saintliness supervene, are neither equity nor inequity, cruelty or kindness but something that is less determinate and serves as the genus for these seemingly opposed species of moral properties. One unhappy result here is that those more determinate natural properties that are favored by reflective equilibrium would prove to be merely accidental and coextensive features of morality. If there is some natural property N that is common to both equitable and inequitable bargaining outcomes, and upon which justice supervenes, then N, and not equity, defines the essence of justice. This would appear to be the metaethical equivalent of the suggestion that water is whatever fills a world’s oceans, so that earthly H2O and Twin-Earthly XYZ both qualify as water. But then being H2O is not the essence of the stuff that we call “water.” (Note that N could be conduciveness to reproductive fitness, so that our two suggestions above would seem to converge. ) One might thus offer a functionalist account of moral properties. Perhaps, for instance, “justice” picks out whatever natural properties tend toward societal stability. We happen to live in a world in which, given “the nature of man and the circumstances of the world in which he is placed,” equity has this effect. But there are worlds in which inequity does the trick. In addition to signaling a significant departure from the sort of account that naturalists like Sturgeon wish to offer, such a move would seem to offer a precarious footing for any robust account of moral realism.

Taking a line from the imperishable Jeremy Bentham, Daniel Dennett has suggested that, from a Darwinian perspective, the notion of rights is “nonsense on stilts.” But, he adds, it is “good nonsense,” and it is good precisely because it is on stilts (Dennett 507). “Rights” language is instrumentally good in that it functions as a “conversation-stopper,” thus putting an end to otherwise paralyzing deliberation. It is a variety of “rule worship,” and obeisance to such rules is conducive to societal stability. But from this perspective, the content of the rules is of no more inherent importance than the contents of varying traffic laws. Things will go smoothly in Cambridge, UK so long as everyone keeps to the left, but they are just as smooth in the New England namesake so long as everyone sticks to the other lane. A realism indifferent to such content is a realism in name only.

We might pursue, if only briefly, one possible route suggested by something Sturgeon says in his exchange with Alan Gibbard (1994). Gibbard offers a possible evolutionary account of human morality that, he thinks, is suggestive of expressivism. Perhaps our notion of justice, for instance, emerged from early “bargaining situations” in which some form of cooperation between self-interested individuals proves beneficial for all involved. Here, “beneficial” means, roughly, getting what one wants out of a bargain, and the assumption is that getting what one wants has some reproductive advantage. The problem is that, unless self-interest is checked in some way, the bargaining—and thus, the beneficial cooperation—breaks down. There is a stable outcome in which each is satisfied with getting his share, that is, an outcome that is least likely to prompt retaliation on the part of any members leading to a breakdown in the bargaining. There would thus be selection pressure in favor of a certain disposition to be satisfied with that outcome. With the advent of language humans came to use words that were functionally equivalent to our words “just” or “fair” to express the positive sentiment attached to an outcome in which goods are distributed in some roughly equal manner. Thus, there is fitness in a particular sentiment that would likely be distributed widely. Moral language describes or expresses this sentiment. The result is a form of non-cognitivism, or, at least, a variety of anti-realism with regard to moral properties.

Sturgeon replies by noting that there is nothing in Gibbard’s admittedly speculative account that requires us to see morality as having been undercut. “Perhaps,” Sturgeon suggests, “our ancestors sometimes called bargaining outcomes just because they really were.” In this case, people have come to “care about justice” and “are also able to resolve disputes about it.” And perhaps “achieving consensus in debate might be a way…of detecting a property.” Why, then, should we not think that Gibbard’s bargainers are “referring to a real property that they care about, and about which their views are often correct?”

Further, moral explanations that appeal to justice enjoy the same plausibility as do appeals to, say, Hitler’s depravity.

The justice of a society … is supposed to stabilize it; and people are alleged to prosper precisely because of their justice. Of course, there is also a tradition that attacks this latter claim as a pious fiction. But the most prominent opposing view also treats justice as explanatory. That justice always pays, and that justice sometimes costs, are both views that cast justice as a property with causal efficacy.

We may discern here echoes of Sturgeon’s exchange with Harman. We are entitled to regard moral properties as real in the event that they play an explanatory role. If an equitable distribution of goods tends toward societal stability, and people have come to believe that such equity is just, then why not conclude that the fact that the bargaining outcome is, in fact, just, explains both the belief and the stability? Why not suppose that the non-moral evolutionary explanation amplifies rather than undermines the moral explanation? Sturgeon claims that Gibbard’s account “does nothing whatever” to favor the “irrealist” account over the realist one. His general conclusion is that “nothing we know of our evolutionary history” supplies us with an undermining nonmoral explanation “or makes irrealism any more plausible than the moral realism that I am prepared to defend.”

But is this so? Justice as equality has a stabilizing effect upon Gibbard’s group of bargainers because of what the parties to the bargain are and are not prepared to accept. That is, stability is achieved because each bargainer leaves the table with the belief, “I got what I deserved.” Gibbard’s story includes a cast of characters who are self-interested individualists, each of whom imports assumptions about his relative worth within the community. Given these conditions, there is pressure in the direction of equitable arrangements.

But might we imagine a different set of initial conditions? Would lupine “bargainers” likewise come to “detect” the natural property of inequity? Might some come away with a disproportionately smaller share plus the belief, “I got what I deserved”? That “justice” would then be causally efficacious. Would it then be real? Not if a property’s being real requires its being mind-independent. For in each of these worlds, actual and lupine, if justice supervenes upon certain natural facts, these will essentially include facts about the psychological constitution of the respective bargainers.

Perhaps Sturgeon or some other ethical naturalist can offer some account that sits comfortably with the implications of Darwinian counterfactuals. My present argument is not that there is no possibly true story that can be told. However, in considering the sorts of circumstances that Darwin describes, it seems that the most plausible explanation is that such counterfactual moral beliefs are formed as the result of selection pressures that are themselves in place due to the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape—contingencies that are morally indifferent. Such beliefs are evolutionary means to non-moral reproductive ends. While ethical naturalists in those worlds no doubt argue for the supervenience of the moral upon the natural, the efficacy of moral explanations, and the existence of corresponding moral facts, we should, I think, regard them as mistaken.
But if the moral beliefs of the actual world have also taken their cue from predispositions that were fitness-conferring, then it is hard to see why our own ethical naturalists are in any better position so to argue.

Darwinian Counterfactuals, Ethical Non-Naturalism and Theism

I suggested earlier that the ethical non-naturalist might have a ready reply to the argument from Darwinian counterfactuals. For she may be in a position to maintain
that certain natural properties bear a necessary relation to the moral properties that they exemplify, regardless of any evolutionary possibilities.

