Jay CarlsonFinal paper: Parfit and Street on Evolution and Normative Beliefs5/08/12

In Chapter 33 of his book On What Matters, Derek Parfit confronts an

argument in favor of skepticism of normative beliefs. The argument claims that our

justification for believing that normative beliefs are true is undermined by the fact

that they were acquired through a process of natural selection, a mechanism that

would select these normative beliefs1 for their advantageousness and not for their

truth-conducive qualities. Sharon Street, the advocate for this position, uses this

argument to support her anti-realist understanding of value judgments (Street

2006, 110). Parfit wants to resist this argument in two ways. First, he wants to

reject the claim that normative beliefs are advantageous such that they could be

sensitive to selective pressures. Second, Parfit points out that evolutionary forces

would produce a slate of moral beliefs that are wildly at odds with the moral beliefs

that most people in fact have.

I want to argue that Parfit is right to reject this skeptical argument, but I do

not think it is for the reasons that he gives. I will argue that Parfit’s classical

understanding of evolution gives him a myopic set of expectations for what

normative beliefs could result from an evolutionary process mechanism. His

narrow expectations then lead him to agree with Street that evolution would be a

distorting influence on our beliefs. Yet there are some plausible stories to be told

about how an evolutionary process could select for the sort of normative practical

1 This argument is against the genus of normative beliefs, of which there are two species: epistemic and practical normative beliefs. Epistemic normative beliefs denotes beliefs that some fact F counts in favor of some belief B is true, while practical normative beliefs are beliefs that some fact F counts if favor of doing some act A. In this paper, I will focus on the argument regarding this latter species of normative beliefs, so “normative beliefs” will be used as a shorthand for “normative practical beliefs.”

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beliefs that Parfit thinks most people have. I want to draw two conclusions from the

plausibility of these stories. The first conclusion is that normative beliefs can

facilitate an organism’s evolutionary fitness in several ways: not only could

normative beliefs facilitate cooperation and coordination with others, but they could

also help individuals engage in deliberative planning about the best course of action.

Given these two points, I argue that we have reason to doubt Parfit’s claim that

normative beliefs could not be subject to selective pressures in basically the same

way that first-order beliefs are. The second conclusion I want to draw is that there

is no reason to think that practical normative beliefs being the products of natural

selection undermines our justification in holding them. Instead, these conclusions

give some measure of credence to a kind of metaethical naturalism that both Parfit

and Street want to resist. In this paper, I will present a viable story for naturalism

that responds to the objections of Parfit and Street.

The argument for normative skepticism which Parfit wants to reject could be

summarized as follows:

1) Normative beliefs are acquired through natural selection.

2) These beliefs would be advantageous regardless of whether they were

true.

3) We have no other way of acquiring these normative beliefs.

4) So, we cannot be justified in believing that these normative beliefs are

true.

The idea behind this argument is that we happen to have our normative beliefs not

because they are true or allow us to form other true beliefs about the world, but

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because such beliefs were advantageous for our predecessors to have. Since a

belief’s advantageousness is quite clearly independent of its truth, having a belief

because it is advantageous does not justify one in holding that belief to be true.

Thus, the argument claims that if it is true that we acquired our normative beliefs

via natural selection, then we have no reason to think that they are true.

Parfit wants to deny the skeptical conclusion of this argument by denying the

first and third premise of this argument I have reconstructed above. He denies that

normative beliefs are advantageous such that they could be shaped by natural

selection. Parfit grants that first-order beliefs concerning facts of one’s environment

would obviously be selected for: “We respond to epistemic reasons when our

awareness of certain facts causes us to believe what these facts give us reasons to

believe” (Parfit 2011, 515). Normative beliefs, however, are not of this first-order

sort, but are second-order beliefs about the status of certain facts, i.e. whether some

fact F counts in favor of some action B. Parfit reasons that our human ancestors

could have responded to facts that were genuinely normative reasons—in such a

way that this response would have been selected for—without any accompanying

belief that those reasons counted as reasons (Parfit 2011, 515). Parfit claims that

having a belief that some fact counts as a reason for some action does not give any

special, additional weight to believing that fact. Nor does an agent need a normative

reason in order to act. For example, a hungry giraffe might come to believe that

there is a tree with edible leaves nearby; the giraffe can respond to there being food

nearby without some additional, second-order belief that the fact that there is food

nearby counts as a reason for her to eat the leaves. For Parfit, in an evolutionary

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story, normative beliefs are just superfluous mechanisms that would not generate

any advantage to the believing creature.

