Several anti-debunkers have argued that evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs fail to meet a necessary condition on undermining defeat called modal security. They conclude that evolution, therefore, does not debunk our moral beliefs. This article shows that modal security is false if knowledge is virtuous achievement. New information can undermine a given belief without providing reason to doubt that that belief is sensitive or safe. This leads to a novel conception of undermining defeat, and it shows that successful debunking (...) of moral realism is possible. (shrink)

Modal Security is an increasingly discussed proposed necessary condition on undermining defeat. Modal Security says, roughly, that if evidence undermines (rather than rebuts) one’s belief, then one gets reason to doubt the belief's safety or sensitivity. The primary interest of the principle is that it seems to entail that influential epistemological arguments, including Evolutionary Debunking Arguments against moral realism and the Benacerraf-Field Challenge for mathematical realism, are unsound. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine Modal Security in detail. (...) We develop and discuss what we take to be the strongest objections to the principle. One of the aims of the paper is to expose the weakness of these objections. Another is to reveal how the debate over Modal Security interacts with core problems in epistemology — including the generality problem, and the distinction between direct and indirect evidence. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently argued that evolutionary considerations undermine the justification of all objectivist moral beliefs by implying a hypothetical disagreement: had our evolutionary history been different, our moral beliefs would conflict with the moral beliefs of our counterfactual selves. This paper aims at showing that evolutionary considerations do not imply epistemically relevant moral disagreement. In nearby scenarios, evolutionary considerations imply tremendous moral agreement. In remote scenarios, evolutionary considerations do not entail relevant disagreement with our epistemic peers, neither on a (...) narrow nor on a broad conception of peerhood. In conclusion, evolutionary considerations do not reveal epistemically troubling kinds of disagreement. Anti-objectivists need to look elsewhere to fuel their sceptical argument. (shrink)

Facts about moral disagreement and human evolution have both been said to exclude the possibility of moral knowledge, but the question of how these challenges interact has largely gone unaddressed. The paper aims to present and defend a novel version of the evolutionary “debunking” argument for moral skepticism that appeals to both types of considerations. This argument has several advantages compared to more familiar versions. The standard debunking strategy is to argue that evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs generate skeptical implications (...) because they attribute those beliefs to factors that are unrelated to their truth. That strategy is vulnerable to “third-factor” responses, which invoke first-order moral claims to challenge the assumption that Darwinian factors and the moral truths are really unrelated in that way. In contrast, our version is immune to those responses, as it does not proceed via assumptions about how Darwinian factors relate to the moral facts. Instead, it focuses on what evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs have to say about the fact that people often reach divergent moral beliefs. The argument thereby illustrates how the debunking strategy can join forces with the argument from moral disagreement. The combination of those strategies presents, we think, a challenge that is more formidable than when they are considered separately. (shrink)

Quasi-realism prominently figures in the expressivist research program. However, many complain that it has become increasingly unclear what exactly quasi-realism involves. This paper offers clarification. It argues that we need to distinguish two distinctive views that might be and have been pursued under the label “quasi-realism”: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. Of these, only conciliatory expressivism is a genuinely meta-ethical project, while quasi-realism is a first-order normative view. This paper demonstrates the fruitfulness of these clarifications by using them to (...) address Terence Cuneo’s recent challenge that quasi-realist expressivists lack the resources to plausibly accommodate certain sorts of data points. (shrink)

If you put chimpanzees from different communities together you can expect mayhem - they are not keen on treating each other nicely. There is closely related species of apes, however, whose members have countless encounters with unrelated specimen on a daily basis and yet almost all get through the day in one piece - that species is us, homo sapiens. But what makes us get along, most of the time? Morality as such is, perhaps surprisingly, not a mainstream research topic (...) in social psychology. Most textbooks in the field do not even mention the term morality at all (and focus on 'prosociality' instead). This relative lack of 'coverage' might have to do with the difficulty of operationalising 'morality' in a fitting way (more on this below). However, morality certainly is a social phenomenon and therefore the collection of Fargas, Jussim, and Van Lange is certainly a step in the right direction; it offers an extensive overview of the field and is suggestive of the vast potential of studying morality through the lens of social psychology. (shrink)