Realismo Mopral y Contigencoia Evolucion

Reductionist Moral Realism and the
Contingency of Moral Evolution*
Max Barkhausen
Reductionist forms of moral realism, such as naturalist realism, are often thought
immune to epistemological objections that have been raised against nonnatu-
ralist realism in the form of reliability worries or evolutionary debunking argu-
ments. This article establishes that reductionist realist views can only explain
the reliability of our moral beliefs at the cost of incurring repugnant first-order
conclusions.
I. INTRODUCTION
If cognitivist meta-ethics is to avoid error theory, it must be able to ex-

plain, at least in principle, why our moral beliefs are reliable. This demand,
which is almost universally accepted, gives rise to a well-known epistemo-
logical objection against nonnaturalist realism. Nonnaturalist realism, the
objection goes, cannot explain the reliability of our moral beliefs, short of
positing a mysterious causal power by which the nonnatural facts affect
our natural intellects. For it would be an incredible coincidence if our
moral beliefs covaried with causally inert moral facts.1 In recent meta-
ethics, epistemological worries about realism have often been pressed in
* A previous version of this paper was presented at the NYU Thesis Preparation Sem-
inar, where ðto say the leastÞ it received careful scrutiny. It has been a source of joy and
pride to be a part of this intellectual community. I would like to thank Hartry Field, Camil
Golub, Max Hayward, Philip Kitcher, Colin Marshall, Kristin Primus, Sharon Street, Jared
Warren, Daniel Waxman, Crispin Wright, and Mike Zhao for helpful comments and dis-
cussions, and two anonymous referees and several associate editors of Ethics for their in-
cisive comments. I owe special thanks to David Velleman for encouragement, as well as in-
sightful and detailed feedback on several drafts.
1. This style of objection was first leveled at Platonist realism about mathematics. See
Paul Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 70 ð1973Þ: 661–79; Hartry
Field, Realism, Mathematics, and Modality ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1989Þ.
Ethics 126 (April 2016): 662–689

© 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014 -1704/2016/12603 -0005$10.00
662
Barkhausen Reductionist Moral Realism 663
2
the form of evolutionary debunking arguments. A perspicuous way of
describing how reliability worries and evolutionary debunking arguments
relate is the following. As a first approximation, to explain the reliability
of our moral beliefs is to explain why they are by and large true. Explain-
ing the reliability of our moral beliefs entails showing that, insofar as they
are true, their truth is not an accident but is rather counterfactually ro-
bust: they could not easily have come apart from the moral facts. Evolu-
tionary debunking arguments purport to show that our moral beliefs
covary with features of our evolutionary history that are independent of
moral facts, as nonnaturalist realists construe them. That way, they call
into question whether, if nonnaturalist realism is true, the truth of our
moral beliefs is counterfactually robust and, hence, whether their reli-
ability can be explained.
It is in large part due to epistemological concerns about nonnat-
uralist realism that reductionist realist views have gained popularity in
meta-ethics—views such as naturalist realism, according to which moral
properties are identical with causally efficacious natural properties.3 Re-
ductionist realist views are often thought immune to reliability objec-
tions.4 If moral facts are, at bottom, causally efficacious nonmoral facts,
there is no reason why it should be inexplicable that our cognitive fac-
ulties track them and hence why the truth of our moral beliefs is coun-
terfactually robust. Moreover, while moral claims may not bottom out in
evolutionary facts, they may bottom out in facts that are causally tied—
and hence covary with—evolutionary facts so as to render us reliable
about morality. So evolutionary considerations do at least not obviously
undermine the counterfactual robustness of our moral beliefs on reduc-
tionist forms of realism.
Unlike the already existing literature on evolutionary debunking,
the present article considers the prospects of reductionist realism to make
good on this promise and explain moral reliability. It is generally agreed
that whether reductionist realism can meet epistemological concerns de-
pends on the specifics of the reduction proposed.5 My aim is to establish
that reductionist realist views do in fact face a reliability worry because they
can explain that our moral beliefs are reliable only at the cost of incurring
unacceptable first-order consequences that their proponents reject.
2. Most prominently in Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of
Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 ð2006Þ: 109–66 and, with a more sweeping skeptical con-
clusion with more than just nonnaturalist realism in its target area, in Richard Joyce, The
Evolution of Morality ðCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006Þ.
3. At the beginning of Section III, a precise definition of reductionist realism, as I
understand it, is given.
4. See David Enoch, “The Epistemological Challenge to Metanormative Realism: How
Best to Understand It, and How to Cope with It,” Philosophical Studies 148 ð2009Þ: 413–38.
5. See ibid., bottom of 422; Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 422. The relevant passage
from Joyce is cited in the conclusion of the present article.
664 Ethics April 2016
I begin, in Section II, by describing in detail and arguing for a view
of the etiological function of moral language and thought that takes into
account both our biological and our cultural evolution. This view har-
monizes with research on the evolution of cooperation in the social sci-
ences and with most views of moral function that are popular in meta-
ethics. In light of this view, we will be able to better appreciate that we
could have easily settled on different and incompatible moral rules and
formed very different and incompatible moral beliefs, if contingent cir-
cumstances in our evolutionary history had been different. In Section
III, I argue that familiar and popular reductionist realist views in meta-
ethics—naturalist realism, Copp’s cognitivist relativism, Foot’s neo-
Aristotelian view, Jackson’s and Pettit’s functionalism—all render the
reliability of our moral beliefs inexplicable. I show that the possibility of
explaining moral reliability would come at the cost of untenable first-
order consequences for the reductionist realist. The conclusion of the
essay is that reductionist realism ought to be rejected across the board.
II. FUNCTION AND CONTINGENCY
It is a familiar thought that the function of moral language and the cog-
nitive capacities required for its use is to enable us to coordinate on rules
of conduct that are mutually beneficial or adaptively advantageous. Let
me begin by considering some expressions of this thought from contem-
porary meta-ethics. One view of the function of moral language ðand,
more generally, the language of practical normativityÞ is that of Allan Gib-
bard, who “has speculated that we have these ½normative capacities be-
cause they coordinate our actions in mutually beneficial ways.”6 As every-
one knows, Gibbard has not only “speculated” but actually asserted that
the function of our normative capacities, which include, roughly, our abil-
ity to use normative ðincluding, but not exhausted by, moralÞ language
and the psychology that underlies our normative judgments, is coordi-
nation on adaptively advantageous rules of conduct. While coordination
itself may be a culturally driven process, the function of our normative
capacities, for Gibbard, is biological.
Richard Joyce, in his book on the evolution of morality, defends a
kindred view of the function of morality. For Joyce, the function of our
moral practice and moral language in particular is to render adaptive
social behavior likelier. He characterizes adaptive social behavior as fol-
lows: “By providing a framework within which both one’s own actions
and others’ actions may be evaluated, moral judgments can act as a kind
of ‘common currency’ for collective negotiation and decision making.
6. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1990Þ,
107–8.
Moral judgment thus can function as a kind of social glue, bonding in-
dividuals together in a shared justificatory structure and providing a tool
for solving many group coordination problems.”7 Adaptive behavior,
for Joyce, is behavior according to norms that solve coordination prob-
lems. Joyce’s notion of a coordination problem is not the narrow game-
theoretical concept of a common interest problem with a mutually pre-
ferred outcome, such as the stag hunt,8 but rather a broader category of
situations where coordination is to our mutual benefit, including pris-
oners’ dilemma type situations in addition to pure coordination prob-
lems like the stag hunt. Elsewhere in the book, Joyce acknowledges that
the function of our moral capacities may result both from our biological
and our cultural evolution, and hence we may assume that the notion
of evolutionary function of which he makes use is not purely biological.
ðMore on the distinction between biological and cultural evolution in a
moment.Þ
Philip Kitcher sees the central function of morality in its ability to
correct for altruism failures through social coordination on mutually
beneficial rules of conduct:
The first ethicists overcame some of the problems by agreeing on

rules for conduct, rules remedying a few of the recurrent altruism
failures that had plagued their group life. Very probably, they be-
gan with precepts about sharing scant resources and not initiating
violence.9
Amelioration of altruism failure was the initial function of ethical
practice. Yet the obvious differences between the pioneering ven-
tures and the complex codes present at the dawn of recorded his-
tory show clearly that other functions have emerged.10
According to Kitcher, the initial function of morality was to remedy re-

curring failures of altruism in the interest of the group. This initial func-
tion is biological: altruistic acts are those that ultimately improve the
reproductive success of some individual other than oneself or of one’s peer
group. While, according to Kitcher, this initial function survives in our
7. Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 117.