An additional problem Parfit points out is that if natural selection had been

the primary cause of our normative beliefs, then we would have a slate of normative

beliefs that is wildly at odds with the beliefs we in fact have. His criterion of what

would count as explaining that a belief was produced by natural selection is that it is

“less easy” to explain by other means of acquisition (Parfit 2011, 535). For example,

it is easy to explain the evolutionary advantageousness of believing that one has

reason to care for the upbringing of one’s own children; since they are the ones who

will transmit one’s genetic material, it seems plausible that the normative belief that

one has a reason to promote their wellbeing would be selected for. It is more

difficult on Parfit’s view to see the evolutionary advantage in believing that one has

a reason to help an unrelated stranger who is in dire need. The unrelated stranger

does not help transmit one’s genetic material, so there is no evolutionary advantage

in believing that one has a reason to care about their wellbeing. Extrapolating this

pattern fully, Parfit suggests that evolution would actually select for a kind of

provincialist—and possibly racist—system of normative beliefs that would give an

agent reason to care only about people insofar as they are genetically related to her

(Parfit 2011, 538). Yet it seems that most people believe that one does have a

reason to care about someone in dire need, and that one’s lack of kinship to a person

in need is irrelevant, ceterus paribus, to whether one has reason to care about their

wellbeing. Parfit’s point is that while it might be evolutionarily advantageous to

believe that one only has a reason to care about one’s offspring and immediate

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relations, such a system is deeply antithetical to many people’s intuitive normative

beliefs. The deep opposition between the normative practical beliefs most people

have and the normative practical beliefs that would seem to be evolutionarily

advantageous leads Parfit to doubt that evolution is the source of our normative

beliefs (Parfit 2011, 540).

Parfit thinks the evolutionary story is especially attenuated in the case of

Golden Rule kinds of beliefs: that one should always do unto others only what one

would want done to oneself. Parfit entertains the counterargument that there are

instances of reciprocal altruism that could be evolutionarily advantageous: creature

A helps another creature B in need and A will get the favor returned when the

situation is reversed and she is need. Parfit rejects this counterargument by noting

that the really advantageous behavior in such scenarios is to be a free rider: receive

help when one needs it, but refuse to reciprocate when the situation is reversed.

Though such behavior might give an agent the reputation of being an

unreciprocating free rider, Parfit reasons that a consistent applier of the Golden

Rule would not discriminate against a known free rider in need (Parfit 2011, 537).

Yet it seems clear that egoistic free riding is hardly behavior to be held up as

something we have a reason to do. Thus it seems clear to Parfit that the behavior

evolution would select for is precisely not what most people would intuitively

believe to be moral behavior.

The disparity between what normative beliefs evolution would give us and

the normative beliefs we in fact have leads Parfit to conclude that if natural selection

does have an influence on our slate of normative beliefs, then it is largely a

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distorting influence. Parfit notes that the position he is opposing claims that “our

having these normative beliefs” and not their truth or truth-tracking capabilities, is

what grants these beliefs their advantageousness (Parfit 2011, 513). If our beliefs

are usually acquired for their ability to approximate the truths of the world, then

beliefs that are not sensitive to truth are thus taken to be the product of a distorting

force. Thus beliefs that are acquired for their advantageousness cannot be

justifiably held to be true. Parfit is actually in agreement with the second premise of

the argument for normative skepticism he opposes, as he admits that normative

beliefs that are advantageous and the ones we think are true come apart quite

readily (Parfit 2011, 513).

On the other side of the argument for normative scepticism, Sharon Street

claims that normative realists —i.e. ones who take the normative beliefs to be true

independent of anyone’s attitudes about them—is forced into a predicament

concerning the evolutionary pressure on the formation of her normative beliefs.

Street calls this predicament the Darwinian Dilemma. On one hand, the realist can

deny that there is any evolutionary influence on the formation of these normative

beliefs. This horn would represent the nonnaturalist kind of realism. To deny the

evolutionary influence on normative beliefs, Street reasons, is implausible because it

flies in the face of mountains of scientific evidence that our makeups are products of

natural selection. Our evaluative beliefs are no different from the rest of our

persons in that they are “saturated with evolutionary influence” (Street 2006, 114).

To claim that normative beliefs are somehow exempt from the pervasive influence

of natural selection is, for Street, simply to deny the manifest.

