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This chapter expands the account of moral knowledge presented in Chapter 3 to respond to evolutionary debunking arguments presented by Michael Ruse, Sharon Street, and Richard Joyce. It ends with a discussion of the concern that the author’s account of moral knowledge entails that our possession of moral knowledge requires that we be inordinately lucky. It is argued that there is no compelling reason to think that the author’s account of moral knowledge requires us to be luckier in possessing moral knowledge than in possessing many other kinds of knowledge, and hence the view does not generate a special luck-related problem for moral knowledge in particular.

Moral debunking arguments are meant to show that, by realist lights, moral beliefs are not explained by moral facts, which in turn is meant to show that they lack some significant counterfactual connection to the moral facts (e.g. safety, sensitivity, reliability). The dominant, “minimalist” response to the arguments—sometimes defended under the heading of “third-factors” or “pre-established harmonies”—involves affirming that moral beliefs enjoy the relevant counterfactual connection while granting that these beliefs are not explained by the moral facts. The authors argue that the minimalist gambit rests on a controversial thesis about epistemic priority: that explanatory concessions derive their epistemic import from what they reveal about counterfactual connections. They then challenge this epistemic priority thesis, which undermines the minimalist response to debunking arguments (both in ethics and elsewhere).

This chapter provides a realist response to Street’s ‘Darwinian Dilemma’ and to evolutionary debunking arguments more generally, showing that there is in fact no such dilemma for ethical realism and that the debunking arguments fail. Nothing in evolutionary biology supports the debunkers’ strong explanatory claims about the etiology of our moral beliefs, unless those arguments are supplemented by philosophical claims that beg the question against realism from the start. At most, the debunking arguments pose an open challenge to realists to provide an alternative account of how we have come to hold some of our moral beliefs that constitute moral knowledge, without running afoul of good science. Finally, Enoch’s alternative realist approach to answering debunking arguments — accepting debunkers’ explanatory claims and then appealing to a ‘pre-established harmony’ between moral beliefs and facts, brought about by some ‘third factor’ — is argued to be unsatisfactory.

The literature is now full of etiological debunking arguments for normative beliefs. This chapter focuses on those arguments that target varieties of normative realism and charge that alignment between belief and fact would be too coincidental, yielding a defeater for justification. One striking thing about this debate is that many folks agree on the key premises of the debunking argument, yet disagree about the epistemic upshot. Here, it tries to sort things out by examining attempts to bring the defeater (or its absence) into sharp relief. In the end, it concludes the best case for defeat rests on a robust sort of insensitivity, what it calls obliviousness of normative belief to non-natural fact.

This chapter considers an evolutionary debunking argument, which states that, because our normative beliefs were greatly influenced by natural selection, these beliefs were caused in ways that were unrelated to their truth. When we know that our beliefs were caused in such ways, these beliefs cannot be justified. The chapter rejects that argument. Though our normative beliefs were influenced by natural selection, this influence was not great enough to give strong support to the evolutionary debunking argument. Furthermore, the chapter questions the suggestions that the causal origins of our normative beliefs could not epistemically undermine these beliefs, and that, in responding to the skeptic's argument from disagreement, we can deny that it makes a difference whether, in ideal conditions, we would in fact have similar normative beliefs.

This chapter argues that accepting modal normativism brings significant epistemological advantages. Those who aim to account for modal knowledge face the integration challenge of reconciling an account of what is involved in knowing modal truths with a plausible story about how we can come to know them, and the reliability challenge of explaining how we could have evolved to have a reliable faculty for coming to know modal truths. Recent empiricist accounts of modal knowledge cannot solve these problems regarding specifically metaphysical modal truths—leaving us with the threat of skepticism about large portions of metaphysics. However, by giving a different functional story, the modal normativist can develop a plausible response to the remaining versions of both of these classic problems for modal epistemology. Modal normativists can also respond to further worries parallel to those raised by Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking arguments in meta-ethics.

Parfit, like Sidgwick, believes that there are objective normative reasons. Yet Sidgwick found himself unable, in The Methods of Ethics, to put ethics on a rational basis. Reason points, he thought, in two distinct directions: we have reason to act from universal benevolence, which leads to utilitarianism, and we have reason to act from self-interest, which leads to egoism. Given that utilitarianism and egoism fail to coincide, this leads to a “dualism of practical reason.” Sidgwick describes this as “the profoundest problem of ethics.” It poses a problem for defenders of the claim that some ethical judgments are based on reason and therefore objectively true. In our view, Parfit’s response does not fully resolve Sidgwick’s problem. We argue that it can be resolved by an evolutionary debunking argument, which has the additional advantage of showing how objectivists can overcome Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma.”

Argument Q, the seventeenth argument in Plantinga’s battery, concerns the problem of explaining how we can take seriously our capacity for intuition in such areas as logic, arithmetic, morality, and philosophy. This argument involves a comparison between theistic and non-theistic accounts of these cognitive capacities of human beings. The argument can take three forms: an inference to the best explanation, an appeal to something like the causal theory of knowledge, and an argument turning on the potential threat of undercutting epistemic defeaters concerning the reliability of intuition. All three support the conclusion that we can have intuitive knowledge only if the reliability of that intuition is adequately grounded, as it can be by God’s creation of us.

This chapter accepts for the sake of argument Ronald Dworkin’s point that the only viable form of normative skepticism is internal, and develops an internal skeptical argument directed specifically at normative realism. There is a striking and puzzling coincidence between normative judgments that are true, and normative judgments that causal forces led us to believe—a practical/theoretical puzzle to which the constructivist view has a solution. Normative realists have no solution, but are driven to conclude that we are probably hopeless at recognizing the independent normative truths they posit. Since this is an unacceptable conclusion, we must conclude that normative realism is false. Drawing on evolutionary considerations, it is explained why this internal skeptical argument does not carry over to our knowledge of objects in our manifest surroundings, and why the challenge does not depend on any assumption that the epistemology of the normative domain must be a causal one.