8. For the uninitiated: in the stag hunt, each player prefers jointly hunting stag to
hunting hare when the other hunts stag to jointly hunting hare to hunting stag when the
other hunts hare. In other words, each player prefers mutual cooperation to exploitation
to mutual defection to being exploited. By contrast, in the prisoners’ dilemma, each player
prefers exploitation to mutual cooperation to mutual defection to being exploited. The stag
hunt is a pure coordination problem because, unlike in the prisoners’ dilemma, each player
prefers mutual cooperation to all other outcomes.
9. Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project ðCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011Þ,
5–6.
10. Ibid., 6.
current moral practice, it has undergone an ongoing process of func-
tional refinement: there is now a much wider range of altruism failures
that moral norms serve to remedy and additional constraints on how
these failures are eliminated, such as “efficiency”—from what I can tell,
efficient rules, for Kitcher, approach Pareto-optimality. Unlike the initial
function, the refined function can be in part based on learning, rather
than the passing on of heritable traits, and is hence in part a product of
our cultural evolution.
Let us consider the theoretical underpinnings of these functional
views in some detail. While the above views differ in important details, it
appears that each is committed to the following thesis:
The Function Thesis A major function of moral language and the

cognitive capacities required for its use is to coordinate on mutually
beneficial rules of conduct in situations with scope for common
gain.
I borrow the term “situation with scope for common gain” from Bacha-
rach to refer to any situation in which cooperation, as opposed to a gen-
eral failure to cooperate, would be beneficial to each or at least the ma-
jority of agents involved, even though cooperation may not be beneficial
to each agent even if others cooperate.11 All else being equal, situations
with scope for common gain can often be modeled as prisoners’ dilem-
mas or instances of the tragedy of the commons, but also as common in-
terest problems such as the stag hunt or their multi-player generalizations.
Kitcher’s altruism failures and Joyce’s coordination problems are all
situations with scope for common gain.
By “moral language,” I mean the fragments of language that we
commonly think of as moral, such as typical thin moral terms like “right”
and “wrong,” typical thick moral terms like “cruel” and “kind,” terms like
“just” or “fair.” By the cognitive capacities required for the use of moral
language, I mean whatever mental capacities, cognitive, emotional, and
otherwise, it takes to be a competent user of such terms. The thesis is
about moral language picked out ostensively, not by definition.
The notions of function to which the authors cited appeal are, to a
great extent, left implicit. So let us try to make the notion precise. As we
shall see, precision is required in order to appreciate that our moral
evolution is in many ways contingent. The broad notion of function to
which I intend to appeal is that of an etiological function. Roughly, Z
is the etiological function of a trait, organism or, in our case, a fragment
of language X if and only if X exists because it has Z. This is to say that Z
11. Michael Bacharach, Beyond Individual Choice: Teams and Frames in Game Theory
ðPrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006Þ.
12
provides the best explanation of the presence of X. On this notion of
etiological function, what explains why we have moral language is that
it helps us to achieve social coordination for mutual benefit. The expla-
nation should be understood in terms of the selection involved in our
biological and cultural evolution. Roughly, our biological and cultural
evolution favored individuals and groups that possessed moral language
precisely because moral language enabled them to coordinate for mutual
benefit.
On the most plausible understanding of the function thesis, selec-
tion should be understood in terms of both our biological and our cul-
tural evolution. Biological and cultural evolution are distinct in virtue of
the selection mechanisms that drive them. While our biological evolution
is driven by mutation and selection for genes that increase reproductive
success, cultural evolution is driven by various forms of replication such
as implicit learning that are not genetic or, as it is often put, by vertical,
horizontal, and oblique cultural transmission, the passing on of strate-
gies from parents to offspring, peers to peers, and older generations to
younger generations, respectively.
This is not the place for speculation about the evolutionary history
of moral norms, but let me note that the function thesis, as I understand
it, is fully compatible with the contours of an evolutionary history of mo-
rality that many theorists accept at least tacitly. Our biological evolu-
tion might have given rise to moral emotions like sympathy that subse-
quently came to shape our moral convictions. Evolutionary hypotheses
about the evolution of emotions like sympathy are endorsed by many evo-
lutionary biologists. Selection for sympathy and altruism is usually ex-
plained in terms of genetic mutation and assortment due to kin selection:
peer groups that engaged in the altruistic behavior to which sympathy
gives rise had greater reproductive success than those who did not. Later,
a plausible story might continue, sympathy came to shape our moral rules
and convictions.13 This might explain, for example, why we have con-
verged on the view that one ought to help family members and friends in
distress. Perhaps—and this is highly speculative and not a claim I could
aspire to substantiate in its full generality—the moral emotions explain
12. Larry Wright, “Functions,” Philosophical Review 82 ð1973Þ: 139–68, proposed the
first precise definition of the notion of etiological function, and there are well-known counter-
examples to his definition ðsee Christopher Boorse, “Wright on Functions,” Philosophical Review
85 ½1976: 70–86Þ. Evolutionary theories of etiological function are often regarded as a way of
eliminating these counterexamples ðsee Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological
Categories ½Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984; and Paul Griffiths, “Functional Analysis and Proper
Functions,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 ½1993: 409–22Þ.
13. For a recent attempt to explain how these ancient emotions shape our current
moral practice, see Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers ðPrinceton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2006Þ.
what is sometimes perceived as the cross-cultural core of morality, which
includes, for example, an aversion to and moral sanctions against wanton
killing and rape. Other aspects of our moral rules and convictions will
have evolved culturally, not biologically. For example, it is plausible that
moral norms pertaining to reciprocity, fairness, and property evolved
culturally. This would, among other things, explain why there is such
great cultural variation in these norms.14 It is, moreover, plausible that
there have been feedback mechanisms between our evaluative emotions
and our culturally evolved norms. The thought is that our culturally
evolved norms modify our social environment and this, in turn, may lead
to new selective pressures that modify our evaluative emotions.15 A caveat
for what follows: since these remarks are speculative, I should note that
the argument of the next section holds only if moral language and our
moral convictions are in fact products of our biological and cultural
evolution, in roughly the way outlined here.16
Charles Darwin was perhaps first to note that our evolution renders
our moral convictions highly contingent: “If, for instance, to take an ex-
treme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-
bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like
the worker bees, 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.”17
In the remainder of this section, I will demonstrate that, if the func-
tion thesis is correct, the moral rules and convictions on which we have
converged are highly contingent, and I will highlight some important
sources of contingency. The first, often overlooked, source has to do with
the notion of mutual benefit at work in the function thesis. The notion of
mutual benefit is often considered innocuous and not in need of much
further explication because we seem to possess an intuitive understand-
14. In economics, hundreds of studies, using different game structures, have been
performed to examine our behavior in collaborative games. For a particularly impressive
recent study, see Joseph Henrich et al., “ “Economic Man” in Cross-Cultural Perspective:
Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 ð2005Þ:
795–855. This is a collaboration between twelve field researchers who examined the be-
havior of subjects from fifteen small-scale societies from twelve countries on four continents
exhibiting a wide range of economic and social conditions. The study shows that there is
a great variation in behavior between the groups, even though nonselfish behavior was ob-
served across the board.
15. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
16. Cf. Street’s remarks in Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of
Value.”
17. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex ðCambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009Þ, 73.
ing of it. But in the context of the function thesis we should not under-
stand mutual benefit in terms of whatever intuitive notion we possess. If
we were talking only about our biological evolution, mutual benefit would
amount simply to mutual reproductive success. As we just saw, it is highly
plausible that moral terms and convictions are not only the result of
our biological evolution but also, in large part, of our cultural evolution.
When an evolutionary process is driven by cultural transmission, how
mutual benefit should, in the context of that process, be interpreted de-
pends on the features of outcomes that individuals seek to attain. Prima
facie, these features could be almost anything: food, social status, health,
well-being of some kind, and so on. Sometimes it depends on the pref-
erences of the population and these, in turn, are determined by a vari-
ety of factors, such as which resources happen to be scarce, coveted, or
needed. At other times it depends on aspects of past history, such as on
what resources have traditionally been scarce. We ought not to assume,
then, that there is a uniform interpretation of the notion of mutual ben-
efit in the function thesis. In the context of cultural evolution, mutual
benefit is a placeholder for whatever property of outcomes led individu-
als to copy certain strategies; in the context of our biological evolution it
is simply shared reproductive success. This points to an important source
of contingency in the evolution of our moral rules and convictions. If
contingent circumstances in our history had been different, we would have
pursued different outcomes and copied different strategies and, as a con-
sequence, our moral rules and convictions would have been different.
There are further sources of contingency in our moral evolution.
The best explanations of how we came to accept rules for cooperation
that the social sciences can at present provide often take the form of
“how possible” explanations. That is, social scientists and, in particular,
evolutionary game theorists are often only able to explain how a given
norm might have evolved if certain contingent conditions in our envi-
ronment had been met.18 This is a reason to believe that any explanation
of the genealogy of our actual moral rules and convictions would have
to take into account precisely this kind of contingent circumstance. In
18. Some notable and highly relevant contributions in this area are Brian Skyrms,
Social Dynamics ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 2014Þ, The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of
Social Structure ðCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004Þ, and Evolution and the Social
Contract ðCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996Þ; K. G. Binmore, Game Theor y and
the Social Contract, vol. 2, Just Playing ðCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998Þ and Game Theor y
and the Social Contract, vol. 1, Playing Fair ðCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994Þ; Robert Sug-
den, The Economics of Rights, Co-operation and Welfare ðOxford: Blackwell, 1986Þ. Research on
the evolution of institutions, such as the research presented in Samuel Bowles, Microeco-
nomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution ðPrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004Þ,
is also highly relevant to understanding the evolution of social and moral norms.
order to appreciate this, it will help to consider an example that illus-
trates some well-known features of the dynamic models used to explain
the evolution of cooperation in the social sciences and to see what they
tell us about the evolution of morality. The first feature is the multiplicity
of equilibria in the games used to model social interactions. Many dy-
namic models have more than one stable equilibrium. For a large num-
ber of games, this means that there are different population states to
which a population will be carried depending on the initial population
state. Which equilibrium a population reaches, in such dynamic models,
is often a function of the initial population state and, when models take
into account other contingent features of the environment such as asym-
metries, the basins of attraction of different equilibria may change radi-
cally. Let me illustrate this with an example. In the hawk-dove game ðsee
table 1Þ, each player has the options either to play hawk or to play dove
when competing for resources. If a hawk meets a dove, he gets the lion’s
share. If two doves meet, they share the resource. And if two hawks meet,
they fight, thus incurring additional costs. The hawk-dove game has only
one evolutionary stable pure-strategy equilibrium where a portion of the
population plays hawk and a portion plays dove. This equilibrium is sub-
optimal in the sense that everyone’s expected payoffs would increase if
more players played dove. In other words, there is no dominant pure
strategy and the only evolutionary stable equilibrium is socially subopti-
mal. This changes once an asymmetry is introduced into the game. Imag-
ine that the hawk-dove game represents a fight for a territory. On each
round of the game, the population is randomly divided into owners and
intruders. The asymmetric version of the game can be used to explain
property norms, because it allows for the possibility of more complex
strategies, like Maynard-Smith’s “bourgeois” strategy, “play hawk if owner,
play dove if intruder.” It turns out that the bourgeois strategy is both
optimal and an evolutionary stable strategy ðESSÞ.19 But obviously its con-
verse, the “Robin Hood” strategy, “play dove if owner, play hawk if in-
truder,” is also optimal and an ESS. So the asymmetric hawk-dove game
has two ESSs. Where the population lands depends very much on its start-
ing point. We can also imagine an asymmetry in the payoffs—perhaps it is
easier to defend territory than to intrude, so that playing hawk is more
attractive if one is the owner. In such a case, the basin of attraction of one
ESS might be larger, increasing the likelihood that a population will be-
come bourgeois. This example illustrates how contingent our property
19. An ESS is a strategy such that, if the entire population adopts it, it cannot be
invaded by any alternative strategy that is initially rare. In the asymmetric hawk-dove game,
any initial population state will move to one of the ESSs mentioned here.
TABLE 1
THE HAWK-DOVE GAME
Hawk Dove
Hawk 3/3 10/0

