The Caveman's Conscience

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The Caveman's Conscience: Evolution and Moral Realism

Scott M. Jamesa
a
University of North Carolina, Wilmington
To cite this Article James, Scott M.(2009) 'The Caveman's Conscience: Evolution and Moral Realism', Australasian Journal
of Philosophy, 87: 2, 215 — 233
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Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 215–233; June 2009
THE CAVEMAN’S CONSCIENCE: EVOLUTION

AND MORAL REALISM
Scott M. James
An increasingly popular moral argument has it that the story of human

evolution shows that we can explain the human disposition to make moral
judgments without relying on a realm of moral facts. Such facts can thus be
dispensed with. But this argument is a threat to moral realism only if there is
no realist position that can explain, in the context of human evolution, the
relationship between our particular moral sense and a realm of moral facts. I
sketch a plausible evolutionary story that illuminates this relationship. First,
the sorts of adaptive pressures facing early humans would have produced more
than just potent prosocial emotions, as evolutionary antirealists like to claim;
it would have produced judgments—often situated within emotions—to the
effect that others could reasonably disapprove of some bit of conduct, for an
Downloaded At: 16:33 23 December 2010
early human who cared deeply about how others might respond to her action
enjoyed the benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans
who did not. Second, according to objectivist versions of moral constructivism,
moral facts just are facts about how others, ideally situated, would respond to
one’s conduct. Thus if any objectivist moral constructivism story is true, then
we can intelligibly assert that a) our capacity for moral judgment is the
product of adaptive pressures acting on early humans and b) some moral
judgments are objectively true.
Introduction
My aim in this paper is to counter an increasingly popular metaethical

argument, one that moves from an evolutionary account of our moral
psychology to the denial of moral facts or truths. Although this style of
argument is not new, recent developments in the biological sciences
strengthen the conviction that the basic line of thinking is sound [Joyce
2005; Street 2006; Kitcher 2005; Lahti 2003]. In essence, the argument
asserts that the best explanation of the human disposition to make moral
judgments need not make reference to a realm of moral facts. We can
explain our tendency to ascribe moral properties to actions and persons
without having to assume that such properties really exist [cf. Harman
1977]. The only assumptions we need are the comparatively uncontroversial
ones we get from developmental biologists, anthropologists, and psychol-
ogists. But without any explanatory need for moral facts, the need for such
facts disappears. Hence, the only metaethical position available to the moral

ISSN 0004-8402 print/ISSN 1471-6828 online Ó 2009 Australasian Association of Philosophy
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/00048400802358016
216 Scott M. James
theorist serious about evolutionary theory is said to be some version of

antirealism.
Previous writers have objected to this general style of argument by
drawing attention to controversial assumptions about the nature of
explanation and the unwarranted push for reduction. For example, it is
sometimes maintained that what counts as ‘the best explanation’ will depend
on, inter alia, one’s interests in giving an explanation, the level of
explanation one takes to be appropriate, one’s background theories, and
so on [Shafer-Landau 2003; Sayre-McCord 1989]. As a result, whether or
not there exist moral facts appears to depend on one’s starting point. I
propose striking out in a different direction. I propose confronting the
argument head-on: the best explanation of why we evolved the moral
psychology we did cannot, as the evolutionary anti-realist maintains, proceed
without reference to moral facts or moral truths. As I aim to show, there is,
on the one hand, an independently plausible account of what makes some
moral judgments objectively true and, on the other, a perfectly sensible
account of why natural selection would have favoured the recognition of
those truths. If this is right, then moral truths play an ineliminable role in
explaining the evolution of the human moral sense.

In two parts, here’s the idea. First, the sorts of adaptive pressures facing
early humans would have produced judgments—often situated within
emotions—to the effect that others could reasonably disapprove of some bit
of conduct, for an early human who cared deeply about how others who
shared a particular social standpoint might respond to her action enjoyed
the benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans who did
not. And this in turn conferred a reproductive advantage on that individual.
Second, according to objectivist versions of moral constructivism, facts
about how others would respond to one’s conduct not only characterize our
particular moral sense, but moral facts or truths themselves, because, on the
constructivist account, moral facts are determined by, very roughly, the
principles that would survive scrutiny from a particular normatively
grounded standpoint.1 Evolutionary theory then does not undermine moral
realism. I contend that evolutionary theory explains why moral realism is
likely to be true.
In Section I, I lay out the challenge to moral realism that evolutionary
theory purportedly embodies, drawing heavily from the recent work of
Richard Joyce, who has offered the most extensive case against moral
realism in the context of evolution. In Section II, I show that the
evolutionary antirealist’s positive account of our moral psychology
1
It’s worth asking, in the context of the growing popularity of evolutionary anti-realism, why more attention
has not been given to moral constructivism, particularly since the evolutionary accounts offered by such anti-
realists as Joyce and Kitcher avail themselves of distinctly constructivist notions. My guess is that these
writers assume that moral constructivism simply cannot count as a moral realist view since it would appear
that the facts that ground moral judgments according to constructivism are in no way objective or mind-
independent. But a moment’s glance at contemporary metaethical debates reveals that this assumption is by
no means obvious. Indeed, there are compelling reasons to think that (at least some versions of)
constructivism deserve to be called realist. For example, on some constructivist accounts, there is the
conceptual possibility that everyone could be mistaken what the moral facts are, but that the nature of a
given domain allows for ‘global error’ is plausibly regarded as an indication that we ought to be realists about
the properties of that domain. I return to this issue in Section 5 below.
Evolution and Moral Realism 217
suppresses at least one critical component, viz., the internalization of others’

