CRITICAL NOTICE

by Robert Breen

RICHARD JOYCE, The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge: MIT Press 2006. ISBN 0-262-
10112-2. Pp. ix + 269.

Philip Kitcher -- a lucid

voice against early sociobiology -- writes: “Human ethical practices have histories, and it is perfectly
appropriate to inquire about the details of those histories...Nothing is wrong with [descriptive
evolutionary ethics] so long as it is not articulated in too simplistic a fashion and so long as it is not over-
interpreted”... Obviously in view of all that has been asserted and looked favorable upon in this book so far, I am
include to think that references to biological natural selection will loom large in a full account of the history of
human ethical practices. But the matter is an empirical one, and no one should be choosing sides with too much
confidence in advance of the evidence. Whether or not descriptive ethics turns out to be a fruitful research program,
no one should be opposed to it in principle (144-145).1

Richard Joyce’s Evolution of Morality gives gives us a good example of just how the texts of

the new Experimental Philosophy movement have been carried out. His is characteristic of the

genre, coming at us as a scientific experiment carried out in the laboratory of his mind. It is not

quick to make any claims to certainty, but nor is it looking to waffle about its content. It may

fare unpalatable for most parochial, historical readers of philosophy since it treats its

propositions as hypotheses and not, as we have said, like conveyors of certain truths. For this

reason its chapters often read like investigations into only plausible, and in some cases only

1 Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)

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possible, explanations concerning morality. And Joyce’s concern is this book is morality’s

evolutionary roots.

The text’s introductory preamble on human nature poses what is in a way the text’s

fundamental guiding question: Can morality be understood as innate? Joyce is sober enough to

concede that defining the grounds of morality in this way is an open-ended question, that his

exploration on the matter is necessarily limited, and that what gets stated in the text’s following

chapters in no way leaves out a further elaboration on culture’s, society’s influential role on

moral development. Culture and society condition what is genetic in us, and that includes

morality (if we come to concede that morality has biological roots). So one must be aware in

reading Joyce that the idea of the text is primarily about how much of our biological identity and

our ancestral past shape our moral lives -- and in particular our moral judgements -- and not

about arguing that morality is all and only biological.

Thus there is a lot of storytelling here. In particular, the book breaks down into two sections

-- with four chapters to the first, and two chapters to the second. With the first part, the more

major idea, Joyce focuses on this question of innateness. These four chapters begin by positing

that the perennial theme underlying all transitions in human evolution is the activity of helping;

they then proceed to develop this idea by explaining with hypotheses how the core, naturally

selected means that could be conducive to this activity of helping is a moral sense. Thus the

first chapter posits that helping is central to human evolution and natural selection, while “the

thesis to be examined in the [following] three chapters is that among the means favored by

natural selection in order to get humans helping each is a ‘moral sense’, by which [Joyce]

mean[s] a faculty for making moral judgements” (44). Thus morality shall be understood by

Joyce as a kind of capacity to make these moral judgements. The second part of the book,

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chapters five and six, simply looks to draw meta-ethical conclusions from part one’s hypothesis

of moral innateness, and this primarily amounts to a discussion of moral skepticism and moral

realism.

The Natural Selection of Helping

So what of helping? Well, Joyce begins this discussion with a supposition, that man has

naturally evolved as a communitarian, not an individualist. On the surface this sounds counter-

intuitive to what the popular voice has construed as natural selection, namely as some battle to

stay alive, even at the expense of others; who stays alive are the winners. But the reality of life is

that we have propagated and are here in communities, not individual caves. And here is the

catch: if we are communitarians, why not say that the best explanation for this is morality --

construed in whatever way, say, to stay alive, to keep others alive, to keep things going, all the

while making use of basic biological mechanisms. Since Joyce talks in terms of evolution, he

deals specifically in what he calls a moral sense, something that was left there for culture and

societal influence to manipulate and appropriate and give us the moral communities around us.

The question in which Joyce is most interested in his first chapter, ‘The Natural Selection

of Helping’, is the following: “‘What proximate mechanisms might be favored by natural

selection in order to regulate...helpful behavior” (16)? What evolutionary process, in other

words, brought about helpful behavior. For Joyce the answer is a kind of altruism which,

evolutionarily speaking, is a kind of fitness-sacrificing behavior. Thus the task of Joyce is to

explain various ways in which “natural selection may favor the trait of acting from altruistic

motives” (ibid). How could helping behavior have been selected for?