But the non-naturalist who is also a metaphysical naturalist seems to have problems of her own in the face of such Darwinian counterfactuals. Here, Santayana’s criticism of Russell resurfaces. If “man is a product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving” and moral beliefs are ultimately the product of whatever selection pressures were in place given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape; if there is a vast range of possible outcomes, how is it that unguided human evolution on earth has resulted in just those moral beliefs that accord with the verities? The circumstances of evolution have likely been shaped by everything from plate tectonics to meteorological fluctuations to terrestrial collisions with asteroids. As Stephen Gould argued, everything about us, including our very existence, is radically contingent so that, were we to imagine “rewinding the reel,” so to speak, and allowing it to play again, it is highly unlikely that evolution would again attempt the experiment called homo sapiens. What a fortuitous chain of events that resulted in the actual existence of the kinds of creatures to whom eternally and necessarily true, but causally impotent, principles apply! The dependence thesis in the hands of the non-naturalist seems highly improbable. A sort of “moral fine-tuning argument” is suggested. The theist may have an advantage just here. For, on theism, as Santayana put it, the Good is also nature’s Creator.

The theist, like the non-naturalist, is in a position to say why there is a necessary connection between certain natural properties and their supervenient moral properties. Robert Adams, for example, has recently suggested that things bear the moral properties that they do—good or bad—insofar as they resemble or fail to resemble God. As he notes, “Natural things that resemble God do so, in general, by virtue of their natural properties” (Adams 1999, p. 61). A theist who accepts such a view can thus agree with Sturgeon that there is no possible world in which anyone does just what Hitler did but is not depraved. And this is precisely because there is no possible world in which such actions fail to be an affront to the divine nature.

But the theist also has an account of the development of human moral faculties—a theistic genealogy of morals—that 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 truth-aimed. Adams again:

"If we suppose that God directly or indirectly causes human beings to regard as excellent approximately those things that are Godlike in the relevant way, it follows that there is a causal and explanatory connection between facts of excellence and beliefs that we may regard as justified about excellence, and hence it is in general no accident that such beliefs are correct when they are."

The theist is thus in a position to offer Daniels’ “little story” that would explain the general reliability of those considered judgments from which reflective equilibrium takes its cue. Certain of our moral beliefs—in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection—are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.

Humean Skepticism or Reidean Externalism?

Both the evolutionary naturalist and the theist may be found saying that certain of moral beliefs are by-products of the human constitution: we think as we do largely as a result of our “programming.” Whether such beliefs are warranted would seem to depend upon who or what is responsible for the program. And this calls for some account of the metaphysical underpinnings of those beliefs and the mechanisms responsible for them. With this point in mind, perhaps we may tidily summarize our discussion by comparing the perspectives of David Hume and his critic, Thomas Reid.

We saw that Michael Ruse claims Hume as one of his own in that Hume seems to have defended a variety of moral subjectivism—and a Humean one at that! But I am not convinced that this is right. Perhaps his discussion of moral beliefs is a part of a seamless whole that includes his account of the beliefs of common life. I do not think that Hume should be read as advancing the positive metaphysical theses that causal connections fail to obtain or that the world is devoid of both material substances and substantial selves. Rather, his is a skeptical epistemological argument to the effect that we lack any warrant whatsoever for thinking that there are such connections. To be sure, in the final analysis, all that we are warranted in accepting are perceptions and the various ways in which we find them conjoined or otherwise related. But determining whether there is or is not anything more calls for speculation that exceeds the limits of Hume’s skepticism. In each discussion—causality, substance, personal identity—he aims to show both that the belief in question is without any epistemic credentials and that relevant human propensities explain the belief without making any assumptions about the truth of the belief.

Things are no different when Hume turns to the question of morality. We are no more warranted in believing in objective moral properties than we are in thinking that there is any necessary connection among events. And a propensity account waits in the offing to explain the persistence of moral beliefs despite their lack of warrant. Moral beliefs are the byproducts of human psychology. “Morality is more properly felt than jug’d of” (Hume, p. 470). But then, so is just about everything else. “All probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ‘Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy” (Hume, p. 103).

As I read him, Hume was no more a subjectivist than he was a bundle theorist regarding persons. He offered positive theories in neither metaethics nor metaphysics. From a Humean perspective, we lack positive reasons for accepting either the dependence or independence theses. Thus, his is a variety of epistemological moral skepticism and, in this, resembles the version of AEN defended above.

Thomas Reid countered the conclusions of Hume’s Treatise by appeal to “Common Sense.” Reid compares the course of modern philosophy, which began with Descartes and ended with Hume, to a traveler who, upon finding himself “in a coal-pit,” realizes that he has taken a wrong turn. Upon hearing the skeptical musings of some of the modern philosophers, the average person, confident in the deliverances of common sense, takes them to be “either merry or mad.” Indeed, Reid suggests that anyone who is a true friend of the man who seriously entertains doubts regarding, say, his own mind or of a world of things that endure over time, will “hope for his cure from physic and regimen, rather than metaphysic and logic” (Reid, p. 17). He places his hope in the doctor of medicine rather than the doctor of philosophy precisely because the beliefs in question do not admit of the sort of proof that the philosopher would vainly offer. As G.K. Chesterton put it, curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher but casting out a devil. There is no set of premises more certainly known from which such beliefs follow. Hume is right: the beliefs of common life are not endorsed by reason, but, instead, are the inevitable byproducts of our constitution. But Hume is mistaken in inferring from this that such the beliefs are, therefore, without warrant. Why, after all, trust the rational faculties to which Hume appeals, but not trust the faculties responsible for our common sense beliefs? After all, both “came from the same shop” (Reid 168-9). As Nicholas Wolterstorff notes, according to Reid, that “shop” was divine creation by fiat” (Wolterstorff 2001, p. 199).

As Reid had it, the common sense beliefs that arise spontaneously and non-inferentially given our constitution are warranted even though they fail to measure up to the exacting standards of epistemic justification assumed by foundationalists after the Cartesian fashion. My belief, I have a head, is not logically self-evident: I am free to deny it without pain of contradiction (though perhaps not without pain of running it into a post). There are logically possible scenarios that would explain my having the belief even if is was false, though, of course, none of these is commended to me. Further, I have a head is not incorrigible in the way that I am being appeared-to headly is. Nor have I inferred the former from the latter or from any other belief. Nevertheless, I am warranted in believing it, and, what is more, I know that I have a head just in case I have one.

