“Evolution, Ethics, Debunking, and Moral Disagreement – To what extent are facts about moral disagreement relevant to evolutionary debunking arguments in metaethics?”

April 07, 2017, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

**** limited places available – registration deadline March 06 ****

 Theme
We human beings are products of evolution. Charles Darwin was convinced that this finding has profound implications for our conception of morality:

“If…men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would […] think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.” (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man. London: John Murray, 1871, p. 73)

To be sure, Darwin did not believe that evolution determines what we ought to value. Rather, he suggested that evolutionary explanations ought to influence our beliefs about what morality is. Since many of our values tend to be evolutionarily useful, for example, our norms about child-care, it stands to reason that morality is species-dependent. This view sharply contrasts with so-called Platonist views of morality, according to which moral values are objective facts, independent of our evolutionary history, and out there to be discovered.

Today, evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs are frequently used to argue that our moral beliefs are unjustified. Several recent discussions, however, question whether there is a sound epistemic principle to support this type of debunking challenge and whether the challenge might ultimately depend on the epistemic significance of moral disagreement. One aspect of the problem of moral disagreement is that it sometimes seems as if we cannot decide who is right in disagreements about moral beliefs, which seems to challenge our justification to maintain the moral beliefs in question.

Aim

The aim of the colloquium will be to deepen our understanding of the relation between debunking arguments that target the epistemic status of moral judgements and the epistemic significance of moral disagreement, specifically in regards to the following two aspects:

1. a) Which epistemic principle undergirds the metaethical debunking challenge?
2. b) Is it legitimate for anti-debunkers to rely on substantive moral truths in responding to the metaethical debunking challenge?

Speakers

Justin Clarke-Doane – Columbia University
Neil Sinclair – University of Nottingham
Folke Tersman – Uppsala University
Christine Tiefensee – Frankfurt School of Finance and Management

Registration

Please register via http://www.evoethics.com/debunking–disagreement-2017.html. Participation is free of charge. Registration deadline: March 06. For any enquiries, please contact Michael Klenk at m.b.o.t.klenk@uu.nl

This colloquium is organised with generous financial support from the the NWO-funded research programme *Evolutionary Ethics? The (Meta-)Ethical Implications of Evolutionary Theory * (www.evoethics.com), headed by Prof Herman Philipse and Prof Johan Bolhuis.