Pragmatic naturalism and moral objectivity

Abstract

Suppose that Darwin is right that human morals or something like them originated and persisted among our remote ancestors as a set of adaptations fashioned through natural selection. Suppose further that in his new book Philip Kitcher (2011) is right that during the past 50 thousand years of cultural evolution our ancestors, living until the past 10 thousand mostly in small groups diversified by age and sex, built on these primitive quasimoral functions to create rules and precepts, in response to the tensions and difficulties of social living, and that they refined these functions and sometimes created new functions, similar enough to the others, to qualify as being moral or moral-like. The process of improving the old functions and creating new ones in response to new problems is iterative on his account, resulting in a long procession of small and large moral changes in diverse and changing populations. As we view them in retrospect, many of us perceive some changes as ‘morally progressive’, others as ‘morally regressive’. Kitcher (2011: 140–1, 145–53, 153–62) gives, as examples of progressive change, the dropping of the idea of exact retribution – eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life – from the earliest legal codes, the abolition of slavery in 19th-century America, and important changes in the civil status of women in Western Europe and North America in the past two centuries. To suppose that this kind of story captures the essence of moral evolution is to endorse a type of moral naturalism that Kitcher calls ‘pragmatic naturalism’, since the moral changes in the story are pragmatically motivated as responses to practical difficulties in living together as interdependent humans. The question we address in this article is whether pragmatic naturalism can explain moral change in a way that allows it to be, at least at some later stages of evolution, objectively progressive (or regressive). More exactly, can progressive/regressive moral change as conceived within this theory of moral evolution be normatively objective in a way that is consistent with the theory’s demand that moral change be explained with psychological realism? We will argue that it can, even given a surprisingly robust conception of normative objectivity. Consider the idea articulated by Russ Shafer-Landau (2003: 15) that an objective moral truth (or fact) must be ‘stance-independent’ in that it exists independently of all our evaluative attitudes, taken collectively, whether we have them now or would have them on reflection under ideal conditions. Sharon Street (2006) has argued that this conception of moral objectivity leads to scepticism about moral knowledge when combined with the above assumptions about moral evolution. Kitcher (2011: 178–86) offers an objection to the existence of such ‘external’ moral truths (or facts) that is related to