"Genetic defects from inbreeding." is the natures way for saying "DON'T GO THERE" That alone is and should be the perfect reason to not do it. People like to think and limit themselves on what is morally right and wrong before they make decisions that have to become public knowledge but when it comes to private times morals go out the window. That is our leash.
As about the war; why don't people simply accept the fact that 9/11 was simply an excuse to start a war? We aren't fighting there we are simply fueling the fight. With all that money that has been spent for that war we could have paid for that entire region to get lobotomies and change their moral motivations. Another reason why inbreeding should be a no no: thousands of years worth of inbreeding created the "enemies" America is fighting right now.Can't change their mind, believe in fairies and their only moral motivation is killing.

"intuitions that do not track any kind of objective moral truth, but instead are artifacts of our biological and cultural histories. " This seems rather a non-sequitur to me. Your phrasing seems to indicate that these two claims are at least in prima facie tension:

M(ethics): Our ethical intuitions generally track an objective moral truth.
P(ethics): Our ethical intuitions are the product of our biological and cultural histories.

But surely there are a great many aspects of our cognition for which a version of both M _and_ P would be true. M(arithmetic) and P(arithmetic) would be perhaps the best example, and I'd suggest that our folk physics and folk psychology are both of this sort as well.

Now, this does not undercut your second point, about critical scrutiny -- _generally_ tracking an objective truth is not at all the same as _infallibly_ doing so. But I think that's a good reason to not attempt the first point in the first place -- the important real-world consequences would be there, no matter what the metaphysics does.

But those sorts of arguments generally prove too much. _All_ of our cognitive faculties, to the extent that they were selected at all, "were selected for their contribution to biological fitness... not for their ability to track truth or even to promote our own happiness". What's impossible, I think, is to craft an argument from these evolutionary considerations that _just_ takes out moral intuitions, and not lots of other parts of our cognition. Mathematics is particularly hard to keep out of danger, in the context of these explanationist arguments. (I think Joel Pust did a pretty good number on explanationist arguments in his published dissertation, btw.)

Now, as for the arguments from disagreement, _those_ I am _of course_ on board with! But I don't think that they yield any metaphysical conclusions -- just epistemological and/or methodological ones.

I'm not seeing at all why couldn't numbers couldn't turn out just to be a useful fiction, on the sort of reasoning you're endorsing. (Isn't that what Hartry Field tried to argue?) Math is clearly the worst case for you here, since its entities are presumably acausal.

But similar arguments would apply very easily to various sorts of things that aren't taken to be acausal. Color perception would be another easy candidate for an anti-realist treatment, for example.. Nothing needs to really _be_ colored, in order for it to be useful for us to see them _as_ colored. Nonetheless, I think it would be very strange to try to infer from the existence of a naturalistic explanation of color perception, to such an anti-realist metaphysics. (Such a metaphysics may be defensible, but not on _those_ grounds.)

Indeed, if one has the right kind of metaphysics -- nothing but basic physics & sets, say -- I suppose that Morris, MN might just count as a useful fiction, too!

The most dangerous case, though, as Pust argued, is that of epistemic cognition. There's no reason to think that our cognition about which beliefs to hold or inferences to endorse is in any better or worse shape, evolutionarily-speaking, than our cognition about which actions to recommend or prohibit. It follows that, if the explanationist argument works at all, it works against its own materials -- in particular, the explanationist intuition about how to apply Ockham's Razor in cases like these.

Well, I read the post and enjoyed it a great deal. I even had a few (I thought) intelligent comments to offer. But then I stumbled into a philosophy seminar and suddenly I'm feeling naked without my elbow patches!

Just kidding (nothing like making fun of philosophers). I'm just a simple country doctor, but I found this passage interesting:

"Haidt does not claim that it's impossible for reason to change our moral values or the values of others. He just believes that this kind of process happens far less frequently than we believe, and furthermore that when values are affected by reason, it is because reason triggers a new emotional response which in turn starts a new chain of justification."

Hold on there, Haidt. Could the intellectual capacity to appreciate reason qualify as "an emotional response?" If so, I'm with you, but not in any way that undermines the validity of reason itself. My cats don't "get" music, but I do, and that makes music very real. I think the deepest kind of intellectual satisfaction for many is the thrill of learning, which of course requires that you can, in some masochistic manner no doubt refined over the centuries at Oxford, enjoy being proved wrong. The thrill for learning supercedes the frailty of ego.

Certainly, not everyone has that capacity, but for those who do, it trumps every other experience.

Joseph Campbell (like him or hate him) called it "detribalization," which I think captures it well.

The process you describe is something we try hard to get across in our book (largely about unwarranted Hobbesian assumptions about prehistory). We call it "Flintstonization." Scholars get "Flintstoned" and project contemporary morality and baseless presumptions about what is "human" on to the canvas of prehistory (constant war, nuclear families, early death, oppression of women, etc.).

If you're familiar with Kanazawa's work (which I see you are), you know the story.

kid Laban, sign up .

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