Evolution can be used to make a strong argument against the existence of moral truths. The main premises of this argument are that our beliefs are heavily influenced by evolution which has no reason to influence our beliefs toward the truth. A moral realist must either deny the influence of evolution or explain the relationship between the influence and independent truths. In this paper I will argue that while the relationship is small and coincidental we can use one coincidence to unlock the rest of the independent moral truths. Rational reflection is not as contaminated by evolution as the antirealist believes.  The paper I will be using to represent the antirealist argument is Sharon Street’s “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”.

The claim about evolutionary influence on our beliefs and evaluations is strong. In our current state of science evolution is widely accepted to be the explanation for almost everything related to living things. There is no reason our thoughts on what is moral or not would be any different, on this front I agree with Street.

Part of Street’s point about the extent of the influence evolution has on our beliefs is that there is no escape to it. She acknowledges that we can use rational reflection to steer our beliefs by comparing to other beliefs but believes this is futile in finding any real truths. If everything is contaminated by evolution then we have no “tools” to use to escape this contamination. If we can find even one uncontaminated truth we can use it rationally to steer our judgements in that direction. Can we find this one independent, uncontaminated truth?

Street herself denies that the coincidence could give us many truths but she acknowledges that it occasionally happens. “Every now and then, Darwinian pressures might have happened to push us toward accepting an evaluative judgement that accords with one of the realist’s independent evaluative truths”(Street 112).  So even if there is no relation, we must have stumbled upon a few independent evaluative truths. It might be infrequent, but there is a good chance we have evolved to believe some independent truths.

There might be some overlap but we must identify it.  Street argues against what she believes to be the most plausible overlap that pain is bad. It is easy to see how we would evolve to believe this. Pain is an indication that something is wrong with us physically and will hurt our chances at surviving and reproducing. Her point is this  “And once again the realist is unable to give any good account of this coincidence. To insist that the coincidence is mere coincidence is implausible” (Street 151).

There may not be a good explanation for this coincidence but there is also no good explanation of why there is no coincidence. Most people do not have blonde hair. There is no good account to why one randomly selected person would have blonde hair but if you randomly select a person they might have blonde hair. In the same way if you can look at a belief we received through evolution it might be an independent truth. A coincidence being unlikely is not a good reason to believe it is not a coincidence. Pain being bad is an example of such a coincidence.

 I have argued that some evaluative truths exist and are identifiable, now I will show how we can use these to discover the rest of the evaluative truths. The thrust of my argument comes from extrapolation. The idea is that If we can find a few independent truths we can use those to find the rest of them. These would have to be independent truths coincidentally imparted on us by evolution because I do believe with Street’s claim that evolution has no reason to track the truths.

Using the previously identified truth, pain is bad, we can discern that actions that only cause pain are bad. We could also discern that the opposite of pain is good, so pleasure is good. Then we could develop this to say that any action that causes more pain than pleasure is bad. Already a primitive groundwork of independent truths is being laid. In this paragraph I have used rational reflection to expand one moral truth into many.

Street assumes that rational reflection is fully contaminated by evolution because there is not one belief we could point to that is uncontaminated. However, street cannot provide a good reason to believe that there is no identifiable overlap between the independent truths and our evolution.  If we can find one independent truth, we can evaluate other beliefs against it to find more independent truths, ultimately discovering all of them. This is how rational reflection can be used to find independent truths from only what nature has given us.