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On the other hand, the other horn of the dilemma is that the realist can claim

that evolutionary forces did have an influential role in shaping our normative

beliefs, in that they allowed our predecessors to track certain facts that they would

not have otherwise been able to. This position represents the naturalist kind of

realism. The evolutionary advantage, the natural realist would claim, is that these

normative beliefs track some truth about the world. Street thinks this horn of the

dilemma is more plausible than the previous horn, as it presents normative beliefs

as properly naturalistic entities and not some causally inefficacious entity typically

asserted by the nonnaturalistic realists. Nevertheless, the claim that normative

beliefs are something like natural-fact trackers is still unacceptable for Street

because alternative hypotheses fare better in terms of explaining why we have these

beliefs (Street 2006, 126). Even if we assume that truth-tracking normative beliefs

is the best explanation of this phenomena, Street finds it to be a massive coincidence

that the independent evaluative truths the realist is asserting also perfectly aligns

with those which would have been selected for by a non-rational process like

natural selection (Street 2006, 132). Such a coincidence would be so unlikely that,

to Street, as to strain credulity.

Street’s superior candidate for explaining why we have the normative beliefs

we do is what she calls the adaptive link account, where tendencies to make certain

evaluative judgments contributed to the judging creature’s evolutionary success by

linking the creature’s situation to creature’s responses to her circumstance in ways

that were advantageous (Street 2006, 127). On this account, the normative beliefs

we have are ones that allowed our ancestors to develop dispositions appropriate to

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the circumstances such that they could succeed and eventually perpetuate their

genetic material better than others. Street takes the adaptive link account to be a

superior explanation to the tracking account for three reasons. First, the adaptive

link account is more parsimonious than all of its realist opponents because the

adaptive link hypothesis does not require positing an additional entity, namely

independent evaluative truth, to explain its theory. Second, the adaptive link

account more clearly delineates the relationship between a being’s evolutionary

fitness and its normative beliefs; while the realist has to give an explanation for why

tracking certain evaluative truths would promote reproductive success, Street’s

adaptive link account claims that the evaluative judgments are selected because they

promoted reproductive success (Street 2006, 130). Finally, the adaptive link

account notes that certain normative beliefs are widespread because they allowed

the organisms that held them to respond to their circumstances in ways that were

more conducive to survival better than other normative beliefs (Street 2006, 132).

Those organisms that had the normative belief that they had a reason to care about

their offspring responded to their circumstances in ways that would allow their

offspring to survive and carry on the line; those organisms that had the normative

belief that they had no reason to care about their offspring were less successful.

Thus, the adaptive link account can explain why certain normative beliefs are

widespread. From these observations Street draws the conclusion that the anti-

realist constructivist stance is the best explanation of why evolution would produce

the normative beliefs we have: evaluative truth is best understood as a function of

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the evaluative judgments and attitudes that selective pressures have given us

(Street 2006, 154).

What can we make of these arguments? I will begin with several questions

that should be raised about Parfit’s proposal. The first is a skeptical question about

Parfit’s expectations concerning what normative beliefs an evolutionary process

would produce. In his discussion of evolution, Parfit seems to be operating under

the classical understanding of evolutionary advantage as inveterately egoistic,

namely that whatever actions or disposition spreads an individual organism’s

genetic material furthest is what will be selected for. This understanding of

evolutionary advantage makes it difficult to see how, for example, altruistic

behavior could be selected for. Since altruistic behavior would lead an individual to

devote scarce resources to further other people’s fitness at the expense of the

agent’s fitness, altruistic behavior seem evolutionarily disadvantageous almost by

definition. Parfit’s conclusion that altruistic normative beliefs could not have been

selected for largely rests on this kind of reasoning: insofar as altruistic beliefs lead

to altruistic behavior, it seems unlikely that altruistic beliefs could be evolutionarily

selected for. But this egoistic account of evolutionary advantage is quite an

outdated view. A more expansive view of evolutionary advantage can expand the

scope of possible normative beliefs that could arise from an evolutionary

mechanism.

Economist Robert Frank details finds one example of a more expansive view

in his 1988 book Passions Within Reason. Frank wants to explain how altruism came

to be advantageous in a system that selects for individual advantage. Frank is

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unsatisfied with the usual explanations of altruism’s advantageousness in terms of

either reciprocating altruism, group selection forms of altruism, and kin-altruism.

These explanations are unsatisfactory for several reasons. The cases of

reciprocating altruism and group selection are problematic because they only

establish that altruistic behavior would be selected for on the group level.

