Free association rant on epistemology

So there's this well known argument against moral realism that focuses on moral epistemology. Mackie presents one version of it, and he puts it like this: the moral realist is going to have to be an intuitionist, and intuitionism is spooky and mysterious and we have reason to doubt that such a capacity to grasp moral truths exists, and so moral realism is false. Why is the moral realist going to have to end up with intuitionism?

Here's one way of telling the story: there's no way to justify our moral beliefs. The idea is that we justify our beliefs through empirical observation or deduction, and ethical beliefs seem to be neither. Of course, if this is the challenge then it seems to take on all of our a priori knowledge (and Mackie notes this). The challenge then becomes an attempt to provide an empirical foundation for those a priori beliefs, probably deflating them so that they're no longer really a priori, but just particularly abstract parts of our empirical theory (ala Quine).

If this is the challenge, then moral realists think that they have an answer. For example, Shafer-Landau offers a moral epistemology. Sayre-McCord offers one. Scanlon does too. The realist will probably want to employ a coherentist theory of justification, since a foundationalist picture seems to force one to rely on non-obvious intuitions (or not, whatever). This will involve a lot of bickering, point scoring about what justification is and how it applies to ethics. Fine.

But this probably doesn't satisfy anyone who's worried about the prospects for moral knowledge. We want a story about how our moral knowledge matches up with the world. After all, our empirical knowledge certainly does.

As Enoch points out, there's a version of the argument that seems to get closer to what's bothering people (and Sharon Street's Darwinian Dilemma is very close to it). It turns out to be a version of Field's improvement of Beneceraff's argument against mathematical realism. It goes like this: suppose that there are moral facts that we know. Then a lot of the time when we have moral beliefs, they turn out to be true. There is a correlation between our beliefs and the truth. The question is, what explains this correlation? It seems to be a mysterious fact. (Field's improvement reminds me of Blackburn's improvement of Mackie's metaphysical side of the argument from queerness, the supervenience problem. I wonder if this suggests that they rise and fall together?)

Some sort of coherentist (or internalist) theory of justification won't help much here. This is because (following Enoch) your moral beliefs will not cohere (or will be defeated) by your belief that there is no reliability to your moral beliefs. The reason why this argument is an improvement is because it gives up on justification. "You want to tell me that justification might not be about the connection between the truth and the belief? Fine, you can have justification. But I still want what we have with our empirical beliefs, which is some sort of story of how my brain matches up with that truth."

Now, how could this be answered? This is what pushes realists to intuitionism, and pushes naturalists to evolutionary arguments (see Enoch, Copp, Alston, and SB who is working on her dissertation here at Harvard, here's the link to her current draft). And we can give a similar story for anything with practical consequences. The story will roughly go like this: if we didn't have a reliable rational faculty for forming intuitions about math/logic/ethics/epistemology(/religion?) then this would have nasty consequences for a biological creature. And so we have good reason to think that our intuitions are pretty reliable (but not too reliable! otherwise we lose our crucial capacity for being totally misguided by intuitions).

What is one to make of these biological arguments? Is evolution really of any help here? Let me focus on concerns about epistemic realism. We're supposed to use our epistemic faculties to determine that evolution is true, and once we have that as our pivot point we're supposed to understand that evolution being true supports our belief that our epistemic faculties are reliable. This seems odd, and the reason it seems odd to me sounds similar to an argument made by Alvin Plantinga. If we have knowledge of evolutionary theory, it seems that we have such knowledge only if we have justification, evidence and the other normative stuff of epistemology. So how could that offer us any more support for our confidence in epistemology?

(It also seems odd for purely biological reasons. There are all sorts of reasons that organisms end up the way that they do, and the idea that all of an organisms are reliable isn't something that you can just toss off. You need evidence. Do we know that it's not due to random drift? Can we show that there is any advantage in reliably representing the world in belief? How would that experiment work?)

How about another method of attack: let's be expressivists about normativity. In short, I think that this just means that we should agree that we don't take our knowledge or beliefs very seriously. This is my opinion as of this moment--I haven't studied others with enough depth to really make this intelligently, but it just seems to me that the common criticism of expressivism is right--it's either realism or nihilism, and you've gotta take one or the other. In this case, either you are part of the human world or you're part of the animal world, and you can make that choice, but let's not kid ourselves about what it means to choose to be human.

(Another option: deny that begging the question is bad. See Boghossion. This discussion could go in Chapter 1.)

I'm not going to solve this question, because this is one of the perennial questions in philosophy. This would be a refutation of skepticism, if it could be done.

Here's what one can start to say: if there are epistemic facts, then this is how moral facts could look like. We start by taking certain things for granted--because we're biological creatures, our environment effects us in some way but we really don't have any idea what the effect was (similar to the problem of talking about before the Big Bang). And then we simply build off of them. We might start with a foundationalist principle that guides our justification, or we might end up with a coherentist one, and this is a matter for debate. But the point is that this is how it would have to work.

And, then, what can one say to the normative skeptic? Nothing really. One doesn't have to accept epistemic realism--in fact, there's nothing that could possibly justify epistemic realism, and this is exactly what the normative skeptic would want. So it's better not to think about half answers, or even to worry about it at all.

All the objections can do is make it unpleasant for you to be a normative realist.

Hmm..I think i'm out of steam. I guess that I'll try some other argument, then write this one up tonight in a fit of caffeine. I wonder if there is any more perspective that I could offer. How does this move the discussion forward? I don't think that it does. Well, maybe it does. I think what it shows is that I really do need to reread the stuff on epistemic expressivism.