A debunking explanation for moral progress
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A debunking explanation for moral progress Nathan Cofnas1
The Author(s) 2019
Abstract According to ‘‘debunking arguments,’’ our moral beliefs are explained by evolutionary and cultural processes that do not track objective, mind-independent moral truth. Therefore (the debunkers say) we ought to be skeptics about moral realism. Huemer counters that ‘‘moral progress’’—the cross-cultural convergence on liberalism—cannot be explained by debunking arguments. According to him, the best explanation for this phenomenon is that people have come to recognize the objective correctness of liberalism. Although Huemer may be the first philosopher to make this explicit empirical argument for moral realism, the idea that societies will eventually converge on the same moral beliefs is a notable theme in realist thinking. Antirealists, on the other hand, often point to seemingly intractable crosscultural moral disagreement as evidence against realism (the ‘‘argument from disagreement’’). This paper argues that the trend toward liberalism is susceptible to a debunking explanation, being driven by two related non-truth-tracking processes. First, large numbers of people gravitate to liberal values for reasons of self-interest. Second, as societies become more prosperous and advanced, they become more effective at suppressing violence, and they create conditions where people are more likely to empathize with others, which encourages liberalism. The latter process is not truth tracking (or so this paper argues) because empathy-based moral beliefs are themselves susceptible to an evolutionary debunking argument. Cross-cultural convergence on liberalism per se does not support either realism or antirealism. Keywords Evolutionary debunking arguments Moral realism Argument from disagreement Moral progress Liberalism
& Nathan Cofnas [email protected] 1
Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ, UK
123
N. Cofnas
1 Introduction Moral realists believe that there are facts in virtue of which (at least some of) our moral beliefs are objectively and non-relatively true or false (Tersman 2006). Realists typically also hold that moral knowledge is possible, and that some (or many) of our ethical views are in fact true. Skeptics about moral realism often appeal to ‘‘debunking arguments’’ to undermine the justification of our moral beliefs. Debunking arguments come in several varieties (Sauer 2018, chapter 1) which roughly conform to the following schema: Causal premise. S’s belief that p is explained by X. Epistemic premise. X is [a non-truth-tracking] process. Therefore S’s belief that p is unjustified. (Kahane 2011, p. 106) There is ongoing debate about exactly what epistemic principles underly debunking arguments, and how such arguments should be formulated (e.g., Bogardus 2016; White 2010). Nichols (2014) favors ‘‘process’’ over ‘‘best-explanation’’ debunking arguments: S’s belief that p is unjustified when it is the product of an ‘‘epistemically defective’’ process. On Vavova’s (2018) account, beliefs are rendered unjustified
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