Individuals do not have the incentive to act altruistically, only to ensure that

someone in the group act altruistically. Thus, both kinds are subject to collective

action problems where egoistic actions are the most advantageous behavior (Frank

1988, 38). It therefore seems implausible to suppose that altruism arose in this

way. Kin-altruism avoids these sorts of problems, as an individual’s altruistic action

of sacrificing herself for her immediate family members does further her genetic

material at the expense ostensible of what ostensibly seems like her own immediate

self-interest. But the advantages kin-altruism for one’s immediate family is direct

enough to the altruistic agent that Frank does not believe that it really needs to be

explained. The sort of altruism Frank wants to capture is of the sort where there is

what Frank calls “golden opportunities,” where there is no plausible way that the

acting agent could accrue benefits from the action (Frank 1988, 74).

One clear example of a golden opportunity is the case Sally, the passing-

through traveler. While on a road trip, she stops at a diner to eat. At the end of the

meal, she is given the bill and begins to consider if she should tip. All the self-

interested reasons that might normally compel her to tip are not operative in her

present circumstances: all her services have been rendered to her, the waitress is

not kin to Sally, she most likely will never eat at this diner ever again, and she is by

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herself so she is at no risk of developing a reputation for being a cheapskate or bad

tipper. Nevertheless she tips anyway. Frank notes that for altruistic behavior in

such a golden opportunity to be selected for evolutionarily, golden opportunity

altruists must accrue some advantage that a golden opportunity egoist—e.g. Sally’s

sister, Betty, who, when put in the same circumstances as Sally, elects not to tip—do

not have access to. Yet it seems like all available advantage granting mechanisms

that might explain such an action’s evolutionary fitness are impotent to explain the

advantages of golden opportunity altruism. It seems the only recourse is to classify

Sally’s altruistic actions—and others like it—as irrational behavior (Frank 1988,

18). In an evolutionary context, therefore, the disposition to act like Sally would

seemingly not be selected for.

Frank thinks this evaluation of Sally is misguided, for there surely are

advantages that an altruist like Sally might enjoy that an opportunist or egoist like

Betty would not. Frank notes that whenever agents act, they are sending signals to

those around them about what their dispositions are like (Frank 1988, 98). In

particular these signals tell others how this person would act as a cooperative

partner. Would they be the type who would steal money in a business partnership

when the conditions make it likely that they will not get caught? In prisoner

dilemma scenarios where it is in the individual’s self-interest to not cooperate, do

they still act cooperatively? If given the choice between cooperating with a golden

opportunity altruist and a golden opportunity egoist, the rational choice is to work

with the altruist, as one would not have to worry about being taken advantage of or

cheated. Thus signaling that one is a cooperating altruist who can be trusted to not

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cheat accrues benefits to the golden opportunity altruist that the golden opportunity

egoist does not have access to. For example, golden opportunity altruists are given

tasks involving sensitive or valuable items because they are trusted that they will be

honest even if they have a low risk of getting caught.

One response to Frank’s claims about altruism is that the more advantageous

behavior than altruism is to be a cooperative imitator, i.e. one who transmits a

cooperative signal like the altruist but will act egoistically when the conditions make

it favorable that such actions will not be detected. There are three reasons

however, why altruist-imitating kind of behavior might not be optimal. First,

genuinely golden opportunities with no possibility of negative repercussions for

opportunistic behavior are fairly rare events. Frequently there is at least a slight

probability that someone could find out about that opportunistic behavior in a way

that it would be could disadvantageous for the opportunistic agent. Second, as a

practical matter it is difficult to discern in real time between these golden and non-

golden opportunities. Third, Frank notes that signals of one’s disposition are often

transmitted through displays of emotion, body language, and general dispositions

that are difficult to change on a whim. Golden opportunities, Frank suggests, are

more like training events where one cultivates the disposition of sending

cooperative signals so that in non-golden opportunity scenarios transmitting

cooperative signals is easier and more second nature (Frank 1988, 18-19). The

point of introducing the phenomena of cooperative signaling is that it gives a

plausible explanation for how unopportunistic behavior like following the Golden

Rule, an example of a moral belief that most people hold some approximation of,

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could be advantageous over competing egoistic strategies such that evolutionary

forces would select for the unopportunistic behavior (Frank 1988, 145).