Dove 0/10 5/5
norms and, consequently, our moral norms against stealing may be. This,
of course, is a toy example. But it is precisely the kind of consideration that
has been used, in the social sciences, to show that our social institutions
and norms are contingent.20 If, as the function thesis assumes, many of our
moral norms and the convictions that sustain them have a similar expla-
nation in terms of our cultural evolution, there is no reason to think that
they should be any less contingent.
Let me very briefly summarize the key points of this section. First,
moral language serves the purpose of coordination for mutual benefit
ðthe function thesisÞ. The function thesis, I have suggested, should be
understood in terms of the etiological function of moral language and
the cognitive capacities required for its use, and ultimately this notion
of function should be cashed out both in terms of our biological and our
cultural evolution. If this is right, it is a crucial point that our moral norms
and convictions are the product of contingent evolutionary processes that
could easily have been different and yielded different moral rules and
convictions in countless ways. Call this the contingency of moral evolution.
III. A DILEMMA FOR REDUCTIONIST REALISM

A. Reductionist Realism
The target area of my argument encompasses any meta-ethical theory
that entails
Reductionism Moral sentences are true or false in virtue of causally

efficacious nonmoral facts.
Reductionism concerns the truth-makers of moral sentences. It rules out

Platonic moral realism or nonnatural realism, as it is sometimes called.
20. A good place to start to understand the contingency of our institutions, in par-
ticular, is Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution.
But it leaves room for any form of realism that proposes a reduction of
the moral to the nonmoral. Among these views are the popular varieties
of naturalist realism,21 Jackson’s and Pettit’s functionalism,22 and, argu-
ably, other functionalist views of morality.23 Each of these views will be
discussed in detail below.
B. Adequacy and Reliability

In the remainder of this article, I will argue that, if the function thesis is
correct, then all reductionist realist views are subject to a dilemma. They
cannot both explain the reliability of our moral beliefs and, at the same
time, avoid repugnant first-order conclusions, many of which are deeply
at odds with ordinary moral thought.
We may define reliability about morality as follows:24
Reliability For most of our core moral convictions p, p is true.
This notion of reliability is purely extensional, as it only concerns the

