The Caveman's Conscience

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THE CAVEMAN’S CONSCIENCE: EVOLUTIONAND MORAL REALISM

Scott M. James

An increasingly popular moral argument has it that the story of human

evolution shows that we can explain the human disposition to make moral

judgments without relying on a realm of moral facts. Such facts can thus be

dispensed with. But this argument is a threat to moral realism only if there is

no realist position that can explain, in the context of human evolution, the

relationship between our particular moral sense and a realm of moral facts. I

sketch a plausible evolutionary story that illuminates this relationship. First,the sorts of adaptive pressures facing early humans would have produced more

than just potent prosocial emotions, as evolutionary antirealists like to claim;

it would have produced judgmentsoften situated within emotionsto the

effect that others could reasonably disapprove of some bit of conduct, for an

early human who cared deeply about how others might respond to her action

enjoyed the benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans

who did not. Second, according to objectivist versions of moral constructivism,

moral facts just are facts about how others, ideally situated, would respond to

one’s conduct. Thus if any objectivist moral constructivism story is true, then

we can intelligibly assert that a) our capacity for moral judgment is the

product of adaptive pressures acting on early humans and b) some moral

judgments are objectively true.

Introduction

My aim in this paper is to counter an increasingly popular metaethical

argument, one that moves from an evolutionary account of our moral

psychology to the denial of moral facts or truths. Although this style of argument is not new, recent developments in the biological sciences

strengthen the conviction that the basic line of thinking is sound [Joyce

2005; Street 2006; Kitcher 2005; Lahti 2003]. In essence, the argument

asserts that the best explanation of the human disposition to make moral

judgments need not make reference to a realm of moral facts. We can

explain our tendency to ascribe moral properties to actions and persons

without having to assume that such properties really exist [cf. Harman

1977]. The only assumptions we need are the comparatively uncontroversial

ones we get from developmental biologists, anthropologists, and psychol-ogists. But without any explanatory need for moral facts, the need for such

facts disappears. Hence, the only metaethical position available to the moral

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 215–233; June 2009

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

ISSN 0004-8402 print/ISSN 1471-6828 online Ó 2009 Australasian Association of Philosophy

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/00048400802358016

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theorist serious about evolutionary theory is said to be some version of

antirealism.

Previous writers have objected to this general style of argument by

drawing attention to controversial assumptions about the nature of

explanation and the unwarranted push for reduction. For example, it is

sometimes maintained that what counts as ‘the best explanation’ will depend

on, inter alia, one’s interests in giving an explanation, the level of

explanation one takes to be appropriate, one’s background theories, and

so on [Shafer-Landau 2003; Sayre-McCord 1989]. As a result, whether or

not there exist moral facts appears to depend on one’s starting point. I

propose striking out in a different direction. I propose confronting the

argument head-on: the best explanation of why we evolved the moral

psychology we did cannot, as the evolutionary anti-realist maintains, proceed

without reference to moral facts or moral truths. As I aim to show, there is,

on the one hand, an independently plausible account of what makes somemoral judgments objectively true and, on the other, a perfectly sensible

account of why natural selection would have favoured the recognition of

those truths. If this is right, then moral truths play an ineliminable role in

explaining the evolution of the human moral sense.

In two parts, here’s the idea. First, the sorts of adaptive pressures facing

early humans would have produced judgmentsoften situated within

emotionsto the effect that others could reasonably disapprove of some bit

of conduct, for an early human who cared deeply about how others who

shared a particular social standpoint might respond to her action enjoyedthe benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans who did

not. And this in turn conferred a reproductive advantage on that individual.

Second, according to objectivist versions of moral constructivism, facts

about how others would respond to one’s conduct not only characterize our

particular moral sense, but moral facts or truths themselves, because, on the

constructivist account, moral facts are determined by, very roughly, the

principles that would survive scrutiny from a particular normatively

grounded standpoint.1 Evolutionary theory then does not undermine moral

realism. I contend that evolutionary theory explains why moral realism islikely to be true.

In Section I, I lay out the challenge to moral realism that evolutionary

theory purportedly embodies, drawing heavily from the recent work of

Richard Joyce, who has offered the most extensive case against moral

realism in the context of evolution. In Section II, I show that the

evolutionary antirealist’s positive account of our moral psychology

1It’s worth asking, in the context of the growing popularity of evolutionary anti-realism, why more attentionhas not been given to moral constructivism, particularly since the evolutionary accounts offered by such anti-realists as Joyce and Kitcher avail themselves of distinctly constructivist notions. My guess is that thesewriters assume that moral constructivism simply cannot count as a moral realist view since it would appearthat the facts that ground moral judgments according to constructivism are in no way objective or mind-independent. But a moment’s glance at contemporary metaethical debates reveals that this assumption is byno means obvious. Indeed, there are compelling reasons to think that (at least some versions of)constructivism deserve to be called realist. For example, on some constructivist accounts, there is theconceptual possibility that everyone could be mistaken what the moral facts are, but that the nature of agiven domain allows for ‘global error’ is plausibly regarded as an indication that we ought to be realists aboutthe properties of that domain. I return to this issue in Section 5 below.

