Was sollen wir tun? Was dürfen wir glauben? - bei DuEPublico ...

DEBUNKING ARGUMENTS 555
impetus, they clearly have constructive potential: As intuitionism only claims that it is
necessary to rely on some moral intuitions to avoid moral scepticism, and as it is highly
plausible that not all intuitions are trustworthy, the intuitionist agenda involves
distinguishing trustworthy from untrustworthy intuitions; we can say that it involves creating
an ‘intuition filter’. 14 Convincing local debunking arguments can and should be recruited for
this task.
It is crucial to acknowledge that in all these ways of responding to local debunking arguments,
metaethical, general epistemological and maybe even moral considerations are involved (on
the latter, see the following section). Although we may start with results from empirical investigations,
and indeed gain helpful insights from them, assessing those results involves
philosophical, and among them normative, considerations. The outcome of this process will
vary for different metaethical frameworks and can be more or less reversionary. But in
principle, local debunking arguments can challenge moral judgments on any non-sceptical
view of moral justification. Likewise, the three described options for responding to the
challenge are plausible on versions of moral (as well as evaluative or normative) realism and
anti-realism alike.
5. Responding to Global Debunking Arguments
The presented outline of defence strategies for intuitionism against debunking arguments is,
however, incomplete. With regard to Singer’s challenge it has recently been suggested that the
attempt to keep the debunking of moral intuitions local is likely to fail. That is because
analogous debunking arguments can be advanced to target the intuitions on which Singer
himself relies. One could, for example, point out that the universalistic-egalitarian doctrine
central to Singer’s utilitarianism has its root in Christian ethics – a basis for morality Singer
has repeatedly rejected as inadequate (cf. Tersman 2008: 401f.). 15 A global debunking argument
of this sort can be formulated with regard to the influence of evolutionary forces on our
moral outlook:
P1
P2
The best explanation for the contents of our moral intuitions is that evolutionary
forces had a tremendous influence on them.
Evolutionary forces have nothing to do with the correctness or truth of our moral
intuitions.
C Our moral intuitions are not justified or trustworthy. 16
If this debunking argument is successful and given the intuitionist framework outlined above,
we are left with moral scepticism. But is it successful? We can see immediately that the first
two ways of responding to local debunking arguments are also applicable to this and other
global debunking attempts; both the explanation adduced in the first premise and the
14
Cf. Daniels 1996: 82 for the use of the filter metaphor within his reflective equilibrium approach.
15
See also Kahane 2011 for a version of the worry that debunking arguments that were meant to target
only a subgroup of moral beliefs end up undermining all moral justification (at least on a robust realist
or, as Kahane calls it, an objectivist understanding of morality).
16
This argument is an adaptation of the first horn of Street’s much discussed Darwinian Dilemma for
realist theories of value: “Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of
human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between
these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the independent
evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of
this relation. […] [T]he realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on
our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical
result that most of our evaluative judgements are off track due to the distorting pressure of
Darwinian forces.” (Street 2006: 109)