evaluative attitudes. I argue that the evolution of this psychological
component not only provides a better explanation of our moral experience,
but also explains why we should expect the structure of morality to consist
in the relationship between our conduct and the evaluative attitudes of
others. In Section III, I address several objections one might raise against
my proposal, and in Section IV, I review empirical evidence indirectly
supporting my proposal. Finally, in Section V, I argue that understanding
morality in terms of the evaluative attitudes of agents seeking mutual
agreement is precisely how the moral constructivist understands the nature
of right and wrong; I rehearse, rather briefly, the basic structure of this view
and the ways in which some authors plausibly regard this view as a form of
moral realism.
I.
Richard Joyce has recently argued that a Darwinian-based moral

psychology supports moral projectivism, according to which moral proper-

ties are ‘projected’ onto the world in the way that, say, cold is projected onto
snow [2005: 125]. On this view, properties such as right and wrong, good
and evil, are not objective properties of actions or persons. Instead, their
existence depends entirely on our particular moral sense—a sense that, on
Joyce’s view, is entirely explained by our evolutionary past. But this
genealogical account is thought to undermine the truth of judgments
containing such concepts, as the following argument attempts to show.
Vindicating a realm of moral facts in the context of evolution depends
critically on showing that the evolution of our moral sense, including our
disposition to make moral judgments, evolved as a consequence of our
recognition of moral facts.2 But this is not how evolution played out.
According to the central claim of evolutionary antirealism, the selection
pressures facing early humans did not need to shape humans in ways that
improved apprehension of the moral facts (as if there were any); what was
needed was simply improved social cooperation. Joyce expresses the central
claim this way: ‘the function that natural selection had in mind for moral
judgment was [nothing] remotely like detecting a feature of the world, but
rather something more like encouraging successful social behaviour’ [Joyce
2005: 131]. Philip Kitcher expresses the central claim this way:
At the initial stage, proto-morality is introduced as a system of primitive rules

for transcending the fraught sociality of early hominids: there’s no issue here
of perceiving moral truths . . . The criterion of success isn’t accurate
representation, but the improvement of social cohesion . . .
[2005: 176]
2
It is of course conceivable that there is no causal relation between the selective forces of evolution and the
evaluative judgments we tend to make, but following Street [2006], I doubt that this is the realist’s most
promising path, for this would mean that it was a fortunate accident that our psychologies happen to track
evaluative facts.
218 Scott M. James
Sharon Street expresses the central claim in more general terms: ‘the
function of evaluative judgments from an evolutionary point of view is not
to ‘‘track’’ independent evaluative truths, but rather to get us to respond to
our circumstances in ways that are adaptive’ [2006: 157–8]. In short,
practical success, not cognitive success, was the evolutionary solution to the
adaptive pressures facing early humans. But despite the widespread appeal
of the central claim, it is (I will argue) mistaken. For what no evolutionary
antirealist considers and part of what this paper is meant to articulate is the
distinct possibility that these two ‘functions’—i.e. detecting a feature of the
world, on the one hand, and encouraging social cohesion, on the other—are
in fact parts of the same moral faculty. As I hope to show, improved social
cohesion requires fairly sophisticated moral judgments. This story will
emerge in the next section.
Evolutionary antirealists lay heavy emphasis on the fact that our moral
judgments play a dynamic role in shaping not only our practical
deliberation, but also our emotions and desires. Indeed, Joyce maintains
that ‘the human tendency to project emotions onto the world lies at the
heart of our moral sense’ [2005: 108]. But whereas the realist holds that this
emotional projection is but one (contingent) part of morality, where at least

one other part of morality consists of moral facts, the antirealist believes
that this projection is all there is to morality. So where the realist contends
that the disgust we feel in response to some bit of viciousness, for example, is
normally a sign of an objective moral property of the world, the antirealist
contends that there is nothing other than the disgust.3 Joyce’s view is more
sophisticated, since he acknowledges that moral predicates express both
conative and cognitive states of mind like belief [2005: 151 ff.]. It’s just that
the latter, on Joyce’s view, fail to refer. At any rate, the central claim is
meant to deliver a substantive metaethical thesis: apart from the moral
motivational tendencies exhibited by humans (however beliefs figure in the
mix), there are no moral facts to speak of. Our motivational tendencies
exhaust the moral realm.
But while antirealist views of morality are not new, defenders of
evolutionary antirealism like to point out that their view possesses the
added virtue of being empirically grounded. Says Joyce: ‘Projectivism is the
predictable result of natural selection’s tight-fisted efficiency’ [2005: 128].
Why? Because in order to solve cooperative problems facing early humans,
natural selection would have favoured individuals who made a distinct type
of judgment—what we now think of as a moral judgment—even though the
predicates that figure in such a judgment fail to refer. But this failure of
reference is unimportant from the view of natural selection, since, as the
central claim asserts, the function of moral judgments during our
Pleistocene past was not referential success, but social cohesion.
For the evolutionary antirealist, the source of our capacity to make moral
judgments lies in early humans’ attempts to resolve the recurrent adaptive
problem of social exchange. Early humans who cooperated in joint ventures
3
Cf. Ruse [1986: 234]: ‘Morality has no more (and no less) status than that of the terror we feel at the
unknown—another emotion which undoubtedly has good biological value.’
(e.g. hunting or foraging) tended to reap greater reproductive advantages

than those individuals who did not. At the same time, as is clear from
Prisoner’s Dilemma, an individual who selectively exploited the cooperation
of others stood to gain an even greater reproductive advantage. However,
since the cost of being exposed as an exploiter tended to be greater than the
cost of cooperating (at least over the long run), the following adaptive
problem would have confronted early humans: how to commit oneself to
cooperating, despite the strong temptation to defect. One solution to the
problem would have been a special motivational mechanism designed to
suppress or discourage maladaptive social behaviours. And how to do this?
Design an individual with a conscience. Someone with a conscience is likely
to commit to cooperating even when, in that instance, it may be prudentially
irrational to do so. The genealogical thesis then is that ‘natural selection has
made us want to cooperate, and granting us a tendency to think of
cooperation in moral terms (where this includes the capacity for guilt) is a
means of securing this desire’ [Joyce 2005: 115]. The overall result is a
population of individuals who are driven to cooperate, not because they
recognize the independent fairness or rightness of cooperating, but because
the disposition to cooperate conferred reproductive advantages on their