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suppresses at least one critical component, viz., the internalization of others’

evaluative attitudes. I argue that the evolution of this psychological

component not only provides a better explanation of our moral experience,

but also explains why we should expect the structure of morality to consist

in the relationship between our conduct and the evaluative attitudes of

others. In Section III, I address several objections one might raise against

my proposal, and in Section IV, I review empirical evidence indirectly

supporting my proposal. Finally, in Section V, I argue that understanding

morality in terms of the evaluative attitudes of agents seeking mutual

agreement is precisely how the moral constructivist understands the nature

of right and wrong; I rehearse, rather briefly, the basic structure of this view

and the ways in which some authors plausibly regard this view as a form of

moral realism.

I.

Richard Joyce has recently argued that a Darwinian-based moral

psychology supports moral projectivism, according to which moral proper-

ties are ‘projected’ onto the world in the way that, say, cold is projected onto

snow [2005: 125]. On this view, properties such as right and wrong, good

and evil, are not objective properties of actions or persons. Instead, their

existence depends entirely on our particular moral sensea sense that, on

Joyce’s view, is entirely explained by our evolutionary past. But thisgenealogical account is thought to undermine the truth of judgments

containing such concepts, as the following argument attempts to show.

Vindicating a realm of moral facts in the context of evolution depends

critically on showing that the evolution of our moral sense, including our

disposition to make moral judgments, evolved as a consequence of our

recognition of moral facts.2 But this is not how evolution played out.

According to the central claim of evolutionary antirealism, the selection

pressures facing early humans did not need to shape humans in ways that

improved apprehension of the moral facts (as if there were any); what wasneeded was simply improved social cooperation. Joyce expresses the central

claim this way: ‘the function that natural selection had in mind for moral

judgment was [nothing] remotely like detecting a feature of the world, but

rather something more like encouraging successful social behaviour’ [Joyce

2005: 131]. Philip Kitcher expresses the central claim this way:

At the initial stage, proto-morality is introduced as a system of primitive rules

for transcending the fraught sociality of early hominids: there’s no issue here

of perceiving moral truths . . . The criterion of success isn’t accurate

representation, but the improvement of social cohesion . . .[2005: 176]

2It is of course conceivable that there is no causal relation between the selective forces of evolution and theevaluative judgments we tend to make, but following Street [2006], I doubt that this is the realist’s mostpromising path, for this would mean that it was a fortunate accident that our psychologies happen to trackevaluative facts.

Evolution and Moral Realism 217

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Sharon Street expresses the central claim in more general terms: ‘the

function of evaluative judgments from an evolutionary point of view is not

to ‘‘track’’ independent evaluative truths, but rather to get us to respond to

our circumstances in ways that are adaptive’ [2006: 157–8]. In short,

practical success, not cognitive success, was the evolutionary solution to the

adaptive pressures facing early humans. But despite the widespread appeal

of the central claim, it is (I will argue) mistaken. For what no evolutionary

antirealist considers and part of what this paper is meant to articulate is the

distinct possibility that these two ‘functions’i.e. detecting a feature of the

world, on the one hand, and encouraging social cohesion, on the otherare

in fact parts of the same moral faculty. As I hope to show, improved social

cohesion requires fairly sophisticated moral judgments. This story will

emerge in the next section.

Evolutionary antirealists lay heavy emphasis on the fact that our moral

judgments play a dynamic role in shaping not only our practicaldeliberation, but also our emotions and desires. Indeed, Joyce maintains

that ‘the human tendency to project emotions onto the world lies at the

heart of our moral sense’ [2005: 108]. But whereas the realist holds that this

emotional projection is but one (contingent) part of morality, where at least

one other part of morality consists of moral facts, the antirealist believes

that this projection is all there is to morality. So where the realist contends

that the disgust we feel in response to some bit of viciousness, for example, is

normally a sign of an objective moral property of the world, the antirealist

contends that there is nothing other than the disgust.3

Joyce’s view is moresophisticated, since he acknowledges that moral predicates express both

conative and cognitive states of mind like belief [2005: 151 ff.]. It’s just that

the latter, on Joyce’s view, fail to refer. At any rate, the central claim is

meant to deliver a substantive metaethical thesis: apart from the moral

motivational tendencies exhibited by humans (however beliefs figure in the

mix), there are no moral facts to speak of. Our motivational tendencies

exhaust the moral realm.

But while antirealist views of morality are not new, defenders of

evolutionary antirealism like to point out that their view possesses theadded virtue of being empirically grounded. Says Joyce: ‘Projectivism is the

predictable result of natural selection’s tight-fisted efficiency’ [2005: 128].

Why? Because in order to solve cooperative problems facing early humans,

natural selection would have favoured individuals who made a distinct type

of judgmentwhat we now think of as a moral judgment even though the

predicates that figure in such a judgment fail to refer. But this failure of

reference is unimportant from the view of natural selection, since, as the

central claim asserts, the function of moral judgments during our

Pleistocene past was not referential success, but social cohesion.

For the evolutionary antirealist, the source of our capacity to make moral

judgments lies in early humans’ attempts to resolve the recurrent adaptive

problem of social exchange. Early humans who cooperated in joint ventures

3Cf. Ruse [1986: 234]: ‘Morality has no more (and no less) status than that of the terror we feel at theunknownanother emotion which undoubtedly has good biological value.’