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 Joyce starts with Kin Selection. Since “a human infant is remarkably dependent on the

help of others, and remains so for many years...we should expect that the trait of caring for one’s

children has been strongly selected for in humans” (20). And as we know, most parents would, if

the moment arose, sacrifice themselves for their infants But why this urge and proclivity

towards one’s kin? Joyce founds an explanation for this care analogously in nature at one of its

lowest levels, in the Hymenoptera class of social insects like ants and bees. There, genetic

similarity explains the self-sacrificial behavior of the bees and ants for the maintenance of the

greater community; bees and ants are helping colonies if there ever were any. Thus genetic

similarity may account for the affinity felt between family members. Also, that kinship involves

a level of close proximity may also extend the explanation about the helpfulness of family

members the that of non-family members: this may explain why we, today, are more likely to

help our neighbors, those with whom we have lived out our daily lives, than the anonymous man.

Joyce also speaks of how nature boasts many mutualistic behaviors, in which the needs of

individual creators may not be achieved alone and, so, require the help of others. Similar to this

too is the idea of direct reciprocity, a kind of quid pro quo: you scratch my back and I will

scratch yours. The benefit of such reciprocity would be one which is valued for its breadth; the

grooming of monkeys, Joyce notes, serves as an example: “If all monkeys entered into this

cooperative venture, in total more benefit than costs would be distributed among them” (24).

Reciprocity also works indirectly, as when creatures further their chances for receiving help and

thus personal gain, when others look upon the helpful actions (regardless of the ends) they

perform in direct reciprocal exchanges and figure that you may also do that for them some day

(31).

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 (We may pause for a moment and note that, of the basic mechanisms which may explain

why helping is selected for, Joyce sees indirect reciprocity as the most important explanatory

framework for this task: because it is built heavily around reputation and punishment -- two very

important “pressures [that] can lead to the development of just about any trait” (33).)

Now the reader may be wondering already at this point why Joyce decides from the outset

to call the object of his analysis of helping, essentially, an altruism of some type, when in the

first few cases for why nature may select helping behaviors no genuine altruism occurs. Help

that is altruistic has no ulterior end to it besides itself. But the help we get with kin-selection is,

since it is based on propagating genetic brethren, therefore towards an end besides itself -- at

least on the genetic level (the explanation of which is something Joyce, understandably, cannot

undertake in his book); the proximity thesis which follows from this, however, may just be closer

to an altruism and exempted from this criticism, since there is nothing genetic determining my

interest in helping my adopted sister. And, as it should be clear, we need not say much about the

non-altruistic feature of mutualistic and reciprocal behaviors. Though Joyce does, in time,

explain why he actually does not see these as bona-fide altruistic behaviors (by arguing, rather

extensively, against Robert Trivers’ (1985) work which identifies these latter behaviors as

altruistic), it just seems a bad idea in writing to introduce this to readers early on only to revoke

it.

It is really only in Joyce’s discussion on group selection that he entertains the possibility of

seeing a strain of altruism figuring therein. There Joyce provides many empirical experiments in

game theory that advance the thesis that groups which contain helpful individuals have a

selective advantage over those containing no helpful individuals. Ultimately, however, he cares

nothing for determining whether altruism is at work in these cases, “willing to end with [a]

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somewhat uncommitted view on the matter, since the existence of genuinely fitness-sacrificing is

not necessary to this project. What is important is that helping behaviors have been selected for”

(38). (Though, again, invoking and revoking the altruism idea does little for Joyce’s clarification

of the helping behaviors hypothesis.)

