Analysis of the Debunking of Evolutionary Debunking As a species, humans have an apparent desire to believe that the decisions they make and the beliefs they form are rational in nature. They strive to obtain knowledge and truth, but do humans have a disposition to actually believe what is epistemically true? Human behavior is highly complex, and a lot of it can be traced back to our evolutionary roots. Evolution has a way of explaining the logistics of many of our characteristics and behaviors. However when it comes to morality and beliefs about evaluative truths, does evolution even “care”? Evolutionary debunking arguments tend to target evaluative realism, and are usually based on the premise that one believes what they believe because
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The validity of their moral judgments now lies in the hands of potentially vindicating empirical research. Considering the nature of the topic, encountering such empirical evidence is merely a possibility. But for the debunker, this leads to mere uncertainty about evolutionary influences possibly shaping our moral judgments. Making the claim that our beliefs may be true only by mere coincidence is a strong statement. Yet it may seem as though it is the most likely scenario considering that the chances of our limited scope of beliefs being true are quite slim. Especially when compared to the massive amount of possible beliefs. Constructivists propose that with certain reliable faculties, moral knowledge is within our grasp. Assuming that constructivism is true, and that we may reliably use reason and prior knowledge to distinguish right from wrong (13). So perhaps the small subset of beliefs we hold may actually be true thanks to or ability to reason and distinguish with at least some success between true and false. But the is still the question, is that reasoning immune from evolutionary …show more content…
The pill would install a belief which may not align with the truth. This pill is analogous to the way evolutionary forces might influence our beliefs. Like a lot of the arguments that debunkers present, this idea potentially leads to complete skepticism, which would alone debunk every belief we have, including the arguments from which the skepticism came from. Once the debunker acknowledges this, it leaves a path for the realist to argue that there is room for corrective efforts that even allow us to distinguish between the perceptual distortions that evolutionary forces might instill in our judgments (20). A belief pill circumvents judgment and reasoning. In reality humans have the ability to reflect and use various different faculties to make moral
The validity of their moral judgments now lies in the hands of potentially vindicating empirical research. Considering the nature of the topic, encountering such empirical evidence is merely a possibility. But for the debunker, this leads to mere uncertainty about evolutionary influences possibly shaping our moral judgments. Making the claim that our beliefs may be true only by mere coincidence is a strong statement. Yet it may seem as though it is the most likely scenario considering that the chances of our limited scope of beliefs being true are quite slim. Especially when compared to the massive amount of possible beliefs. Constructivists propose that with certain reliable faculties, moral knowledge is within our grasp. Assuming that constructivism is true, and that we may reliably use reason and prior knowledge to distinguish right from wrong (13). So perhaps the small subset of beliefs we hold may actually be true thanks to or ability to reason and distinguish with at least some success between true and false. But the is still the question, is that reasoning immune from evolutionary …show more content…
The pill would install a belief which may not align with the truth. This pill is analogous to the way evolutionary forces might influence our beliefs. Like a lot of the arguments that debunkers present, this idea potentially leads to complete skepticism, which would alone debunk every belief we have, including the arguments from which the skepticism came from. Once the debunker acknowledges this, it leaves a path for the realist to argue that there is room for corrective efforts that even allow us to distinguish between the perceptual distortions that evolutionary forces might instill in our judgments (20). A belief pill circumvents judgment and reasoning. In reality humans have the ability to reflect and use various different faculties to make moral