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(e.g. hunting or foraging) tended to reap greater reproductive advantages

than those individuals who did not. At the same time, as is clear from

Prisoner’s Dilemma, an individual who selectively exploited the cooperation

of others stood to gain an even greater reproductive advantage. However,

since the cost of being exposed as an exploiter tended to be greater than the

cost of cooperating (at least over the long run), the following adaptive

problem would have confronted early humans: how to commit oneself to

cooperating, despite the strong temptation to defect. One solution to the

problem would have been a special motivational mechanism designed to

suppress or discourage maladaptive social behaviours. And how to do this?

Design an individual with a conscience. Someone with a conscience is likely

to commit to cooperating even when, in that instance, it may be prudentially

irrational to do so. The genealogical thesis then is that ‘natural selection has

made us want to cooperate, and granting us a tendency to think of

cooperation in moral terms (where this includes the capacity for guilt) is ameans of securing this desire’ [Joyce 2005: 115]. The overall result is a

population of individuals who are driven to cooperate, not because they

recognize the independent fairness or rightness of cooperating, but because

the disposition to cooperate conferred reproductive advantages on their

ancestors, from whom they inherit the disposition. And this would smoothly

explain the platitude that moral judgments are ‘strongly authoritative

prosocial ’ prescriptions.4

Putting all this together, then, we have the following story: early humans,

faced with the recurrent problem of social exchange, evolved the dispositionto feel and judge that certain actions are wrong, and such attitudes played a

dynamic role in shaping individuals’ practical lives in ways that encouraged

social cooperation. But since this account can successfully explain moral

judgments and our moral sense without positing moral facts, we can dispense

with moral facts altogether.

II.

There are of course subtleties and details I have had to leave out. But, for

our purposes, the above description will do. The question we need to

consider now is: if we accept this general description of moral judgment and

moral sense, and even the rough picture of the adaptive problems facing

early humans, are we committed to the antirealist account of morality? In

the remainder of the paper I want to show why the answer is no. But I will

not simply argue that there are other stories compatible with the above

assumptions, for the evolutionary antirealist need not deny this. Rather, I

4The sort of genealogical debunking the evolutionary anti-realist is pressing is modelled on the following sortof example [Joyce 2005: 179]. Suppose you come to believe that there is a pill that causes people to believethat Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, and suppose that you come to believe that you weresurreptitiously slipped just such a pill as a teenager. If you are inclined to say that this causal account of yourbelief about Napoleon undermines your warrant for that belief, then you should be similarly inclined to thinkthat the evolutionary account of your moral sense undermines your warrant for your moral beliefs. In bothinstances, coming to believe that p is explained by a causal process that has nothing to do with the fact that p.While p may no doubt obtain, justification for our believing it does must rest on independent grounds.


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want to sketch another account of morality, one that not only does a better

job of explaining our moral experiences, but does so in the context of a

realm of moral truths. I do not intend for this story to represent merely a

‘how possibly’ story; converging lines of evidence suggest that there were

real constraints on the sorts of evolutionary pressures shaping the structure

of our moral psychologies. I present this evidence in the course of my

discussion.

The alternative account I wish to advance involves two parts. The first

part is genealogical: solving the adaptive problem of social exchange

required, as all parties to the dispute agree, coordinated motivational

tendencies possessing the requisite ‘moral clout’; these tendencies, I submit,

consist in part in a special sensitivity to others’ evaluative attitudesmore

specifically, a sensitivity to whether or not others could reasonably object to

one’s conduct. Under normal conditions, this sensitivity manifests itself in a

desire to see that one’s actions could be justified to others. ‘Justifiability toothers’, therefore, plays a central role in our particular moral sense. Now, as

far as it goes, this claim is not inconsistent with antirealism. What is

inconsistent with antirealism is the second, metaethical, part of the story:

moral facts are ultimately grounded in facts about the evaluative attitudes of

others. Realist or objectivist versions of constructivism maintain that moral

facts or moral truths are constituted by the attitudes or responses of

persons, usually under idealized conditions. This brings the contents of our

particular psychologies together with the structure of moral facts in an

attractive way, for it can explain the apparent objectivity of moraljudgments without introducing dubious elements into our ontology. But

for the purposes of this discussion, it is inessential which constructivist view

we champion, so long as it constitutes a form of moral realism. According to

the view that I favour, what I will call contractualist constructivism, the

truth-makers for moral claims are, at bottom, facts about reasons, viz., those

reasons that count in favour of norms of behaviour that no one with the aim

of fixing on principles to regulate behaviour could reasonably reject. Thus

the wrong-making property of a wrongful act consists in the fact that it is

prohibited by a principle that no one could reasonably reject.5

Taken together, the genealogical and metaethical claims could be read to

imply that the evolution of our particular moral sense was the result of the

recognition of facts about hypothetical agreement. Thus an early human,

disposed to judge that others could reasonably object to what she was intent

on doing and motivated by that judgment, enhanced reproductive fitness

partly because such judgments were sometimes true. And this, I will

maintain, constitutes a moral realism worthy of the name, for inter alia it

supports the possibility of global error. In the remainder of this section, I

focus on the genealogical part of the story. In Section V, I fill in the

metaethical component.

Early humans needed a way of committing to adaptive social behaviour.

The evolutionary antirealist’s solution is to design an individual with a

powerful distaste for maladaptive social behaviour, a distaste that is

5This formulation follows Scanlon’s [1998] detailed proposal.

