Darwinian Dilemma Research Articles

Reason monolithism: A Darwinian dilemma for “relaxed” realism

AbstractStreet formulated a Darwinian Dilemma for realist theories of value. Much criticism of her formulation of the dilemma targets the second horn, posed by the scientifically implausible assumption of a tracking relation between our attitudes and evaluative truth. This paper shows how a recent wave of metaethical realism, most prominently defended by Scanlon, succeeds without a tracking relation and thus avoids the Darwinian Dilemma in Street's formulation. However, Scanlon's approach, which builds on the concept of a reason relation and defends a metaphysically pluralist, domain‐specific conception of truth, runs into another version of the Darwinian Dilemma. The problem is not that Scanlon's realism assumes a tracking relation but that it assumes what I call reason monolithism – the idea that there is one possible expression of the faculty of reason and that this cognitive faculty could not be otherwise, which is scientifically implausible on similar grounds.

Una respuesta desde el realismo moral al argumento socavante de Street

In this article, we advance a realist response to Sharon Street’s debunking argument, which appeals to evolutionary theory to argue that natural selection and moral realism are incompatible. Our aims are three. First, we describe the debate on this topic by distinguishing between a modal argument, a parsimony argument, and Street’s Darwinian Dilemma. Secondly, we focus on her reasoning, one of the most relevant arguments in the recent metaethical debate against moral realism. To mount a defense of that, we will point at three fundamental characteristics of moral realism: its cognitive character, the nature of its representative language, and the relationship between evaluative judgements and their truthmakers (facts). Finally, we will argue, contra Street, that moral realism is not scientifically inferior to moral antirealism, thus, the former is not debunked.

Conceptual truths, evolution, and reliability about authoritative normativity

ABSTRACT An important challenge for non-naturalistic moral realism is that it seems hard to reconcile it with the (purported) fact of our reliability in forming correct moral beliefs. Some philosophers (including Cuneo and Shafer-Landau) have argued that we can appeal to conceptual truths about our moral concepts in order to respond to this challenge. Call this “the conceptual strategy”. The conceptual strategy faces a problem: it isn’t clear that the relevant moral concepts are “extension-revealing” in the way that the conceptual strategy needs them to be. A further problem stems from the tradeoff between the “extension-revealing” and the “authority-revealing” aspects of normative concepts. To underscore the import of these issues, I discuss a version of the reliability challenge that concerns authoritative normative facts in ethics (rather than moral facts). The problems I identify for the conceptual strategy carry over to versions of it that are used in response to a range of epistemological arguments in ethics that (like the reliability challenge) are tied to Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma” argument. These problems also bear on the prospects of the conceptual strategy for explaining our (purported) reliability in other domains (e.g., in epistemology, law, and politics).

An Evolutionary Sceptical Challenge to Scientific Realism

Evolutionary scepticism holds that the evolutionary account of the origins of the human cognitive apparatus has sceptical implications for at least some of our beliefs. A common target of evolutionary scepticism is moral realism. Scientific realism, on the other hand, is much less frequently targeted, though the idea that evolutionary theory should make us distrustful of science is by no means absent from the literature. This line of thought has received unduly little attention. I propose to remedy this by advancing what I will call an evolutionary sceptical challenge to scientific realism. I argue that, given standard evolutionary theory, our possession of sound innate metaphysical intuitions would have taken an epistemically problematic ‘lucky accident’. This, as I will show, entails that scientific realism is a self-undermining position. I discuss objections to my argument’s two premises, including ones that appeal to the success of the sciences and to the possibility that sound innate metaphysical intuitions evolved as an evolutionary ‘by-product’. I then draw out an advantage of my argument over a similar one recently put forward by Graber and Golemon (Sophia, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0695-0). I finish by submitting that scientific realism, given the soundness of my argument, is faced with a new ‘Darwinian Dilemma’, and briefly address the significance of this for the debate between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of science.

