Tom Swann Street Darwinian Dilemma

Street - A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist theories of Value

“Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes”.

the realist has to give some account of how evolutionary influences on our evaluations relates to evaluative truths. either they don’t relate. which means only “distorting influence of Darwinian forces”, we’re almost certainly wrong. or there is a relation, that nat selection favoured the grasping of those truths. but scientifically unacceptable.

anti-realism provides an account of the relation

##2) The Target of the Argument: Realist Theories of Value

There are some evaluative facts or truths. of the form X is a normative reason to Y, that one ought to Y, that Y is good, etc evaluative attitudes include desires, attitudes, tendancy to experience X as counting in favour of T, and judgmetnt.

constructivism, qua reflective equilibrium, is anti-realist. because it “understands truths about what reasons a person has as depending on her evaluative attitudes.” but on this view one has reasons independantly of whether one thinks one does. (some?) anti-realists can agree that statements are true independantly of their ever being judged. the crucial point is the dependance or not of evaluative truths on the whole set of evaluative attitudes

Russ Shafer-Landau’s notion of stance independance. “according to realists, the truth that Hitler was morally depraved holds independently of any stance that we (or Hitler) take toward that truth, whether now or on >>>ideal<<< reflection”

non-naturalist realism: evaluative facts are reducible to any natural fact, play no causal role. this is increasingly popular in recent years >>>doubts about this re: McDowell<<<

naturalist realist: evaluative facts are or are constituted by natural facts and are causal. we might not be able to say which by giving the reduction. different realists with different views of what the reduction would consist in.

the dilemma a problem only for some kinds of naturalism.

##3) A Caveat

##4) Evoluationary forces on the content of our evaluative judgements

Evolution by nat selection, but also genetic drift. non-evoluationary forces -social, cultural, etc. Sui generis influence of rational reflection also to be taken into account.

selection against some obvious valuings, for others. gives an incontrovertible list of transculturals. evolution “offers powerful answers to these questions”.

explaining our having this content rather than any other content. but not explaining having any such content itself<<<

chimps experience actions as ‘counting in favour of’ and as ‘being called for’. >>>so do any organisms? the question is in what sense<<< conspicuous continuities with other organisms leads support to the idea evoluationary forces have been very influential.

of course we didn’t first make evaluative judgements, then have them selected for. content of our linguistically infused judgments growing out of and ‘superimposed on top of’ more basic evaluative responses.

evaluative attitudes not (simply) genetically selectable. but the more basic ‘proto’ things surely are (more so). the motivational pulls. the evolutionary influence is indirect. but still important

##5) First Horn of the Dilemma: Denying a Relation

If there is no relation, then Darwinian forces must be seen as having a purely distorting influence, source of evaluative error.

implausible skeptical conclusion that our attitudes are probably off track

even more implausible that, as Street says:<<< their being on track would be sheer co-incidence.

but the argument so far ignores rational reflection! a hand on the tiller. Street agrees, not trying to make us automata

Kant’s comment in the metaphysics of morals that “we cannot concieve a reason that conciously responds to a bidding from outside with respect to its judgements” Street’s reading of this: our attitudes to our reaons must change once we become conscious of how our reasons have been given to us.

wtf?<<<

rational reflection about evaluative matters “involves, inescapably, … assessing some evaluative judgements in ters of others”. evaluative standpoint

so rational reflection will have been always in terms of judgements that we have already made suspect when thinking of their evolution. just as sorting contaminated materials with contaminated tools wont find you purity.

##6) Second Horn of the Dilema: Asserting a Relation.

more plausible. we think of our evaluations as true. but also as evolved. so /what/ relation?

• evolution tracks truth Derek Parfit (in correspondence) “just as cheetahs were selected for their speed, and giraffes for their long necks, the particular features for which we were selected was our ability to respond to reasons and to rational requirements”.

Mc Dowell says something like this? find quote<<<

in Footnote 28, Nozick 1981 P 337 “it seems reasonable to assume there has been some evolutionary advantage in acting for (rational) reasons. The capacity to do so, once it appeared, would have been selected for. Organisms able and prone to act for (rational) reasons gained some increased efficiency in leaving great-grand progeny”

the tracking account is a putative scientific explanation. the trans cultural judgments are to be explained by the fact that they are true.

but it fares badly in the scientific struggle for worthiness. a better account is the adaptive link account.