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occasionally, but not necessarily, backed by a belief that maladaptive

behaviour is prohibited . A better solution, and one that does not require

additional cognitive resources, is to design an individual to care powerfully

about how others view her, where this concern (or something suitably close)

supplies the content of one’s moral judgment. Indeed, something like this

must be true, for there is more to our moral motivational tendencies than

the evolutionary antirealist tends to admit. As I will argue, designing human

psychology to be intimately connected to the attitudes of others is nearly a

mandatory requirement for social beings such as ourselves. And this points

to the most glaring problem with evolutionary antirealism: its failure to

appreciate that only some prosocial emotions are fitness-enhancing.

The view that conscience is an evolutionary adaptation whose function is

simply to produce a distaste for maladaptive social behaviour (perhaps

coupled with a belief with no specific content apart from the idea that some

actions are prohibited ) considerably under-describes its structure. If what wethink of as conscience is an evolutionary adaptation, then, like other

adaptations, we should expect that it is domain-specific and relatively

impervious to other contextual features. It should, in other words, ‘latch on

to’ certain environmental features rather than others, in the way that

different sensory systems are receptive to only one kind of input. So what

sort of input is one’s conscience designed to receive? Few evolutionary

antirealists bother to distinguish what features of the environment, if any,

such a faculty is designed to latch on to. This is not an incidental matter. A

faculty that indiscriminately produced prosocial emotionslike a facultythat indiscriminately deemed actions ‘prohibited’would not have served

an individual well. Adaptive pressures would have favoured an individual

who experienced prosocial emotions only in the right circumstances; similar

pressures would have favoured an individual who made moral judgments

that, at the very least, were coordinated with others’ expectations over time.

What this points to is a sub-problem the evolutionary anti-realist has not

addressed: how should an individual’s environment either constrain the

prosocial emotions she experiences or determine the content of one’s moral

beliefs? The solution, I contend, is both intuitively plausible and empiricallygrounded: moral judgments (and those that figure in the emotions we think

of as moral emotions, e.g., guilt) should track, as far as possible, whether or

not anyone else could reasonably condemn one’s behaviour, where

‘reasonable condemnation’ is determined by one’s adopting a particular

sort of standpoint, viz., seeking to live with others on terms they could

accept.6

The evolutionary anti-realist’s view (at least as it is standardly presented)

is inadequate because it fails to account for the coordination of our moral

sense with others’ expectations. Quite obviously, someone who experienced

anticipatory guilt whenever he entered into a cooperative exchange would

6Let me reiterate: nothing in the evolutionary anti-realist’s position prevents her from conceding just thesepoints. My aim is to direct critical attention, not to an alternative genealogical portrait, but to the manyrequirements an adequate moral sense must meet. The philosophical significance of this attention, however,cannot be overstated: by conceding that our moral sense is attuned to features not heretofore expressed, theevolutionary anti-realist may well have to concede a metaethical point, viz., that early humans’ psychologieswere being shaped by moral facts, at least according to one prominent metaethical view.


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eventually find himself the target of periodic exploitation (on the

assumption that anticipatory guilt reliably encourages cooperation). Such

feelings would prohibit him from countenancing retaliation or defection

precisely when such responses were fitness-enhancing. What is needed is a

way of representing social information in a way that effectively interfaces

with our motivational mechanisms. Such mechanisms not only should be

relatively immune to rational revision (i.e. to succumbing to prudential

calculations in bargaining situations), but should make defection costly. At

the same time, it should be flexible enough to accommodate a range of

‘noise’: errors in representation and prediction, social anomalies, and the

like. On my hypothesis, the relevant social information that one represents

to oneself is how others would receive one’s actions were they to adopt a

distinctly social standpoint. It is the adoption of this standpoint that

distinguishes the moral sense of our earliest moral ancestors from more

generally norm-guided behaviour. As I hope to show, the pressure tocoordinate our behaviour with the expectations of others, together with the

pressure to establish and preserve bargaining coalitions, would have driven

individuals to represent social information within a distinctly social frame

even as opposing pressure drove individuals to distinguish between in-group

and out-group members. (More on this later.)

Failing to represent to oneself the thought that a given conspecific could

condemn one’s behaviour on a given occasion would have obvious

biological consequences, at least over the long run. But more is required.

Representing to oneself the thought that a given conspecific could condemnone’s behaviour on a given occasion but for reasons unrelated to this

distinctly social standpoint, while practically significant, will not solve the

adaptive problem with which we began. After all, a conspecific could

condemn my behaviour for a host of reasons, some of which will be

completely idiosyncratic: it violates his personal faith; it doesn’t maximize

his own utility; perhaps he simply finds my behaviour irksome. An

individual who possessed this sort of sensitivity, while she would perhaps

increase her chances of coordinating her behaviour with the expectations of

others when compared with an individual who possessed no such sensitivity,would nevertheless be at a biological disadvantage among individuals who

possessed a more constrained sensitivity. There are several reasons why.

First, avoiding any action that could be rejected by any of one’s conspecifics

for whatever reason would limit one’s ability to act to the point of paralysis.

Second (and this will be important later), attempting to represent to oneself

the range of idiosyncratic reasons each of one’s conspecifics possess would

be ‘cortically costly’, in the sense that encoding, updating, and accessing

representations of each of one’s many conspecifics would be far more

cortically demanding than representing others in more general social terms

(e.g. as creatures with standing interests).7 Finally, attempting to represent

to oneself what others will actually condemn increases one’s chances of

acting on false-negatives: mistakenly believing that a given conspecific will

7This is not to suggest of course that there would be no pressure to store some critical information aboutspecific conspecifics (e.g. ‘Ogg never repays a debt’).