These four processes whereby traits of helpfulness can develop by the forces of biological

natural selection -- kin selection, mutualism, reciprocal exchanges, and group selection -- only

exhaust the helpfulness of the animal world; they do not complete the human account. So Joyce

explains how the ‘human ultra-sociality’, as he calls it, that characterizes our present condition is

as much a result of cultural determination in the greater scheme of things as it is of genetic

determination in the minutiae of things. Conforming one’s behavior to that of a group can be

adaptive in variable environments. Note that we conform to a behavior, not a genetic code. The

point here is that if we have with cultural groups an environment in which, say, a non-reciprocal

behavior will be punished (expulsion from the group because they did not conform to their

practices), we also have a breeding ground for the cultivation of gene which would be requisite

for maintaining one’s fitness insofar as one’s fitness is served by acquiescence with a cultural

group. This gene, then, would help cultivate in the human species a major particular pro-social

trait.

“Morality, Schmorality!”

Now all this about our proclivities to engage with others in helping behaviors, as good as it is, is

not enough for Joyce to use and start saying is indicative of morality’s innateness. It is not even

enough for him to call moral behavior (50). In whatever way we read the kin-selection process

mentioned before -- as a kind of nepotism, prosocial behavior and first instance of love, which

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biological natural selection could fiddle with and exploit to create a capacity to love non-kin (49)

-- we cannot settle for it, or any prosocial behavior, as an explanation of how humans came to

judge things morally right and wrong, and to this extent is no explanation of an innate moral

faculty. At best it is the start of an explanation (50).

When Joyce tackles morality, he does not strive for a complete conceptual

account; it is enough for his study, rather, to know the behavioral consequences of moral

thinking. So his second chapter on ‘The Nature of Morality’ is a brief observation of some

common notions surrounding morality in terms of how it appears to function and how it simply

appears to others. To this extent, “it includes two ways of thinking about morality: morality as a

distinctive subject matter concerning interpersonal relations, and morality as a particular

normative form of authority behind our actions. And “any hypothesis concerning the evolution

of the human moral faculty is incomplete unless it can explain how natural selection would favor

a kind of judgement with both these features” (71).

Joyce’s first stab at morality is at the composition of moral judgements, stating his

position somewhere between (i) non-cognitivism and (ii) cognitivism, that is, between the view

that moral judgements are (i) speech-act expressions and they (ii) express beliefs. When we call

someone a moral term we not merely expressing (i) a feeling we have at the moment of

expression, nor are we merely conferring a property upon that person (i.e. Saying ‘John is good’

means John has the attribute of ‘being good’). Joyce thinks we are doing both. He thinks moral

judgements express both beliefs about the object of deliberation as well as conative non-belief

states, conative in that we have subscriptions pertaining to the object of our moral judgement:

saying ‘Mary is bad’ believes Mary is in fact bad, but it also speaks of a disapproval.

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 On this note of subscription, Joyce thus holds that moral judgements have a practical

‘clout’ -- in other words, a binding feeling to them, that says they are more than mere expressions

of taste and liking. There is something inescapable about moral judgements. This practical

clout, this practical binding force to moral judgements will be something that pops up a bit in

Joyce’s book; but it is not something the source of which Joyce proclaims to know. He thinks

the best we have at getting at what this clout is is knowing what it is not. For one, “the

applicability of a moral prescription does not typically depend on the punishment that may

ensure if the action prescribed is not performed”2 (58). And the sanction for their applicability

seems to be neither merely internal nor merely external. Joyce just thinks we can see the issue

from both points of view without completely acquiescing with the Kantians (on internal

sanction) or with the Utilitarians (on external sanction) (60-64). His point is merely to

countenance the binding force of moral judgements, and to maintain that it transcends a

definition in terms of mere convention.

In describing the exact subject matter of moral judgements, Joyce alludes to a number of

comprehensive cross-cultural studies that have unanimously found certain broad universals in

moral systems: that moral judgements constitute and express (i) negative appraisals of certain

acts of harming others, (ii) values pertaining to reciprocity and fairness, (iii) requirements

concerning behaving in a manner benefiting one’s status relative to a social hierarchy, and (iv)

regulations of bodily matters (65). Moral relations, in other words, seem to function in

sustaining society, that is, in the interpersonal relations between people. Joyce thinks we can

explain the governing dynamics of such relations with the notions of desert and justice and guilt.

2 Says Joyce, “I would be astounded to hear of a culture whose members’ practices revealed that they generally
conceive of transgressions as wrong because they are punished, rather than punishable because they are wrong”
(59).