truth of our actual beliefs. In many discussions of reliability, by contrast,
reliability is understood as a stronger, modal notion that entails coun-
terfactual robustness. But the argument below would go through for even
more obvious reasons on the stronger notion.25
Just how to delineate the relevant group—the referent of “we”—is
up to the realist. For our purposes, we may assume, that it refers to, say,
the readers of this article, who are likely to share a core of common moral
21. For example, Richard Boyd, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in Essays on Moral Realism,
ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord ðIthaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998Þ, 181–228; David
Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics ðCambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989Þ.
22. See Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics ðOxford: Oxford University Press,
1998Þ; Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, “Functionalism and Broad Content,” Mind 97 ð1988Þ:
381–400, and “Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation,” Philosophical Quarterly 45 ð1995Þ:
20–40.
23. For example, David Copp, Morality, Normativity, and Society ðOxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001Þ; Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 2004Þ.
24. The present article bears an intellectual debt to Jared Warren and Daniel Waxman,
“A Reliability Challenge for Mathematical Realism” ðunpublished manuscript, 2015Þ. My ex-
planation of the reliability challenge and, in particular, what an explanation of reliability
would require has been greatly improved by my reading of Warren and Waxman’s excep-
tionally lucid discussion. My exposition follows theirs for the most part. One difference is
that, for my purposes here, counterfactual robustness is better understood in terms of a
generalized truth-sensitivity requirement than a generalized safety requirement. Thanks to
David Velleman for helpful discussion on this latter point
25. My argument below is that any explanation of reliability must give us reasons to
think that reliability is counterfactually robust. If reliability entails counterfactual robust-
ness, this is even more obvious.
convictions. The argument would not change substantially if the realist
chose to delineate the relevant group differently.
Some reductionist realists may believe that most of our present moral
beliefs are false but that we are on our way to converging on a set of mostly
true moral convictions. Strictly speaking, such realists do not in fact accept
that we are reliable. Their views may eschew reliability as formulated above,
but they are still committed that, at some point in our inquiry, we will ðall
else being equalÞ be reliable. They would have to be able to explain future
reliability and this comes with the same difficulties as explaining present
reliability.
It has been argued extensively that any theory of a domain of
thought like morality or mathematics should at least in principle be able
to explain the reliability of beliefs in that domain, and I cannot make as
detailed a case for this as others have.26 However, I can provide what I
think is the most compelling case in broad outline. One reason why
we should at least in principle be able to explain reliability is that, if we
were debarred from providing an explanation, we would lack positive
reasons to believe that we are in fact reliable. At least if justification in a
domain of thought requires an antecedent justification for our reliability
in that domain, this would give rise to first-order skepticism. Some may,
of course, wish to deny this. But even then, there is a grave problem: re-
liability is a striking fact that calls out for an explanation. To borrow an
example from Hartry Field, to accept that the reliability of our moral be-
liefs is in principle unexplainable would be “rather as if someone claimed
that his or her belief state about the daily happenings in a remote village
in Nepal were nearly all disquotationally true, despite the absence of
any mechanism to explain the correlation between those belief states and
the happenings in the village.”27 Especially when alternatives are avail-
able, we should not believe a theory that renders such a striking fact a
coincidence.28
Any explanation of reliability is subject to certain constraints, and
this is crucial for my argument. To give a full-fledged theory of these
constraints would require a detour into the philosophy of explanation
26. I will not rehearse these arguments in detail but rather refer the reader to Field,
Realism, Mathematics, and Modality ; Warren and Waxman, “A Reliability Challenge for
Mathematical Realism”; Roger White, “ You Just Believe That Because . . . ,” Philosophical
Perspectives 24 ð2010Þ: 573–615.
27. Field, Realism, Mathematics, and Modality, 26–27.
28. I am aware that some moral realists may accept that their views have no good
explanations of moral reliability available and regard this merely as a cost of their views. It
would be well beyond the scope of this article to establish that the cost is too great for any
view ðsee Joshua Schechter, “The Reliability Challenge and the Epistemology of Logic,”
Philosophical Perspectives 24 ½2010: 437–64, for a discussion of this responseÞ. For these
realists, then, the present article merely establishes that their views incur a significant cost.
that lies well beyond the scope of the present article. However, whatever
it takes to explain reliability ðor, more generally, a correlation between
two types of factÞ, any explanation would have to show, at least, that the
correlation between both kinds of fact could not easily have failed to
obtain or, equivalently, that it is counterfactually robust. Why? Because
if the correlation were not counterfactually robust, it would be a mere
coincidence, and hence an ‘explanation’ according to which the corre-
lation could have easily failed to obtain would be no explanation at all.
With regard to the epistemic correlation between moral beliefs and
moral facts, counterfactual robustness requires, at least, the following:
Generalized Falsity-Sensitivity ðGFSÞ If, in nearby scenarios, the

moral facts had been different, our moral beliefs ðin that scenarioÞ
would be correspondingly different and hence mostly true.
Generalized Truth-Sensitivity ðGTSÞ If, in nearby scenarios, the

moral facts were still the same, our moral beliefs ðin that scenarioÞ
would still be true.
There are crucial differences between GFS and GTS and the local re-
quirements familiar from Nozick’s tracking account of knowledge. GFS
and GTS concern our moral beliefs taken jointly as opposed to indi-
vidual moral beliefs. So even if our moral beliefs, taken jointly, fail these
conditions, it is possible that some or all of them are sensitive, taken in-
dividually. I wish to take no stance on whether GFS and GTS rule out
local sensitivity of individual beliefs in the moral case and on whether
they are requirements for moral knowledge. For the following argument,
it is crucial that, independently of whether our beliefs are sensitive taken
individually, generalized GFS and GTS need to be satisfied in order to
explain moral reliability. If either constraint were violated, there would
be nearby scenarios in which vast chunks of our moral beliefs are false. As
a consequence, it would be a mere coincidence that our moral beliefs are
mostly true and hence reliable. In the following, I will sometimes say that
our moral beliefs are insensitive to truth or falsity in order to express that
vast chunks of our moral convictions fail GFS and GTS, respectively.
Reliability, in the following argument, plays a somewhat similar role
as it does in a well-known reliability challenge for nonnaturalist moral
realism.29 According to this challenge, on nonnaturalist realist views of
morality, it cannot be explained why moral beliefs reliably indicate the
facts that they are claimed to be about. But the reliability of our moral
29. Field, Realism, Mathematics, and Modality ; Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth.”

beliefs, proponents of the challenge argue, is a striking fact in need of
explanation. I am going to assume, like these challengers, that no cog-
nitivist meta-ethical view ðwith the exceptions noted aboveÞ should debar
us from explaining the reliability of our moral beliefs. This assumption
is widely shared both among challengers and those who wish to defend
realist views against the challenge.30 While the reliability challenge is usu-
ally aimed at antireductionist views like nonnaturalist realism, my argu-
ment targets reductionist views that do in fact construe morality’s sub-
ject matter in terms of causally efficacious nonmoral facts. My focus will
be GTS. Put metaphorically, the thought crucial to the argument is that,
because of the contingency of our moral evolution, reductionist realists
are forced to accept either that we could have veered off the moral truths
all too easily, or that moral terms track highly disjunctive properties. The
former alternative renders them incapable of explaining moral reliabil-
ity for the reasons given in this section, and the latter leads to a repug-
nant form of relativism. Note that this argument is very different from
traditional debunking arguments31 that ðoften implicitlyÞ focus on GFS.
GFS-based challenges tend to raise worries about moral reliability by ar-
guing that our moral evolution invariably gears us toward certain views,
independently of the truth of these views. By contrast, I argue that real-
ists are easily rendered incapable of explaining reliability because, on
such views, the contingency of our moral evolution makes us veer off the
path of objective moral truth all too easily.
C. Panglossian Functionalism versus Evolutionary Functionalism

It is often thought that reductionist realist views, such as naturalist real-
ism, can explain the reliability of moral beliefs. Here is David Enoch: “But
some metanormative views can explain such correlation ½between nor-
mative beliefs and normative facts with relative ease. In particular, meta-
normative views according to which normative truths are causally effi-
cacious—perhaps because reducible to or identical with natural facts—
can ðin principle, at leastÞ explain the correlation in the obvious way, by
claiming that the normative truths are causally responsible for our nor-
mative beliefs. Indeed, epistemological worries of some sort . . . about
non-naturalist realism can be seen as a part of the motivation for natu-
ralist realist views.”32 I am going to argue that this motivation is mis-
guided. The thesis I am going to defend is that reductionist realist views
30. See Enoch, “The Epistemological Challenge to Metanormative Realism.”