ancestors, from whom they inherit the disposition. And this would smoothly
explain the platitude that moral judgments are ‘strongly authoritative
prosocial’ prescriptions.4
Putting all this together, then, we have the following story: early humans,
faced with the recurrent problem of social exchange, evolved the disposition
to feel and judge that certain actions are wrong, and such attitudes played a
dynamic role in shaping individuals’ practical lives in ways that encouraged
social cooperation. But since this account can successfully explain moral
judgments and our moral sense without positing moral facts, we can dispense
with moral facts altogether.
II.
There are of course subtleties and details I have had to leave out. But, for
our purposes, the above description will do. The question we need to
consider now is: if we accept this general description of moral judgment and
moral sense, and even the rough picture of the adaptive problems facing
early humans, are we committed to the antirealist account of morality? In
the remainder of the paper I want to show why the answer is no. But I will
not simply argue that there are other stories compatible with the above
assumptions, for the evolutionary antirealist need not deny this. Rather, I
4
The sort of genealogical debunking the evolutionary anti-realist is pressing is modelled on the following sort
of example [Joyce 2005: 179]. Suppose you come to believe that there is a pill that causes people to believe
that Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, and suppose that you come to believe that you were
surreptitiously slipped just such a pill as a teenager. If you are inclined to say that this causal account of your
belief about Napoleon undermines your warrant for that belief, then you should be similarly inclined to think
that the evolutionary account of your moral sense undermines your warrant for your moral beliefs. In both
instances, coming to believe that p is explained by a causal process that has nothing to do with the fact that p.
While p may no doubt obtain, justification for our believing it does must rest on independent grounds.
220 Scott M. James
want to sketch another account of morality, one that not only does a better
job of explaining our moral experiences, but does so in the context of a
realm of moral truths. I do not intend for this story to represent merely a
‘how possibly’ story; converging lines of evidence suggest that there were
real constraints on the sorts of evolutionary pressures shaping the structure
of our moral psychologies. I present this evidence in the course of my
discussion.
The alternative account I wish to advance involves two parts. The first
part is genealogical: solving the adaptive problem of social exchange
required, as all parties to the dispute agree, coordinated motivational
tendencies possessing the requisite ‘moral clout’; these tendencies, I submit,
consist in part in a special sensitivity to others’ evaluative attitudes—more
specifically, a sensitivity to whether or not others could reasonably object to
one’s conduct. Under normal conditions, this sensitivity manifests itself in a
desire to see that one’s actions could be justified to others. ‘Justifiability to
others’, therefore, plays a central role in our particular moral sense. Now, as
far as it goes, this claim is not inconsistent with antirealism. What is
inconsistent with antirealism is the second, metaethical, part of the story:
moral facts are ultimately grounded in facts about the evaluative attitudes of
others. Realist or objectivist versions of constructivism maintain that moral
facts or moral truths are constituted by the attitudes or responses of
persons, usually under idealized conditions. This brings the contents of our
particular psychologies together with the structure of moral facts in an
attractive way, for it can explain the apparent objectivity of moral
judgments without introducing dubious elements into our ontology. But
for the purposes of this discussion, it is inessential which constructivist view
we champion, so long as it constitutes a form of moral realism. According to
the view that I favour, what I will call contractualist constructivism, the
truth-makers for moral claims are, at bottom, facts about reasons, viz., those
reasons that count in favour of norms of behaviour that no one with the aim
of fixing on principles to regulate behaviour could reasonably reject. Thus
the wrong-making property of a wrongful act consists in the fact that it is
prohibited by a principle that no one could reasonably reject.5
Taken together, the genealogical and metaethical claims could be read to
imply that the evolution of our particular moral sense was the result of the
recognition of facts about hypothetical agreement. Thus an early human,
disposed to judge that others could reasonably object to what she was intent
on doing and motivated by that judgment, enhanced reproductive fitness
partly because such judgments were sometimes true. And this, I will
maintain, constitutes a moral realism worthy of the name, for inter alia it
supports the possibility of global error. In the remainder of this section, I
focus on the genealogical part of the story. In Section V, I fill in the
metaethical component.
Early humans needed a way of committing to adaptive social behaviour.
The evolutionary antirealist’s solution is to design an individual with a
powerful distaste for maladaptive social behaviour, a distaste that is
5
This formulation follows Scanlon’s [1998] detailed proposal.
occasionally, but not necessarily, backed by a belief that maladaptive

