THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM WITH STREET’S META-ETHICAL DILEMMA: A PROPOSAL BASED ON ALVIN PLANTINGA

Abstract

Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) generally aim to damage the epistemic status of a belief domain by appealing to its evolutionary origins. On the horizon of metaethics, EDAs are usually directed toward realistic theses of morality and essentially consist of asserting that if our moral beliefs have been significantly influenced by selection pressures during our evolutionary history, then some kind of moral skepticism follows. One of the paradigmatic arguments articulated in this direction is the Darwinian Dilemma of Sharon Street. Our proposal in this article is to place Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (AECN) – an EDA derived from the analytical philosophy of religion – as a possible answer to the problem of moral skepticism proposed by Street. Thus, Plantinga points out that evolutionary considerations taken within the framework of ontological naturalism entail an epistemic conflict for the subject who wishes to maintain in his doxastic system both the belief in the contemporary theory of evolution and the belief in ontological naturalism. We argue, from this point, that the Darwinian Dilemma suffers from a structural problem because of its commitment to naturalistic ontology, which causes the dilemma to generalize in its scope and harmfully affect non-moral beliefs, becoming self-referentially incoherent.

Keywords: Moral realism. Naturalism. Beliefs.