These days we would say that such beliefs are "properly basic." My belief in my head is basic in that it is non-inferential. And my accepting this belief in this basic way constitutes no epistemic impropriety on my part. The belief is properly basic just in case the faculty through which it is acquired is functioning as it ought. More specifically, as Alvin Plantinga has refined Reid’s original view, a belief is warranted just in case it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is truth-aimed and functioning properly in the environment for which it was designed (Plantinga 1993). This account accommodates those perceptual, memorial, testimonial and even metaphysical beliefs that are the guides of common life, and, closer to our purposes, are among the fund of native beliefs with which we begin in theory assessment. Even closer to our purposes, such an account accommodates those moral beliefs employed in reflective equilibrium.

Reid appealed to a set of “first, or self-evident” principles” of morality discerned through faculties, which he thought were wrought in the same shop as reason and perception. Just as there is no reasoning with the man who, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is convinced that his head is a gourd, neither is there advantage in engaging in moral argument with a man who fails to recognize self-evident principles of morality.
If a man does not perceive that he ought to regard the good of society, and the good of his wife and children, the reasoning can have no effect upon him, because he denies the first principle upon which it is grounded (Reid 1983, p. 322).
The details of Reid’s own candidates for such first principles need not concern us in the present context. What is of significance is the suggestion that there are moral beliefs to which “we should pay homage,” as Norman Daniels has put it. We pay such homage when we utilize them as data for the construction of moral theories or as a kind of court of appeal in assessing them. This is business as usual in moral philosophy. We may suppose, with Nicholas Sturgeon, that Adolph Hitler was depraved or with Kai Nielsen that wife-beating or child molesting is vile, and go on to agree with the latter that such beliefs are “bedrock” (Nielsen 1990, p. 10).

But our confidence in these constitutional beliefs is wisely invested only in the event that we have reason to believe the faculties responsible for them to be truth-aimed. Reid’s theism provided him with such a reason: the moral faculties were forged in the same shop as our other cognitive faculties. They are designed by God for the purpose of discerning moral truth. “That conscience which is in every man’s breast, is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned” (Reid 1983, p. 355). Hume, on the other hand, finding only the faculties but pretending to no knowledge of their origin, placed no such confidence in their reliability. The evolutionary naturalist may have added an account of origins, but it is one that inspires no more confidence than that displayed by Hume.

muddle and Naturalism

Submitted by skyspy on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:29pm.

Ummmm, I'm not going to pretend to understand what you wrote. I need to read it again, maybe it will sink in.

Who is your target audience?? I did see your link to a publication, but I did not recgonize it. Is this targeted towards a specific religious group??

I have read(no I don't remember where, and I do not have a link to what I read) that some animals actually behave better than humans on certain issues of moral values. I have read that wovles and sea horses are faithful to one mate their entire lives. Yet many a "christian man" has fallen in this area. I'm sure there are many arguments back and forth but in that case it seems that naturalism triumphs.

I'll read again, I have probably missed your point.

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Sky: "Morality" and animals

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 8:51pm.

Well, it would be a bit of a stretch to say that animals behave either morally or immorally, as we probably should think that a prerequisite is the ability of understand and act upon moral principles.

But, at the risk of stumping for one book all night, I highly recommend Mary Midgley, Beast and Man. She has a lengthy discussion of the alleged "beastliness" of beasts, and says some things along the lines of what you have in mind.

Midgley is a marvelous (and witty--sometimes hilariously funny) writer coming from a Darwinian and, I think, naturalist, perspective. But her views are so well-argued and sensible--particularly in dealing with the question of whether natural selection has bequeathed to us a nature--that, whether you wind up agreeing or disagreeing, you will have learned how to think carefully about the issues.

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Thanks Muddle

Submitted by skyspy on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 7:53am.

I'm going to look for that book today. It sounds interesting.

Have a safe holiday if you are traveling. Merry Christmas.

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Sky: Target Audience

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:55pm.

Blackwell Publishers (Oxford) has a series titled the Blackwell COmpanions to Philosophy. (There are volumes on Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, etc.)

This essay is merely one segment of a much longer piece that will be included in a new volume in Blackwell's Companion series. It is not for a religious group at all. Rather, it is for philosophers, theologians and students.

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Name That Logical Falacy!

Submitted by Josh on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 5:57pm.

…Naturalists (atheists) are not warranted in their moral beliefs because they must embrace a theory (Darwinism) that explains our having those beliefs without their being true. The theist, on the other hand, maintains that human moral faculties are "truth-aimed" because they were designed precisely for the purpose of discerning moral truth. Moral beliefs are thus warranted against the background assumption of theism, but unwarranted with naturalism in the backdrop.

Muddle, I’m sorry that you wasted so much time writing the rest of your post. There is no point in arguing against any of your points because your entire thesis is logically absurd. It’s what we intellectuals call a false premise. Actually, it’s a false premise coupled with a tautology concluding with a non-sequitur entangled with a false dichotomy. So, in order to help you avoid such logically defunct arguments in the future, let me explain.

Let me take your first premise that naturalists must embrace Darwinism to explain morality. This is false because evolution explains how life evolves, not how the human brain works. Second, saying that “human moral faculties are truth-aimed because they discern moral truth” is circular reasoning because human morals are determined by human morals. In other words, it’s like saying A=B because A=B. Third, your notion that moral beliefs are only warranted if one believes in a god doesn’t make sense because humans are capable of valuing life without a belief system of how one obtained that life. Finally, you conclude your thesis by implying that there are only two options: to believe in evolution and have invalid morals, or believe in a god and have a valid moral compass. Evolution, morals, and the belief of a god are independent entities that neither depend on each other for their existence nor are they mutually exclusive, so arbitrarily linking them and assigning mutual exclusion is invalid.

Oh yeah, and those of us that believe in evolution don’t call ourselves Darwinists. Only evolution deniers apply us with that label.

Better luck next time.

Josh.

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"we intellectuals "

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 7:09pm.

I almost missed this.

What a riot.

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Josh: You are Both Mistaken and Brash

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:50pm.

Let me take your first premise that naturalists must embrace Darwinism to explain morality. This is false because evolution explains how life evolves, not how the human brain works.

First, you sound like a sophomore who has had a course in philosophy and learned just enough to be dangerous.
You need to do some reading, my friend.

I suggest beginning with Mary Midgley's majesterial Beast and Man.

The recent book by Richard Joyce, The EVolution of Morality would also be of help.

Funny, you here, whether wittingly or not, reject the disciploine of evolutionary psychology outright. Joyce says there that "no sensible person" can do this.

It is wildly implausible to suppose that natural selection would have nothing to do with human psychology. Why would any Darwinist (the word isd not pejorative as you suggest--look it up) wish to say such a thing? (And nothing in my argument denies the theory of evolution. I am arguing against "evolutionary naturalism.")
Midgley calls this the "blank paper view" and she has a field day with it.

You don't understand the theory that you profess.