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not condemn one’s action because he is either too dim, too distracted, or too

compliant. Individuals with this disposition would over time jeopardize their

reputation by ‘overplaying their hand’.

I have argued that early humans would have been interested in not just

any reason to condemn one’s behaviour, but reasons of a particular sort:

reasons that would survive scrutiny from a particular social standpoint. On

the one hand, it’s reasonable to assume that there would have always been

(as there always will be) a degree of uncertainty about how one’s

conspecifics will receive one’s actions. But this uncertainty must, at the

risk of paralysis, be overcome. On the other hand, early humans needed a

way of separating those idiosyncratic reasons from reasons that would, over

time and across conspecifics, stand up to scrutiny. An obviousnot to

mention, cheapsolution would be the adoption of a default standpoint: if

my counterpart here were only seeking principles that all could agree to live

by, would he have any reason to condemn my behaviour?8 Bear in mind thatthe process leading up to this stage, like the processes leading up to mastery

of syntax, say, would have been gradual. Over successive generations, the

object of practical deliberation becomes increasingly abstract, to the point at

which one is concerned with the evaluations of a hypothetical observer. (We

should not ignore as well the cultural transmission of standards of

reasonableness, but where the grounds for those standards are left implicit.

There is no need to deny that we acquire a range of moral standards from

our environment. Justification, of course, is another matter.) Adopting this

standpoint would be a critical step towards flexibly coordinating one’sbehaviour with one’s conspecifics. At the same time, by displaying a

commitment to holding oneself accountable, at least in principle, for how

one governs oneself in the light of those reasons [cf. Darwall 2006], one

considerably improves one’s status as a trustworthy bargaining partner. The

adoption of such a standpoint would constrain, but not overly constrain,

one’s behaviour by constraining the reasons one ought to regard, in the

practical sense, as salient.

These observations are meant to illuminate the notion of reasonableness

as it figures in the claim that early humans would have been interested inavoiding behaviour others could reasonably reject. To be sure, the concept

of reasonableness goes beyond the concept of what others could likely reject

given the principles they actually hold. Reasonable rejection requires

adopting a standpoint that may not be shared by one’s conspecifics; it

requires appeal to a standard that forms the backdrop for practical

deliberation in an uncertain social world. I might appeal to general

expectations, social conventions, and even individual particulars in

evaluating the grounds for rejecting a piece of behaviour, but I do not

necessarily assume that affected parties either subscribe to those standards

or, even if they did, would bring them to bear in evaluating my action.9 For

8In other places I speak of what a given conspecific could reject or accept; the use of ‘could’ in these instancesis meant to be understood as hypothetical in this sense: what others would accept if they were seekingagreement on a set of principles governing behaviour.9One may even suspect that they do not. In such a situation, while it may be rational for them to reject one’sbehaviour (if, for example, doing so increases their welfare), we may nevertheless deny that doing so is


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reasons already adduced, abstracting away from particulars through the

adoption of a social standpoint, while perhaps costly in some respects,

would have constituted the necessary sort of structure to solve the adaptive

problem.

III.

This picture of psychological development, however, raises two worries.

First, why would mere ‘norm-tracking’ not prove to be as equally

(biologically) advantageous as the moral sense I’ve described, where the

norms being tracked may or may not bear any resemblance to what we

think of as moral norms? Where norms have nothing to do with morality

(e.g., the leader of the hunt should wear the Tsonga beads), we cannot

claim that moral facts played a critical role in the development of ourmoral psychology. Second, we might plausibly regard the claim that moral

norms apply to members of groups apart from our own as a platitude, but

if so, then the evolutionary pressures that I’ve identified cannot explain

this, since those pressures required only that individuals consider the

attitudes of members of their own group. Let me address these objections

in turn.

The first objection, though initially plausible, comes unravelled when re-

evaluated by the standards of evolutionary logic. Mere ‘norm-tracking’, it

turns out, would have exhibited a fatal limitation. Confronted with anysituation in which one’s (proposed) action A is either covered by conflicting

norms or not covered by any existing norm, mere ‘norm-trackers’ will feel

free to perform A even when A could be reasonably condemned by those

affected by A. Consequently, mere norm-trackers expose themselves to

condemnation and the possible loss of future exchanges where the sorts of

individuals I’m describing do not.10 Individuals aligning their behaviour to

those standards that no one could reasonably reject would not only cover

many of the norms in a communitysince such standards will be co-

extensional with, for example, norms prohibiting gratuitous harmbut alsonorms that are not yet either considered or codified. A moral sense that

latched on to others’ evaluative standpoints and evaluated them against the

backdrop of public expectations about self-governance would have provided

a reliable means of producing appropriate prosocial emotions like guilt since

an early humanwhose thoughts of exploiting her neighbour were reliably

coupled with thoughts of how her neighbour could reasonably respond to

that treatmentwould experience anticipatory guilt only when it would be

rational to do so (assuming, again, there is a reliable association between

such thoughts and anticipatory guilt). Someone who was disposed to

judge whether others could accept her action and conformed her behaviour

to standards no one could object to would be the very image of

trustworthiness.

reasonable [Scanlon 1998: 191–3]. We might explain this by saying that it would be one’s right to act in thatway, even though one chooses not to exercise that right for prudential considerations.10Peter Carruthers and I [2008] discuss this point in more detail.

