The Evolutionary and Psychological Debunking of Moral Principles as an Ethical Problem

Abstract

The paper analyzes a potential impact of evolutionary and psychological studies of moral consciousness on normative ethics. Recently some philosophers tried to debunk particular moral principles as reflecting the evolutionary developed heuristics. They supposed that the genealogy of such principles prevents us from considering them objective criteria of right and wrong. The most telling example of this strategy is the conception of Joshua Green who tried to establish a con­nection between deontological moral principles and “our dual-process moral brains”. Deontological principles, according to Green, are no more than a cogni­tive reflection of the automatic alarm-system against the in-group violence, the system concentrated on “up close and personal” harmful acts and harming that immediately included into plans of actors. This focus is rooted in obsolete evolu­tionary conditions and some cognitive limits that do not have any independent moral meaning. The author of the paper defends the thesis that the evolutionary and psychological debunking of particular moral principles is a dubious strategy because 1) it inescapably turns into the debunking of morality itself (the total de­bunking), 2) it makes normative ethics too dependent on the changing and con­tradictory empirical data. The special attention was paid to the attempt of Peter Singer and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek to transform the intention of the total de­bunking into the key to the justification of morality. In their opinion, the skepti­cal testing of every moral principle allows to establish the unquestionable core of morality, though this core is not independent from pressures of evolution. It fol­lows that 1) the justification of morality should rest on the immediate experience of practical reflection, 2) the evolutionary and psychological data does not de­bunk particular moral principles but only calls them into question