Question Hi, I'm wondering what is the purpose of moral philosophy assuming that our moral intuitions are mere products of evolution. Evolutionary psychology seems to explain our moral roots (genes that coded for cooperation helped the organisms in which they resided reproduce and replicate those genes). Given this, our instincts that say we should behave in certain ways are merely adaptations that increased survival. It seems then that there is no objective answer to "What should I do?" and the entire field of normative ethics is premised on the delusion that there is. Wouldn't it be more honest for professors of moral philosophy to tell their students that they're merely looking for a consistent framework for decision-making that best coheres with our moral intuitions? And that outside of these intuitions (which arose because they increased survival), there is no warrant for believing in some absolute, metaphysical grounding of ethics--in other words an objective answer to the question "what SHOULD I do?" Thanks!

Accepted:
February 17, 2010

Comments

As happens often, also with professional philosophers, your word "then" marks the weakest spot in your argument. "Our instincts that say we should behave in certain ways are merely adaptations that increased survival. It seems then that there is no objective answer to 'What should I do?'."

How does the second sentence derive support from the first?

Our instincts may predispose us to get frightened by certain sights and sounds, and we may through evolutionary factors have become disposed to overestimate vertical distances and to underestimate horizontal distances over water. Does it follow that there is no objective answer to the question of whether those sights and sounds really are associated with danger -- no objective answer as to what these distances really are?

I think your worry comes about as follows. You believe that what really goes on in moral philosophy is that people are "looking for a consistent framework for decision-making that best coheres with our moral intuitions (which arose because they increased survival)." You then say -- quite reasonably -- that the successful construction of such a consistent framework cannot count as the discovery of objective morality.

Why not? Here you might give two answers. One answer says that what our instincts dispose us to do is often wrong (e.g. when young males feel strongly inclined to take advantage of a safe opportunity to rape a female). But this answer would seem to presuppose rather than deny that there is an objective morality. Moreover, the fact that this answer is widely shared among moral philosophers shows that they do not count whatever our instincts urge us to do as a moral intuition. Our instincts may urge us to save ourselves from a dangerous situation, which we caused by our own negligence, through an action that is likely to kill innocent bystanders. But our moral intuitions tell us that this would be quite wrong.

The other answer says that history might have gone differently and might then have produced different instincts and moral intuitions. But since there can only be one objective morality, the moral intuitions that emerged in this history we actually happened to have cannot be a good path to discovering what this objective morality is. This answer makes some sense but, to reach your conclusion, you need to overcome two further hurdles. First, why cannot the morality that best accords with our moral intuitions be objectively right for our world even while another morality would have been objectively right if a very different history had shaped our moral intuitions differently? Second, are moral intuitions really the only basis on which an objective account of morality can possibly be established?