Abstracts
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at AAP 2013. If you've just submitted an abstract, it may take a few days to appear.
| Name: Dr. Katia Vavova |
| Institution: Mount Holyoke College |
| Title: A Dilemma for the Darwinian Debunker |
| Abstract: The realist holds that there are attitude-independent evaluative truths. The debunker argues that we have no reason to think that the evolutionary forces that influenced human evaluative attitudes track those truths. The realist could respond that evolutionary forces do track independent evaluative truths. But she cannot simply assert this. Nor can she simply assume that our ability to recognize evaluative truths is advantageous. This tracking account can seem both question-begging and scientifically implausible. I will first present the best version of the tracking account and argue that it is promising. I will then show that if it ultimately fails, it is because there is no non-question-begging response available. But this reflects more poorly on the debunker than on the realist. If the debunker does not grant the realist enough ground on which to construct even a bad non-question-begging response, then she has not presented a new epistemic challenge from our evolutionary origins. She has merely reiterated the usual skeptical argument. The debunker is thus faced with a dilemma: she can admit that the tracking account succeeds and dispells the Darwinian challenge or she can collapse that challenge into a more general skeptical argument she did not intend to make. |
| Keywords: metaethics, moral realism, evolutionary challenge |