Parfit, of course, might well grant that altruistic behavior might be

advantageous over egoistic behavior in some circumstances, but the present issue is

whether normative beliefs could be subject to selective pressures and thus

contribute to an organism’s overall fitness. Parfit is certainly correct that first-order

beliefs and actions are subject to selective pressures and are thus primary

contributors to an organism’s fitness. But I think there are ways in which normative

beliefs could contribute to an organism’s evolutionary fitness. Parfit’s account

seems to ignore the fact that organisms—certainly humans but perhaps other

animals too—do not exclusively wander through their lives mindlessly responding

to the surrounding environment. Frequently one has to choose what action to take,

where one should go, how much food one should save for winter, and so on. In so

choosing, the agent must decide not only the end that she wants to achieve, but also

the means to achieving that end. Central to this decision-making process are the

reasons there are for each mean and end under consideration.

In deliberation one is confronted with a bevy of possible actions to choose

from, but certain actions are better than others in that they have a greater net of

reasons in favor of them. To know which action has an optimum set of reasons in its

favor—or, more modestly, whether some action A has more reasons in its favor than

action B—requires that one have some way of evaluating these reasons. One might

call such evaluative beliefs meta-normative beliefs. For instance, imagine that a

creature sensed a dangerous predator lurked near a waterhole. Since the creature

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has reason to avoid extended exposure to harmful forces and to obtain basic life

necessities, she has reasons to approach the waterhole and avoid it as well. What

the creature should do—that is, what will allow her to fulfill her own goals—is

influenced by the relative salience of the conflicting reasons. If the predator is

relatively slow moving or the creature has some means of easily escaping an attack,

then the reason to avoid the waterhole should be discounted. Conversely, if the

waterhole is not the only water source available; then the creature has more of a

reason to avoid this waterhole and seek out a safer alternative. If the creature does

not have enough information about the current situation to prioritize these reasons,

then the creature has a salient reason to gather data about the situation to try to

break the deadlock. The ability to prioritize some reasons as more salient than

others allows the creature to respond to the most important reasons of a situation

without devoting scarce resources responding to other, less salient, reasons.

Normative beliefs are the subject matter of deliberations that are ranked in

order of salience according to meta-normative beliefs. In this way, normative and

meta-normative beliefs allow the planner to determine which course of action has

the highest net balance of reasons in its favor. If planning and deliberation could

afford an organism any advantages at all, then normative and meta-normative

beliefs are central to that advantage. Consider, as a contrast, a different animal that

had no ability or interest in prioritizing the salience of reasons. It seems that such a

creature would struggle to develop a consistently efficient plan that tracks the most

salient reasons if she was not able to somehow evaluate the various reasons of a

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situation. I conclude that it is plausible to think that an organism who is aware of

salient reasons would have an advantage over creatures who did not.

We can tie these two criticisms of Parfit together by asking how natural

selection could produce specifically altruistic normative beliefs. As Frank has

pointed out, certain altruistic attitudes are useful in forming mutually advantageous

partnerships with others in ways that opportunistic attitudes might not. An

individual who is attempting to plan what kind of life she is to live might note that

displaying altruistic and cooperative behavior grants advantages that egoistic and

opportunistic behavior does not. Furthermore, displaying altruistic behavior sends

the signal that she will continue to act altruistically in the future. It is very difficult

to send a consistent altruistic signal while simultaneously displaying some instances

of non-altruistic behavior. The agent thus has a reason to consistently display

altruistic behavior. Having the normative belief that she has a reason to act

altruistically would serve as a motivational ground for that action. Consider the

alternative scenario; if she wanted to display altruistic behavior but lacked any

sense that she had a reason to do so, it would be very hard to see what would

motivate her to continually display that behavior, especially in situations where it

would be tempting to display non-altruistic behavior. The advantage of having an

altruistic normative belief is that it provides a motivation to act altruistically.

Of course, this is only one counter instance to Parfit’s claim that our

evolution could not be the provider of our normative beliefs. The further task here

would be to show that each of the normative beliefs that Parfit thinks people

generally share could have been the product of evolutionary forces. It seems to me,

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though, that most of the moral beliefs and normative beliefs that Parfit takes to be

implausibly explained by evolution could be presented with a story, mutatis

mutandis, similar to the one Frank gives about altruistic behavior.

