Abstract
Several moral objectivists try to explain the reliability of moral beliefs by appealing to a third factor, a substantive moral claim that explains, first, why we have the moral beliefs that we have and, second, why these beliefs are true. Folke Tersman has recently suggested that moral disagreement constrains the epistemic legitimacy of third-factor explanations. Apart from constraining third-factor explanations, Tersman’s challenge could support the view that the epistemic significance of debunking explanations depends on the epistemic significance of disagreement. This paper aims to show that disagreement does not constrain the epistemic legitimacy of third-factor explanations in metaethics, and it suggests a way forward in addressing the view that debunking depends on disagreement. First, Tersman’s constraints are impossible to violate, given the assumption that the justification relation exhibits monotonicity. Second, some disagreements are irrelevant, given that they cannot be about beliefs whose reliability the objectivist seeks to defend. Third, actual disagreement about moral beliefs is implausible, given recent ethnographic findings. In light of this discussion, the paper shows that the prospects of the disagreement view depend on which moral beliefs objectivists need to defend and the criteria we use to assess epistemically relevant moral disagreement.
Highlights
The Darwinist view of morality claims that the human propensity to make certain moral evaluations, such as the widespread judgement that parents have most reason to support their children, can be explained in evolutionary terms
This claim, in turn, is plausibly seen as an intermediary step towards drawing the conclusion that all our objectivist moral beliefs are undercut in light of the Darwinist view of morality
I will assume that there is a legitimate way for a Darwinist view of morality to undercut all objectivist moral beliefs
Summary
The Darwinist view of morality claims that the human propensity to make certain moral evaluations, such as the widespread judgement that parents have most reason to support their children, can be explained in evolutionary terms. If an adequate explanation proves to be impossible in principle, the challenge goes, any prima facie justification that our objective moral beliefs might have is undercut.3 Several objectivists regard this challenge to be their most arduous test (Shafer-Landau 2012; Enoch 2010; Wielenberg 2014). Street’s (2006) main aim is to show that moral objectivism should be rejected As such, her argument may be better interpreted as suggesting that we have no reason to think that any objective moral belief is justified in light of a Darwinist view of morality. Rejecting Tersman’s constraints on third-factor accounts means bad news for proponents of the disagreement view, but, insofar as third-factor explanations are prima facie legitimate, the conclusion of this paper should be a boon for moral objectivists. 4 ‘Belief’ is ambiguous here: ‘true belief’ really means that the propositional content of a belief is true, whereas evolutionary explanations show why we have dispositions to hold true certain propositions. 5 Radical disagreement in Tersman’s sense is understood as rational and faultless; cf. Kölbel (2004)
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