behaviour is prohibited. A better solution, and one that does not require
additional cognitive resources, is to design an individual to care powerfully
about how others view her, where this concern (or something suitably close)
supplies the content of one’s moral judgment. Indeed, something like this
must be true, for there is more to our moral motivational tendencies than
the evolutionary antirealist tends to admit. As I will argue, designing human
psychology to be intimately connected to the attitudes of others is nearly a
mandatory requirement for social beings such as ourselves. And this points
to the most glaring problem with evolutionary antirealism: its failure to
appreciate that only some prosocial emotions are fitness-enhancing.
The view that conscience is an evolutionary adaptation whose function is
simply to produce a distaste for maladaptive social behaviour (perhaps
coupled with a belief with no specific content apart from the idea that some
actions are prohibited) considerably under-describes its structure. If what we
think of as conscience is an evolutionary adaptation, then, like other
adaptations, we should expect that it is domain-specific and relatively
impervious to other contextual features. It should, in other words, ‘latch on
to’ certain environmental features rather than others, in the way that
different sensory systems are receptive to only one kind of input. So what
sort of input is one’s conscience designed to receive? Few evolutionary
antirealists bother to distinguish what features of the environment, if any,
such a faculty is designed to latch on to. This is not an incidental matter. A
faculty that indiscriminately produced prosocial emotions—like a faculty
that indiscriminately deemed actions ‘prohibited’—would not have served
an individual well. Adaptive pressures would have favoured an individual
who experienced prosocial emotions only in the right circumstances; similar
pressures would have favoured an individual who made moral judgments
that, at the very least, were coordinated with others’ expectations over time.
What this points to is a sub-problem the evolutionary anti-realist has not
addressed: how should an individual’s environment either constrain the
prosocial emotions she experiences or determine the content of one’s moral
beliefs? The solution, I contend, is both intuitively plausible and empirically
grounded: moral judgments (and those that figure in the emotions we think
of as moral emotions, e.g., guilt) should track, as far as possible, whether or
not anyone else could reasonably condemn one’s behaviour, where
‘reasonable condemnation’ is determined by one’s adopting a particular
sort of standpoint, viz., seeking to live with others on terms they could
accept.6
The evolutionary anti-realist’s view (at least as it is standardly presented)
is inadequate because it fails to account for the coordination of our moral
sense with others’ expectations. Quite obviously, someone who experienced
anticipatory guilt whenever he entered into a cooperative exchange would
6
Let me reiterate: nothing in the evolutionary anti-realist’s position prevents her from conceding just these
points. My aim is to direct critical attention, not to an alternative genealogical portrait, but to the many
requirements an adequate moral sense must meet. The philosophical significance of this attention, however,
cannot be overstated: by conceding that our moral sense is attuned to features not heretofore expressed, the
evolutionary anti-realist may well have to concede a metaethical point, viz., that early humans’ psychologies
were being shaped by moral facts, at least according to one prominent metaethical view.
222 Scott M. James
eventually find himself the target of periodic exploitation (on the

assumption that anticipatory guilt reliably encourages cooperation). Such
feelings would prohibit him from countenancing retaliation or defection
precisely when such responses were fitness-enhancing. What is needed is a
way of representing social information in a way that effectively interfaces
with our motivational mechanisms. Such mechanisms not only should be
relatively immune to rational revision (i.e. to succumbing to prudential
calculations in bargaining situations), but should make defection costly. At
the same time, it should be flexible enough to accommodate a range of
‘noise’: errors in representation and prediction, social anomalies, and the
like. On my hypothesis, the relevant social information that one represents
to oneself is how others would receive one’s actions were they to adopt a
distinctly social standpoint. It is the adoption of this standpoint that
distinguishes the moral sense of our earliest moral ancestors from more
generally norm-guided behaviour. As I hope to show, the pressure to
coordinate our behaviour with the expectations of others, together with the
pressure to establish and preserve bargaining coalitions, would have driven
individuals to represent social information within a distinctly social frame—
even as opposing pressure drove individuals to distinguish between in-group

and out-group members. (More on this later.)
Failing to represent to oneself the thought that a given conspecific could
condemn one’s behaviour on a given occasion would have obvious
biological consequences, at least over the long run. But more is required.
Representing to oneself the thought that a given conspecific could condemn
one’s behaviour on a given occasion but for reasons unrelated to this
distinctly social standpoint, while practically significant, will not solve the
adaptive problem with which we began. After all, a conspecific could
condemn my behaviour for a host of reasons, some of which will be
completely idiosyncratic: it violates his personal faith; it doesn’t maximize
his own utility; perhaps he simply finds my behaviour irksome. An
individual who possessed this sort of sensitivity, while she would perhaps
increase her chances of coordinating her behaviour with the expectations of
others when compared with an individual who possessed no such sensitivity,
would nevertheless be at a biological disadvantage among individuals who
possessed a more constrained sensitivity. There are several reasons why.
First, avoiding any action that could be rejected by any of one’s conspecifics
for whatever reason would limit one’s ability to act to the point of paralysis.
Second (and this will be important later), attempting to represent to oneself
the range of idiosyncratic reasons each of one’s conspecifics possess would
be ‘cortically costly’, in the sense that encoding, updating, and accessing
representations of each of one’s many conspecifics would be far more
cortically demanding than representing others in more general social terms
(e.g. as creatures with standing interests).7 Finally, attempting to represent
to oneself what others will actually condemn increases one’s chances of
acting on false-negatives: mistakenly believing that a given conspecific will
7
This is not to suggest of course that there would be no pressure to store some critical information about
specific conspecifics (e.g. ‘Ogg never repays a debt’).
not condemn one’s action because he is either too dim, too distracted, or too
compliant. Individuals with this disposition would over time jeopardize their
reputation by ‘overplaying their hand’.
I have argued that early humans would have been interested in not just
any reason to condemn one’s behaviour, but reasons of a particular sort:
reasons that would survive scrutiny from a particular social standpoint. On
the one hand, it’s reasonable to assume that there would have always been
(as there always will be) a degree of uncertainty about how one’s
conspecifics will receive one’s actions. But this uncertainty must, at the
risk of paralysis, be overcome. On the other hand, early humans needed a
way of separating those idiosyncratic reasons from reasons that would, over
time and across conspecifics, stand up to scrutiny. An obvious—not to
mention, cheap—solution would be the adoption of a default standpoint: if
my counterpart here were only seeking principles that all could agree to live
by, would he have any reason to condemn my behaviour?8 Bear in mind that
the process leading up to this stage, like the processes leading up to mastery
of syntax, say, would have been gradual. Over successive generations, the
object of practical deliberation becomes increasingly abstract, to the point at
which one is concerned with the evaluations of a hypothetical observer. (We

