Formulation 2: Reliability Would Be Extremely Unlikely

The proponent of the second formulation of a debunking argument is grants the possibility of epistemic access (at least for the sake of argument). But she claims that this is not enough to rebut skepticism, since it remains extremely unlikely that our actual moral beliefs are latching onto the moral facts. This seems to be what Sharon Street has

11 _{[See Ch. 1]}

12 _{For more on this, see Jenkins (2008, Ch.3).}

13 _{Hartry Field (2005, 77) gives a powerful statement of the sentiment behind premise 2: “[Non-naturalism]} postulate[s entities] that are mind-independent and bear no causal or spatiotemporal relation to us, or any other kinds of relations to us that would explain why our beliefs about them tend to be correct”.

in mind when she says that “Allowing our evaluative judgments to be shaped by evolutionary influences is analogous to setting out for Bermuda and letting the course of your boat be determined by the wind and tides”.14 _{Just as it would be a priori}

extremely unlikely that our boat would make it to Bermuda with no guidance, it would be extremely unlikely—given all the conceptually possible ways the moral truths could turn out—that our evolved moral beliefs latched onto the moral facts.

Call this the Extreme Unlikelihood Argument (EUA):

1. There is a huge range of logically possible stance-independent moral truths (and systems of truths).

2. Our actual moral judgments are not caused by the moral facts.15 Therefore,

3. It is extremely unlikely that a significant subset of our moral beliefs are true, and those that are true are true as a result of luck in a way that undermines their justification.

EUA, as stated, is not logically valid. But it remains a powerful inference to the best explanation, and so merits some sort of response on behalf of the non-naturalist. 5. Formulation 3: No Good Reason to Think We’re Tracking the Moral Facts

14 _{Street (2006), pp.121-122.}

15 _{In Street’s argument, evolution plays the central role in the genealogy of our moral judgments, but a proponent} of EUA could also appeal to culture, individuals’ upbringing, or some combination of these three things. Regardless of the details here, most non-naturalists would accept premise 2, so I do not distinguish between these

The third and final formulation of the epistemological objection to non-

naturalism that I’ll consider relies on something like the following plausible epistemic principle:

No Good: “If you have no good reason to think that your belief is true, then you cannot rationally maintain it.”16

If No Good is correct, and our moral beliefs are caused by something other than the moral facts, it looks as though we have a defeater for most if not all of our moral beliefs. Take some actual moral belief that we have, such as that suffering is bad. The proponent of No Good points out that we have no good reason to think this belief is true—after all, whatever it was caused by, it presumably wasn’t caused by the fact that suffering is bad (even if it in fact is). So we can’t rationally maintain it. A similar argument would apply to any moral belief you choose, so skepticism seems to follow.

Now, the anti-skeptical non-naturalist may try to forestall this sort of argument by pointing out that we do have good reason to think many of our moral beliefs are true. And she can claim this by appeal to any of a number moral belief-forming processes: Her beliefs may be based on moral intuitions, or moral perceptions, acquaintance relations with the moral facts, etc. And she can say that her preferred theory about what grounds our moral beliefs does give her good reason to think they’re true after all.

16 _{This is Vavova’s (2014) formulation. Street (forthcoming, p.2) endorses a similar but more sophisticated} principle.

However, this kind of response on behalf of the anti-skeptical realist only serves to move the bump in the rug. That’s because insofar as No Good is an attractive

epistemological principle, so too is:

No Good Process: If you have no good reason to think that a given belief-forming process generates true beliefs, you cannot rationally maintain beliefs formed on the basis of such a process.

Even granting the anti-skeptical realist’s initial response above, then, she’ll still owe us a good reason to think that her favored moral belief-forming process(es) generate true beliefs a significant portion of the time. And this is no easy task.

Putting this together, we get what I’ll call the No Reason Argument (NRA):

1. If you have no good reason to think that a given belief-forming process

generates true beliefs, you cannot rationally maintain beliefs formed on the basis of such a process.

2. We have no good reason to think that moral belief-forming processes generate true beliefs.

Therefore,

3. We cannot rationally maintain our moral beliefs (i.e. they are unjustified). Notice the difference between NRA and EUA. Unlike EUA, NRA doesn’t depend on any claim about the logical space of possible moral facts or the prior likelihood that we would latch onto the moral facts. It only depends on the claim that we’ve got no (good) non-circular reason to think that our moral belief-forming processes are reliable. This, along with the plausible claim that lacking such a reason undermines any claim to

justification (or rational belief), is enough to undermine justification to most, if not all, of our moral beliefs.

6. Two Epistemically Neutral Responses to Epistemological Objections (and Their