31. For example, Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”; Justin
Clarke-Doane, “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge,” Ethics 122 ð2012Þ:
313–40.
32. Enoch, “The Epistemological Challenge to Metanormative Realism,” 422.
cannot meet the reliability requirement while avoiding repugnant first-
order conclusions, if the function thesis is true. More specifically, I am
going to argue that reductionist realist views are hampered by a global
epistemic contingency that renders vast chunks of our moral beliefs gen-
erally insensitive to truth and hence the reliability of these judgments is
unexplainable in principle, unless they are willing to take onboard ab-
solutely unacceptable first-order consequences.
It is perhaps in response to the reliability challenge that naturalist
realism has such currency in contemporary meta-ethics. For naturalist
realism may be understood as the view that moral claims are ultimately
about facts that are closely tied, causally or constitutively, to mutual benefit
in the sense of the function thesis.33 David Brink, for instance, suggests
that
the moral realist might claim that moral properties are functional
properties. He might claim that what is essential to moral properties
is the causal role which they play in the characteristic activities of
human organisms. In particular, the realist might claim that moral
properties are those which bear upon the maintenance and flour-
ishing of human organisms. Maintenance and flourishing presum-
ably consist in necessary conditions for survival, other needs asso-
ciated with basic well-being, wants of various sorts, and distinctively
human capacities. People, actions, policies, states of affairs, etc. will
bear good-making properties just insofar as they contribute to the
satisfaction of these needs, wants, and capacities.34
Richard Boyd, in a celebrated defense of naturalist realism, advocates

the following strategy to determine the right reduction of the moral to the
natural: “There are a number of important human goods, things which
satisfy important human needs. Some of these needs are physical or med-
ical. Others are psychological or social. . . . The question of just which
important human needs there are is a potentially difficult and complex
empirical question. . . . Moral goodness is defined by this cluster of goods
and the homeostatic mechanisms upon which their unity depends.”35
Some naturalist realists emphasize the fact that we have managed to con-
verge on a great variety of moral views, and they are often optimistic that
the future will bring an even greater degree of convergence. They are
33. Richard Joyce, in Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, discusses a view he calls “evolu-
tionary naturalism,” which comes close to this. Joyce’s argument against this view is distinct
from mine: he argues that evolutionary naturalists cannot explain the ‘inescapable au-
thority’ of moral judgments.
34. David Brink, “Moral Realism and the Skeptical Arguments from Disagreement
and Queerness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 ð1984Þ: 111–25, 121–22.
35. Boyd, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” 203.
sometimes prone to likening moral progress to scientific progress. Con-
vergence ðthey thinkÞ sits well with the view that moral terms track causally
efficient properties or clusters of properties that can be discerned em-
pirically. Implicitly, their conception of moral inquiry seems to assume
that moral progress is geared toward a unique point of convergence, in-
dependent of contingencies and quirks in our evolutionary history. The
contingency of moral evolution calls into question this last assumption.
We should not assume that moral inquiry is geared toward a unique point
of convergence. Rather, our present convictions are a highly contingent
product of our evolutionary history. It is important to appreciate that
contingency does not rule out convergence. In fact, the function thesis
predicts convergence. But where we converge, if the function thesis is
right, very much depends on contingencies in our history.
Taking into account the contingency of moral evolution, we ought
to distinguish between to two distinct interpretations of naturalist real-
ism. On one kind of view, moral terms refer to the natural properties of
the moral rules on which we have actually converged. “Good,” on this
view, would rigidly refer to the heterogeneous property shared by the
rules of conduct, actions, and characters that our moral history has led
us to endorse morally, such as the property norms and the norms of
justice that we accept. Let us call this kind of realist a Panglossian realist
or simply a Panglossian, and his view Panglossianism or Panglossian
functionalism. I imagine that, to the extent that naturalist realists accept
that our moral evolution is contingent, they have Panglossian inclina-
tions, though I am not aware of any explicit discussions of this issue. A
view closely related to naturalist realism that is explicitly Panglossian is
the reductionist view defended by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit.36
Roughly, on their view, the nonmoral facts and properties to which our
moral terms refer are whatever renders moral platitudes—the moral
claims, both first and second order, on which we have in fact converged
and will converge—true. This view is squarely in the target area of the
argument against Panglossianism presented in the next section because
it, too, renders moral truth contingent on our actual evolutionary history.
On a different view, moral terms refer, in each scenario, to the prop-
erties on which we converge in that scenario. Let us call this view evolu-
tionary functionalism. A crucial difference between Panglossian and evo-
lutionary functionalism is how each view evaluates the moral convictions
of actual or possible moral reasoners whose moral outlooks are distinct
from ours and result from distinct evolutionary histories. The Pangloss-
ian will evaluate the views of others from his own perspective and hence
36. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics; Jackson and Pettit, “Moral Functionalism and
Moral Motivation,” and “Functionalism and Broad Content.”
disagree with moral outlooks that fail to conform to his own, while, for the
evolutionary functionalist, evolutionary history goes into determining
correctness. The result is a permissive view according to which each com-
munity is bound by the moral rules that their evolutionary history has led
them to accept. In the following, I will discuss and argue against each view
in turn.
Note that a third alternative, albeit one that is unavailable to genuine
realists, would be to endorse conceptual pluralism. For the conceptual
pluralist, occupants of alternative scenarios possess a distinct set of con-
cepts that are not moral concepts, and their ðschmoralÞ sentences should
not be translated homophonically into our ðmoralÞ sentences. This is
not a realist view. Conceptual pluralism, as far as I can see, escapes epis-
temological challenges of the kind discussed here, but it will give rise to
issues about disagreement and communication that lie well beyond the
scope of this article. Its natural competitors are contextualist, relativist,
and constructivist views. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that con-
ceptual pluralism is the natural interpretation of nonnaturalist realist
views like Boyd’s and Brink’s.37 To the extent that this is true, these views
are only realist in name but not in spirit, and it is for this reason that I
am strongly disinclined to believe that conceptual pluralism, as opposed
to either evolutionary functionalism or Panglossianism, is Boyd’s and
Brink’s intended reading.
D. Panglossian Functionalism, Contingency, and Generalized Truth-Sensitivity

If the function thesis is correct, Panglossians must concede that, if our
contingent circumstances had been only slightly different at various
points in our evolutionary history, we would have converged on radically
different moral rules and our moral rules and convictions would have
evolved in radically different ways. In the face of contingency, Pangloss-
ians maintain that the truth-conditions of moral claims are tied to the
moral rules on which we have actually converged. When the Panglossian
looks back on our evolutionary history, he considers himself lucky that it
all turned out so well against the odds.
If you are like me, this reaction might strike you as arrogant. What
makes the Panglossian so confident that he is right and the alternatives
37. Michael Smith, for instance, argues that his definitional naturalism has the edge
over functionalist views like Boyd’s and Brink’s that construe moral properties in terms of
their causal role, because the latter views lead to conceptual pluralism and cannot explain
disagreement. ðSee Michael Smith, The Moral Problem ½Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995, 32–
35.Þ For similar criticism, see Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons, “New Wave Moral
Realism Meets Moral Twin Earth,” Journal of Philosophical Research 16 ð1991Þ: 447–65. In
debunking debates, it is generally understood that conceptual pluralism is not a form of
realism and is not in the target area of epistemological challenges. See, for instance, Street,
“A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” sec. 7.
are wrong? A Panglossian might respond to this gut reaction by arguing
that his view is no more arrogant than that of a sailor who makes it out
of the Bermuda triangle against the odds and acknowledges how lucky
he is to have survived.38 He will point out that, on the contrary, his
position is humble, as it acknowledges the we are lucky to have been
placed in a position where moral knowledge is so much as a possibility.
On the Panglossian’s view, the tree of moral knowledge has already been
planted, survived some cold winters, and now we just need to pluck the
fruit. The Panglossian can confidently point out that, at this point in our
moral evolution, individual moral beliefs are sensitive. Holding our
moral evolution fixed, they could not have easily been different. For
instance, if my parents had been killed in an accident and I had been
raised by a foster family, I would, in all likelihood, still believe that racism
is bad.
But the reliability challenge for the Panglossian arises not at the
level of individual beliefs but rather when we consider the body of moral
beliefs on which we have converged as a whole. Let us say that a body of
shared belief or a theory is globally epistemically lucky if we could easily
have converged on a distinct and incompatible body of belief or theory,
when, in other words, history could have misled us easily. Given the con-
tingency of moral evolution, the Panglossian is forced to acknowledge
that, on his view, the moral beliefs on which we have converged as a whole
are subject to global epistemic luck.
In order to ascertain whether global epistemic luck jeopardizes any
explanation of reliability, let us begin by considering John Burgess’s and
Gideon Rosen’s reasons for denying this,39 given in the context of a dis-
cussion of Benacerraf’s and Field’s reliability challenge against mathe-
matical realism.40 Their argument is to the effect that epistemological ob-
jections based on contingency are bound to overgeneralize:
One can hardly avoid acknowledging that standard set theory is the
end product of an immensely complex historical process that could
have gone differently in countless ways. It was lucky that Cantor came
along when he did with the key concepts; that opposing forces,
which kept him from obtaining a major professorship and from
publishing in some major journals, did not silence him altogether,
that unlike some of his forerunners, he found contemporaries with
the capacity to understand and appreciate his theories. But what we
have just said about the cumulative history of set theory, in which
Field does not believe, could equally be said about the warped space
38. The metaphor is from White, “ You Just Believe That Because, . . .”
39. Gideon Rosen and John Burgess, A Subject with No Object ðOxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997Þ.
40. Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth”; Field, Realism, Mathematics, and Modality.
of general relativity, in which he does believe. Surely it is to a large
degree a matter of luck that Einstein came along when he did with
the key concepts; that the Nazi campaign against ‘Jewish physics’,
with Einstein its foremost target, did not succeed; that the remark,
attributed by legend to Einstein himself, that only a dozen people in
the world would have the capacity to understand the mind-bending
implications of warped space, proved unfounded. If there is an ar-
gument for anything in the fact that accident or luck plays a large
role in the history of science, it is an argument not just against set
theory but against general relativity as well: it is an argument not for
nominalism in particular, but for skepticism in general.41
Burgess and Rosen argue that contingency is so widespread that it would