should not ignore as well the cultural transmission of standards of
reasonableness, but where the grounds for those standards are left implicit.
There is no need to deny that we acquire a range of moral standards from
our environment. Justification, of course, is another matter.) Adopting this
standpoint would be a critical step towards flexibly coordinating one’s
behaviour with one’s conspecifics. At the same time, by displaying a
commitment to holding oneself accountable, at least in principle, for how
one governs oneself in the light of those reasons [cf. Darwall 2006], one
considerably improves one’s status as a trustworthy bargaining partner. The
adoption of such a standpoint would constrain, but not overly constrain,
one’s behaviour by constraining the reasons one ought to regard, in the
practical sense, as salient.
These observations are meant to illuminate the notion of reasonableness
as it figures in the claim that early humans would have been interested in
avoiding behaviour others could reasonably reject. To be sure, the concept
of reasonableness goes beyond the concept of what others could likely reject
given the principles they actually hold. Reasonable rejection requires
adopting a standpoint that may not be shared by one’s conspecifics; it
requires appeal to a standard that forms the backdrop for practical
deliberation in an uncertain social world. I might appeal to general
expectations, social conventions, and even individual particulars in
evaluating the grounds for rejecting a piece of behaviour, but I do not
necessarily assume that affected parties either subscribe to those standards
or, even if they did, would bring them to bear in evaluating my action.9 For
8
In other places I speak of what a given conspecific could reject or accept; the use of ‘could’ in these instances
is meant to be understood as hypothetical in this sense: what others would accept if they were seeking
agreement on a set of principles governing behaviour.
9
One may even suspect that they do not. In such a situation, while it may be rational for them to reject one’s
behaviour (if, for example, doing so increases their welfare), we may nevertheless deny that doing so is
224 Scott M. James
reasons already adduced, abstracting away from particulars through the

adoption of a social standpoint, while perhaps costly in some respects,
would have constituted the necessary sort of structure to solve the adaptive
problem.
III.
This picture of psychological development, however, raises two worries.

First, why would mere ‘norm-tracking’ not prove to be as equally
(biologically) advantageous as the moral sense I’ve described, where the
norms being tracked may or may not bear any resemblance to what we
think of as moral norms? Where norms have nothing to do with morality
(e.g., the leader of the hunt should wear the Tsonga beads), we cannot
claim that moral facts played a critical role in the development of our
moral psychology. Second, we might plausibly regard the claim that moral
norms apply to members of groups apart from our own as a platitude, but
if so, then the evolutionary pressures that I’ve identified cannot explain
this, since those pressures required only that individuals consider the
attitudes of members of their own group. Let me address these objections
in turn.
The first objection, though initially plausible, comes unravelled when re-
evaluated by the standards of evolutionary logic. Mere ‘norm-tracking’, it
turns out, would have exhibited a fatal limitation. Confronted with any
situation in which one’s (proposed) action A is either covered by conflicting
norms or not covered by any existing norm, mere ‘norm-trackers’ will feel
free to perform A even when A could be reasonably condemned by those
affected by A. Consequently, mere norm-trackers expose themselves to
condemnation and the possible loss of future exchanges where the sorts of
individuals I’m describing do not.10 Individuals aligning their behaviour to
those standards that no one could reasonably reject would not only cover
many of the norms in a community—since such standards will be co-
extensional with, for example, norms prohibiting gratuitous harm—but also
norms that are not yet either considered or codified. A moral sense that
latched on to others’ evaluative standpoints and evaluated them against the
backdrop of public expectations about self-governance would have provided
a reliable means of producing appropriate prosocial emotions like guilt since
an early human—whose thoughts of exploiting her neighbour were reliably
coupled with thoughts of how her neighbour could reasonably respond to
that treatment—would experience anticipatory guilt only when it would be
rational to do so (assuming, again, there is a reliable association between
such thoughts and anticipatory guilt). Someone who was disposed to
judge whether others could accept her action and conformed her behaviour
to standards no one could object to would be the very image of
trustworthiness.
reasonable [Scanlon 1998: 191–3]. We might explain this by saying that it would be one’s right to act in that
way, even though one chooses not to exercise that right for prudential considerations.
10
Peter Carruthers and I [2008] discuss this point in more detail.
The second objection begins with the assumption that moral norms are, to
a considerable extent, impartial. The solution to the adaptive problem that
I’ve described, however, apparently did not require considering what anyone
would object to, only what in-group members would object to. Indeed,
anthropological evidence strongly suggests that we possess systems that
work against the social standpoint I’ve proposed [Brewer 1999; Boyd &
Richerson 2005]: we draw distinctions between in-group and out-group
members and, as a result, sometimes make permissibility judgments that
would be incorrect from the social standpoint described above. Is this a
problem for my account? I don’t believe it is. First, it is worth noting that, as
it happens, there is no received view among anthropologists regarding
discrimination against outsiders. Some argue that successful bands of
hominids, notwithstanding a general prejudice toward outsiders, developed
means of cooperation with unrelated bands of hominids [Wilson et al. 1992;
Macy and Skvoretz 1998]. But let us suppose discrimination did pay. The
objection is unconvincing, for while it may be true that our moral sense
evolved among small bands of hominids, hominids who may have already
possessed a disposition to discriminate against outsiders, the disposition to
adopt the social standpoint would have yielded true moral judgments,
judgments that applied to out-group members, even in the absence of
reflection on out-group members. The reason, simply put, is that out-group
members would have been similar to in-group members along the relevant
dimensions.
Recall that successfully overcoming the recurrent adaptive problem of
exchange was bound by constraints on representation: given the limitations
on recollection and prediction, an individual is forced to rely on the more
universal features of conspecifics—for example, patterns of emotional
reaction based on involuntary facial expressions.11 But since these
expressions (and other traits targeted for detection) would be shared by
in-group and out-group hominids, the moral sense I’ve described would,
ceteris paribus, be triggered in situations involving out-group members. In
fact, if this were not the case, it would be difficult to explain the fact that
very young children in a vast array of cultures judge some norm-violations
(what turn out, on my picture, to be moral norm violations) as
impermissible independently of where they occur or whom they affect [Nucci
et al. 1983; Hollos et al. 1986; Nichols 2004]. Observe as well the striking
psychological fact that components of this system are reflected in early
ontogenetic development. Developmental psychologists have observed that
children as young as three i) have the capacity for both counterfactual and
deontic reasoning [Harris et al. 1986]; ii) distinguish between intentional
and unintentional harm in making moral judgments [Nelson-Le Gall 1985];
and iii) appeal to rights in the contexts of moral transgressions [Smetana
1989]. Of course, left unexplained is the fact that humans are all too partial
to their own groups; it would appear that we sometimes make false moral
judgments regarding members of other groups. But it is important to point
11
For a compelling account of how involuntary ‘symptoms’ of emotional states like guilt serve to telegraph
one’s intentions in such a way as to reassure potential bargaining partners, see Frank [1989].
226 Scott M. James
out that the tracking account I’ve proposed is not undermined by the
making or holding of false moral judgments, anymore than a tracking
account of perceptual systems is undermined by the making or holding of
false perceptual judgments.12 What would undermine my account is if we
have reason to believe that a preponderance of early humans’ moral
judgments were false (by the constructivist’s lights) and yet this did nothing
to decrease their biological fitness. But I’ve tried to show that this would
have been highly improbable: individuals that systematically acted in ways
that others could reasonably condemn faced bleak futures, social and
otherwise.
IV.
I have argued for the evolution of a moral sense, in large measure, by taking
advantage of standard evolutionary logic. But several lines of empirical
research provide indirect support for the view. First, psychologists have for
some time now maintained that the mind is innately equipped with a ‘theory
of mind’ (TOM) module or system, whose function is to ascribe beliefs and

