Problems for Moral Debunkers

On the Logic and Limits of Empirically Informed Ethics

Peter Königs

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783111358451
• eBook ISBN: 9783110750218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

One the most interesting debates in moral philosophy revolves around the significance of empirical moral psychology for moral philosophy. Genealogical arguments that rely on empirical findings about the origins of moral beliefs, so-called debunking arguments, take center stage in this debate. Looking at debunking arguments based on evidence from evolutionary moral psychology, experimental ethics and neuroscience, this book explores what ethicists can learn from the science of morality, and what they cannot.

Among other things, the book offers a new take on the deontology/utilitarianism debate, discusses the usefulness of experiments in ethics, investigates whether morality should be thought of as a problem-solving device, shows how debunking arguments can tell us something about the structure of philosophical debate, and argues that debunking arguments lead to both moral and prudential skepticism.

Presenting a new picture of the relationship between empirical moral psychology and moral philosophy, this book is essential reading for moral philosophers and moral psychologists alike.

1 Introduction

1.1 Debunking arguments

Debunking arguments are arguments of the form “you just believe that because…”.¹ They challenge a belief by showing this belief to have a questionable genealogy. Consider the following thought experiment: Imagine there is a pill that makes you believe that Napoleon lost Waterloo. Now imagine

that you are proceeding through life happily believing that Napoleon lost Waterloo (as, indeed, you are), and then you discover that at some point in your past someone slipped you a ‘Napoleon lost Waterloo’ belief pill. […] [Y]ou somehow discover beyond any shred of doubt that your belief is the product of such a pill. Should this undermine your faith in your belief that Napoleon lost Waterloo? Of course it should.²

This intuitively compelling thought experiment, due to Richard Joyce, conveys a good idea of what debunking arguments are. Roughly, the strategy is that of showing that the targeted belief has its causal source in a belief-forming process that fails to track the truth. And awareness of the fact that one’s belief originates from a non-truth-tracking process should prompt one to abandon this belief. It renders continuing having this belief epistemically unjustified.

Debunking arguments occupy an ambivalent position in philosophy. On the one hand, the idea of discrediting a doctrine – moral or otherwise – by looking at its genealogy has a rich philosophical history. The heyday of genealogical debunking arguments was the late 19^th and early 20^th century, which witnessed three of the most influential genealogical debunkers in the history of philosophy: Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.³ In The Future of an Illusion, Freud demasks people’s belief in God as, precisely, an illusion that has its origins in an unconscious wish for a strong father-figure.⁴ Marx’s theory of ideology has it that a society’s dominant religious and political views are just vehicles of the interests of the ruling class: “Law, morality, religion are to [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”⁵ And Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals, debunks ascetic moralities, such as Christian morality, as resentment-driven attempts to come to terms with the meaninglessness of suffering.⁶ What unites these three authors is their commitment to a naturalistic methodology and the notion that understanding the origins of beliefs can render them epistemically suspect.⁷ This methodological insight can be traced back much further to the early days of philosophy. Early instances of debunking arguments, which bear a striking resemblance to some of the above, can be found in the Platonic dialogues. In Plato’s Politeia, Thrasymachus notoriously claims that justice is what serves the interests of the powerful, a claim that may be interpreted as a sociological debunking explanation of popular conceptions of justice. In quite a Marxian fashion, he contends that the norms of justice are put in place by the rulers to manipulate the weak in an attempt to promote the formers’ interests.⁸ And in Gorgias, Callicles, anticipating Nietzsche, holds the opposing view that the moral norms have been determined by the weak in an effort to keep down the more gifted and capable: “[T]o prevent these men from having more than themselves they say that taking more is shameful and unjust, and that doing injustice is this, seeking to have more than other people.”⁹

On the other hand, it is a common-place, especially among analytic philosophers, that the genesis of a belief and its truth or validity are two entirely different things that must not be conflated. Since it is the philosopher’s task to determine the latter, genealogical considerations do not belong in philosophical argumentation. A locus classicus for this assumption is Hans Reichenbach’s Experience and Prediction. He introduces the terms ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’ and maintains “that epistemology is only occupied in constructing the context of justification.”¹⁰ Not only has it typically been assumed that genealogical aspects can be bracketed when we engage in philosophy with an epistemic intent.¹¹ Often, the much stronger claim is made that genealogical reasoning is fallacious. Genealogical arguments are routinely dismissed as genetic fallacies. Philosophers in the analytic tradition especially pride themselves with assessing the merits of a theory exclusively by assessing the evidence for and against it, rather than by looking at how it originated or who its authors are. The following statement by John Searle is worth quoting at length as it encapsulates how analytic philosophers tend to think about genealogical arguments:

A standard argumentative strategy of those who reject the Western Rationalistic Tradition is to challenge some claim they find objectionable, by challenging the maker of the claim in question. Thus, the claim and its maker are said to be racist, sexist, phono-phallo-logocentric, and so forth. To those who hold the traditional conception of rationality, these challenges do not impress. They are, at best, beside the point. To those within the Western Rationalistic Tradition, these types of challenge have names. They are commonly called argumentum ad hominem and the genetic fallacy. Argumentum ad hominem is an argument against the person who presents a view rather than against the view itself, and the genetic fallacy is the fallacy of supposing that because a theory or claim has a reprehensible origin, the theory or claim itself is discredited. I hope it is obvious why anyone who accepts the idea of objective truth and therefore of objective knowledge thinks this is a fallacy.¹²

The strategy of debunking a philosophical doctrine by discrediting its genesis is informed by the assumption that this strict distinction between genesis and validity, as suggested by Searle and many others, is untenable.