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The second objection begins with the assumption that moral norms are, to

a considerable extent, impartial . The solution to the adaptive problem that

I’ve described, however, apparently did not require considering whatanyone

would object to, only what in-group members would object to. Indeed,

anthropological evidence strongly suggests that we possess systems that

work against the social standpoint I’ve proposed [Brewer 1999; Boyd &

Richerson 2005]: we draw distinctions between in-group and out-group

members and, as a result, sometimes make permissibility judgments that

would be incorrect from the social standpoint described above. Is this a

problem for my account? I don’t believe it is. First, it is worth noting that, as

it happens, there is no received view among anthropologists regarding

discrimination against outsiders. Some argue that successful bands of

hominids, notwithstanding a general prejudice toward outsiders, developed

means of cooperation with unrelated bands of hominids [Wilson et al. 1992;

Macy and Skvoretz 1998]. But let us suppose discrimination did pay. Theobjection is unconvincing, for while it may be true that our moral sense

evolved among small bands of hominids, hominids who may have already

possessed a disposition to discriminate against outsiders, the disposition to

adopt the social standpoint would have yielded true moral judgments,

judgments that applied to out-group members, even in the absence of

reflection on out-group members. The reason, simply put, is that out-group

members would have been similar to in-group members along the relevant

dimensions.

Recall that successfully overcoming the recurrent adaptive problem of exchange was bound by constraints on representation: given the limitations

on recollection and prediction, an individual is forced to rely on the more

universal features of conspecificsfor example, patterns of emotional

reaction based on involuntary facial expressions.11 But since these

expressions (and other traits targeted for detection) would be shared by

in-group and out-group hominids, the moral sense I’ve described would,

ceteris paribus, be triggered in situations involving out-group members. In

fact, if this were not the case, it would be difficult to explain the fact that

very young children in a vast array of cultures judge some norm-violations(what turn out, on my picture, to be moral norm violations) as

impermissible independently of where they occur or whom they affect [Nucci

et al. 1983; Hollos et al. 1986; Nichols 2004]. Observe as well the striking

psychological fact that components of this system are reflected in early

ontogenetic development. Developmental psychologists have observed that

children as young as three i) have the capacity for both counterfactual and

deontic reasoning [Harris et al. 1986]; ii) distinguish between intentional

and unintentional harm in making moral judgments [Nelson-Le Gall 1985];

and iii) appeal to rights in the contexts of moral transgressions [Smetana

1989]. Of course, left unexplained is the fact that humans are all too partial

to their own groups; it would appear that we sometimes make false moral

judgments regarding members of other groups. But it is important to point

11For a compelling account of how involuntary ‘symptoms’ of emotional states like guilt serve to telegraphone’s intentions in such a way as to reassure potential bargaining partners, see Frank [1989].


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out that the tracking account I’ve proposed is not undermined by the

making or holding of false moral judgments, anymore than a tracking

account of perceptual systems is undermined by the making or holding of

false perceptual judgments.12 What would undermine my account is if we

have reason to believe that a preponderance of early humans’ moral

judgments were false (by the constructivist’s lights) and yet this did nothing

to decrease their biological fitness. But I’ve tried to show that this would

have been highly improbable: individuals that systematically acted in ways

that others could reasonably condemn faced bleak futures, social and

otherwise.

IV.

I have argued for the evolution of a moral sense, in large measure, by takingadvantage of standard evolutionary logic. But several lines of empirical

research provide indirect support for the view. First, psychologists have for

some time now maintained that the mind is innately equipped with a ‘theory

of mind’ (TOM) module or system, whose function is to ascribe beliefs and

desires to conspecifics as a means of explaining and predicting behaviour

[Baron-Cohen 1995; Carruthers et al. 2005]. While disputes remain about

how to understand the TOM module [cf. Goldman 2006], a consensus has

developed around the idea that our social understanding of the world is

erected around a core set of assumptions about the mental states that moveother people. But a TOM module is precisely the sort of cognitive precursor

one would expect if one were independently drawn to the view that our

moral sense is attuned to the evaluative attitudes of others. (And the fact

that this ability develops quite early ontogenetically supports the adaptation

hypothesis.) If the outputs of this module interface with one’s first-person

set of hypotheses about what sorts of experiences lead to what sorts of

mental states, then through induction one can generate hypotheses about

the sorts of evaluative attitudes others are likely to have under a range of

circumstances.13

Second, one of the more unexpected features of both many primate

societies and extant hunter-gatherer tribes is a strong tendency towards

egalitarianism [Binmore 1998; Boehm 1999; de Waal, 1996]. One explana-

tion for this tendency is that ‘humans are singling out competitive or

predatory behaviours that are likely to cause conflict, and, by suppressing

them, they are, in effect, damping conflicts pre-emptively’ [Boehm 1999: 85].

Boehm thus supposes that ‘the first behaviour to be outlawed and controlled

by a human group may well have been the expression of dominance’ [ibid.:

12My account is compatible with the evolution of other systemse.g., systems supporting strong preferencefor kin and local conspecificsthat would have sometimes moved an individual to ignore the deliverances of the moral system. This is, after all, consistent with a range of psychological findings: in select environments,two or more evolved cognitive systems deliver competing information or competing motivations.13Darwall has recently tried to illuminate this connection in normative terms: ‘the ability to attribute beliefsand feelings to others is intimately bound up with the capacity to engage one another second-personally’,where second-person engagement ‘requires the capacity to put oneself in another’s shoesin a word,empathy’ [2006: 98].