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He is, we should remember, ultimately looking at narrowing in on a locus of morality in humans

that could be subject to natural selection, an emergent moral sense, namely. And if moral sense

is the well-springs for moral judgement, it would be responsible for the particular dynamic of

interpersonal relations as noted above. So it is part of the moral sense of humans to invoke

notions of desert and justice, that is the actions of punishments and rewards, if we are to mean

anything intelligible by the ‘sustenance of inter-personal relations’, or moral equilibrium as

Joyce calls it (68). But the implementation of desert and justice requires a waking awareness of

a person’s role in this interpersonal affair, according to Joyce, and it is best explained by the guilt

notion, making guilt the conscience of our moral sense in governing our responses not only to

the actions of others, but to our own. (Joyce will return to elaborate upon this idea of guilt, as we

will see, in chapter three, ‘Moral Language and Moral Emotions’.)

Morality Needs Language and Emotions

So if, say, moral judgements in this sense evolved as a prosocial mechanism for the development

of human community and helping (us communitarians!), when and how did that come about?

Joyce looks briefly at our primate cousins, for the sole reason to show the threshold between a

community of creatures (chimps) who have a social structure between them, with aversions and

preferences, and beliefs (but not moral beliefs) and imperatives (hypothetical, not categorical)

and all the rest, and a community of creatures (humans) who have that difference, that quality

needed for making the move from ‘disliking’ to ‘disapproving’. Joyce locates this difference in

moral language.

The difference is actually quite obvious since chimps have no language like human

language period. Joyce differentiates moral language even from the human language of taste and

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preference. Moral language knows it is expressing subscriptions to certain practical standards of

linguistic standards. Moral language, for example, is language imbued with the awareness that

kraut takes the extra step of denoting more than a certain nationality; for it connotes a certain

nationality which acted in way, rendered in our judgement, of which we disapprove. In other

words, if you think ethnic slurs carry some kind of moral sense, then you think appropriately

using kraut to its connotive end is an instance of using moral language. From this Joyce makes

the claim that chimps perhaps lack morality per se because they lack this language (indeed,

because they lack language). It seems odd, however, to pit an account of how chimps could be

moral with an account of (i) the morality expressed in speech and (ii) how this demolishes the

case of morality for chimps, since, as I have mentioned, chimps do not have language in the way

we are conceiving it (human language), and since it makes the discussion of chimp’s taste

conventions a little superfluous. Nevertheless the thesis of Joyce here is that, given this

linguistic difference between humans and chimps, it seems safe to say that morality, or the moral

sense, emerged with certain other mental and linguistic faculties.

But the further point Joyce is making surrounds, again, this idea of practical clout.

Chimps do not have the oomph! of practical clout; they are merely normative in behavior, not

moral. Humans are different in being able to go beyond merely disliking something to

disapprove of something. And how do we account for this? The crucial difference between the

two foregoing species is language, but language, as Joyce notes, seems not specific enough to

explain this (93). Enter emotions: the evolution of language made possible certain emotions

(most notably, guilt). Emotions evolved, on Joyce’s account, as mechanisms to encourage the

adaptive response to fitness-relevant threats and opportunities in the environment. And often the

conduit needed for their communal life was language. Joyce would seem to need to put the point

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this way, having emotions tied in with language, in order to reinforce his later, important point in

this third chapter, namely that some emotions have intellectual components to them. The crucial

one Joyce mentions here is guilt. What makes guilt so important has, perhaps, already been

hinted at in the previous section. Guilt is important because it is a self-regulating emotion “that

guides one’s moral conduct from the inside” (101). More than something like shame, for

example, which issues from our awareness that we have come short of something (viz. concerns

shortcomings) and has us shut down and recluse from a field of action, guilt may do others.

Guilt is the feeling that we have transgressed something. And this may result in some action

of recompense.

