Moral Realism and the Argument from Alternate Histories

Abstract

Evolutionary moral debunking arguments often emphasize the inevitability of our moral beliefs: given how natural selection operates, we would have had the moral beliefs we do regardless of what the moral facts are. I examine an alternative strategy, which emphasizes the contingency of our moral beliefs: there are things in our evolutionary history that could easily have gone differently and that would have resulted in substantially different moral beliefs. I consider various ways of moving from this observation to a skeptical upshot.