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The view that one’s conscience is effectively a faculty for evaluating and

conforming one’s behaviour to the evaluative attitudes of others yields a

positive thesis about guilt, viz., that guilt is the internalization of others’

reactions. A range of writers has endorsed such a view. William James, for

example, articulates the ‘justifiability to others’ view when he writes: ‘Yet

still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal

social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the

highest possible judging companion, if such a companion there be.’15 More

recently, Patricia Greenspan has argued that guilt involves ‘sharing the

evaluative standpoint of another person’ [1995: 129]. The moral content of

moral guilt is supplied by a judgment to the effect that others could

justifiably find fault with one’s behaviour, and this judgment is motivation-

ally linked to reparation. Simon Blackburn reinforces the reparative

component of guilt when he argues that guilt is an ‘awareness that our

behaviour could not survive the impartial scrutiny of others,’ and this, hesays, is ‘uncomfortable, and in principle opens up the gate to reform’ [1998:

204]. From an evolutionary standpoint, the reparative urge is noteworthy.

An individual with the capacity to experience guilt, where guilt is

understood in terms of the internalization of the evaluative standpoints of

others, is not only more likely to resist maladaptive social behaviour (in

virtue of what Greenspan calls ‘anticipatory guilt’), but more likely to repair

whatever damage her reputation may have sustained in violating others’

trust.

Indeed, the view that our moral sense is tightly linked to the evaluativeattitudes of others comes through on Joyce’s own account:

A person’s resolve to act (or not to act) is importantly affected by her

conception of how others will receive her decisions, her confidence in whom

she can justify herself, her perception of herself as acting from considerations

that would also move her fellowsin short, her experience of herself as a

social being.

[2005: 117]

Or, as he puts it a few pages later: ‘When we think of ourselves in moral

terms we are thinking of ourselves in social terms, we are evaluating actions

against the background of a collective justificatory framework’ [2005: 123].16

From the point of view of natural selection, this is precisely what we

would expect. Since an early human’s success in social interactions depended

critically on her reputation, and since, conceptually, her reputation

depended on what sorts of evaluative attitudes others take towards her,

we would expect natural selection to have favoured those individuals who

conformed their behaviour according to those standards others could not

reasonably criticize. But such conformity would require inter alia the

capacity to make judgments about what others could or could not accept.

15I have been unable to locate the source of this quotation. It forms part of an epigraph to Carruth [1993].16The metaethical significance of this remark will become even more plain in the next section, where Irehearse the view that, very roughly, this ‘collective justificatory framework’ forms the objective ground formoral judgments.

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And if, as many believe, such judgments are sometimes embedded in

affective states like guilt, then this strongly encourages the view that our

moral psychology was designed not simply to produce prosocial emotions

and content-less moral beliefs, as important as those may be, but to evaluate

and care about how others view us. It would pay for an individual to be

sensitive to whether others could raise objections to the action she was

considering performing, for with objections come social sanctions. And, in

evolutionary terms, social sanctions are costly.

I have just argued that if the social world of our early ancestors is as

complex as most theorists assume, and if social exchanges were as important

as Joyce and others contend, then only an account like mine stands a chance

of being correct. Only my account is sensitive to the finer grain description

of the adaptive problem facing early humans, according to which the

adaptive pressures of social exchange required fitness-enhancing moral

tendencies. Such tendencies, I contend, require judgments about theevaluative attitudes of others.

V.

With this sketch of our moral psychology on the table, I want to turn now to

the metaethical part of the story. As discussed in the first section, the

challenge to the evolutionary realist is to illuminate the relationship between

the adaptive pressures on early humans and moral facts, assuming for themoment there are such facts. But the challenge can be met rather directly by

appeal to one version of constructivism or another. For views of this type

take moral facts or moral truths to be constituted by the attitudes or

responses of persons, usually under idealized conditions. So a typical

constructivist will assert that what makes an action wrong are ultimately the

sorts of responses individuals, ideally situated, could have to certain types of

conduct. But at the heart of the genealogical story sketched in the previous

section was the idea that adaptive pressures would have favoured humans

who cared deeply about the types of responses others could have to certaintypes of conduct. Thus, constructivism promises to bring the contents of our

particular psychologies together with the structure of moral facts in a

theoretically attractive way.

What needs to be emphasized, however, is that a number of moral

theorists regard constructivism as a form of moral realism or moral

objectivism, where this is understood, roughly, as the view that some moral

judgments are objectively true and that this truth is independent of any

particular individual’s attitude.17 But if any one of these views is correct,

then we can intelligibly assert, on the one hand, that our capacity for moral

judgment is the product of adaptive pressures acting on early humans (along

the lines described above) and, on the other, that some moral judgments are

objectively true. We may insist that the genealogy of our moral psychology

17See, for example, Korsgaard 1996a and 1996b; Rawls 1980; Copp 1995; Milo 1995; Darwall 2006; andScanlon 1998.


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is the genealogy of a faculty sensitive to the moral facts. That humans came

to judge that ‘f-ing is morally wrong’ is explained, in part, by the fact that

f-ing is morally wrong.

