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Debunking Arguments

Worked example: an evolutionary debunking argument.
This is a vivid way to see what a (global) debunking-style challenge looks like. We are not trying to resolve Street here; we’re using it to motivate why people reach for debunking in the first place.

Darwin (1871): if we had evolved like hive-bees ...

‘unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers ...’

(Darwin, Bonner, & May, 2008, p. 73)

Full quote: ‘If, for instance, to take an extreme case, 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.’

Street’s dilemma

Very rough version: either evolution tracks stance-independent truth, or it doesn’t.
One connection to Kagan: if this kind of global evolutionary story worked, it would make moral intuition epistemically suspect across the board (for some metaethical pictures).

Target: We know some stance-independent truths about ethics.

‘The kind of independence from our evaluative attitudes that realists endorse is what Russ Shafer-Landau has called stance-independence.3 To illustrate: Realists of course agree that the evaluative truth that "Hitler was morally depraved" depends in part on Hitler's evaluative attitudes in the sense that if Hitler had valued peace and universal human rights instead of dictatorial power and genocide, then it would have been false instead of true that he was morally depraved. But given that Hitler did value dictatorial power and genocide, value realists think that it is true, independent of all of our (and any of Hitler's other) evaluative attitudes, that Hitler was morally depraved. According to realists, the truth that Hitler was morally depraved holds independently of any stance that we (or Hitler) might take toward that truth, whether now or upon reflection.’ (Street, 2006, p. 111)

Premise: Evolutionary forces shape evaluative attitudes.

How do the forces relate to the truths?

‘The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, the realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgements are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. The realist's other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and independent evaluative truths, namely that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds.’ (Street, 2006, p. 109)

If no relation, ‘most of our evaluative judgements are
off track ...’

If relation, ‘unacceptable on scientific grounds’
(because adaptive link > tracking link)

(Street, 2006)

‘According to what I will call the adaptive link account, tendencies to make certain kinds of evaluative judgements rather than others contributed to our ancestors' reproductive success not because they constituted perceptions of independent evaluative truths, but rather because they forged adaptive links between our ancestors" circumstances and their responses to those circumstances, getting them to act, feel, and believe in ways that turned out to be reproductively advantageous.’ (Street, 2006, p. 127)
‘at the adaptive link account wins this competition hands down, as judged by all the usual criteria of scientific adequacy. In particular, there are at least three respects in which the adaptive link account is superior to the tracking account: it is more parsimonious; it is much clearer; and it sheds much more light on the explanandum in question, namely that human beings tend to make some evaluative judgements rather than others.’ (Street, 2006, p. 129)
Taxonomy: Street is (roughly) global; Singer/Greene-style projects are selective. Connect back to Kagan: these are different strategies for supplying “something especially problematic” about moral intuitions.

Debunking arguments

global (ex. Street)

vs

selective (ex. Singer/Greene)

A robust selective debunking contender from the literature. This is a direct answer to Kagan’s challenge: identify something epistemically problematic about (some) moral intuitions.

‘If ... these moral intuitions are the biological residue of our evolutionary history, it is not clear why we should regard them as having any normative force.’

(Singer, 2005, p. abstract)

[On Footbridge] ‘the answer these subjects gave is, surely, the rational answer. The death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five people. [...]

reasoning [...] should [...] lead us to push the stranger [off] the footbridge [...]

if this is an intuition [...] It does not seem to be one that is the outcome of our evolutionary past.’

(Singer, 2005, p. 350)

‘we might attempt the [...] task of separating those moral judgments that we owe to our evolutionary and cultural history, from those that have a rational basis. This is [...] the only way to avoid moral skepticism’

(Singer, 2005, p. 351)

Debunking arguments

Global (ex. Street)

Selective (ex. Singer/Greene)

So now we know what a selective debunking argument looks like, and we have a clear example of one. Next step: consider an objection to selective debunking arguments, due to Rini.
I will start with Rini’s general idea, then apply it to Singer ...

Rini’s objection to selective debunking arguments

insert-transcript#8f0ea1f0-0797-466e-9e32-6ae7bf4577c2-here

‘To say that a particular psychological process
does not track moral truth is to say that the process generates judgments which are not subjunctively sensitive to *certain* moral properties.

We cannot say this without making some moral judgments ourselves’

(Rini, 2016, p. 682, my emphasis).

‘nearly any attempt to debunk a particular moral judgment on grounds of its psychological cause risks triggering a regress, because a debunking argument must involve moral evaluation of the psychological cause—and this evaluation is itself then subject to psychological investigation and moral evaluation, and so on’ (Rini, 2016, p. 676).

Rini’s thought: you can’t do this without making moral judgments.
insert-transcript#0bc2ef00-78d5-4e61-8e4e-30660b4baf4f-here

Singer’s selective debunking is driven by ‘the ‘intuition’ that tells us that the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five’ (Singer, 2005, p. 350)

This intuition is an outcome of our evolutionary past (Kahane, 2014), notwithstanding Singer’s denial of this.

Singer say that the intuition ‘does not seem to be one that is the outcome of our evolutionary past’ (Singer, 2005, p. 350)
‘de Lazari-Radek and Singer face a dilemma. If their argument against self-interest, partiality, and rational egoism works, then it also works against core beliefs about well-being. If it doesn’t work against these core beliefs, then it also fails to undermine self-interest, partiality, and rational egoism.’ (Kahane, 2014, p. 340)
Kahane points out that the utilitarian calculus ("five deaths are worse than one") is entirely empty without a substantive theory of well-being. To make the utilitarian math work, you must rely on the core moral belief that death and suffering are intrinsically bad.

∴ we need to subject this intuition to ‘psychological investigation and moral evaluation’

But that will require some further moral intuitions ...

insert-transcript#88f6ee25-d46a-472e-bad2-4c026f97d578-here

Street:
global debunking

Singer/Greene:
selective debunking

Global debunking implies skepticism

Rini: selective debunking creates regress.

‘a form of global debunking can evade my regress—precisely because it is not selective debunking.’ (Rini, 2016, p. §5)
insert-transcript#0c3ef6fb-aefa-4cc5-9ec1-bc9d53da1bf3-here
I am frustrated because the arguments we have considered involve almost no reference to discoveries in moral psychology.
Despite all we have discovered about moral psychology, Darwin could write about, and evaluate these, arguments just as well as you or I.
insert-transcript#d7215f59-fbfc-4321-b487-b963424df9c0-here

a different kind of argument

For my part, I do not know which factors are morally relevant. So I want a different kind of argument—not a debunking argument.
The next unit starts by stating the alternative in outline form (the “hard part” early), then the rest of the lecture argues for its premises.