lead to global skepticism, including skepticism about science. So, unless
we are prepared to accept a very global skepticism, contingency cannot
be problematic. They are no doubt right that the kind of contingency
that they gesture toward is unproblematic. Of course, we are lucky that
our history allowed us to invent theories and form extensive bodies of
belief instead of, say, wiping us out altogether or eliminating the brilliant
minds capable of their invention, and this does not call into question the
epistemic merits of these theories. As Burgess and Rosen point out, it is
absurd to think that a theory is only justified if a nearly deterministic
explanation of how we came to hold it is available. But Burgess and
Rosen’s examples do not in fact show that scientific theories are globally
epistemically lucky. Rather, they show that the genesis of these theories
was, as we might say, historically precarious. The reason why, according
to Burgess and Rosen, we are lucky to know about the warped space of
general relativity is that scientific progress could easily have been frus-
trated by fascist forces or that it could have stalled due to our cognitive
limitations. In each of these scenarios, we would not have been in the
market for an extension of scientific knowledge in the first place. A more
forceful example would show that, in science too, mere contingencies
lead us to accept one theory rather than some competing theory, but I
am not aware of any such examples in science. Newtonian mechanics and
the theory of relativity are not, in the relevant sense, competing theories.
The theory of special relativity explains why Newtonian mechanics makes
sufficiently accurate predictions for some purposes but not for others.
It is no mere quirk of our contingent history that the theory of special
relativity superseded Newtonian mechanics, and not vice versa.
In the scenarios rendered salient by the contingency of our moral
evolution, unlike in Burgess and Rosen’s examples, we are not alto-
gether debarred from forming moral beliefs or inventing moral theo-
41. Rosen and Burgess, A Subject with No Object, 46.

