主题：What Makes Evolution a Defeater?

主讲：南加州大学博士候选人Matthew Lutz

时间：2015年3月5日（星期四）下午3点

地点：哲学院南楼114会议室

It is a popular hypothesis in evolutionary psychology that our moral beliefs are the product of evolutionary forces. If this hypothesis were true, what would follow? It has become very popular of late to claim that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs shows that none of those beliefs are justified. Yet it is very hard to explain why this is, as recent attempts to prove this skeptical hypothesis all rest on epistemic principles that either entail global skepticism or else fail to show what is troubling about evolution. In this talk, I will first try to answer the question of what it takes for a piece of evidence to be an undercutting defeater. The concept of an undercutting defeater is a common one in contemporary epistemology, yet the nature of undercutting defeat is poorly understood. By looking at a variety of standard cases of undercutting defeaters, I motivate and refine an account of undercutting defeat. With this account in hand, I show that evidence in favor of an evolutionary explanation of moral belief is a defeater. Indeed, it is a paradigmatic instance of undercutting defeat.