Tuesday, December 08, 2020

Does evolution undermine moral realism?

Evolution, at best, explains how moral beliefs could have arisen without there being an objective reality to morality. But it doesn't follow that there is no objective moral reality just because moral beliefs arose through a process of evolution.

There are two problems with dismissing the reality of morality on the basis that moral beliefs arose through evolution. Actually, there are three, but I'm just going to mention two.

The first problem is that it undermines all of the other things we know in the same way. There are some beliefs that are just naturally occurring. Everybody assumes, from as early as they can think and perceive, that what they are experiencing with their sensory organs corresponds to a real external world. This belief is built into us, and it's so automatic that people don't even think about it unless they take an interest in philosophy. This is a naturally occurring belief that is hardwired into our brains, and since our brains became the way they are through evolution, it follows that this belief came by way of evolution. So if evolution undermines morality, then it undermines the existence of the external world for the same reason. And it undermines several other basic things we know.

Everything else we know is built on the foundation of the beliefs and assumptions that are hard wired into our brains. Most of what we know can be traced back to sensory perceptions, memory, and inductive reasoning from experience. If you conclude that this knowledge is unreliable, then it undermines pretty much everything you claim to know. In fact, it undermines your argument against morality since that argument is based on observations you made with your sensory perceptions, your memory of having made those observations, and your knowledge of logical inferrence. So the argument is self-refuting.

The second problem is that it commits the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is when you say that some proposition is false because belief in that proposition arose in an unreliable way. For example, suppose I came to believe the earth was round because I had a dream that the earth was a big baseball, and since baseballs are round, the earth must be round. That is an unreliable way of arriving at the truth of the shape of the earth, but that doesn't mean the belief is false. In the same way, even if evolution is responsible for how we came to have moral beliefs, it wouldn't follow that those beliefs are false.

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