42
ries. Rather, in these scenarios we came to form radically different moral
views incompatible with our current moral outlook using the very same
faculties that we have used in the actual world. The Panglossian is thus
forced to accept that we could have easily arrived at a radically differ-
ent moral outlook and that we acquired the correct moral outlook only
through a series of massive coincidences. As a result, for the Panglossian
our having true ðas opposed to falseÞ moral beliefs is the product of con-
tingencies in our evolutionary history, not of the correct application of
our moral faculties. This, in itself, might be taken to be a reason to reject
Panglossianism, but the strongest reason to reject it is that global episte-
mic luck renders vast chunks of our moral beliefs insensitive to truth.
For, given global epistemic luck, there are nearby worlds where our evo-
lutionary history took slightly different turns and we arrived at radically
different moral views using the same cognitive faculties that we used in the
actual world, and these views are, of course, false according to the Pan-
glossian. In consequence, the correlation between our moral beliefs and
the facts could have easily failed to obtain. But this correlation is precisely
what needs to be explained in order to explain moral reliability and any
explanation of a correlation must give us a reason to think that the cor-
relation is counterfactually robust, in other words that it could not have
easily failed to obtain. In consequence, the Panglossian is unable to ex-
plain our moral reliability in principle and hence fails the reliability chal-
lenge set up in Section III.B.
Even if Rosen and Burgess’s argument does not succeed, one might
ask whether the present argument from global epistemic luck overgen-
eralizes to the scientific, perhaps even to the observational, case, whether,
that is, observational or scientific beliefs are globally epistemically lucky
too. Let us begin with the observational case: consider, for example, the
language we use to describe the locations of everyday objects. Such lan-
guage serves the purpose of coordination on belief and, by virtue of this,
on actions, joint actions, and collective plans that require shared beliefs.
For example, an assertion of “The salt is on the shelf ” might enable you
and me to coordinate our behavior in a way likely to result in successful
dinner preparations. This is perfectly compatible with a straightforward
conception of the subject matter of such talk, according to which it is
used to refer to salt dispensers and shelves and the locations of such
objects, and we have little difficulty in explaining how we came to have
reliable beliefs about such objects. We are equipped with perceptual fac-
ulties that reliably indicate the locations of ordinary objects to us, and
we can provide, at least in broad outline, an evolutionary explanation of
42. Warren and Waxman, “A Reliability Challenge for Mathematical Realism,” use
the same distinction to argue that our mathematical beliefs are contingent in a way that
our scientific beliefs are not.
how we came to have these faculties. This explanation seems to rule out
global epistemic luck. While our history might have gone badly, fore-
stalling the development of perceptual faculties altogether, our percep-
tual faculties and the beliefs they yield could not easily have come to track
something other than the locations of everyday objects or turned out very
differently.
The case of science is more complex. A first worry that might come
to mind is that scientific theories are not reliable about the theoretical
entities they posit but only the observable facts that they entail. In light
of this kind of worry, van Fraassen has argued that we should only ac-
cept the Ramsey-sentence of our best scientific theories, but not the the-
ories themselves.43 For our purposes we can lay this worry aside. For even
if van Fraassen is right, scientific theories would still reliably indicate
past and future observations. A more pressing question for our purposes
is whether scientific theories, like our moral convictions, are subject to
global epistemic luck. In that case, the present argument would in fact
overgeneralize and threaten to turn into a skeptical argument with sci-
entific theories in its target area. As we have already seen, no malicious
contingency arises from the historical precariousness of our scientific
theories. But one might worry that our scientific history is not only pre-
carious but also contingent for additional reasons. Specifically, one might
worry that, given historical contingencies, we could have come to endorse
alternative scientific theories: are the values that have governed theory
choice—perhaps a combination of predictiveness, simplicity, parsimony
ðor whatever the right historical account of theory choice isÞ—contingent
on historical circumstances that could easily have been different? Per-
haps these values depend on the nature of contingent social institutions
providing the incentives for scientists, institutions whose evolution is just
as contingent as that of morality. It will be impossible to do full justice to
these worries in the present article, as they merit a much more thorough
and historically informed discussion than what I can hope to provide.
However, the least we can say is that there seems to be no case for global
epistemic luck in the case of science that is nearly as straightforward as
the case that can be made in the case of morality by appeal to the con-
tingency of moral evolution. So there is at least some reason to think that
there is an asymmetry between morality and science. To the extent that
science is globally epistemically lucky, I do believe that we should be
cautious about what theories to accept. Imagine that historical investiga-
tions reveal that a hitherto unquestioned scientific theory is the product
of a very contingent historical process and that we can clearly envision
alternative theories that we could have easily come to endorse. Imagine
43. Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1980Þ.
that these theories are clearly not just notational variants of our present
theory, perhaps because they differ in the probabilities they assign to
future events. Shouldn’t we then concede that we have little reason to
favor our current theory over the alternatives? Of course, it is not clear
whether this in fact mandates skepticism about the present theory. Per-
haps it mandates agnosticism about it and a belief in the disjunction of
the alternatives, which is importantly different from wholesale skepti-
cism. To pursue these issues further would be well beyond the scope of
this article. Let me conclude with the conditional claim that, to the ex-
tent that a scientific theory is globally epistemically lucky, we have no
reason to accept it while rejecting its alternatives.
E. Evolutionary Functionalism
If the preceding argument is sound, Panglossianism is unacceptable
because it renders vast chunks of our moral beliefs globally epistemically
lucky and hence insensitive to their truth, thus depriving the Pangloss-
ian of the possibility to explain their reliability. Evolutionary function-
alism, by contrast, steers clear of this problem because it does not render
our moral views globally epistemically lucky. For, according to the evo-
lutionary functionalist, contingent evolutionary history goes into deter-
mining the truth-conditions of moral claims. The evolutionary function-
alist allows that what is right or wrong, permissible or impermissible,
obligatory or forbidden, and so on, covaries with our contingent evolu-
tionary history. In consequence, we would not have come to form vast
chunks of false beliefs if our evolutionary history had been different.
My objection to evolutionary functionalism is that it entails a mor-
ally repugnant relativism that is at odds with the verbal behavior of or-
dinary moral reasoners. Most of us are deeply opposed to the idea that
any way of coordinating on mutually beneficial behavior that our moral
evolution might have led us to endorse is as good as any other. Some of
these ways, for example, are fair and others exploitative. For instance, we
do not have to venture far from our actual history in order to imagine
that an asymmetry in the population, such as color of skin, could have led
to a long-lasting cooperative scheme that systematically disadvantages
part of the population, and that this disenfranchisement might have
made its way into our dispositions to apply moral terms. We can even
imagine that exploitative schemes of this kind are mutually beneficial in
the sense that everyone gains something, as a life in servitude and poverty
is arguably preferable to starvation. We can also imagine that they are
Pareto and stable, but this still doesn’t make them moral. A present-day
example is global wage slavery and the morality that supports it, such as a
widespread belief that it is permissible to buy high-end consumer goods
without otherwise compensating the workers. There is cooperation for
mutual benefit ðon the somewhat unintuitive sense of “mutual benefit”
of the function thesisÞ: while citizens of developed countries gain easy
access to high-end consumer goods, disenfranchised factory workers, who
have no preferable outside options, escape starvation.
Another striking and, as most will agree, objectionable consequence
of evolutionary functionalism is that it cannot explain why we bear moral
responsibilities toward those whom we could exploit and who stand no
chance of entering a mutually beneficial arrangement with us, such as
toward minorities we could subjugate, or toward animals. Even if we
have actually evolved to care, to some degree, about such agents, there
are certainly nearby evolutionary scenarios where this is not the case. The
evolutionary functionalist is forced to say that the inhabitants of those
scenarios bear no responsibilities toward the disenfranchised. Perhaps
most strikingly, evolutionary functionalism implausibly licenses the sub-
jugation of third parties for mutual benefit when our moral evolution
has led to convergence on views that favor it. It goes without saying that
each of these first-order views is deeply at odds with the moral outlooks
that most of us ðmyself includedÞ endorse.
While many will take these consequences to be strong enough rea-
sons to reject evolutionary functionalism, it must be conceded, at least,
that evolutionary functionalism entails a very permissive first-order view
that many of us will find repugnant. Before we accept this first-order ar-
gument against evolutionary functionalism, we ought, however, to con-
sider the following line of thought. The function thesis tells us that our
moral practice is, at bottom, a device for coordination on mutually ben-
eficial rules of conduct, in the heterogeneous sense of “benefit.” This line
of thought bears some resemblance to Aristotle’s ergon argument, his
attempt to derive a view of what it is to be a good human being from an
antecedent view of the functional kind human being. If coordination on
mutually beneficial rules is what moral language is for, then a correct
application of a moral term is one that is in accordance with this func-
tion. So it might be argued that evolutionary functionalism is correct
for independent, deeper reasons, and the unpalatable first-order con-
sequences a bullet we should bite.
This response commits the evolutionary functionalist to ascribing
pervasive error to those who wish to reject the relativist conclusions that
evolutionary functionalism requires. He might attempt to explain why
many of us find this kind of relativism objectionable in terms of the un-
derstandably, but wrongly, provincial nature of our moral views. We have,
he might go on to argue—understandably but without justification—
built the contingent features of our evolutionary history into our moral
views. The mistake we have collectively made, he might go on to say, is
very much like a failure to recognize that the rules of etiquette that we
have adopted are a contingent product of our history, which is in no way
better or privileged to similar products that serve the same purposes and
resulted or might have resulted from alternative histories.
Ultimately, this line of thought fails. Recall that just as famous as
Aristotle’s ergon argument is a powerful objection to it. Consider the
functional kinds dictator, assassin, and thumbscrew. A good dictator, it might
be said, is one who subjugates his subjects and succeeds at staying in
power for a long time, a good assassin an efficient and professional killer,
and a good thumbscrew a torture device that causes the right amount
of pain to extract information. It obviously doesn’t follow that we should
be good dictators or serial killers or that we should use thumbscrews in
accordance with their function. Similarly, even if moral language is a
device for coordination on mutually beneficial agreements ðwhere this
includes subjugating third parties and blatantly unfair agreementsÞ, it
does not follow that we should use moral language in accordance with its
function. In fact, it does not follow that we should use moral language at
all. Recall that the notion of function at work in the function thesis is
etiological. On the etiological notion, to say that X has a function Z just
is to say that X exists and continues to exist because it has Z. It is all but
obvious that this kind of view entails no normative conclusion to the ef-
fect that the X ’s are rationally or morally required to retain Z. Consider
racial slurs: it is, of course, possible to endorse a negative view of the
etiological function of racial slurs—for instance, that they have served
the subjugation of ethnical groups—without promoting their use or, in
any sense, endorsing them. Similarly, it is possible to endorse a negative
view of the etiological function of moral language without advocating its
use or, in any sense, endorsing it.
A less ambitious ðand perhaps less offensiveÞ proponent of evolu-
tionary functionalism might espouse an abolitionist view of moral lan-
guage and thought. The abolitionist believes that we should not use moral
language, and a reason for thinking this, she might argue, is that, prop-
erly understood, it has relativism built into it. There is much to be said
about this view, but the point I wish to make is that it still fails, in an im-
portant sense, to do justice to the dispositions of ordinary speakers. Many
ordinary speakers are ill disposed toward the relativism that functional-
ism entails. Moreover, ordinary subjects will balk at the thought that the
contingency of their convictions should give them a reason to become
relativists. If they are born into a society where norms of fairness have
prevailed and subjugation is rejected, they tend to count their lucky stars
when they come to see the contingency of it all, rather than to render
their moral views more permissive and reliable ðthe same, as we know,
may hold for the slave ownerÞ. The moral functionalist is unlikely to im-
press anyone when he stamps his foot on the ground and urges that we
had better make our moral views reliable along the lines he envisions. In
general, it is an important aspect of our moral practice that our evalua-
tions tend to accord with our contingent standards. It is, among other
things, an important precondition of moral change ðor, as some might
like to say, ‘moral progress’Þ. We had better find a meta-ethical view that
makes sense of this crucial feature of our moral practice.
F. Ideological Functionalism
According to what I will call ideological functionalism, moral terms express
functional concepts, but crucially the notions of function at work are
more intuitively morally relevant than the etiological, evolutionary no-
tion spelled out in Section II. The meaning of moral terms, on these views,
is more closely tied to human flourishing or human needs. Prominent
examples are, substantial differences notwithstanding, Philippa Foot’s
neo-Aristotelianism and David Copp’s cognitivist relativism.44 Foot argues
that moral behavior, especially cooperation for mutual ðbut not always
personalÞ benefit,45 is part of what it is to be a good human being in the
Aristotelian sense. Importantly, when Foot speaks of mutual benefit, what
she has in mind is not the heterogeneous notion at work in the function
thesis but rather a notion connected to human flourishing in the Aris-
totelian sense. Foot’s strategy, like Aristotle’s, is to give an account of the
characteristic function of human beings and to argue that morality is a
special department of that characteristic function.
David Copp believes that morality, in successful cases at least, pro-
vides a code of conduct that meets a society’s needs. For him, the needs
of a society determine whether a moral code is correct relative to that
society. The right moral rules are those that a society would rationally
choose given its needs. While Foot and Copp endorse very different views
of the function of moral terms from each other, each proceeds from a
premise about the function of morality about what, ultimately, makes
our moral claims true: their conformity to the function identified. Copp
is explicit that his approach leads to a constrained relativism precisely
because a society’s needs may be met by more than one moral code, and
because different societies have different needs. I imagine that Foot would
be inclined to make a similar concession, as it seems that her notion of
human flourishing leaves room for different and incompatible ways of
acting cooperatively.46
In the following, I will argue that Copp’s and Foot’s views cannot
explain the reliability of our moral views. Let me begin with Copp’s view.
He appeals to the notion of a moral code that best meets a society’s
needs. A first question to ask about this view is whether needs are things
that we strongly prefer, things that are important to our well-being, sim-
44. Foot, Natural Goodness. Copp, Morality, Normativity , and Society.