More than that, though, the seat of guilt, as been said before, is the seat of conscience,

because when you are guiding yourself from the ‘inside’ as it were you are guided by what we

usually call conscience. Conscience, Joyce notes, is about doing or not doing things for one of

many reasons (102). And with this we can see that if any of these moral emotions is basic and

innate, it would be guilt, as the mediator of conscience, since if anything is basic to human nature

it is the modality of human action. But if guilt is innate in this sense and imperative to the

making of self-oriented moral judgement, then moral judgement is to this extent innate. The

conclusion of all this is that the emergence of certain prosocial emotions (guilt), the arrival of

certain concepts (justice, desert), and the advancement of language are all intertwined, making

the evolution of moral sense a terribly messy affair indeed, according to Joyce (105).

“Morality, Schmorality!”: The Moral Sense

In his fourth chapter on ‘The Moral Sense’, Joyce describes further an account of the moral sense

in terms of (i) why it may have evolved in the first place, and (ii) how this may have happened.

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Ultimately, he is not really interested in the second question, since a good answer to it would be

outside philosophy texts and inside scientific journals and laboratories (108). The answer to the

why question is very similar to his account of the subject matter of morality in chapter two,

namely, it concerns interpersonal relations.

He starts by telling us why moral judgements help fitness. In particular, he claims that

moral judgments can be fitness enhancing when they affect either (i) the motivation to act or (ii)

the motivation to refrain from acting in particular ways. Moral judgments can regulate an

individual’s behavior, particularly in cases where prudence may falter, and allow others to

evaluate this individual as a potential partner in co-operative actions. (Think of the über-

determined, though moral, customer who goes to the heights of absurdity to have justice served

to his having been dealt the wrong deal over the counter). Joyce does not, however, believe this

view commits him to the idea that humans evolved to be unconditional cooperators. It is just

that, in his eyes, “there are adaptive benefits to be had by moralizing the whole plastic social

structure” (including scenarios where we hustle shop-owners because they have hustled us)

(118). Moral judgments, as effective personal commitments, will provide an effective

motivational wall, not just for us but for those who observe the outcomes of our moral judgments

(like those watching us seek exact justice from the store-owner with our persistence).

Joyce also entertains the idea that perhaps the moral sense, our capacity for moral

judgements, just emerged form the need to eliminate certain practical possibilities from the space

of deliberative reasons (111). In this sense he reads moral judgements as what Dennett calls

‘conversation stoppers’ -- the results of the moral sense as a practical eye to the things which

would extend further than most practical principles in their scope, influence, and reach, that is, to

the moral reasons. So to some extent, moral judgements motivate us. But they add something to

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the motivational profile, according to Joyce (113). Remember, they have clout; they bind us.

They have more bind on the moral agent than do the sympathies and inclinations on the non-

moralized agent.

So, Joyce asks, what is the difference between (i) a robust strong desire to perform a

behavior and (ii) a moral sense to perform that behavior as a duty? The main idea here is that

moral judgement is not taste-oriented; it is not ‘I do not like P’, but ‘You should not like P’. In

other words, the difference takes a binding regard on the other: the inclination to dislike

something is just not relevant to my judgements concerning others pursuing that same thing

(117). This notion of binding to the other raises the idea that this is all, at bottom, about

cooperation: perhaps natural selection just made us want to cooperate and perhaps this is why

moral judgements are the ultimate arbiters of human cooperation. Certainly, granting us a

tendency to think of cooperation in moral terms (which includes the capacity for guilt) is a way

of securing this gregarious desire. And we seem able to remain gregarious and self-oriented

through moral judgement, on this account, since moral judgements have an implicit public nature

despite also being self-directed. Indeed, what makes a moral judgement moral is its

communicability given, as Joyce has argued, moral judgement as a mental phenomenon is

dependent on moral judgements as a linguistic phenomenon (115). Thus self-directed moral

judgements bring the same benefits as other-directed moral judgements (117). Moral judgements

are a uniting tool: they “can act as a kind of ‘common currency’ for collective negotiation and

decision making” -- a social glue, a tool for solving many group coordination problems (ibid).

And Joyce further notes on this point how important thus conscience must be for this effect, for

since moral thinking is motivationally resolute thinking, it is a further argument in favor of the

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idea that it may be in a creature’s best interest to have a moral conscience. So much for the why

of moral sense.