Second, saying that “human moral faculties are truth-aimed because they discern moral truth” is circular reasoning because human morals are determined by human morals

There is nothing circular about it whatsoever. COnsider Freud's explanation of religious belief. He suggested that such belief is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is not truth-aimed. That is, humans have a psychological propensity to believe in God, not because the belief is true, but because it helps them to cope in an otherwise unsettling universe. The argument of my essay is that an evolutionary account of the human moral sense gives us no reason to suppose that our moral faculties are truth-aimed. We tend to believe in right and wrong primarily because doing so tends to promote behavior that is fitness-conferring. A Darwinian account of morality appears to parallel the Freudian account of religious belief in this respect. So the question is simply what kind of background theory would we need in order to make sense of the idea that our moral beliefs are truth-aimed rather than merely fitness-aimed. Theism provides one such answer.

Evolution, morals, and the belief of a god are independent entities that neither depend on each other for their existence nor are they mutually exclusive, so arbitrarily linking them and assigning mutual exclusion is invalid.

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Whatever it is, it is a bald assertion.

It is just fall-down funny to see such a combination of arrogance and ignorance.

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Fall-down funny responses...

Submitted by Josh on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 7:38pm.

I got that "bald assertion" from your thesis. Check it out. It's right after "The thesis for which I argue..."

Furthermore, by saying that theists “maintain that human moral faculties are “truth-aimed” because they were designed to discern moral truth” and then concluding that their moral beliefs are thusly warranted is the definition of circular reasoning.

Finally, please tell me where I “reject the disciploine (sic) of evolutionary psychology outright.” Darwinism is not about evolutionary psychology. "Darwinism" is just a slight against evolutionary biology, as Darwin had nothing to do with evolutionary psychology. I suggest you read On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin.

Josh.

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Thanks Josh-for the accurate quote

Submitted by Paul Perkins on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 8:07pm.

At least you quoted the entire title.

I don't believe that every Darwinist holds the following view, but I find the latter part of his book to contain some incredibly racist presumptions.

This is the way to blog!

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Josh: Don't Embarrass Yourself

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 7:52pm.

Read Darwin's Descent of Man--particularly chapters 4 and 5 and then come back and tell me that Darwin said nothing about the evolution of human psychology.

Again, there is nothing circular in the point. You simply betray your ignorance of an extensive literature in epistemology--particularly a family of theories known as externalism. (And WVO Quine addressed the question of whether we have reason to expect that our cognitive faculties are reliable given evolution. My discussion of moral beliefs falls right in with that discussion.)

Let me try an analogy that might help.

Suppose you have a device that you think is a compass, and you are wondering whether the needle reliably points north. Learning that it was, in fact, designed to point north (and is functioning well), gives you confidence to use it as you set out. There is nothing circular about this, and it is exactly parallel to the point I make.

Josh, clearly you are out of your league here.

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Round and round we go

Submitted by Josh on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 12:48pm.

If you state that the compass points north because the compass is designed to point north, that doesn't prove that the compass is actually pointing north, which is why it is circular reasoning, which is why it is a logical fallacy.

I am not doubting that you are well read, for it is obvious that you are. However, that doesn't mean that your thesis isn't tragically flawed.

You state as your thesis that morals are not warranted in atheists because they accept Darwinism. You further state that morals are warranted in theists because they can discern moral truth because they think they can discern moral truth. This makes no sense, regardless of if you are talking about evolutionary Darwinism, social Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, classical Darwinism, neural Darwinism, corporate Darwinism, or even Universal Darwinism.

Your thesis is just a collection of psychobabble that doesn’t mean anything.

Josh.

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Josh

Submitted by d.smith700 on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 1:37pm.

I'm afraid I have to agree although I realize that I'll never be a "philosopher."
If I give you 16 paths to follow here and you happen to pick one, I suppose I was correct, huh?
If not, I'll give you 16 more!
It takes 3-4 years to learn how to do that!

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Josh's Disorientation

Submitted by muddle on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 1:09pm.

I'm not trying to prove that the compass points north, Josh. The point is, you and I both think that it does. But we have different theories about what mechanisms are responsible for its production. We're already relying on the thing. Now we are asking a background question: what is the best explanation for the reliability of this device?

Again, there is no circular reasoning here whatsoever. In some ways it resembles what Kant called a "transcendental argument" and involves what Peirce called "abductive reasoning."

Look, I'm going to act out of character a bit here to make a point. I've read an ancestor of the present essay to a conference of philosophers at Oxford University. Many people there had objections. One--the editor of a prestigious journal in Cambridge--thought that my argument was interestingly wrong enough that he has dogged me for several months in email exchanges and is publishing an attempted refutation of the argument.

But none of these hard-core analytic philosophers raised the superficial objections that you raise because they understood the issues well enough to know where the argument lies. It simpoly ain't where you're pointing.

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We're still spinning, Muddle.

Submitted by Josh on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 2:12pm.

If you use the notion that "human moral faculties are "truth-aimed" because they were designed precisely for the purpose of discerning moral truth" as proof to therefore conclude that their moral beliefs are warranted, that is -again- circular reasoning.

Furthermore, I'm sure you know that one of the main modern criticisms of Kant's "Transcendental Argument (for the Existence of God)” by Theodore Drange, Michael Martin, Richard Dawkins, etc., is that it utilizes circular reasoning to get to the point and is therefore logically bunk.

Besides, the fact that philosophers at Oxford and Cambridge thought your argument was ridiculous from a more interesting philosophical viewpoint doesn’t diminish my point that your thesis is tragically flawed.

Josh.

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Josh! Theodore Drange?! (w/Addendum)

Submitted by muddle on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 3:48pm.

Done some googling?

Dawkins doesn't have a philosophical bone in his body. He proved that with his last book-length installment.

I didn't say that anyone thought the argument ridiculous. In fact, they found it stimulating. We had a great discussion after the paper was read.

Running into disagreement is just life in philosophy. I've never been to a conference and heard a paper by anyone where there were not vigorous objections to the thesis. And the point undercuts what you are saying: they understood the issues and accepted the approach of the argument. You understand little to nothing.

You've demonstrated that you have little grasp of Darwin's theory itself.