desires to conspecifics as a means of explaining and predicting behaviour
[Baron-Cohen 1995; Carruthers et al. 2005]. While disputes remain about
how to understand the TOM module [cf. Goldman 2006], a consensus has
developed around the idea that our social understanding of the world is
erected around a core set of assumptions about the mental states that move
other people. But a TOM module is precisely the sort of cognitive precursor
one would expect if one were independently drawn to the view that our
moral sense is attuned to the evaluative attitudes of others. (And the fact
that this ability develops quite early ontogenetically supports the adaptation
hypothesis.) If the outputs of this module interface with one’s first-person
set of hypotheses about what sorts of experiences lead to what sorts of
mental states, then through induction one can generate hypotheses about
the sorts of evaluative attitudes others are likely to have under a range of
circumstances.13
Second, one of the more unexpected features of both many primate
societies and extant hunter-gatherer tribes is a strong tendency towards
egalitarianism [Binmore 1998; Boehm 1999; de Waal, 1996]. One explana-
tion for this tendency is that ‘humans are singling out competitive or
predatory behaviours that are likely to cause conflict, and, by suppressing
them, they are, in effect, damping conflicts pre-emptively’ [Boehm 1999: 85].
Boehm thus supposes that ‘the first behaviour to be outlawed and controlled
by a human group may well have been the expression of dominance’ [ibid.:
12
My account is compatible with the evolution of other systems—e.g., systems supporting strong preference
for kin and local conspecifics—that would have sometimes moved an individual to ignore the deliverances of
the moral system. This is, after all, consistent with a range of psychological findings: in select environments,
two or more evolved cognitive systems deliver competing information or competing motivations.
13
Darwall has recently tried to illuminate this connection in normative terms: ‘the ability to attribute beliefs
and feelings to others is intimately bound up with the capacity to engage one another second-personally’,
where second-person engagement ‘requires the capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes—in a word,
empathy’ [2006: 98].
97]. It should be obvious then that an individual in such a climate would be

careful to conform one’s behaviour to standards one’s conspecifics could
accept. After all, even where one’s own interests are not directly at stake,
cross-cultural studies show that people punish individuals who attempt to
exploit or cheat other members of the group [Nowack et al. 2000]. Indeed,
people will pay to do so. But these observations lend support to the
prediction that individuals would be strongly inclined to govern themselves
in ways that escape the condemnation of members of the group.
Third, in tandem with the previous studies, some biological anthropol-
ogists and game theorists argue that the earliest (recognizably) moral
communities exemplify the social contract tradition of morality since, in the
absence of a dominant ruler (or philosopher-king), decisions affecting the
welfare of individuals in a group would have to be made collaboratively
[Binmore 1998; Skyrms 1996]. Indeed, some experimental results show that
when individuals across a wide cultural range are asked to choose principles
of distributive justice, they almost always fix on the two principles outlined
by Rawls’s contractarian approach [Frohlich 1993]. In fact, the idea that our
moral psychologies are best described as Rawlsian forms the central
hypothesis of Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser’s new book [2006].

Finally, if, as I have argued, selection would have favoured individuals
who adopted a particular standpoint in evaluating the permissibility of a
given action, a standpoint marked by hypothetical agreement, then one
should expect to see evidence of this perspective embedded in cross-cultural
norms. There is a presumption in favour of such evidence. From Buddhism
(‘Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find harmful’) to Judaism
(‘What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man’) to Islam (‘No one of
you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for
himself’), core social norms appear to be constrained by considerations of
fairness: one extends to oneself only those principles for social living that
others could accept [cf. Hauser 2006: 357 ff.]. Apparently, even among
divergent cultures, where a variety of norms obtain, there will remain a fixed
deliberative point that commands our attention in practical matters.
There are of course many elements of this account that remain to be filled
in, but even so, this account represents an important advance over the
evolutionary anti-realist’s proposal. Any serious attempt to understand the
evolutionary history of our moral sense—on the assumption that there is
an evolutionary history to be uncovered—must account for the environ-
ment’s role in ‘tuning up’ that sense. Take Joyce’s assertion that ‘the
function that natural selection had in mind for moral judgment was
[nothing] remotely like detecting a feature of the world.’ As we’ve seen, the
difference between detecting and not detecting the evaluative attitudes of
others would have made a critical difference in an individual’s fitness over
time. But even apart from this point, Joyce’s claim, taken literally, cannot be
true, for any number of sophisticated judgments is required for successful
cooperative exchanges.14
14
Street [2006: 114] effectively makes the same point.
228 Scott M. James
The view that one’s conscience is effectively a faculty for evaluating and
conforming one’s behaviour to the evaluative attitudes of others yields a
positive thesis about guilt, viz., that guilt is the internalization of others’
reactions. A range of writers has endorsed such a view. William James, for
example, articulates the ‘justifiability to others’ view when he writes: ‘Yet
still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal
social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the
highest possible judging companion, if such a companion there be.’15 More
recently, Patricia Greenspan has argued that guilt involves ‘sharing the
evaluative standpoint of another person’ [1995: 129]. The moral content of
moral guilt is supplied by a judgment to the effect that others could
justifiably find fault with one’s behaviour, and this judgment is motivation-
ally linked to reparation. Simon Blackburn reinforces the reparative
component of guilt when he argues that guilt is an ‘awareness that our
behaviour could not survive the impartial scrutiny of others,’ and this, he
says, is ‘uncomfortable, and in principle opens up the gate to reform’ [1998:
204]. From an evolutionary standpoint, the reparative urge is noteworthy.
An individual with the capacity to experience guilt, where guilt is
understood in terms of the internalization of the evaluative standpoints of

