Do evaluative attitudes 'track' moral facts?

The Darwinian Dilemma, introduced by Sharon Street, is based on a simple empirical point: evolutionary forces have played a crucial role in the development of human evaluative attitudes. But, if this is the case, Street claims, then moral realists, who believe that there exist normative truths independent of our evaluative attitudes, have to explain the relation between those truths and the evaluative attitudes. The dilemma is simple. If realists accept that evaluative attitudes have evolved to track natural moral facts, then they have to provide an account of that tracking (which they have failed to do). If, on the other hand, they reject this assumption, then they are directly confronted with skepticism: there would be no reason (apart from a gigantic coincidence) to think that our attitudes reflect some independent moral facts. In his criticism of Street, David Copp attempts to provide a realist account of moral truths that will not be vulnerable to the Darwinian Dilemma. He proceeds by specifying the nature of the truth conditions of moral propositions, stipulating that a given moral proposition is true if a morally authoritative standard enjoys a particular truth-grounding status. For Copp, the morally authoritative standard is the normative code that would best serve the basic needs of a society, if it were to serve as its moral code (2008, p.199). According to this “society-centered” theory, morality has the function of “enabling society to meet its needs” (p.198). If we accept this account, Copp claims, then we can provide a realist account of morality compatible with the evolutionary explanation of the evaluative attitudes: the evolved attitudes would favor behavior that is very similar to the behavior favored my the social moral code; i.e. the evaluative attitudes effectively ‘track’ (or ‘quasi-track’) moral truths. Continue reading