“Judgements about reasons—and the more primitive,”proto" forms of valuing that we observe in many other animals—may be viewd, from the external standpoint of evolutionary biology, as another such mechanism. They are analogous to… in the sense that they also serve to link a given circumstance with a given response in a way that may tend to promote survival and reproduction" despite proximate differences, structural similarities in their ultimate functional roles. “>>>i<<>>/i<<<” the experience of normativity or value

considers reasons for survival or for retaliation. both the tracking and the adaptive link theses think we make these judgements because this contributed to reproductive success. on tracking account, this is so because the judgements are true and it was advantageous to grasp such truths. on adaptive link account, such judgements were adaptive “because they got our ancestors to respond to their circumstances with behaviour that itself promoted reproductive success in fairly obvious ways”

are these incompatible?<<<

the adaptive link hypothesis wins hands down. -More parsimonious. —doesn’t need evaluative truths. -clearer. —why did making true judgements increase reproductive success? not adequate just to say because they are true. why /these/ truths? there are lots of irrelevant truths.

look at the “irreducibly normative truths posited by non-naturalist realists like Nagel, Dworkin, Scanlon and Shafer-Landau”. These truths cannot eat you or feed you. So why ?

neither can truths about tigers or food? only tigers and food can do that. but does this matter?<<<

Value naturalists have better prospects. but still need to answer the question. seems dim.

“Exactly what natural fact or facts does the evaluative fact that one should care for one’s offspring reduce to, or irreducibly supervene upon, and why would perceiving the natural fact or facts in question have promoted our ancestors’ reproductive success?”

-Explains better. —“it is quite clear why…” >>>problem of apparent maladaptives.<<< —three problems. 1) how does the “tracking account explain the remarkable coincidence that so many of the truths it posits turn out to be…the very same judgements we would expect to see if our judgements had been selected on those grounds alone, regardless of their truth?” 2) what about our reflective judgements that some of our evaluations are not true. >>>i.e. possibility of error!<<< 3) possible but not actual moral judgements

the adaptive link account explains a “disparate mishmash” of transcultural values as having a unified basis. the tracking account has nothing comparable to offer. sheds no light on why we observe the specific contents of evaluative judgements that we do.

To close off the Dilemma, Street asks about the possibility of a realism that doesn’t think we evolved to track moral truth. thinks there is no other option.

P134-5 “the only way for realism both to accept that those attitudes have been deeply influenced by evolutionary causes and to avoid seeing these causes as distorting is for it to claim that these causes actually in some way tracked the alleged independent truths.” if evolution does take us towards evaluative truths then it must, most of the time, take us away from them, or bear no relation to them.

what about a realist view that doesn’t seek to explain adaptiveness by the tracking of truth? so our truth-tracking judgements were selected because they they linked behaviours to circumstances, and yet it was not their truth that caused them to be selected. Charge that Street confuses ultimate with proximate explanations.

But here Street asks for an explanation for why adaptiveness in fact lines up with truth.<<<

##7) First Objection: an objection by the value naturalist.

“in ways roughly analogous to the ways in which we were selected to be able to track, with our non-evaluative judgements, facts about such things as fires, predators, and cliffs, so we were also selected to be able to track, with our evaluative judgements, evaluative facts, which are just identical with such-and such natural facts.”

the relevant natural facts as dependant on our evaluative attitudes? doesn’t count as genuinely realist. because our evaluative attitudes determine which facts count as evaluative.

Railton’s account of individual non-moral good. What a person would desire to desire under conditions of full information.

also wants to rule out the strategy of ‘rigidifying’, where we think our value judgements refer to the natural facts they do because of contingent features of us and our use of language. not a realist view because different possible moralities will be talking past each other, unable even to disagree, for their words will refer to different facts. no possibility of evaluating each’s sense of good against anything else. neither can accuse the other of making a mistake.

does rigidifying really remove the possibility of having a debate about what deserves to be called? What if there is overlap in how the referents are determined (their sense)?<<<

genuinely realist versions of value naturalism: which natural facts evaluative facts are is independent of all our evaluative attitudes, do not achieve this by the rigidifying move. even if two groups’ use of the word ‘good’ track different natural properties, they are using the term in the same sense. so there is room for disagreement.

how do we work out which are the right natural-normative identities? Sturgeon: “will have to be derived from our best moral theory, together with our best theory of the rest of the world.” Brink: “determination of just which natural facts and properties constitute which moral facts and properties is a matter of substantive moral theory.” >>>Which is to say that questions about what the content of moral claims should be is not a question of any other, meta questions about the content of moral claims.<<< in trying to work out what are the natural-normative identities, we have to start with those evaluations, standards and dispositions with which we find ourselves. but these have been subject to Darwinian pressures. >>>Joyce says stronger: they have been created by. actually only Street’s claim is needed.<<< so subject to the Darwinian Dilemma: is there a relation between selective regimes and the normative-natural identities?