There is a body of respectable literature--articles in refereed journals--on this very topic. There are extremes of the kind of thesis that I urge. Harvard entomologist E.O. WIlson has written scores of books in which he argues that "the genes have culture reined in on a leash." Daniel Dennett interacts with Wilson's views (and those of other "sociobiologists") and argues that Wilson is a "greedy reductionist." I do not believe for a minute that you actually read my essay. You've shown no evidence that you have gotten past the italicized thesis that I inserted into the blog above. But if you had, you would see that I enter into the fray of a very lively debate over these issues, involving Wilson, Michael Ruse (note the opening quote of my essay from Ruse and WIlson, both Darwinists), Elliot Sober (who has written splendid things on the nevolution of altruism--see his Unto Others written with David Sloan Wilson), Sharon Street, whose recent Harvard dissertation advances an argument so similar to mine that I almost feel "scooped," Richard Joyce, in his recent The Evolution of Morality (in which he argues that moral beliefs are not warranted due to their evolutionary origins), Duke professor Alex Rosenberg who is a naturalist and a Darwinist (and, by the way, use the term "Darwinist" to describe the view) who argues along with Tamler Sommers that Darwinism entails moral nihilism--a position far stronger than my own. There is Darwin, in The Descent of Man arguing that, had the circumstances of our evolution been different, then so would have been the dictates of conscience. There is the exchange between Bertrand Russell and George Santayana, in which Santayana argues Russell out of his moral realism on the grounds that, given a naturalistic account of things, the belief in moral properties is not warranted. Santayana actually says that if Russell were a theist, then he might be entitled to the belief.

The final section of the essay discusses the exchange between Hume and Reid. There has been much discussion of Reidean externalism of late, and my essay fits squarely into all of that.

In short, you simply don't have a clue of what you're talking about. I'm absolutely fine with disagreement. AGain, that's life in philosophy. There is no such thing as philosophy without argument. If you found some genuine issues to raise (e.g., When Dennett says that the emergence of "memes" allows culture to "snap" WIlson's leash. Might we not suppose that moral reasoning is as autonomous--independent of the genes as mathematical reasoning?) I would welcome the debate.

But you came out swinging. You displayed arrogance, contempt and ignorance--serious ignorance--simultaneously.

And, for the last time, you're simply and plainly wrong about your charge of circularity. My last way of putting the compass example demonstrates the point, so I will not repeat it. I could try ALL CAPS, or, if in person, perhaps I could speak slowly and more loudly. But the fact that you don't see the point counts against you in this case, not me. Here's an idea. In your googling, google "reliabilism" or "proper function epistemology" and then get back to me after you have learned something.

Addendum: Read the portion in my essay in which I discuss "reflective equilibrium" and Norman Daniels' point about the "little story" that must needs be told to justify the homage that we pay considered beliefs in reflective equilibrium. If you understand Daniels, you'll understand where my argument comes in.

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Yep! Teddy Drange

Submitted by Josh on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 5:38pm.

However, I admit I was just padding up to Richard Dawkins, which you might not be surprised to find out that I actually like. I never admitted to actually reading any of your work after the thesis and don't claim to. In fact, I have yet to comment on anything but your thesis. However, your introductory thesis statement that one cannot have valid morals unless they believe in a god is what I would classify as "arrogance, contempt and ignorance--serious ignorance--simultaneously." It was you with that introduction that came out swinging, and I was just responding in kind.

Josh.

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It's funny that you bring up Dawkins

Submitted by bad_ptc on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 7:28pm.

I forwarded this series of posts to his WEB site and asked if they had any interest in chiming in.

Thanks in large part to muddle's followers and non-followers, this has to be one of the most diverse blogs for a small town newspaper in the country if not the world.

I don't agree with many on here but I have to admit they make me think, read and do research that I wouldn't normally do.

God forbid I might learn something along the way.

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The Dawkins Dancers (credit to Sniffles for the original link)

Submitted by muddle on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 9:34pm.

And now the moment you've all been waiting for. The Grand Finale of this thread (as far as I'm concerned).

We've lined up four--count 'em, four!--leading atheists to ring in the holidays!

Dan Dennett (my favorite atheist), Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

Of course, Hitchens would never really be able to execute these steps being "permanently pissed" and all.

But here they are!

(Somebody feel like doing televaneglists next?)

Dawkins Dancers

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HEAL!

Submitted by bad_ptc on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 10:15pm.

Televangelists are OK with me just as long as we get to include Professional Wrestling somewhere in the conversation.

As far as I'm concerned, you can't have one without the other.

Talk about a theme for SNL.

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Josh: This Speaks Volumes

Submitted by muddle on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 6:02pm.

You react to the thesis (which you do not like) and therefore disregard whatever argument might be waiting in the offing.

Unbelievable.

As a result, you could not know the ways in which the essay anticipates objections (not yours, of course) and attempts to steer a coherent course through them.

Unbelievable!

Are you an example of the "new atheism"? This has been my impression in general. As Alvin Plantinga says in his review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, Dawkins assumes a "smarter-than-thou" tone throughout. My memory is flawed, but I seem to recall your entering into earlier blogs on religion with that same snide and snotty attitude.

Grow up, Josh and learn how to engage in genuine dialog and debate.

And there is nothing arrogant about proposing an argument. (Are you thinking of Pullman's blurb on the back of Dawkins' book here?) I show no contempt, for instance, for Nicholas Surgeon whom I admire and have interacted with personally and extensively but whose views I critique. I have the deepest respect for Elliot Sober, who is a naturalist, a Darwinist and my former professor who taught me how to think about the philosophy of biology--but whose views I also critique here.

It's all in the difference between saying, "I'm not sure that argument can work. Here's why..." and saying, "Everything you say is sheer nonsense (and then failing to look at anything the person says.." (And being so presumptious as to, incorrectly, offer a free tutorial in logic.) It's the difference between arguing and insulting. You thought you could substitute the latter for the former. It might work in some circles, Josh. Not here.

The essay, once it is in final form, will be published in a great forum. Naturalist philosophers will do their best to tear it apart. (I know I'll be the target of essays over at infidels.org, for instance) I fully anticipate that. And I'll likely publish rejoinders in various journals as a result, including revisions or adjustments in light of the attacks. But none of those revisions will be even remotely related to anything you've said here.

You didn't even bother to understand what the argument might be and yet think you have something to say on the topic. How very fundamentalist of you. I didn't like the implications of Dawkins' title. But I read the book, and therefore have something substantial to say about kit.

Unbelievable.

The entire tenor of your reply betrayed the sort of cocky self-assuredness of not a few people these days who assume in advance that anyone who offers a challenge to an atheistic worldview must have just fallen off the back of a turnip truck.

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Unbelievable, muddle?

Submitted by Josh on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 6:56pm.

What's so unbelievable that someone commented on your 15,000 word philosophical rant on the Peachtree City local newspaper blog without reading it?

Atheist? No. New-atheist? No. Darwinist atheist? No. Just someone who thinks that anyone who tries to prove or justify their a priori holier-than-thou moral superiority is worthy of more ridicule than discourse.

Obviously you disagree.

Josh.

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Another Philosopher

Submitted by d.smith700 on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:02pm.

They seem to be a dime a dozen!

I fully comprendoism yers howsumever!

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No, Dollar. He's Not a Philosopher at All. Trust Me

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:52pm.

Not at all.