Bad bootstrapping: the problem with third-factor replies to the Darwinian Dilemma for moral realism

Street’s (Philos Stud 127:109–166, 2006) “Darwinian Dilemma” is a well-known epistemological objection to moral realism. In this paper, I argue that “third-factor” replies to this argument on behalf of the moral realist, as popularized by Enoch (Philos Stud 148(3):413–438, 2010, Taking morality seriously: a defense of robust realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011), Skarsaune (Philos Stud 152(2):229–243, 2011) and Wielenberg (Ethics 120(3):441–464, 2010, Robust ethics: the metaphysics and epistemology of godless normative realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), cannot succeed. This is because they are instances of the illegitimate form of reasoning known as “bootstrapping.” The phenomenon of bootstrapping has been discussed in detail, most notably by Vogel (J Philos 97(11):602–623, 2000) and Cohen (Philos Phenomenol Res 65(2):309–329, 2002), in a different context as an objection to reliabilism and related theories of knowledge. I introduce four different characterizations of the error of bootstrapping from the epistemic literature in order to argue that the form of reasoning exemplified by third-factor replies would be deemed illegitimate by every one of them. I conclude that the moral realist should abandon third-factor replies, or else suggest a novel diagnosis for what goes wrong in bootstrapping cases that does not apply equally to the realist’s form of argument. However, I am not optimistic about the prospects for this latter strategy.

Entre Cila e Caríbdis: o dilema darwiniano e o debunking da moralidade

This paper intends to analyze the evolutionary metaethical discussion that revolves around the evolutionist thesis about the origin of evaluative judgments and the possibility of there being objective moral values. Sharon Street (2006) presented what became known as the Darwinian dilemma for moral realism. Moral realists, represented by David Copp, did not take long to reply. I will resume this debate and offer an alternative to the dilemma and the problems brought up by both philosophers through procedural constructivism.Keywords: evolution, realism, constructivism, morality, normativity.

To protect or to kill: The immune system Darwinian's dilemma

To protect or to kill: The immune system Darwinian's dilemma

Must realists be skeptics? An Aristotelian reply to a Darwinian Dilemma

In a series of influential essays, Sharon Street has argued, on the basis of Darwinian considerations, that normative realism leads to skepticism about moral knowledge. I argue that if we begin with the account of moral knowledge provided by Aristotelian naturalism, then we can offer a satisfactory realist response to Street’s argument, and that Aristotelian naturalism can avoid challenges facing other realist responses. I first explain Street’s evolutionary argument and three of the most prominent realist responses, and I identify challenges to each of those responses. I then develop an Aristotelian response to Street. My core claim is this: Given Aristotelian naturalism’s account of moral truth and our knowledge of it, we can accept the influence of evolutionary processes on our moral beliefs, while also providing a principled, non-question-begging reason for thinking that those basic evaluative tendencies that evolution has left us with will push us toward, rather than away from, realist moral truths, so that our reliably getting things right does not require an unexplained and implausible coincidence.

Ethics and Evolutionary Theory

It has long been argued that sometimes, acquiring information about the origins of one’s beliefs removes or diminishes the justification for those beliefs that one would otherwise have had. Descartes, for example, claimed that the less powerful the Author of his nature, the more reason he had to doubt his own beliefs (1960 [1641]: 79). And the more specific worry that knowledge of our evolutionary origins might give us reason to doubt our own beliefs famously goes back as far as Darwin himself, who remarked in an 1881 letter that ‘with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’1 In contemporary analytic philosophy, two sorts of arguments that might reasonably be regarded as descendants of Darwin’s doubt have attracted a lot of attention. The first of these is Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN), which first appeared in the early 1990s (see Plantinga 1993, 2000, 2011). That argument is intended to show that anyone who accepts both atheism and the claim that human beings are products of evolutionary processes has grounds to doubt the reliability of all of her cognitive faculties and hence has grounds to doubt all of her beliefs. Plantinga advanced this argument as part of a critique of contemporary naturalism; it attracted a lot of attention among philosophers interested in the contemporary debate between Christian theism and naturalism. Around or shortly after the time that philosophical discussion of Plantinga’s argument had waned, there was an explosion of interest in arguments concerned specifically with normative beliefs or with some specific subset thereof. That explosion was triggered by the 2006 publication of Sharon Street’s ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value’ and Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality. Street and Joyce both argue that recognition of the evolutionary influences on our moral beliefs construed in a certain way gives us reason to doubt those beliefs and hence removes (or at least significantly diminishes) whatever justification those beliefs would have otherwise had. Although Plantinga advanced his EAAN as part of a defence of Christian theism over contemporary naturalism, Street and Joyce advance their arguments in support of specific metaethical positions. Street argues that her Darwinian dilemma makes trouble for any realist metaethical view according to which moral beliefs are true just in case they correspond with attitude-independent moral truths. She further argues that a version of constructivism according to which moral truths are functions of certain human attitudes is not susceptible to the Darwinian dilemma. Her argument, then, is advanced in support of constructivism over realism in metaethics. Joyce, by contrast, advances his argument in defence of a certain sort of moral error theory.2 His contention is that if there are moral truths at all, then there are attitude-independent moral truths but that recognizing the evolutionary origins of our concept of moral obligation gives us grounds for doubting that we ever apply that concept correctly and hence any justification our moral beliefs may have had is undermined.3 In this article, I provide an overview of the contemporary discussion of ‘evolutionary debunking arguments’ (hereinafter ‘EDAs’) that was triggered by the work of Street and Joyce. My main aims are to provide rough characterizations of the EDAs of Street and Joyce, indicate some of the various ways that these EDAs have been understood by commentators together with the most prominent lines of criticism of these EDAs, examine one particularly interesting off-shoot of Street’s EDA and identify some interesting areas for future research.

