Can Our Moral Beliefs Be Debunked?

In this chapter we apply the results of our analysis of the nature of moral truth in the previous chapter to Sharon Street’s anti-realism and her reliance on evolutionary debunking arguments to support it. We show how, ultimately, it is not possible to construe Street’s claims as attacking only a meta-ethical account of what it is to claim that there are moral truths. Her claims inevitably have substantive implications. We show that the source of her claims is a tendency to model ethical beliefs and claims on empirical beliefs and claims. Then, when she finds this comparison wanting, as inevitably she must, she becomes trapped in an impasse, the only way out of which seems to require denying the existence of ethical truth and objectivity. The solution is to reject the faulty modelling of ethical on empirical beliefs. Once we clarify what “true independent of our beliefs” means in a moral context, we are no longer saddled with the anti-realist and inevitably sceptical conclusions Street is forced to draw from the trap into which she has fallen.