others, is not only more likely to resist maladaptive social behaviour (in
virtue of what Greenspan calls ‘anticipatory guilt’), but more likely to repair
whatever damage her reputation may have sustained in violating others’
trust.
Indeed, the view that our moral sense is tightly linked to the evaluative
attitudes of others comes through on Joyce’s own account:
A person’s resolve to act (or not to act) is importantly affected by her

conception of how others will receive her decisions, her confidence in whom
she can justify herself, her perception of herself as acting from considerations
that would also move her fellows—in short, her experience of herself as a
social being.
[2005: 117]
Or, as he puts it a few pages later: ‘When we think of ourselves in moral

terms we are thinking of ourselves in social terms, we are evaluating actions
against the background of a collective justificatory framework’ [2005: 123].16
From the point of view of natural selection, this is precisely what we
would expect. Since an early human’s success in social interactions depended
critically on her reputation, and since, conceptually, her reputation
depended on what sorts of evaluative attitudes others take towards her,
we would expect natural selection to have favoured those individuals who
conformed their behaviour according to those standards others could not
reasonably criticize. But such conformity would require inter alia the
capacity to make judgments about what others could or could not accept.
15
I have been unable to locate the source of this quotation. It forms part of an epigraph to Carruth [1993].
16
The metaethical significance of this remark will become even more plain in the next section, where I
rehearse the view that, very roughly, this ‘collective justificatory framework’ forms the objective ground for
moral judgments.
And if, as many believe, such judgments are sometimes embedded in

