Can Naturalism Contain the Universal Acid?
@fractcalbryan on Twitter objects to my article on Catholic Answers regarding Atheism as Universal Acid: “Not sure I get why evolution is a problem for morality (that is to say, a problem without a certain version of God). The idea that our morality is a product of evolution is consistent with moral facts being real & moral knowledge being attainable.”
I suggest reading my original article and his Tweet-series for full context. Then my response, which is this:
First, we must clarify what “our morality is a product of evolution” means. If we mean that our moral beliefs are a product of evolution, few will deny this (even if many will say evolution isn’t the entire story). The question is whether those beliefs accurately track some mind-independent reality. In other words, regarding our moral beliefs, has evolution caused us to discover or invent. My article provides numerous reasons that if favoring a naturalistic perspective one should prefer the theory of invention – reasons coming from various (quite prominent) naturalists and naturalistic theory, like Mackie and Russel and Stone, the notion of Darwinian counterfactuals, etc., for adopting moral anti-realism.
Of course, it is consistent (logically speaking) that moral beliefs are a product of evolution and that moral facts are real. But that is not the concern. The concern is what is the more plausible, simple hypothesis, and the point of the article is that, if you’re a naturalist, moral-anti realism is unquestionably the winner. Naturalistic-evolution can easily explain false but useful moral beliefs; it has an extremely hard time – without enormous amounts of (ad hoc) theoretical complexity – explaining not just moral facts but moral knowledge.
Going further (this part was edited out of my original article; word count, you know.), philosopher Mark Linville reinforces Sharon Street’s proposal in arguing against moral-supervenience theories among naturalists, since what Darwin’s theory conjoined to naturalism should cause is to do is “glance back over our shoulder” to see if our widely held judgments might be unreliable, including supervenience of moral facts upon natural facts.[1] In other words, if the atheist is assuming some sort of Dependence Thesis between moral and natural facts to undergird a system of moral objectivity, then what thinkers like Street & Linville are proposing is reason for doubting that any judgments about the dependence thesis itself are true. Surely, this is correct.
Nevertheless, the concern with moral knowledge is consistent with there being moral facts. Moral knowledge means coming to have the right moral beliefs formed in the right sort of way. That is something naturalism struggles immensely with, even if we grant (parting with many naturalists) that there are — or could be — moral facts if naturalism were true. Speaking to FractalBryan’s later point about drawing having to draw a line between reliable and unreliable processes in some niche, evolutionary pressures are definitely not a reliable guide in the context of moral belief formation (that’s the whole point about Darwinian counterfactuals) given evolutionary theory (though, importantly, the matter only need be inscrutable for the argument to have force), and that undermines moral knowledge.
See Also:
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/morality-has-to-be-objective
[1] See Linville’s entry in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology for a detailed exposition.