Just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

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muddle

Submitted by Bonkers on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 7:34pm.

not even worth the 5/6 of a cent?

How do you define one? Can't be done by others apparently. Must take
another one!

What is a "homespun" philosopher?

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Our good songwriter- Dan Fogelberg has passed

Submitted by BPR on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 4:04pm.

I grew up in the late 70's meaning I was a teenager- I loved Dan Fogelberg- he passed away from prostate cancer at the age of 56, I am saddened by his death, loved his music,, also- I want us to keep Muddle in our prayers- my friend, I am praying for you. I care.

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Fogelberg and Prostate Cancer

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 4:18pm.

It's very sad. By the time he was diagnosed in 2004, the cancer was already well advanced (i.e., had escaped the prostate and gone systemic).

Mine was also discovered in '04, on a fluke, really. When I went to the Dr. for hand pain, he ordered blood work to see if evidence of arthritis turned up. He said, "We might as well do your PSA while we're at it." I was 47, so that was three years early according to the conventional wisdom of starting at 50. A suspicious PSA led to a biopsy, which revealed that 10 out of 12 samples were positive for cancer, and one of those included some pretty aggressive stuff (some grade 4 cells on a scale of 1 to 5). I have reasonable hope that I was treated before there was any local escape of the cancer. But, of course, there is no guarantee of this. It's PSA tests every six months for years.

Almost certainly, had I waited until 50 to start screening it would have been advanced not unlike Fogelberg's. This local doctor--Charles Bergstrom--likely saved my life by his thoroughness.

I'm very sad about Dan Fogelberg. 56 is too young, and most certainly too young to be taken by prostate cancer--very, very rare.
I've always loved his music ("Leader of the Band," "Longer," "Run for the Roses," etc.) and play some of it on the guitar.

Men 50 and older (better, 40 and older): Do you know your PSA?

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While we are on the subject of....

Submitted by Cyclist on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:31pm.

cancer, make sure you get checked for the colon rectal variety. Like "muddle" I had no idea until a test revealed the presence of blood were it shouldn't be. When it was all said and done I had to gave birth to my son - colon. Since it was caught early I can write about it and make fun of it. Don't put it off!

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Cyclist: i got my december and january schedule:

Submitted by AF A-10 on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 10:37pm.

Delta will be checking my colon for two months straight I loved "The Leader of the Band." Dan will be missed.

Kevin "Hack" King

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Hack,

Submitted by Cyclist on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 10:43pm.

I hope it's not up-close and personal.
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Cyclist- Explain a little more please

Submitted by BPR on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:42pm.

Honestly, I'm a duh, my husband is 49 can you explain a little better. Thanks- ( just don't tell everyone how stupid I am)

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bpr,

Submitted by Cyclist on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:52pm.

Google "colon cancer" and pick any of the hits. I was 44 when I had my surgery.
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Cyclist- Thanks

Submitted by BPR on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:54pm.

Thanks for the information, with Dan Fogelberg death and Muddle's situation , I am concerned for my husband. You are okay aren't you? I hope and pray so.

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Cyclist- Thanks again

Submitted by BPR on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:57pm.

I went to the site, I am going back- wooow boy, I will take a deep breath. Thanks for the information again.

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bpr,

Submitted by Cyclist on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:57pm.

I'm doing so well that I'm complaining about weight gain.

Thanks!!!
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Muddle- Just know

Submitted by BPR on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 4:45pm.

Just know that bpr and her husband we will always keep you in our prayers and thanks for the reminder my husband is 49. Your a great guy and I know Mrs. Muddle is a great lady- please please don';t give up on the Jesus thing- I know life is hard- I am just glad that you told me that you are a Christian, with that I have peace. If you passed you have been so kind in your writings that I would miss & shed tears for you. Life is hard but God is Good, no matter what.

My mom and sister passed about 3 years ago, my sister before Thanksgiving, I led my sister to Christ, she was 50 died from COPD. Not a day goes by that I don't miss them, and shed tears, I will for the rest of my life- my hope is God.

Hey, Give Mrs. Muddle a hug for us.- By the way when did you all get married? My husband is 49 and we married when he was out of college, God blest us with a 14 year old after 12 years of prayers. How do you have g-kids- you must have started early. Ha. Hey, just see how old we will be when we have g-kids, that's a laugh.

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Gobbledegook

Submitted by JeffC on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 1:51pm.

The whole argument is fallacious, assigning attributes to Darwinism that Darwin never espoused then tearing them down in the typical straw man attack.

For instance: (1) If Evolutionary Naturalism is true then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.

This is the core of the argument and it is total bunk. The argument totally excludes environmental factors which come into play after the natural selection has taken place. No Darwinists has ever made such a claim. The idea expressed so confusingly, so as to obscure what is really being argued, is that all learning is predetermined by natural selection.

Show me where a Darwinist ever said anything even remotely similar to this.

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Jeffc: Gobbledegook Revisted

Submitted by muddle on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 6:36am.

Hey, I just got feedback from the Blackwell editors on my "gobbledegook" argument that I tried out on you: Two enthusiastic thumbs up! Here's one comment:

"I found your paper to be a provocative and original
> piece of work on the moral argument, one that
> wonderfully blends classical moral theorists with
> contemporary thinkers."

Ah, and my jokes were not lost on them:

"I'm amazed at your dry humor--like
> the lupine philosophers regarding an argument as a
> howler! How do you come up with these things?"

I anticipate and welcome fierce challenges from philosophers--naturalists in particular--but it is nice to know that it is well-received as a serious contender.

Again, the theist is in a much better position to accomodate the notion that morality is objective (e.g., that rape is actually wrong--not simply that we are subjectively wired to think so) than is the naturalist.

The volume in which the essay appears will most assuredly draw fire from proponents of the so-called "new atheism." It includes eleven original and substantial (30k word) essays, each urging a separate theistic argument from a well-known (but, perhaps, for me) philosopher.

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Jeffc: Menschenwerk

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 6:38am.

I'm disappointed.

I thought that I would get up this morning to a reply from Jeffc after he had actually read the essay.

In an effort at making it easier, here is a choice section that makes it abundantly clear that the argument does not, in fact, exclude "environmental factors that come into play after natural selection has taken place."

Similarly, human culture is responsible for great accomplishments that assuredly are not the direct product of our evolution. And these may well include complex systems of moral precepts. Perhaps human social contracts—like sponges on the snout—are Good Tricks in that they solve problems posed by some combination of genetics plus environment plus intelligence. Rationality—Menschenwerk—is certainly employed. But it is an instrumental rationality.