Joyce tops off the chapter with a brief account of the how of moral sense. He notes how

Phineas Gage established in the scientific community the relation between moral deliberation

and emotional capacity, and how this further supports the idea, then, that natural selection

manipulated centers of the human brain to enable moral judgements. So the moral judgements

come from the brain. But how do this contribute to explaining their activity as governing

interpersonal relations and commitments. Here Joyce posits the plausibility of Projectivism -- in

this case, the idea that we project emotions onto the world, that “certain [moral] qualities that

appear to be in the world owe this appearance to the nature of the perceiver’s mental life” (126).

It is best for things to be this way on Joyce’s account, for one’s senses to be open windows to the

reality, as if the way things reliably seem is the things really are, because having things as they

seem to be in the world makes them communal, intelligible discursive objects that we can

incorporate into our inquiries about with interpersonal affairs. Projecting moral emotions onto

the world just encourages successful social behavior since the means with which we can morally

deliberate and, thus, cooperate are up for grabs -- in the world. Thinking moral features as

features in the world thus gives them a certain authoritative force, insofar as they things that are

difficult to ignore.

Evolutionary Vindication of Morality?

The second part of Joyce’s book begins by looking at various evolutionary vindications of

morality. This is the title of the fifth chapter. Thus far Joyce has “advocated the hypothesis that

descriptive evolutionary ethics produces a positive output,” namely a nuanced understanding of

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how we may have evolutionary moral roots and how this morality was useful to our ancestors.

But “many thinkers...have tried to squeeze more robust evaluative conclusions from descriptive

evolutionary ethics” than this (145). Some contend that ethical decisions may just be influenced

by facts about human evolution. Joyce himself is officially agnostic in this book on this matter,

about how much influence upon moral judgements descriptive evolutionary ethics may have in

this respect. In this chapter he tries to show how evolutionary moral naturalism -- the attempt by

prescriptive evolutionary ethicists to vindicate morality by appealing to evolution -- fails. Prior

to doing this he tries to further define and clarify some historical arguments related to the thesis

of evolutionary moral naturalism. These are Moore’s naturalistic fallacy and open question

argument, and Hume’s claim that it is impossible to derive an 'ought' from an 'is', which, he

holds, has been fallaciously called Moore’s naturalistic fallacy. We see here in this chapter and

the one that follows Joyce’s writing as much better. With many witticisms he plows through his

clarification of Moore’s fallacy and brings us to a comic juncture in the chapter that looks to

show us how we can present an ought from an is via logical trickery (153). Thus, ultimately, it is

left in the air whether the ‘ought’ from ‘is’ movement really obtains for Joyce, or even matters in

this sense.

Joyce gets his hands dirtier when he turns his attention to actual arguments from various

prescriptive evolutionary ethicists. Two recurring problems that will be highlight are (i) that the

prescriptive revolutionary ethicist often displays explicit or implicit (but in either case specious)

neglect for the cognitive element of moral judgement and (ii) that the prescriptive evolutionary

ethicist will often find some non-moral kind of normativity implied by the evolutionary

hypothesis which is then erroneously declared to be moral value (156). Joyce finds one instance

of this second problem in Robert Richard’s (1986) idea that “the good of the community is what

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we mean by the word ‘moral’. It may well be,” says Joyce, “that the human moral sense evolved

in order to foster social cohesion, but it wouldn’t follow form this that this is what the word

‘moral’ means” (159). The normativity of Richard’s idea is a soft one, one in which the ‘ought’

with which we should act for the good of the community is a predictive ought, not a prescriptive

ought. The reason here for this is that Richards really takes it that because evolution constructed

us to be communitarians, we ought to be communitarians. But, for Joyce, the normativity at

work here is of mere probability, not prescription.

We see an instance of the first problem of Joyce’s with prescriptive evolutionary ethicists,

the problem that neglects the cognitive element of moral judgement, in Richmond Campbell’s

(1996) idea that having some morality is better than having no morality, and that this is justified

by the fact that it improved the lives of everyone involved. But Joyce takes issue with the

justification here, since it is an instrumental justification and not, as it should be, an epistemic

justification. Religious beliefs may be justified because they improve one’s life, but that does

not make this justification of them as true things. Overall, “what sounds disconcerting about this

is that instrumental justification is generally not the kind of justification we employ when we talk

of beliefs” (162). Campbell’s idea, in this sense, epistemically unjustified, which would suggest

it is lacking in some intellectual character (Joyce’s first problem).

