Sometimes, we offer reasons to believe a proposition isn’t true. Other times, we adduce reasons to show that it isn’t justified, or that someone isn’t justified in holding it. The former are often called rebutting, the latter undercutting defeaters. This post is about the latter category.
In many cases, undercutting defeaters take the form of debunking explanations: they aim to point out that, given the way a subject (or group) arrived at her belief(s), those beliefs are unlikely to be true. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are perhaps the most influential debunkers, but traces of this method can already be found in Xenophanes’ anthropomorphism objection.
Debunking explanations pose a reliability challenge: if S arrived at p using method M, but using M is unlikely to “track the truth” with regard to p, p is unjustified. Debunking explanations account for the causal genesis of a (set of) beliefs in terms of off-track processes. If you ask me how many chairs there are in the building next door, and I guess 384, then I have used an unreliable method to arrive at this belief. And if I were to figure out what I ought to do, morally speaking, by consulting the emotions and intuitions my evolutionary history has disposed me to find plausible, my moral judgments would be unjustified. Yet this is precisely the situation proponents of so-called evolutionary debunking arguments think we are in. We think that pain is bad and that we have stronger obligations towards our children than to strangers. But in principle, the moral facts could be anything; so how likely is it that selective pressures, which we have no reason to believe to be truth-tracking with regard to moral facts, would give us true moral beliefs? Fantastically unlikely, debunkers suggest. And so our moral beliefs are unjustified.
But notice that we can only be off-track if there is a track to be on. In an extremely influential paper from 2006, Sharon Street has shown that reliability challenges need not undermine the justification we have for our (moral) judgments. At least, she suggests, if we are willing to sacrifice something else instead. If we are prepared to change our metaethics – that is, the beliefs we have about our beliefs – then we can leave our normative ethics – that is, our substantive moral beliefs themselves – intact. Metaethics can protect our moral beliefs from debunking.
I wish to suggest that this is a mistake. First, notice how utterly strange this suggestion sounds. If your method for arriving at a belief is bad, don’t give up that belief. Change your account of what it is that makes this belief true! In a more recent paper, Street acknowledges this herself:
“That move might seem odd. It’s as though upon learning that your belief [that Hayes was the 20th president of the US] about Hayes [the 19th president of the US, H.S.] had its origin in hypnosis, you find it so implausible that you could be wrong about whether Hayes was the twentieth president that you opt to change your conception of the subject matter, concluding that facts about who was the twentieth president are constituted by facts about who you think the twentieth president was, no matter what the source of your views, hypnotism included.”
What could possibly be the reason for what seems, on the face of it, to be an epistemically obscene suggestion? Street argues that we can make a pick. Evolutionary explanations of the origin of our moral judgments, metaethical realism about those judgments, and belief in those judgments are an inconsistent triad. What gives? Street suggests realism has to go, because it is the smallest sacrifice:
“The evolutionary theory of our origins is overwhelmingly supported by our best science. Taking that as a fixed point, I suggest that it is much more plausible to think that a mind-independent conception of value is false than it is to think that we have no idea how to live, which is the conclusion that results if we pair a mind-independent conception of value with an evolutionary genealogy of valuing. Accepting this radical sceptical conclusion would involve nothing less than suspending all evaluative judgment, and either continuing to move about but regarding oneself as acting for no reason at all, or else sitting paralyzed where one is and just blinking in one’s ignorance of how to go forward. Accepting the conclusion that value is mind-dependent, on the other hand, preserves many or our evaluative views – allowing us to see why we are reasonably reliable about matters of value – while at the same time allowing us to see ourselves as evolved creatures.”
But notice that, in assessing which of the aforementioned three links is the weakest, Street appeals to pragmatic considerations first and foremost. These pragmatic considerations, I wish to suggest, are the problem here. Since evolutionary theory is non-negotiable, and moral skepticism pragmatically and deliberatively unacceptable, realism should be given up. Why? Because giving up our substantive moral beliefs rather than our realist metaethics would be too much to bear – it would paralyze, confuse, and depress us, leaving us with “no idea how to live”.
But so what? Firstly, pragmatic reasons seem to be of the wrong kind. We want to know which is true – realism or our moral beliefs. Which of the two is more important or pleasant to us seems neither here nor there with regard to this question. (Compare tbe belief I have cancer.) Secondly, if pragmatic considerations are admissible, and indeed decisive in this context, why not sacrifice evolution? Whether or not evolutionary theory is true has the smallest pragmatic significance, after all. (Consider that people did perfectly fine without believing in evolution for, well, a long time.) Thirdly, I see no reason why being unable to take moral values and norms seriously should yield the predicted result. (Consider psychopaths, who certainly aren’t paralyzed and depressed. If anything, their impoverished moral repertoire seems to make them hyperagential.)
I think that for the three reasons mentioned above, Street’s strategy fails. But why would one think that the “odd move” she suggests should be plausible to begin with? This, I suggest, is due to an unbalanced diet of examples. When we compare the plausibility of metaethical realism to how compelling we find beliefs such as Pain is bad or Cheaters should be shunned, realism has to go. But when we compare realism to beliefs such as Incest is immoral or Strangers should be met with hostility, the balance tips in the other direction. Debunking arguments can be deployed selectively in just this way: sometimes, they can undermine our first-order beliefs; sometimes, they can target the beliefs we have about those beliefs. Metaethics can protect our moral beliefs from debunking, but only when we have reason to want it to.