We are now in a position to refine our claim at (1). “Human morality” is a by-product of natural selection in that a fundamental moral orientation—Street’s “basic evaluative tendencies” and Midgley’s “programming”—is in place because it was adaptive for our ancestors given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. Thus, the “program” provides general directives or tendencies. The “gap” allows room for rational reflection regarding our moral beliefs, but their very rationality is conditional or hypothetical: given the program that has been bequeathed to us by our genes, some policies are better than others. The program itself—with the general “moral” orientation that it determines—is precisely as it is due to its adaptive value given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. Even if the gap is positively cavernous for humans, allowing for rational and moral deliberation, it is nevertheless found within the scope of our programming that is directly explained by appeal to natural selection. Moral reasoning would then appear to be means-end reasoning, where the ends have been laid down for us by natural selection.

Counterfactually, had the programming been relevantly different, so would the range of intelligent choices. As we saw, Darwin was of the opinion that the moral sense is the result of a sort of recipe—what you get when you begin with a set of social instincts and throw in a sufficient degree of intelligence. There may be “forced moves” through evolutionary design space, as Daniel Dennett has observed. For instance, given locomotion, stereoscopic vision is highly predictable (Dennett 1997, p. ). But Darwin did not think that any determinate set of moral precepts or dictates of conscience were among them. Consider what he described as an “extreme example” and what I will call a Darwinian Counterfactual.

"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 brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering" (Descent, p. ##).

Given the actual conditions of our “rearing,” we have come to believe that our children and siblings are deserving of our care and respect, and that equitable bargaining outcomes are just. But here we are asked to imagine a world in which the resulting fundamental moral orientation—Midgley’s open instincts—is different. Darwin appears to countenance the possibility of a species that is prompted, even upon reflection, to behave in ways that are inequitable, and, from our standpoint, unjust. If rational and moral reflection takes its cue from a more primitive predisposition, then have we any reason for supposing that such reflection—the product of culture—would inevitably settle upon equitable treatment?

Recall our lupine philosophers who find themselves strongly inclined to think in terms of a social hierarchy and to regard anything like Bentham’s dictum—“Each to count for one, none to count for more than one”—an absolute howler. Lacking opposable thumbs and all, they do not write books. But if they did, one learned treatise might be titled, Our Caste System of Justice, with chapters on “Duties of Obeisance” and “Beta Encounters Alpha: Rules of Engagement.” If humans as a species have come to regard equitable arrangements as fair or just (have they?), then perhaps this is only because their initial programming was wired as it was given the circumstances of human evolution. We have the actual moral orientation that we do because it was adaptive. Had the circumstances been different, some other set would have conferred fitness. Is there any plausible reason to suppose that such a moral orientation is adaptive because its resultant moral beliefs are true? Does this not return us to Joyce’s observation, “It was no background assumption of that explanation that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment” (Joyce 2006, 183)

Be sure not to miss the full implication of what Darwin himself is suggesting. The contents of "conscience" are largely determined by basic features of human psychology that are, indeed, the product of evolutionary hardwiring.

COnsider Mary Midgley's point about evolutionary "programming." We have three basic possibilities before us:

(1) There is no programming at all. Humans are "structureless" as Midgley puts it.

(2) Everything about us is as function of our programming. (This is the "greedy reductionism" view of some sociobiologists.)

(3) We are programmed, but it is programming "with a gap." This is Midgley's view (and the only one that avoids excess).

Jeff, were you assuming (1)? This is a position that "no sensible person" can accept, according to Richard Joyce.

Did you think that my argument assumed (2)?

All that is needed to get the argument up and running is (3), combined with Darwin's point about what might have been had the evolutionary landscape been appreciably different.

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Sorry Muddle

Submitted by JeffC on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 10:46am.

Philosophical arguments are interesting but generally useless in science. No amount of philosophizing will make one iota of difference in determining whether a scientific theory is true or not.

For instance the claim: (1). “Human morality” is a by-product of natural selection in that a fundamental moral orientation…is in place because it was adaptive for our ancestors given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape.

Scientifically, this statement cannot be negated, cannot be proven and does not allow testable predictions to be derived from it. Therefore, scientifically related to Darwin’s theories of evolution through natural selection, the hypothesis has no value. Theories of evolution are completely indifferent to the assertion whether it is true or false.

As I have said in previous blogs, Darwin’s theory is flawed because we know that it does not encompass or explain all of the observable data. I think that Darwin’s theory is on the same plane as Galileo or Newton waiting for an Einstein or Planck to take it to the next level.

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Who's Doing Science?

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 11:19am.

I don't offer my argument as a substitute for a scientific theory. It is intended to be philosophical, drawing philosophical implications from the theory.

But having said that, it is clear that Darwin himself thought along these lines, as I point out in discussion of his views in The Descent of Man.

I'm not sure that evolutionary psychologists would agree that such claims are unverifiable/unfalsifiable. Consider, for instance, my example contrasting dolphin motherhood to sea turtle motherhood. Dolphins come equipped with a maternal instinct for nurturing and protecting their offspring. Sea turtles do not give their babies a second thought. One might argue that the difference is predictable given the theory. And it is, I think, in principle, falsifiable. Suppose, for instance, that we came across powerful evidence that the dolphins maternal "instinct" is not an instinct at all, but is the result of a kind of "cultural" transmission, in much the way that the sponge-on-the-snout trick (see example in essay) is culturally transmitted.

And some (Street, for instance) have argued that such an account of human moral beliefs is the most parsimonious and in harmony with what are taken to be the scientific facts. It is hard to see how we can say that the theory of evolution is "indifferent" to such claims. (On this, read the SOmmers/Rosenberg article to which I provided a link. They argue specifically, following Dan Dennett, that natural selection functionsd as a "universal acid," and, as such, cannot be indifferent to our account of human psychology and morality.)

But I've been thinking about whether I wish to say that scientific theories, by definition, must make testable (verifiable/falsifiable) predictions. Shall we say that all and only scientific hypoetheses and theories do this? I'm not sure that this is either necessary or sufficient for rendering a theory scientific.

Philosophers engaged in worldview assessment, for instance (as I am in my essay), will take an entire worldview or conceptual system as a kind of hypothesis, ask, What should we expect the world to be like were this worldview true?, and then compare the implications to what we actually discover. The same sort of thing is done in the assessment of ethical theories. Does this mean they are doing science?

Is String Theory science?

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Scientific theories

Submitted by JeffC on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 4:34pm.

You are not sure whether you are willing to say that “scientific theories, by definition, must make testable (verifiable/falsifiable) predictions”, and yet this is the very definition of a scientific theory and the core concept which makes science useful. It is this rigorous definition which sets science apart when scientific methods define a “truth”. It is this that conveys a special status to a scientific theory and is precisely why Creationists and ID’ers claim that their theories are “scientific” or why, conversely, they will claim that the theory of evolution is not.