Parfit has a partial response to this kind of argument is that even if there

were some kind of evolutionary story that satisfactorily explained why we have our

slate of normative beliefs, this would be more of a strike against his opponents like

Street than against himself. It is difficult, Parfit claims, to see how an evolutionary

explanation of our normative beliefs would debunk or undermine our having those

beliefs (Parfit 2011, 537). If our beliefs were produced by evolution they would

nevertheless “correspond to some of the independent normative truths” about the

world, e.g. pain is something we have a reason to avoid, that we have a reason to

care for our children, etc. (Parfit 2011, 533). If our ability to recognize normative

beliefs is analogous to physical adaptations by contributing to our successful

flourishing in the world, then there is nothing distortive about such normative

beliefs (Parfit 2011, 515). But this position Parfit mentions would be some form of

naturalism that he would reject, as he clearly states that the normative properties

our beliefs refer to are not “a discoverable part of the natural world” nor are they

causally efficacious (Parfit 2011, 496). Parfit’s rejection of naturalism entails that he

cannot help himself to naturalism as a fallback position in resisting Street. Parfit is

correct, however, that one can reject the undermining claim of the antirealist if one

adopts some kind of metaethical naturalism, a statement that Street agrees with

(Street 2006, 126), but that is little help to him.

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What then of Street’s advocacy for anti-realism? There are two arguments

that are crucial to her case for anti-realism: the weakness of the truth-tracking

alternative and the strength of her adaptive link account of normative beliefs. For

the purposes of this essay I will limit my examination to some of Street’s arguments

against truth-tracking alternative.

One of Street’s objections to metaethical naturalism is that the truth-tracking

option does not give an adequate explanation of how the knowledge of independent

evaluative truths facilitates evolutionary fitness. Her argument grants that believing

in some truths, namely about an organism’s immediate circumstances, is clearly

survival conducive. But it seems that believing other kinds of truths, such as truths

about low frequency electromagnetic wavelengths, would hardly be survival

conducive at all (Street 2006, 130) and it appears that evaluative truths would be in

this latter category. This is a fairly weak argument for two reasons. First, it’s not

clear to me that any truth-tracking realist is committed to every truth about the

natural world being survival conducive. Second, as I have outlined earlier, it seems

that normative beliefs are the basis for deliberation and planning, and the

evaluation of those beliefs by meta-normative beliefs are central in discerning and

tracking the most salient reasons within a given circumstance. If deliberative

planning affords a creature any advantage over undeliberative progression through

life, then normative and meta-normative beliefs are central to that advantage. This

leads me to conclude that having normative and meta-normative beliefs could

contribute to a creature’s evolutionary fitness.

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Street’s other argument for believing that the evaluative judging tendency is

at the heart of the formation of our normative beliefs is that there is dispositional

diversity across species. If we had evolved to be like lions—where a male lion

eating a non-relative cub is common—or like bonobos—where sexual promiscuity

is abundant—or even still like insects—where individuals sacrifice themselves for

the sake of the colony—then our evaluative tendencies, and thus our normative

beliefs, would be very different than the ones we have (Street 2006, 119). Street

claims dispositional diversity is difficult for the realist who wants to claim that

dispositions are formed in response to some facts about the world because different

species display different dispositions even though they are all subject to the same

environmental facts. This warrants two responses. First, it seems implausible to

deny that all species have some general dispositions, for example, to avoid

unnecessary exposure to harmful forces and to obtain basic necessities for life.

These dispositions are in response to facts about what they need to survive, but

species are obviously free to develop different strategies to those reasons in

different ways. More importantly, though, it seems clear that in many ways

different creatures are subject to different facts; a species’ specific makeup makes

some facts about their environment more salient than they would for species with

different makeups. A member of a slow-moving species has a reason to avoid the

territory of fast predator that quicker-moving species do not have. For a species like

humans that lacks tremendous speed or strength relative to other species, it might

well be the case that they have a salient reason to cooperate and coordinate their

collective actions in order to flourish as a species.

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In this paper I have tried to argue for a middle position of metaethical

naturalism between Street’s anti-realism and Parfit’s non-naturalism. Since

effectively pursuing one’s goals frequently involves evaluating various plans of

action on the salience of their reasons, I think we have reason to believe that

normative beliefs could be subject to evolutionary pressures, but that this fact does

not necessarily undermine the justification for holding these normative beliefs.

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Works Cited

Frank, Robert H. Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of Emotions. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.

Parfit, Derek. On What Matters. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011

Street, Sharon. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical Studies. 127 (2006): 109-66.

---. “Reply to Copp: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Varieties of Realism Worth Worrying About.” Philosophical Issues (a supplement to Noûs), vol. 18 on “Interdisciplinary Core Philosophy,” ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008, pp. 207-228.