Are Ambitious Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Self-Refuting?

Are Ambitious Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Self-Refuting?

Caner Turan

Evolutionary debunking arguments (henceforth, EDAs) present an epistemic challenge for evaluative/moral realism. The idea is that, since (i) evolutionary forces shape extensively the content of our evaluative/moral beliefs, and (ii) evolutionary mechanisms aim at reproductive success rather than attitudeindependent evaluative/moral truths, evaluative/moral realism is an epistemically untenable metanormative (or metaethical) view. A possible response to the challenge is to assert that ambitious EDAs are self-refuting: since they take all of our evaluative/moral beliefs to be epistemically suspect, they cannot provide independent reason to believe that our evaluative/moral beliefs are debunked by the argument. My aim in this paper is to show how to plausibly respond to such an objection. To do that, I first lay out the epistemic challenge EDAs pose for evaluative/moral realism and briefly explain Sharon Street’s and Richard Joyce’s arguments (Section 1). I then discuss Katia Vavova’s objection that ambitious EDAs are self-refuting (Section 2). I argue, contra Vavova, that the level of ambition of an EDA does not affect the strength of its epistemic premise because EDAs are essentially inductive arguments. Rather, the level of ambition of an EDA affects the strength of its empirical premise, which is the Achilles heel of any ambitious EDA.

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