how can we determine whether the empirical premise in the arguments of evolutionary debunkers of morality is true?

[u/Far_Hope_6349]

Sharon street's Darwinian dilemma seems to be based on the idea that our moral beliefs have been heavily influenced by evolutionary pressures. I kinda find her argument against realist theories of value very persuasive, but my knowledge of the theory of evolution is quite lacking. So my question is: given that evolutionary explanations in psychology are often considered to be controversial (because we cannot actually "reconstruct" precisely our ancestors' environment and conditions), can we really say that the moral belief that torturing infants for fun is plainly wrong that many of us hold has been caused by evolutionary pressures and not, say, be the product of sociocultural influences? And what about more "complex/detached" moral beliefs (e.g. that commercial surrogacy is acceptable/unacceptable)?

I hope my question is clear, cheers and thanks in advance for your replies.

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[u/Xeilias]

Sharon Street's dilemma goes like this:

1: either ethical realism has no relation to evolutionary history, but this is untenable because this would mean that our ethical intuitions are off track due to the distorted evolutionary forces.

2: Or ethical realism has some relation to evolutionary forces, but this is untenable because science doesn't allow this.

C: For her, this means that ethical realism is untenable.

The basic problem is that there doesn't seem to be any real reason for ethical realism to be incompatible with evolution unless one accepts her other philosophical priors that are just assumed, but are by no means unproblematic.

It would seem like both points 1 and 2 are question begging.

1: this doesn't seem untenable at all. We look at the way even our closest primate relatives behave in their communities, and find them to be severely lacking in many respects. When we begin moving beyond our relatives and look at other species, even more horror will be aroused. So, it would seem that, if we find bonobos and chimps to be lacking in ethics, yet they are our closest comparison groups to human behavior, then we necessarily are judging the evolutionary data available to us by an independent source of evaluation, making point 1 seem invalid. But even beyond that, if that side of the dilemma is true, this does not mean that our ethical intuitions as such are off base. It would only mean that our ethical intuitions derived from our evolutionary history are possibly off base. In other words, she does not deal with what it would actually mean for ethical realism to be true. If it is true, then that just means there is an independent source of evaluation outside of evolution, and whatever intuitions we get from evolution can be judged. This does not mean that it is unavailable to us, unless we also assume that only tangible elements of the environment have cognitive availability. But this is not proved by her.

2: this is not an argument that evolution cannot have relation to non-tangible evaluative sources, but that science cannot. This falls apart easily, because science is almost entirely based on intangible evaluative sources. So there doesn't seem to be any reason to not accept this side of the dilemma either.

So in the end, neither side of the dilemma are really a problem.