Dehorning the Darwinian dilemma for normative realism

Normative realists tend to consider evolutionary debunking arguments as posing epistemological challenges to their view. By understanding Sharon Street's 'Darwinian dilemma' argument in this way, they have overlooked and left unanswered her unique scientific challenge to normative realism. This paper counters Street's scientific challenge and shows that normative realism is compatible with evolutionary views of human evaluative judgment. After presenting several problems that her Adaptive Link Account (ALA) of evaluative judgments faces, I outline and defend an evolutionary byproduct perspective on evaluative judgment. I then argue that a consideration of levels of analysis in biological-behavioral explanation suggests that the realist who adopts the byproduct perspective I outline is not at a prima facie disadvantage to the normative anti-realist on grounds of parsimony. This perspective, I suggest, can enable normative realists to answer evolutionary challenges to their view.

Evolutionary debunking: Can moral realists explain the reliability of our moral judgments?

Evolutionary debunking arguments, notably Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma (2006), allege that moral realists need to explain the reliability of our moral judgments, given their evolutionary sources. David Copp (2008) and David Enoch (2010) take up the challenge. I argue on empirical grounds that realists have not met the challenge and moreover cannot do so. The outcome is that there are empirically-motivated reasons for thinking moral realists cannot explain moral reliability, given our current empirical understanding.

Konstruktywizm w metaetyce i etyce normatywnej – analiza krytyczna konstruktywizmu głębokiego Sharon Street

Artykuł zawiera prezentację teorii konstruktywizmu metaetycznego Sharon Street i stanowi próbę ustalenia, czy koncepcja ta posiada status adekwatnej teorii metaetycznej pociągającej wiarygodne konsekwencje normatywne. W toku analizy okazuje się, że konstruktywizm Street jest stanowiskiem niedookreślonym w szczegółach, a jego relacja do ekspresywizmu pozostaje niejasna. Normatywne konsekwencje konstruktywizmu głębokiego są nieintuicyjne i kontrowersyjne – przede wszystkim dlatego, że teoria ta uzależnia sferę powinności od dokonywanych przez jednostkę wartościowań, o ile tylko wartościowania te są ze sobą wzajemnie spójne i są instrumentalnie racjonalne w świetle prozaicznych faktów. Konstruktywizm pada ofiarą problemu autoreferencji, który to problem może być sformułowany w postaci następującego pytania: czy konstruktywistyczne ujęcie warunków prawdziwości twierdzeń normatywnych wynika z każdego praktycznego punktu widzenia, czy też jego trafność jest niezależna od praktycznego punktu widzenia w ogóle? Problem jest poważny, ponieważ stawia pod znakiem zapytania wewnętrzną spójność dyskutowanego stanowiska. Ponadto jest rzeczą wątpliwą, czy konstruktywizm jest najmocniejszym poglądem antyrealistycznym w metaetyce – wydaje się, że teorie odwołujące się do reakcji podmiotów znajdujących się w idealnych okolicznościach posiadają przewagę. Te ostatnie są zasadnie bardziej restrykcyjne w dziedzinie etyki normatywnej, nie wchodzą w konflikt z wnioskami wyciąganymi przez Street z tzw. dylematu darwinowskiego oraz w mniejszym stopniu niż konstruktywizm dopuszczają wpływ nieistotnych procesów przyczynowych.