Although the idea that the genealogy of a belief might tell us something about its truth is not new, recent years have seen a renaissance of philosophical interest in debunking explanations. In moral philosophy in particular, debunking explanations have become a popular, if controversial, argumentative device.

One debunking project, carried out by Joshua Greene and Peter Singer, invokes genealogical findings in an attempt to debunk deontological moral theory and vindicate utilitarianism. Deontological intuitions are exposed as mere remnants of natural selection, as sensitive to morally irrelevant factors, and as dysfunctional. More sophisticated defenses of deontology, which do not rest on the debunked intuitions, are dismissed as mere products of confabulatory post hoc rationalization.¹³

A more far-reaching evolutionary debunking argument has been advanced by Sharon Street, who takes evolutionary forces to have messed with virtually all our evaluative dispositions. As a result, there is little reason to assume that our evaluative beliefs are even anywhere near the evaluative truth. This, at least, follows if we operate within a realist framework, which posits a Platonic realm of evaluative truths that are independent of our evaluative attitudes. If we adopt a constructivist, attitude-dependent framework, the fact that our beliefs have been influenced by evolutionary processes should not lead us to doubt their correctness. In light of the implausibility of radical evaluative skepticism, Street suggests that we reject realism and embrace constructivism.¹⁴

A third debunking project focuses on the evolution of our moral sense as such, rather than on evolution’s impact on the contents of our moral beliefs. Richard Joyce has suggested that our very tendency to think in moral categories and to judge actions in moral terms is explainable in evolutionary terms. And like Greene, Singer and Street, Joyce takes it that a naturalistic evolutionary explanation along these lines has an undermining effect on the justification of our beliefs. He concludes that our belief in the existence of moral facts is unjustified.¹⁵

This book assesses the merits and prospects of debunking arguments in moral philosophy. It proceeds by exploring these three routes of debunking widely shared moral commitments. Before I say more about the aim and structure of this book, however, I wish to take the opportunity to provide a more panoramic overview of the many potential uses and varieties of genealogical critique to convey an impression of the diversity and versatility of debunking arguments. Debunking arguments can differ in a wide range of aspects, among which are their subject matter, scope, ambition, level of defeat, reason for defeat, dialectical function and direction.¹⁶

1.2 Varieties of debunking arguments

Subject matter

The present study deals with debunking arguments in moral philosophy. It should be kept in mind, though, that the applicability of the debunking method is by no means limited to beliefs related to morality. Beliefs about any subject matter are, in principle, amenable to debunking explanations. While debunking arguments in moral philosophy have arguably been at the center of attention in the current debate surrounding debunking arguments, there are noteworthy examples of debunking arguments in other fields and disciplines.¹⁷

Traditionally, debunking arguments have been particularly popular in political theory. Karl Marx, one of the most influential debunkers in political theory, has already been mentioned. Marx’ critique of ideology and his notion that the superstructure of society − its culture, belief system, political institutions, etc. – are determined by a society’s economic arrangements has been very influential among left-leaning political theorists. Indeed, it has inspired an entire research program aimed at understanding and demasking ideology.¹⁸ While critique of ideology is typically associated with the left, debunking explanations have also been employed by libertarians in an effort to make sense of why libertarianism has garnered so little support both within and outside the academy. In his Why do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?, Robert Nozick attempts to explain why intellectuals of the ‘wordsmith’ type − journalists, authors, literary critics, etc. – tend to be on the left of the political spectrum and to resent capitalist society.¹⁹ He suspects that their resentment is due to differences in how two important social institutions, the school and the market, distribute praise and rewards. At school, the wordsmith’s skills are the most highly valued ones. This instills in those who later go on to become authors or journalists a feeling of superiority and entitlement. In a free market, by contrast, the skills of the wordsmith are worth relatively little. The capitalist society denies verbally gifted people the status of superiority that they have grown to feel entitled to. Their rejection of capitalism is a response to this humiliation. This speculative suggestion is not entirely without irony, given that Marxist Louis Althusser, in his classic Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, has identified the educational system as the institution that is chiefly responsible for perpetuating capitalist ideology.²⁰ More recently, Michael Huemer has devoted a chapter of his book-length defense of anarcho-capitalism to exploring the biases that might account for the near-unanimous but, in his view, misguided belief in the legitimacy and authority of the state.²¹

Another popular target for debunking explanations, which we briefly encountered above, are religious beliefs. Again, the idea of explaining away religious belief has a long history that can be traced back far beyond the likes of Freud and Nietzsche.²² But as in the field of moral philosophy, advancements in the empirical sciences – especially in evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences – have generated renewed interest in the natural mechanisms underlying religious belief and in the possibility of demystifying religion as an entirely natural phenomenon. Protagonists of a research program called ‘the cognitive science of religion’ include David Sloan Wilson and Daniel Dennett, who suggest that religion can be e...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Evolution
• 3 Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Experimental Ethics
• 4 Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Morality as Problem-Solving
• 5 Deontology, Confabulation, and the Structure of Philosophical Debate
• 6 Realism, Constructivism, and Evolution
• 7 Morality, Wellbeing, and Evolution
• 8 Conclusion
• Index