Tom Swann Joyce Essay Planning

##Innateness Joyce says in The Evolution of Morality that morality is innate. By this he means, as he says in a Precis, that

“in claiming that X is innate I mean that the present-day existence of the trait is to be explained by reference to a genotype having granted ancestors reproductive advantage, rather than by reference to psychological processes of acquisition.”

I spent about 20 minutes today just mulling over this quote, not sure why it seemed weird to me, and weirder because it hasn’t yet seemed weird this semester. The thoughts I was having started with the fact that they’re different categories of explanation - the former is ultimate, the second is developmental. These are quite different questions, which in biological studies one is told not to confuse, even as one relates them. (Thinking here of the Tinbergen’s proximate functional developmental and evolutionary explanations. Returning to this now I have trouble getting a grip on the functional explanation; it seems folded into the evolutionary?)

I’m going to have a look for some lit on these categories.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that these are contrasted. Broadly speaking Joyce is saying that the answer to the question “why are we like this?” is (mostly?) in our genetic nature rather than (only) our environmental nurturings. But this says little, at best, and a lot of the explanatory work we really want done is to get a handle on the qualifiers.

Granting that he’s hoping to answer the ultimate question, the contrast also seems odd in the sense that there’s no a priori contradiction between them: part of what was selected for genetically could have been and surely was the basis for various acquisition capacities, along with those facilitating feedbacks from niche constructions and cultural evolution (which he talks about as well!). This is in fact all part of his account, although obliquely. But then I worry that in reading his thesis in this way, he hasn’t actually said anything much, except to say these capacities were selected for rather than drifting in or selected as a by product. Then it comes down to what the genetically based, selected-for capacities are, on which he says very little, really - just that we are disposed to make moral judgements. Nothing satisfyingly explicit about the relative explanatory relevancies of the genetic and the cultural and the rest, even if he talks as if it’s ‘mostly’ genetic.

As far as his meta-ethical argument goes, I think it doesn’t matter what the ultimate story is, whether it comes out as an adaptation with a proper function in Millikan’s sense (as seems necessary to be a good explanation in the context) or not (which is certainly not conceptually incoherent), nor does it matter how the genes and culture and niches intertwine. So long as the explanation makes no appeal to truth, and so no explanatory appeal, then moral truth falls out of the picture as explanatorily redundant.

##Naturalism

This makes me wonder if it’s even possible for any such explanation to appeal to truth. And if it isn’t, then the game is up from the presumption of there being some complete explanation from this range of acceptably naturalistic options - complete in the sense of correct and exhaustive.

If this is so then it undermines what could otherwise be an attractive feature of Joyce’s strategy, albeit one which he doesn’t make explicit. That is the lack in his argument of a reliance on a presumption of some form of metaphysical naturalism.

going off on a tangent here, but I’ll follow it cause it’ll be useful for the thesis

As is common enough to make it ritualistic of discussions of metaphysics, I stipulate this term ‘metaphysical naturalism’,to mean the view that every property is or supervenes on natural properties. In light of considerations of the causal closure of physics, most take the the relevant class to be the physical. Nothing changes without the physical changing, in accordance with its laws and, presumably, in such a way as to explain, because determining, all other changes; the possibilities of the physical determine all possibilities, in accordance with some mapping function.

Commitment to this picture leads to the projects of naturalisation, where one tries to make the physical world safe for the target phenomena. To do this, one has to show how the target phenomena escape the charge that its instances are epiphenomena with respect to everything, by showing how, or at least making plausible that, these phenomena are realised by physical states. One distinctive worry (Realisation is identity

But naturalisation is difficult and controversial: with respect to what it would take and whether it is even possible, between which questions it is easy to oscilate as one wonders just what we are fitting into what. The project and prospects of moral naturalisation are especially difficult to adjudicate

The obvious explanation for why Joyce doesn’t claim for his case this dialectic virtue is that he does and which we could doubt as a matter of exeges. Charity in pressing this point would read Joyce as intending what Street makes clearer in the way she sets her argument out: assuming that everyone accepts the empirical story, the naturalist can force the non-naturalist (in the sense of anyone who doesn’t seek to operate under such constraints) to show how moral epistemic properties could play any vindicating role in the explaination of there being creatures such as us with our kind of moral concepts and practices.

Joyce is, we presume, a naturalist in this sense. This is clear, rhetorically, from his emphasis that a global naturalist can reject moral naturalism of the sort that tries to find a place for moral claims in the naturalistic frame; and clearer strategically when he appeals to such naturalism to show that no way of cutting up the patterns will justify moral judgements.

This diverges with naturalism in the old sense of empirical study of nature; extended in to the realm of the human sciences, such is the concern of chapters 1-4. Here Joyce’s empirical story covers, in a way directed by the theoretical pressures of meta-ethicsa wide range of phenomena, albeit often in ‘arm chair’ mode. Chapter 1) concerns the principles of evolution of ‘helping’ behaviour; 2) performs conceptual analytic with such emphasis on the pragmatics of moral discourse that it verges on social linguistics, and a bit of moral psychology; 3) adverts to ethology and again to arm chair conceptual pragmatics; 4) appeals variously to anthropology and cognitive science.