45. Foot, Natural Goodness, 44.
46. For all I know, she has not addressed this issue.
ply unfulfilled material desires, or perhaps requirements for survival or
reproductive success. Copp somewhat loosely characterizes needs as
follows in his reply to Street: “A society needs to ensure that its popula-
tion continues to exist. It needs to ensure that there is and continues to
be a system of cooperation among its members. It needs to ensure in-
ternal social harmony. It needs peaceful and cooperative relationships
with neighboring societies.”47 A further salient question is what is it for a
moral code to best meet the needs of a society? In using this terminology,
Copp implicitly appeals to a theory of social choice that must yield a
partial ordering of moral codes relative to the needs of a society. There
is, of course, a worry that this theory of social choice is itself a moral
theory, but I will refrain from addressing this issue here. I wish to show
instead that on any sensible understanding of a need and the back-
ground theory of social choice, Copp’s view cannot explain the reliability
of our moral judgments because it renders them insensitive to their
truth. In so doing, I will refute Copp’s explicit response to evolutionary
debunking arguments: that, on his account, our moral beliefs track evo-
lutionary forces, where tracking is acknowledged to entail sensitivity.48
I believe that Copp’s account cannot explain the reliability of our
moral beliefs because, pace his explicit claim, it renders vast chunks of
our moral beliefs insensitive to their truth. This is, again, a consequence
of the contingency of our moral evolution. Whatever Copp means by a
need, surely he does not have in mind the historically contingent notion
of mutual benefit. If he did, what counts as a need would be determined
by the properties of outcomes that individuals have in fact replicated as a
result of their contingent circumstances. In spite of the vagueness of the
quote above, it becomes obvious that he intends a more unified, static
notion of a need. This is for a good reason: to give up this notion would
render his view wildly implausible from a first-order perspective. If the
function thesis is correct, our moral terms track mutual benefit in the
heterogeneous sense. For this reason, it is highly unlikely that our pres-
ent views are in conformity with the traits that are identified as society’s
needs on Copp’s view. But even if they are, this would be a huge coin-
cidence, thus rendering vast chunks of our present views insensitive to
their truth. Second, whatever theory of social choice determines whether
47. David Copp, “Darwinian Skepticism about Moral Realism,” Philosophical Issues 18
ð2008Þ: 156–206, 200.
48. See ibid., 197–98. Copp here argues explicitly that an ‘aggressive realist’s’ strategy
“should support the idea that, even if natural selection had led our moral psychology to be
somewhat different from what it is, and even we had had somewhat different moral beliefs
as a result, it is likely that our moral beliefs still would have tended to approximate to the
truth.” Since he is a self-proclaimed proponent of the ‘aggressive strategy’, it is safe to assume
that he accepts the requirement that his theory must not render vast chunks of our moral
beliefs insensitive to truth.
a given moral code meets a society’s needs, the contingency of our moral
evolution makes it extremely unlikely that our moral views should be in
accordance with the output of this rational choice procedure. In order to
assess the extent to which our actual moral views are in conformity with
the view that Copp’s social choice procedure yields, one would have to fill
in the details of this procedure and to engage in an anthropological
study of our moral convictions. But even if the overlap were extensive or
even nearly perfect, the contingency of moral evolution would render
much of this overlap a coincidence. There would be many nearby pos-
sible worlds in which our moral evolution would have led to distinct views
that are not in accordance with the output of Copp’s social choice pro-
cedure, whatever it is. As any economist knows, static notions of social
choice and the outcomes of contingent evolutionary processes are bound
to come apart.49 Whatever Copp’s notion of a need might be and whatever
background theory of social choice he implicitly appeals to, vast chunks of
our moral convictions come out as insensitive to truth on his view, and
hence he cannot explain moral reliability.
While Foot never explicitly addresses this question, her account faces
an analogous problem.50 The notion of human flourishing to which she
appeals is, as no doubt she would herself insist, far removed from the
heterogeneous notion of mutual benefit at work in the function thesis.
When Foot speaks of flourishing, she does not have in mind the hetero-
geneous and technical notion of the function thesis, but a notion that
gives rise to more plausible moral views. If we understand Foot’s theory
as a reductionist view that lays down modally robust truth-conditions
independent of our psychology and the contingent values that we have
adopted, however, it seems that the extent to which our current moral
beliefs overlap with it is highly contingent. For, if the function thesis is
correct, moral evolution does not select for moral convictions promoting
human flourishing in the Aristotelian sense.
IV. CONCLUSION
Richard Joyce has pointed out that the “mere promise of a naturalistic
theory of morality ½reductionist realism, on my terminology will not
suffice, unless we have some really compelling reason for assuming that
such a theory is forthcoming” and that the “burden of the argument falls
on the moral naturalist to put forward a theory.”51 If the arguments of
49. I refer the reader once more to Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and
Evolution.
50. For similar and more extensive criticism of Aristotelian naturalism, see the final
section of Charles R. Pigden, “Geach on ‘Good’,” Philosophical Quarterly 40 ð1990Þ: 129–54.
51. Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 190.
this article are sound, there is not even much of a promise, because sen-
sitivity to truth and hence the possibility of explaining moral reliability,
for the reductionist, come at the cost of repugnant first-order views. This
is a sweeping conclusion that should inspire us to reconsider the merits of
the reductionist views that have become so popular in recent meta-ethics.
An important and difficult question concerns the meta-ethical les-
sons we should draw from the contingency of moral evolution more
generally. While the present article only considers how contingency af-
fects reductionist realist views, one might reasonably expect that its ar-
guments will generalize to other views that assume moral objectivity and
mind-independence. According to any such view, we are right and those
whose views evolved or might have evolved differently due to contingent
circumstances in their history are wrong, thus threatening to render the
truth of vast chunks of our moral convictions a mere contingency. Such
views include not only nonnaturalist realism but also Gibbard’s and Black-
burn’s quasi-realism. I believe that it will be a great challenge to construct a
meta-ethical theory that accommodates both contingency and our intui-
tions about objectivity and mind-independence. How to reconcile the two
is, no doubt, an issue that merits further thought.
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Reductionist Moral Realism and the

Contingency of Moral Evolution*

If cognitivist meta-ethics is to avoid error theory, it must be able to ex-

Ethics 126 (April 2016): 662–689

II. FUNCTION AND CONTINGENCY

The first ethicists overcame some of the problems by agreeing on

According to Kitcher, the initial function of morality was to remedy re-

7. Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 117.

The Function Thesis A major function of moral language and the

THE HAWK-DOVE GAME

Hawk 3/3 10/0

III. A DILEMMA FOR REDUCTIONIST REALISM

Reductionism Moral sentences are true or false in virtue of causally

Reductionism concerns the truth-makers of moral sentences. It rules out

B. Adequacy and Reliability

Reliability For most of our core moral convictions p, p is true.

This notion of reliability is purely extensional, as it only concerns the

Generalized Falsity-Sensitivity ðGFSÞ If, in nearby scenarios, the

Generalized Truth-Sensitivity ðGTSÞ If, in nearby scenarios, the

29. Field, Realism, Mathematics, and Modality ; Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth.”

C. Panglossian Functionalism versus Evolutionary Functionalism

30. See Enoch, “The Epistemological Challenge to Metanormative Realism.”

Richard Boyd, in a celebrated defense of naturalist realism, advocates

D. Panglossian Functionalism, Contingency, and Generalized Truth-Sensitivity

Burgess and Rosen argue that contingency is so widespread that it would

41. Rosen and Burgess, A Subject with No Object, 46.

44. Foot, Natural Goodness. Copp, Morality, Normativity , and Society.

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