I am currently exploring the philosophical benefits of normative quasi-naturalism, a view that combines expressivism about normative discourse with a naturalist metaphysics of normativity in a deflationary framework. This view is largely inspired by Allan Gibbard’s discussion of naturalism in Thinking How to Live (2003) . One of my working hypotheses is that quasi-naturalism can successfully deal with important epistemological challenges to normative realism, while avoiding problems faced by other naturalist views and by standard versions of non-naturalist realism. Here is how I plan to argue for this.
First, some background. I am focusing on two epistemological challenges to realism: Sharon Street's (2006) evolutionary debunking argument and the Benacerraf-Field reliability challenge discussed by David Enoch (2011) and others. Street aims to show that evolutionary facts undermine any justification we might have had for normative beliefs realistically construed: it is unlikely that our beliefs about objective normative facts are true, she argues, given that these beliefs are influenced by evolutionary processes that did not have anything to do with tracking normative truths. The reliability challenge is the demand to explain how it is that our beliefs are by-and-large true. If realists cannot offer such an explanation, or at least show that an explanation is in principle available, the argument goes, then this makes realism implausible.
A common response to these challenges on behalf of non-naturalist normative realism (e.g., Schafer 2010, Wielenberg 2010, Enoch 2011, Vavova 2014) goes as follows. Evolution has endowed us with certain basic evaluative tendencies, like valuing reciprocity, which happen to align with objective normative truths, e.g. reciprocity is good. This provides the starting point for a good explanation of our reliability and shows that evolutionary history does not undermine the justification of normative beliefs, the argument goes, even if normative facts do not causally explain our beliefs. (This is called a minimalist response or a third-factor explanation in the literature, because it does not posit a direct explanatory link between normative facts and our psychology.)
However, this response arguably begs the question against the evolutionary debunker, because it appeals to normative commitments whose justification is undercut by the fact that they were influenced by evolutionary factors indifferent to normative truths (Street 2016, Morton 2018). Moreover, while this realist story might show that our normative beliefs are modally secure, i.e. they would have been true if the facts had been different and we couldn’t have easily had false beliefs (Clarke-Doane 2014, 2015), it arguably fails to fully explain our reliability, because it treats some key connections between our evaluative tendencies and the normative truths as brute facts (Faraci 2019, Korman and Locke 2019).
Naturalist realists seem to be better placed to address these epistemological challenges. If normative properties are nothing over and above certain natural properties with which we causally interact, then the realist can offer a deep Darwinian vindication of our normative beliefs, according to which our basic evaluative tendencies were selected because they tracked normative facts, e.g. human beings developed a tendency to value reciprocity because reciprocity is good (Copp 2008). Call this a hard naturalist response to the two epistemological challenges.
This naturalist response does not beg the question against the evolutionary debunker: it does rely on substantive normative commitments, but this is fine given that it also reveals why evolutionary history is not an undercutting defeater for those commitments. (A blanket prohibition on appealing to facts in the domain at issue would make any deep Darwinian vindication of our beliefs impossible, including e.g. for perceptual beliefs, and would lead to global skepticism.) Nor is this picture scientifically implausible: if naturalists identify normative properties with certain natural properties that played a central role in the evolutionary development of our basic evaluative attitudes, such as the property of promoting social cohesion, then their explanation of how said attitudes emerged is not in competition with an evolutionary explanation. It is that explanation. Moreover, this naturalist account of our reliability does provide the explanatory link between normative facts and our attitudes that was missing from the non-naturalists' story, so it fully addresses the reliability challenge.
However, hard naturalism runs into a different problem: it either entails objectionable normative claims, e.g. about what would be valuable in a world in which sacrificing innocents promoted social cohesion, or it proposes an implausibly narrow picture of the range of evolutionary paths for our species, i.e. one on which the scenario just mentioned wasn't possible.
Quasi-naturalism preserves the epistemological advantages of hard naturalism while avoiding these pitfalls.
Quasi-naturalism holds that normative properties are identical with natural properties, and thereby allows for causal explanations involving normative properties, including causal explanations of beliefs. In particular, focusing on our actual evolutionary pathway, quasi-naturalists hold that we have the basic evaluative attitudes that we do partly because we interacted with normative properties, i.e. with the natural properties that constitute rightness, goodness, etc. Thus, quasi-naturalists can successfully respond to the two epistemological challenges at issue: they can explain the reliability of our normative beliefs in a way that does not beg the question against the evolutionary debunker and without relying on brute connections between our psychology and the normative facts.
Nevertheless, quasi-naturalists reject a deep Darwinian vindication of normative thought and the related view that normative properties are identical with properties that played a central role in our evolutionary history, like the property of promoting social cohesion. In other words, they do not claim that our basic evaluative tendencies were selected because they were truth-conducive, in contrast to hard naturalists. For this reason, the quasi-naturalist explanation of our reliability is less modally robust than a deep Darwinian vindication of normative beliefs: it does not claim that our evaluative tendencies would have been aligned with the moral truths even if evolution had pushed us in very different directions. But this explanation is still modally robust enough: the relevant worlds for assessing the safety and sensitivity of our beliefs are arguably nearby worlds where our basic evaluative tendencies are the same, and soft naturalism ensures the modal security of our beliefs thus understood.
Moreover, precisely because it rejects a deep Darwinian vindication of normative thought, quasi-naturalism avoids the problems faced by hard naturalism: it does not entail any objectionable claims about what would have constituted rightness, goodness, etc. in other evolutionary scenarios, while allowing that evolution could indeed have led us to have very different and even abhorrent evaluative attitudes.