Learning information about the etiology of one's beliefs can reduce the justification a thinker has for those beliefs. Learning information about the etiology of one's desires, emotions, or concepts can similarly have a debunking effect. In this chapter, I develop a unified account of etiological debunking that applies across these different kinds of cases. According to this account, etiological debunking arguments work by providing reason to think that there is no satisfying explanation of how it is that some part of (...) our mental life is fitting. The role that etiological information plays is to help to rule out (or render less plausible) potential explanations, given our background views about the world. This account suggests several potential morals for epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and metaethics. (shrink)

Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in (...) terms of which they are articulated. Second, not all genealogical debunking is epistemological debunking. Focusing on concepts rather than beliefs brings distinct forms of genealogical debunking to the fore that cannot be comprehensively captured in terms of epistemological debunking. We thus need a broader understanding of genealogical debunking, which encompasses not just epistemological debunking, but also what I shall refer to as metaphysical debunking and ethical debunking. (shrink)

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

Several moral objectivists try to explain the reliability of moral beliefs by appealing to a third factor, a substantive moral claim that explains, first, why we have the moral beliefs that we have and, second, why these beliefs are true. Folke Tersman has recently suggested that moral disagreement constrains the epistemic legitimacy of third-factor explanations. Apart from constraining third-factor explanations, Tersman’s challenge could support the view that the epistemic significance of debunking explanations depends on the epistemic significance of disagreement. This (...) paper aims to show that disagreement does not constrain the epistemic legitimacy of third-factor explanations in metaethics, and it suggests a way forward in addressing the view that debunking depends on disagreement. First, Tersman’s constraints are impossible to violate, given the assumption that the justification relation exhibits monotonicity. Second, some disagreements are irrelevant, given that they cannot be about beliefs whose reliability the objectivist seeks to defend. Third, actual disagreement about moral beliefs is implausible, given recent ethnographic findings. In light of this discussion, the paper shows that the prospects of the disagreement view depend on which moral beliefs objectivists need to defend and the criteria we use to assess epistemically relevant moral disagreement. (shrink)

Debunking arguments aim at defeating the justification of a belief by revealing the belief to have a dubious genealogy. One prominent example of such a debunking argument is Richard Joyce’s evolutionary debunking explanation of morality. Joyce’s argument targets only our belief in moral facts, while our belief in prudential facts is exempt from his evolutionary critique. In this paper, I suggest that our belief in prudential facts falls victim to evolutionary debunking, too. Just as our moral sense can be explained (...) in evolutionary terms, so presumably can our tendency to judge our actions in prudential terms. And if the evolutionary explanation of our moral sense has an undermining effect, then so does the evolutionary explanation of our belief in prudential facts. This also undermines moral fictionalism, the view that we have prudential reasons to maintain moral discourse as a fiction. I consider and refute four possible objections to the suggested debunking of our belief in prudential normativity. (shrink)

While Richard Joyce’s moral skepticism might seem to be an extreme metaethical view, it is actually far more moderate than it might first appear. By articulating four challenges facing his approach to moral skepticism, I argue that Joyce’s moderation is, in fact, a theoretical liability. First, the fact that Joyce is not skeptical about normativity in general makes it possible to develop close approximations to morality, lending support to moderate moral revisionism over moral error theory. Second, Joyce relies on strong, (...) contentious conceptual and empirical claims in support of his views. Third, Joyce’s evolutionary debunking argument threatens to backfire, generalizing to all normative judgments. Finally, Joyce fails to offer an adequate account of the normativity of desire. Each of these four challenges can be either sidestepped or embraced by radicalizing and defending a global form of normative skepticism. There are thus several ways in which global normative skepticism appears to be in a more robust dialectical position than Joyce’s moral skepticism. Furthermore, I argue, Joyce’s arguments against global normative skepticism are unconvincing. While this discussion is framed in terms of Joyce’s work, its arguments will apply to other moral skeptics who are not also global normative skeptics. The result is an invitation for Joyce and other moral skeptics to leave these problems behind and join the radical camp. (shrink)

Particularism is widely conceived to endorse the view that moral reason is context-dependent. This being so, it is often accused of flattening the moral landscape—treating the feature of promise-keeping as constituting no more of a (moral) reason for action than the feature of wearing a yellow shoelace in advance of the considerations of the contexts. In reply, Dancy maintains that his particularism allows some features such as promise-keeping to have a reason status by default, ontologically speaking; it is just that (...) their default reason status might get ‘switched off’ in some contexts. In this paper, I will argue that Dancy's ontological understanding of default reason wouldn't help the particularists address the flattening objection, due to a violation of what Tsu calls ‘the embedded thesis’, which is a general constraint on how moral reason behaves. However, once the nature of default reason is correctly understood as psychological, particularism will be enabled to deflate the flattening objection, or so I will argue. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to undercut the justification of our moral judgments by showing why a tendency to make moral judgments would evolve regardless of the truth of those judgments. Machery and Mallon (2010. Evolution of morality. In J.M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group (Eds.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (pp. 3-46). Oxford: Oxford University Press) have recently tried to disarm these arguments by showing that moral cognition – in the sense that is relevant to debunking – is not (...) the product of natural selection. Specifically, they present a barrage of increasingly influential challenges against reciprocity-based approaches to moral nativism. In the present paper I defend the nativist account of moral cognition against these criticisms, thereby bolstering the skeptical conclusions of evolutionary debunking arguments. However, Machery and Mallon's critique does successfully highlight several vulnerabilities in Richard Joyce's approach to debunking, suggesting several ways in which it can be revised toward generating a more robust version of the argument. (shrink)