At any rate, it is inessential for our purposes which constructivist view we

champion so long as a) it comports with the general genealogical story of

our moral psychology outlined above and b) it constitutes a form of moral

realism. Thus I won’t enter into a defence of any one view. Instead, I will

simply describe a view that I believe is one of the more promising

contenders, viz., Scanlonian contractualism. On this view, the truth-makers

for moral claims are, at bottom, facts about reasons, viz., those reasons that

count in favour of norms of behaviour that no one with the aim of fixing on

principles to regulate behaviour could reasonably reject.

What I’ll call contractualist constructivism brings together the idea that

morality is fundamentally a matter of reasonable agreement with the idea

that moral truths are truths about which principles people could reasonablyagree on not about an independently given moral order. The view that

morality is fundamentally about reasonable agreement is meant to capture

what it is we owe to each other at the most basic level, viz., a mutual

recognition of the reasons people have for wanting their lives to go a certain

way. The view that moral facts are facts about reasonable agreement

explains the strongly intuitive idea that some moral claims (e.g., ‘Murder for

fun is morally wrong’) are objectively true, but does so without introducing

‘queer’ properties into our ontology. Let’s start with the first of these views.

Scanlon’s version of contractualism asserts that an act A is wrong underconditions C when others could raise a legitimate objection to a principle

permitting A in C . More formally, A is wrong under C if A’s performance

under C would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general

regulation of behaviour that no one with the aim of finding such a set could

reasonably reject [Scanlon 1998: 153].18 Therefore, the truth of a moral

judgment depends on the principles co-participants could not reasonably

reject. Seen from this angle, contractualist constructivism takes moral truths

as practical truths, where these are ‘truths about what there is reason, for

some individual or group of individuals, to prefer, choose, or do, from somepoint of view’ [Milo 1995: 186]. Thus we are justified in accepting a moral

truth so long as it would be the rational choice from the standpoint of those

seeking mutual cooperation.

Now some will be unconvinced that constructivism ought to count as a

variety of moral realism. The usual motivation for this scepticism is that

moral realist views require that the facts that ground moral truths obtain

independently of agents’ psychologies, but the facts that ground moral truths

according to contractualist constructivism do not obtain independently of

agents’ psychologies. To settle this issue adequately would require far more

space than I have; it would, besides, require delving into many controversial

domains. Let me offer instead two (very) abbreviated sets of replies.19 The

18Milo [1995: 189] offers a more general constructivist framework: ‘an act is wrong if and only if it would beprohibited by any set of norms chosen by (suitably idealized) hypothetical contractors.’19To be sure, I do not take myself to be defending all forms of realism; instead, I want to show very brieflythat there is a kind of realist view against which standard arguments do not work.

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first set aims at undermining the main motivation for this kind of scepticism.

The second set adduces positive reasons for regarding contractualist

constructivism as a realist view of morality.20

There is good reason for resisting a conception of realism that requires

that the facts that ground judgments in a given domain obtain

independently of agent’s psychologies: it’s too conservative [Sayre-McCord

1989: 5 ff]. Take, for example, hedonistic utilitarianism: what makes it a fact

that some action A is morally required is that, of the available alternatives,

only A will maximize overall pleasure. But since one of the essential

components of the state of affairs that constitutes that moral fact is a

psychological state (i.e. pleasure), this would make hedonistic utilitarianism

out to be an anti-realist view, which it plainly is not. To insist, therefore, on

a conception of realism that altogether excludes reference to agents’

psychologies runs the risk of ruling out positions that, on any reasonable

construal, deserve the realist moniker.But perhaps the sort of constructivism I am proposing is mind-dependent

in a stronger sense. Consider the characterization put forward by Milo:

moral facts are strongly mind dependent if moral facts supervene on other

facts (including psychological facts) only as a consequence of these other facts

being made the object of some intentional psychological state, such as a belief

or an attitude.

[1995: 191]

On this characterization, it is only because we have a certain psychological

reaction towards some act or person that we make the moral judgment we

do. On what grounds then does constructivism deserve to be called an

objective moral theory?21

The answer lies in identifying the right kind of stance or standpoint. It is

sometimes true that the stance we take towards a given principle is parochial

or personal when, for example, we hold others to standards to which we do

not hold ourselves. But it is also truefor some of us at least some of the

timethat the stance we take towards a given principle is impersonal orimpartial when, for example, we adopt another’s standpoint and ask

ourselves whether, from that standpoint, we have a good reason to object to

a given piece of behaviour. The point is that this standpoint is available in

principle to creatures like us [Milo 1995: 193]. We can ask whether the

reasons others have for wanting us to refrain from performing a given act

are reasonable, as measured against public expectations about how we

should govern ourselves. And this, as some authors contend, can ground the

objectivity of right and wrong.22

20It bears repeating that moral constructivism covers a wide territory, so even if my efforts to stake out arealist version of constructivism leave the reader unconvinced, this shows only that this path towards realismdoes not appear promising. A successful scepticism about constructivism’s hopes on this front would requireshowing that no constructivism offers a promising path towards realism, and this would be a largeundertaking indeed, given the range of objectivist versions of constructivism in the literature (see note 17).21Street [2006] denies that constructivism ought to be regarded as realist for just this reason.22Compare this to what Michael Smith calls Internalist Naturalistic Moral Realism: ‘Acts are right or wrongdepending on whether, notwithstanding any contingent and rationally optional culturally induced differences


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The Caveman's Conscience

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