1 Darwin and Moral Realism: Survival of the Iffiest

It takes steady epistemic nerves to be a moral realist. Not only do we tend to struggle with our positive accounts of how moral knowledge is possible; we must also face a recent, powerful argument which is intended to show that we needn’t even bother trying: it is clear beforehand that we are bound to fail. From the premise that evolutionary pressures have had a tremendous (though indirect) impact on the content of our evaluative beliefs, Street (2006) argues that realists are faced with a Darwinian dilemma: they must either assert or deny that there is a relation between evolutionary pressures and the evaluative facts. If realists assert a relation, they are forced to advance a “tracking account, ” according to which evolution has bestowed upon us an ability to “track, ” or grasp, the evaluative facts, because this ability is reproductively advantageous. Street objects that there is no reproductive pay-off in grasping evaluative facts, as realists conceive of them. On the other hand, if realists deny that there is such a relation, then they are forced to the unacceptably sceptical conclusion that many or most of our evaluative beliefs are probably false (I’ll present the argument more fully below)