Debunking Arguments

A view or a discipline may be debunked because it becomes the subject of ridicule (astrology or tasseography) or because rightly or wrongly it is viewed in a new light (Christianity as the result of resentment, or capitalist morality as the result of a certain mode of production). However, to the extent that this type of debunking merely rests on psychology, it does not amount to an argument.

General scheme of a debunking argument:

1. Causal premise: Our adoption of P is relevantly caused/explained by X

2. Epistemic premise 1: X is not a truth tracking process with respect to P

3. Epistemic premise 2: If the adoption of P has been arrived at because of X and X is not truth tracking, then we are not justified in believing that P

4. Meta-assumption: P’s truth or falsity obtain independently of our having reasons for believing P, and therefore intuitions or judgments about it are produced by processes that succeed or fail at tracking the truth of P.

There are several types of debunking arguments, historical or philosophical ones being examples. They can be attempted on any type of propositions. Here we focus on evolutionary debunking arguments against moral judgments.

See Kahane’s Evolutionary Debunking Arguments; Shafer-Landau’s Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism and Moral Knowledge (http://www.jesp.org/PDF/Evolutionary_Debunking_final.pdf); Joyce, Evolution, truth tracking and moral skepticism (http://www.victoria.ac.nz/staff/richard_joyce/acrobat/joyce_evolution.truthtracking.moral.skepticism.pdf

Schema of evolutionary debunking argument for some moral propositions:

1. Causal premise: Our adoption of moral judgment P is relevantly caused/explained by our evolutionary history

2. Epistemic premise 1: Evolution is not a truth tracking process with respect to moral truths

3. Epistemic premise 2: If an intuition or judgment that P has been arrived at because of a process that is not truth tracking, then we are not justified in believing that P

4. Metaethical assumption: moral facts obtain independently of our having reasons for believing them, and therefore intuitions or judgments about them are produced by processes that succeed or fail at tracking the truth about them.

Hence,

We are not justified in adopting P.

Example: Green’s and Singer’s analysis of the Trolley Problem showing that deontology conforms to intuitions produced by evolution, while consequentialism involves the use of higher intellectual functions; allegedly, this makes consequentialism better.

Notes:

· The argument is about justification, not truth. Note that

o A false belief can be justified and a true one not be justified

o Belief P may be justified at time t1 and unjustified at time t2, or justified for Bill and not for Mary, if their background info is different

· Example of belief forming process that tracks/fails to track the truth: Jim believes that Lincoln was assassinated because of credible eyewitnesses and the autopsy/Jim believes Lincoln was assassinated because he hears voices in his head. The latter method (voices) is not sensitive to historical facts, and Jim, a college graduate, should know better.

· (4) need not entail objectivism, the view that moral truth is independent of human attitudes, although objectivism entails (4). Consider Joyce’s example of money.

Schema for evolutionary debunking argument for all moral propositions:

1. Causal premise: All our moral judgments are relevantly caused /explained by our evolutionary history or irremediably “infected” by it

2. Epistemic premise 1: Evolution is not a truth tracking process with respect to moral truths

3. Epistemic premise 2: If a moral judgment has been adopted because of a process that is not truth tracking, then we are not justified in adopting P

4. Metaethical assumption: moral facts obtain independently of our having reasons for believing them, and therefore intuitions or judgments about them are produced by processes that succeed or fail at tracking the truth about them.

Hence,

None of our moral judgments is adopted justifiably. (Joyce adopts this. Note that this does not entail that we shall never be able to adopt moral judgments justifiably).

Or

One or more of (1)-(4) is false.

Since (3) seems clearly true, there are only three options:

A Denial of causal premise:

i. Strong Autonomy claim: All of our moral thinking follows norms appropriate to the subject, and therefore is truth tracking.

ii. Weak Autonomy claim: Some of our moral thinking follows norms appropriate to the subject, and therefore is truth tracking.