Your question about string theory is apt and one I have considered and argued. As it stands now, I would classify string theory as just a hypothesis while allowing that after further refinement it may become science.

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Science

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 4:39pm.

I'm not not sure that the criteria plausibly provide both necessary and sufficient conditions for a theory's qualifying as scientific. My interest and motive in even raising the question comes from the direction of the philosophy of science and out of curiosity--not because I have a pet theory that needs to fit somewhere.

As I mentioned before, it isn't clear to me that these criteria mark off "science" from "philosophy."

Admittedly, I am half-baked here. I need to go back into the oven a while.

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Prove philosophy?

Submitted by Nitpickers on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 11:16am.

It all of course was your Mother's fault--it is that simple.
At least that was the theory until nut-houses came along,then shock treatments and mis-treatment (Cuckoo's Nest), then pills, and then more improved pills.
All a Psychiatrist is, is a Psychologist who took the time tp get an M.D. so he could write prescriptions.
We used to keep them in the back room at home!

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Grimsley: It's philosophy, not psychology

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 11:24am.

It is one thing to be ignorant. Everyone is ignorant of something or other.

It is another to be opnionated. We all have our opnions.

But it is foolish to be opinionated on areas in which you are obviously ignorant.

Your approach: I cannot understand it; therefore, there is nothing there to understand.

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Jeffc: Rejoinder?????????

Submitted by muddle on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 5:18pm.

Each of us becomes busyn with other things. I know that.

But I am particularly interested in your rejoinder to my reply.

I am thoroughly convinced that you read only deep enough to think you had my argument pegged, and replied at that point. I maintain that nothing that you have said comes close to a plausible critique of the ultimate argument of the essay. (If you'll note, premises in the original argument of AEN are revised in light of potential objections. As I see it, though I appreciate the fact that you display some understanding of the relevant issues, you ultimately fail to see the point of the overall argument.

I welcome your more circumspect response to the argument.

Best,

Muddle
(MarkL)

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Muddle

Submitted by Nitpickers on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 11:19am.

Many brilliant people are ignored due to their refusal to learn to write theories that impress other people who learned to impress PhD. judges.It is a cottage industry which plays it safe.

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At it again, Grimsley?

Submitted by muddle on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 11:22am.

Why do you persist?

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Jeff C: Gobbedegook Back at You

Submitted by muddle on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 2:19pm.

Show me where a Darwinist ever said anything even remotely similar to this.

I did--in the essay itself.

(1) Darwin himself in Descent

(2) Richard Joyce in his recent The Evolution of Morality (M IT Press).

(3) Sharon Street in her "A Darwinian Dilemma for Value Realism"

(4) Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg in "Darwin's Nihilistic Idea"

(5) Michael Ruse in Taking Darwin Seriously

(6) Edward O. Wilson in Sociobiology and darn near everything else he ever wrote.

(7) (Not mentioned in the essay) James Rachels in Created From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism.

You (clearly) didn't really read the essay, did you? I more than take into account the sort of objection that you raise in the section titled "AEN and "Greedy Reductionism." Indeed, I state the objection far more forcefully than you do, appealing to the likes of Kitcher and Dennett.

Please actually read (and think about) the essay and then offer an assessment.

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Jeffc

Submitted by muddle on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 2:38pm.

The idea expressed so confusingly, so as to obscure what is really being argued, is that all learning is predetermined by natural selection.

I failed to add in my other reply that the argument neither assumes, implies nor says any such thing.

Again, if you'll read and reflect rather than react, perhaps we can have intelligent dialog. The relevant section for what you seem to think, is under the heading "AEN and 'Greedy Reductionism'."

One disadvantage that you appear to have is a lack of acquaintance with core literature. Else, you would never have said that no Darwinist ever said such a thing. Even if my argument fails in the end, it falls comfortably within the context of a lively discussion of the moral implications of Darwinism.

The paper by Sharon Street is available online for you to read at her website at NYU. Shucks, here it is.

The Sommers/Rosenberg piece (Darwinists and naturalists both) is available online here

Also, even if I did not have a long list of Darwinists who actually say such things, the issue is whether the tenets of Darwinism, taken as premises, entail such conclusions. Not whether any actual person has embraced them.

What is interesting is that, in your haste to paint me as some sort of hare-brained fundamentalist out to set up straw men to knock down, you failed to consider the argument itself. Who is setting up straw men here?

If only I had this easy a time of it in other contexts.

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Deleted

Submitted by JeffC on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 7:52pm.

Deleted

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readin and reflectin

Submitted by Bonkers on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 3:06pm.

is what gits many into deep goobledegook---or whatever.
I wondered if I was the only one with enough guts to say what a piece of crap! Not confusing, just indecipherable.

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Readin' & Reflectin'

Submitted by Hoosier Fan on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 5:12pm.

Bonk, it's evident from your frequent, incoherent rants that you have limited experience with either reading OR reflecting!

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Dollar's guts

Submitted by muddle on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 5:06pm.

Insofar as your guts are simply full of crap, you may be right.

Give me some evidence of actually understanding what is going on and then your "objections" might be worth considering.

Short of that, nothing has changed: You excel at mocking that which you are incapable of understanding.

And, so far as I can tell, there is much that is open to your mocking as a result.

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muddle

Submitted by Git Real on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 2:23pm.

Check it out.

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Jeffc Interested in your take on this

Submitted by Paul Perkins on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 2:03pm.

Are you saying that what most all of us would call the highest and best of human emotion and morality (self-sacrificing love, etc.)came purely a result of environment?

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on how this could happen.

Show me where a Darwinist ever said anything even remotely similar to this.

BTW-I believe the rational response crowd (self proclaimed Darwinists) have claimed exactly what you say above.

This is the way to blog!

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Sorry Muddle...

Submitted by bowser on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 12:41pm.

...but without the footnotes and italics, I just couldn't make heads or tails of this.

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luckydog

Submitted by muddle on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 12:53pm.

Guess you'll just have to buy the book! It will appear in the same series as this, probably late next year (assuming that my slow writing doesn't hold up the works.

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Worst yet

Submitted by Nitpickers on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 11:52am.

You and Denise need to have private e-mail conversations.
I didn't even have time to roll down all of it!

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Dollar

Submitted by muddle on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 11:57am.

Yes, it is rather long.

Here's an idea: perhaps the four of you can divide up the task of reading it and then have a discussion together.
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muddle,

Submitted by Cyclist on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 2:38pm.

If only they knew who they're dealing with. I find this so comical!!!!

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dealin with

Submitted by Bonkers on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 3:10pm.

is he bad?

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$mithpicker$

Submitted by hutch866 on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 11:55am.

He said you wouldn't like it.

I yam what I yam....Popeye

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