##8) Second Objection: The Byproduct Hypothesis

Human capacity for grasping independant evaluative truths does have an explanation, but not as being selected for directly, an outgrowth. like our capacity for astrophysics. but outgrowth out of what? for any capacity, pose Darwinian Dilemma for it Either no connection with the truths. totally implausible for this capacity. or there is a connection totally implausible for evolution astrophysics capacities are “refined extensions of more basic abilities”. what for evaluative truths?

##9) Third Objection: Intrinsic badness of pain?

evolved to feel pain pain is bad.

but we didn’t evolve to feel pain because it is bad?<<<

reason for the feeler to avoid etc. but reason for others? focuses on the former, much stronger/

trial definition of pain: sensation that creature unreflectively takes to count in favour of avoiding it. available to many animals. >>>experience /of/ the motivational pull? surely she means just that such a pull can occur in most animals?<<< pain refers to the object of the evaluation, not the evaluation plus the pain; yet the evaluation makes it the pain. >>>a question begging strawman?<<< maybe “in many perhaps all cases” of pain the sensation and the evaluation are ‘merged’, but it is possible to seperate the pain. patients who have been suffering terrible pain get the drugs, feel the pain sensation, but it doesn’t bother them. so isn’t pain. thinks it is a plausible necessary condition that pain have this reason aspect.

Pain Dilemma. First horn: suppose the definition is denied: possible that organisms could take pain sensations to count in favour of intensifying those sensations. realist about pain badness would have to say that even in these cases the sensation itself poses no reasons for mitigation. could signal for other goods, of course. but “unattractive”.

realist could focus on reflective ‘countings for’?<<<

obvious why evolution makes us respond painfully to the things we do. striking coincidence between the realist truths about pain and what evolutionary theory would lead us to expect. “The realist tells us that it is an independent evaluative truth that pain sensations (however he or she defines them) are bad, and yet this is precisely what evolutionary theory would have predicted that we come to think.” tracking? “scientifically unacceptable”

so forced to take the other horn of the Pain Dilemma. to affirm Street’s original definition. but this means it depends on our taking it to be bad. >>>taking it to be reason to stop it = badness? <<< so pain is not bad independently of our evaluative attitudes. “it’s that evaluative attitude which (at least in part) makes the sensation bad.”

##10 How Antirealism sidesteps the dilemma

possibility of error even though the standards are set by our own evaluative attitude

“these and other questions are left in the hands of the scientists”. takes the products so explained, the evaluative judgements, and then sayd evaluative truth is a function from that.

where the realist and anti-realist differ is over the direction of dependence. >>>but it’s not as if the dependences are symmetrical. the anti-realist doesn’t think truth is whatever our evaluations say. so how?<<<

footnote 57 “an objector might charge that the antirealist, in arriving at his or her view on the way in which evaluative truth is a function of our evaluative attitudes, must rely heavily on our substantive evaluative judgements (regarding practical reasons).” and so another Darwinian Dilemma? “in brief my reply is that in arriving at his or her metaethical view, the antirealist does not need to rely on our substantive evaluative judgements (regarding practical reasons).” imagine an alien investigator with evaluative concepts but very different attitudes, who comes to the anti-realist conclusion for the same kinds of reasons

what exactly is this meant to show? Joyce will differ on exactly this point, because he takes the locus of dispute to be not particular ‘values’ but the moral concepts, the invocation of which in judgement makes it a moral judgement.

“I believe the Darwinian Dilemma can be extended to apply against realism about epistemic reasons. A full discussion of this objection would address such complications.”

!!! obviously. Joyce will deny the dilemma grips in the epistemic case<<<

##CONCLUSION

“Ultimately, the fact that there are any good scientific explanations of our evaluative judgements is a problem for the realist about value.”

!!!

“valuing was (and still is) prior to value.” “Thus, although valuing ultimately came first, value grew to be able to stand partly on its own. It grew to achieve its own, limited sort of priority over valuing a priority that we can understand while at the same time being fully conscious of great biddings from the outside.”