Moral Realism, Evolutionary Debunking and Normative Qualia

This thesis has two parts, a critical and a constructive part. The first part raises a set of challenges to moral realism. The second part provides a response to these challenges. The first part begins by raising the possibility that morality is in some sense illusory. It then goes on to articulate two arguments that seem to point in this direction. Both arguments assume moral realism as the correct explanation of ethics. The first argument is a debunking argument aimed at debunking the epistemic validity of our moral intuitions. I argue that given what we know of the origin of our moral intuition we have no reason to believe that our moral intuition coincides with ethical truth. The second debunking argument argues that the moral realist who believes in the existence of mind independent moral facts, will have a serious problem explaining how there is any connection between these and our evolved moral capacities. These two arguments differ in scope and structure, but are deeply related as both grew out of a concern about how to make sense of the relation between moral facts and our evolved moral capacities in the light of modern biology. In the second part of the thesis I try to lay the groundwork for a plausible naturalist moral realism and construct a view that can overcome the challenges raised in the first part of the thesis. Central to this view is the introduction of a concept of normative qualia. I argue that there exists a negative normative quale of painfulness, which is a reason to avoid it. I also argue that there exists a positive normative quale of pleasurableness, which is a reason to pursue it. I give two arguments against epiphenomenalism about qualia. With these arguments I hope to subtract from the plausibility of competing views on pleasure and pain, views which are incompatible with the idea of normative qualia. At the same time I hope to prove the naturalistic respectability of normative qualia I then go on to argue that if one accepts that painfulness and pleasurableness are moral facts, then one can expect that our moral intuitions track moral facts in certain situations and not in others, thereby partly exonerating our moral intuitions from the debunking argument leveled at them in the first part of the thesis. I then go on to address possible objections to the thesis, including G. E Moors open question argument, before concluding