Duality Unresolved and Darwinian Dilemmas

By using Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer attempt to show that Sidgwick’s duality of practical reason, whereby an agent has equal reason to act in their own interests or act impartially for the benefit of all, is not actually a duality; rather, reasons for action are solely impartial due to the unreliability of intuitions favoring self-interested behavior. I argue that Lazari Radek and Singer fail to accomplish their goal. I argue that Singer has previously provided an account of impartiality that makes it just as unreliable on the same grounds as self-interested tendencies. Sidgwick’s duality remains unresolved.

Rescuing tracking theories of morality

Street’s (Philos Stud 127(1):109–166, 2006) Darwinian Dilemma purports to show that evolutionary considerations are in tension with realist theories of value, which include moral realism. According to this argument, moral realism can only be defended by assuming an implausible tracking relation between moral attitudes and moral facts. In this essay, I argue that this tracking relation is not as implausible as most people have assumed by showing that the three main objections against it are flawed. Since this is a key premise in the reasoning, I conclude that the Darwinian Dilemma against moral realism can be resisted.

A Plantingian Pickle for a Darwinian Dilemma: Evolutionary Arguments Against Atheism and Normative Realism

AbstractTwo of the most prominent evolutionary debunking arguments are Sharon Street's Darwinian Dilemma for Normative Realism and Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Atheism. In the former, Street appeals to evolutionary considerations to debunk normative realism. In the latter, Plantinga appeals to similar considerations to debunk atheism. By a careful comparison of these two arguments, I develop a new strategy to help normative realists resist Street's debunking attempt. In her Darwinian Dilemma, Street makes epistemological commitments that ultimately support Plantinga's structurally similar argument. If Street succeeds in debunking normative realism, I argue, then she also succeeds in debunking atheism. But atheism is a suppressed premise of the Darwinian Dilemma as well as a commitment of almost all normative anti‐realists. If Street's argument entails theism, then the Darwinian Dilemma is internally incoherent and should be abandoned by almost everyone.

Medusa’s Gaze Reflected: A Darwinian Dilemma for Anti-Realist Theories of Value

Street has argued that the meta-ethical realist is faced with a dilemma. Either evolutionary forces have had a distorting influenced on our ability to track moral properties or evolutionary forces influenced our beliefs in the direction of tracking moral properties. Street argues that if the realist accepts the first horn of the dilemma, the realist must accept implausible skepticism regarding moral beliefs. If the realist accepts the second horn of the dilemma, the realist owes an explanation of the fitness producing nature of moral beliefs. As Street establishes the dialectic, the anti-realist’s explanation is better. I will argue that Street’s first horn is question begging then I will grasp the second horn of the dilemma and argue that only the realist can explain the role of moral beliefs in our evolutionary history. My argument will take the form of a dilemma. For our evaluative judgments to be fitness conducive, they must be responsive to the right sort of external world properties. The non-reductive realist can provide such a set of properties. On the first horn of the dilemma, the anti-realist cannot. The realist, unlike the anti-realist, can explain why our evaluative judgments are fitness conducive. The realist has won the explanatory battle. On the second horn of the dilemma, the anti-realist can provide a set of non-normative external world properties that our evaluative attitudes are responsive to. In doing so, the anti-realist has provided the heretofore-missing component of the reductive realist’s project. Again, the realist has won.

Darwin and moral realism: survival of the iffiest

This paper defends moral realism against Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” (this journal, 2006). I argue by separation of cases: From the assumption that a certain normative claim is true, I argue that the first horn of the dilemma is tenable for realists. Then, from the assumption that the same normative claim is false, I argue that the second horn is tenable. Either way, then, the Darwinian dilemma does not add anything to realists’ epistemic worries.

The Darwinian dilemma of the first species and the principle of pseudo-monophyly of Phanerozoic diversity

The Darwinian dilemma of the first species and the principle of pseudo-monophyly of Phanerozoic diversity

A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value

A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value