Can This Debunk Morality?

The final chapter, 'The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality', presents positive arguments for

Joyce’s view that moral beliefs lack epistemic justification. At the outset he tells of a thought

experiment concerning belief pills and claims natural selection would have a similar effect on

our moral belief system as such imaginary pills. It can make us believe we have a foundation for

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morals in evolutionary bits, but to hold the contention seems to mean holding, thus, an imaginary

contention. The idea here is that our ancestors did not know what right and wrong are in the

way we do now today, but it may have still been useful for them to formulate beliefs about right

and wrong, nevertheless, given what was around them (183). Obviously, we say that they

countenanced moral facts when they did these things; but Joyce is curious about what moral

evolutionary naturalists can say about them. His position ultimately is that moral naturalism

cannot overcome what he calls Harman’s challenge, which is the idea that there could be a

complete explanation of moral judgments that “neither presupposes moral facts nor acts as a

reductive base of moral facts” (186).

Something about which Hartman is correctly adamant, according to Joyce, is that

acknowledging the mere possibility of moral naturalism saving the day accomplishes next to

nothing if it not backed up with a concrete theory explaining, with some degree of precision, how

the moral fits into the natural world (189). How can moral naturalism, in other words, explain

the practical clout of morality as something different than the clout of -- what he usually

translates how morality figures into naturalism as -- etiquette? So what would the practical clout

of etiquette be? Joyce’s example is this: him eating like pig in front of a television, because there

he is not really following etiquette. But that is only because the conventional condition of

etiquette is quite elastic. He compares this, then, to ‘actual’ practical clout, that of morality, with

the example of Jack wanting to kill his friend out in the woods (203). Violating etiquette seems

okay, even if you know it is not desirable, but violating a moral of murder does not even if you

want to kill. This may show the stronger bind morality has on people than does etiquette, but it

may also show an asymmetry here in Joyce’s cases, for it seems unfair in the examples to have

another person present in the moral example but not in the etiquette example. Most arguments

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for morality always include reference to people, and if Joyce is looking to show how the

etiquette ‘morality’, if you will, characterizing moral naturalism falls short of morality, he would

be best to include in his own etiquette example a relation between persons, not a man and a

television.

Conclusion

Overall, the crux of Joyce’s argument against the moral naturalism is that naturalistic moral facts

do not seem to “provide the inescapable authority we apparently expect and require of moral

values” (191). This authority is something we need not look to evolution to sense or understand.

In fact, the end message of Joyce’s Evolution of Morality seems to be related to this, that our

discoveries about our evolutionary roots are more or less independent of what we may still

construe as moral in our waking life today. It is a curious point:

We have an empirically confirmed theory about where our moral judgements come from (we are
supposing). This theory doesn’t state or imply that they are true, it doesn’t have as a background
assumption that they are true, and, importantly, their truth is not surreptitiously buried in the
theory by virtue of any form of moral naturalism. This amounts to the discovery that our moral
beliefs are products of a process that is entirely independent of their truth [(the location of which
Joyce is unsure, though he is sure we do not check our evolutionary roots before wondering
whether something is moral or not)], which forces the recognition that we have no grounds one
way or the other for maintaining these beliefs. They could be true, but we have no reason for
thinking so. Thus we should, initially, cultivate an open mind in order to go and find some other
more reliable grounds for either believing or disbelieving moral propositions (211).

It is interesting to see where Joyce himself stands on these issues of how we know the truth of

moral judgements and moral facts, for he is not really clear about it; indeed, he is not merely a

moral skeptic on such views but a moral skeptic with a twist: he is a moral agnostic! “Pointing

out that we have no reason to believe in moral facts,” he says, “does not imply that we have a

reason to disbelieve in them” (210; original emphasis).

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 I think the message of Joyce on these matters comes at the end of the quote above here,

and that is to keep an open mind towards these issues. This is similar to his comment in the

quote which opened this critical notice: to see the value in a descriptive enterprise like The

Evolution of Morality, but without immediately coming to a position on the matter before or

after the inquiry is over.

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