Notes:

· (i) seems implausible; analogy with physics is rather weak .

· (ii) may be true but vague: “some” meaning most, much, restricted but crucial? Perhaps we could use moral judgments we know not to be the result of evolutionary pressure, if we know any, to evaluate other moral judgments. But are there such judgments? Perhaps evolutionary influences on our morality may be distorting but can be overcome by rational considerations.

· Perhaps one could weaken the causal premise by prefacing it with “Probably…” or even “We cannot rule out that…” and still have the argument, suitably modified, work.

B Denial of epistemic premise 1: Evolution is a truth tracking process with respect to moral truths.

Problems:

Support for epistemic premise 1 (EP1):

· Evolutionary explanations make no appeal to moral facts. So, it’s unlikely that attitudes or beliefs caused by evolution track moral truths

· Given the set of possible moral intuitions, it is very unlikely that evolutionary pressures led us to the correct ones because evolution favors adaptiveness, not truth.

o Problem: same can be said about, say, perceptual judgments

Possible reply: In the case of perception adaptation presupposes at least near truth; in the case of morality it does not; for example, any sort of moral/religious/taboo-based views (they cannot all be true), or psychological misrepresentations can result in prosocial behavior most of the times. Seeing water in the pond typically works if there is water in the pond, and therefore the visual perceptual apparatus must be reliable to be adaptive. “My group is overall the best” works if it reinforces parochial prosociality, and therefore it need not be true. Hence, parochial tendencies need not track the truth with respect to the comparative worth of competing groups in order to be adaptive.

· If evolution had pushed towards adopting a different set of moral intuitions, we would accept them even if they were false. Our moral intuitions are based on evolutionary accidents. (Darwin example of the intelligent bees).

In addition:

It doesn’t matter whether the evolutionary explanation is in terms of adaptation, genetic drift, or exaptation (pre-adaptation).

It is possible that when it comes to morality evolution is truth tracking, but the burden of proof seems on the supporter of that view.

C Denial of metaethical assumption: moral facts obtain because of one’s believing they do, some form of subjectivism. Perhaps moral truths are not pre-given.

One could argue that evolution is the source of morality and that morality is just a well entrenched set of conventions based on evolutionarily produced emotions via projectivism, for example. Then, by and large emotions are attuned with morality in the sense that certain situations elicit certain judgments. (The distress of a group member is supposed to elicit the emotion of pity and the desire to help, which may be verbalized as “I should help him.”) When this fails, then one is behaving wrongly. However,

· Whether truth is relevant here is unclear, which means that EP1 is not false but irrelevant and/or based on a category mistake.

· It seems clear that if moral judgments involve some sort of objectivism, then EP1 is almost certainly true.

· The ‘morality’ arrived at by evolution is very basic, in the sense that it covers only parochial prosociality and is compatible with many types of morality (moral pluralism).

General Comment

One must distinguish four things:

1. A set of parochial prosocial attitudes, the result of gene/culture coevolution, resulting in prosocial behavior, that have been shaped by evolution

2. Historically given moralities embodying and supporting such attitudes.

3. Normative ethics, a rational reconstruction of what philosophers think the correct moral judgments are.

4. Meta-ethics, the philosophical consideration of things such as the nature of morality, moral judgments, the relation between good and right. Note that morality is objectivist, while meta-ethically reconstructed morality need not be.

In addition:

· Evolution provides the signposts within which a great different number of moralities are viable. In other words, evolution only delimits the range of possibility of successful moralities, all of which must foster prosocial attitudes and some degree of parochialism if inter-group hostility is present.

· Whether any morality captures moral truth, if there is such a thing, is unclear; debunking arguments present problems for those who say so.

· Normative ethics is removed from evolution, and therefore evolutionary considerations are probably not directly applicable to it; however, to the extent that normative ethics appeals to intuitions shaped by evolution, it is influenced by our evolutionary history.