affective states like guilt, then this strongly encourages the view that our
moral psychology was designed not simply to produce prosocial emotions
and content-less moral beliefs, as important as those may be, but to evaluate
and care about how others view us. It would pay for an individual to be
sensitive to whether others could raise objections to the action she was
considering performing, for with objections come social sanctions. And, in
evolutionary terms, social sanctions are costly.
I have just argued that if the social world of our early ancestors is as
complex as most theorists assume, and if social exchanges were as important
as Joyce and others contend, then only an account like mine stands a chance
of being correct. Only my account is sensitive to the finer grain description
of the adaptive problem facing early humans, according to which the
adaptive pressures of social exchange required fitness-enhancing moral
tendencies. Such tendencies, I contend, require judgments about the
evaluative attitudes of others.
V.
With this sketch of our moral psychology on the table, I want to turn now to
the metaethical part of the story. As discussed in the first section, the
challenge to the evolutionary realist is to illuminate the relationship between
the adaptive pressures on early humans and moral facts, assuming for the
moment there are such facts. But the challenge can be met rather directly by
appeal to one version of constructivism or another. For views of this type
take moral facts or moral truths to be constituted by the attitudes or
responses of persons, usually under idealized conditions. So a typical
constructivist will assert that what makes an action wrong are ultimately the
sorts of responses individuals, ideally situated, could have to certain types of
conduct. But at the heart of the genealogical story sketched in the previous
section was the idea that adaptive pressures would have favoured humans
who cared deeply about the types of responses others could have to certain
types of conduct. Thus, constructivism promises to bring the contents of our
particular psychologies together with the structure of moral facts in a
theoretically attractive way.
What needs to be emphasized, however, is that a number of moral
theorists regard constructivism as a form of moral realism or moral
objectivism, where this is understood, roughly, as the view that some moral
judgments are objectively true and that this truth is independent of any
particular individual’s attitude.17 But if any one of these views is correct,
then we can intelligibly assert, on the one hand, that our capacity for moral
judgment is the product of adaptive pressures acting on early humans (along
the lines described above) and, on the other, that some moral judgments are
objectively true. We may insist that the genealogy of our moral psychology
17
See, for example, Korsgaard 1996a and 1996b; Rawls 1980; Copp 1995; Milo 1995; Darwall 2006; and
Scanlon 1998.
230 Scott M. James
is the genealogy of a faculty sensitive to the moral facts. That humans came
to judge that ‘f-ing is morally wrong’ is explained, in part, by the fact that
f-ing is morally wrong.
At any rate, it is inessential for our purposes which constructivist view we
champion so long as a) it comports with the general genealogical story of
our moral psychology outlined above and b) it constitutes a form of moral
realism. Thus I won’t enter into a defence of any one view. Instead, I will
simply describe a view that I believe is one of the more promising
contenders, viz., Scanlonian contractualism. On this view, the truth-makers
for moral claims are, at bottom, facts about reasons, viz., those reasons that
count in favour of norms of behaviour that no one with the aim of fixing on
principles to regulate behaviour could reasonably reject.
What I’ll call contractualist constructivism brings together the idea that
morality is fundamentally a matter of reasonable agreement with the idea
that moral truths are truths about which principles people could reasonably
agree on—not about an independently given moral order. The view that
morality is fundamentally about reasonable agreement is meant to capture
what it is we owe to each other at the most basic level, viz., a mutual
recognition of the reasons people have for wanting their lives to go a certain
way. The view that moral facts are facts about reasonable agreement
explains the strongly intuitive idea that some moral claims (e.g., ‘Murder for
fun is morally wrong’) are objectively true, but does so without introducing
‘queer’ properties into our ontology. Let’s start with the first of these views.
Scanlon’s version of contractualism asserts that an act A is wrong under
conditions C when others could raise a legitimate objection to a principle
permitting A in C. More formally, A is wrong under C if A’s performance
under C would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general
regulation of behaviour that no one with the aim of finding such a set could
reasonably reject [Scanlon 1998: 153].18 Therefore, the truth of a moral
judgment depends on the principles co-participants could not reasonably
reject. Seen from this angle, contractualist constructivism takes moral truths
as practical truths, where these are ‘truths about what there is reason, for
some individual or group of individuals, to prefer, choose, or do, from some
point of view’ [Milo 1995: 186]. Thus we are justified in accepting a moral
truth so long as it would be the rational choice from the standpoint of those
seeking mutual cooperation.
Now some will be unconvinced that constructivism ought to count as a
variety of moral realism. The usual motivation for this scepticism is that
moral realist views require that the facts that ground moral truths obtain
independently of agents’ psychologies, but the facts that ground moral truths
according to contractualist constructivism do not obtain independently of
agents’ psychologies. To settle this issue adequately would require far more
space than I have; it would, besides, require delving into many controversial
domains. Let me offer instead two (very) abbreviated sets of replies.19 The
18
Milo [1995: 189] offers a more general constructivist framework: ‘an act is wrong if and only if it would be
prohibited by any set of norms chosen by (suitably idealized) hypothetical contractors.’
19
To be sure, I do not take myself to be defending all forms of realism; instead, I want to show very briefly
that there is a kind of realist view against which standard arguments do not work.
first set aims at undermining the main motivation for this kind of scepticism.
The second set adduces positive reasons for regarding contractualist
constructivism as a realist view of morality.20
There is good reason for resisting a conception of realism that requires
that the facts that ground judgments in a given domain obtain
independently of agent’s psychologies: it’s too conservative [Sayre-McCord
1989: 5 ff]. Take, for example, hedonistic utilitarianism: what makes it a fact
that some action A is morally required is that, of the available alternatives,
only A will maximize overall pleasure. But since one of the essential
components of the state of affairs that constitutes that moral fact is a
psychological state (i.e. pleasure), this would make hedonistic utilitarianism
out to be an anti-realist view, which it plainly is not. To insist, therefore, on
a conception of realism that altogether excludes reference to agents’
psychologies runs the risk of ruling out positions that, on any reasonable
construal, deserve the realist moniker.
But perhaps the sort of constructivism I am proposing is mind-dependent
in a stronger sense. Consider the characterization put forward by Milo:
moral facts are strongly mind dependent if moral facts supervene on other
facts (including psychological facts) only as a consequence of these other facts
being made the object of some intentional psychological state, such as a belief
or an attitude.
[1995: 191]
On this characterization, it is only because we have a certain psychological

reaction towards some act or person that we make the moral judgment we
do. On what grounds then does constructivism deserve to be called an
objective moral theory?21
The answer lies in identifying the right kind of stance or standpoint. It is
sometimes true that the stance we take towards a given principle is parochial
or personal when, for example, we hold others to standards to which we do
not hold ourselves. But it is also true—for some of us at least some of the
time—that the stance we take towards a given principle is impersonal or
impartial when, for example, we adopt another’s standpoint and ask
ourselves whether, from that standpoint, we have a good reason to object to
a given piece of behaviour. The point is that this standpoint is available in
principle to creatures like us [Milo 1995: 193]. We can ask whether the
reasons others have for wanting us to refrain from performing a given act
are reasonable, as measured against public expectations about how we
should govern ourselves. And this, as some authors contend, can ground the
objectivity of right and wrong.22
20
It bears repeating that moral constructivism covers a wide territory, so even if my efforts to stake out a
realist version of constructivism leave the reader unconvinced, this shows only that this path towards realism
does not appear promising. A successful scepticism about constructivism’s hopes on this front would require
showing that no constructivism offers a promising path towards realism, and this would be a large
undertaking indeed, given the range of objectivist versions of constructivism in the literature (see note 17).
21
Street [2006] denies that constructivism ought to be regarded as realist for just this reason.
22
Compare this to what Michael Smith calls Internalist Naturalistic Moral Realism: ‘Acts are right or wrong
depending on whether, notwithstanding any contingent and rationally optional culturally induced differences
232 Scott M. James
The most compelling reason, however, to construe at least some versions

of moral constructivism realistically is that they satisfy what some [e.g.
Wright 1987] regard as a sufficient condition for realism, viz., they allow for
the conceptual possibility of global error. What justifies a given principle P is
not that we think P withstands scrutiny from the relevant procedure of
construction, but that P withstands scrutiny from the relevant procedure,
whether or not anyone has bothered to consider the matter. By virtue of
depending on subjunctive conditionals (i.e. what agents would agree to
under certain conditions), at least some moral truths can be strongly mind-
independent, obtaining even when evaluated against worlds in which there
are no rational agents.23
I won’t pretend of course that that these remarks will settle all concerns;
the point to insist on, however, is that, quite apart from evolutionary
considerations, there are and continue to be overlapping lines of support for
contractualism [e.g. Wallace 2002; Ridge 2001; Kumar 1999 and 2003].
What this indicates is that there is at least one plausible constructivist view
of morality that a) comports with the general genealogical story of our
moral psychology and b) can ground a form of moral realism worthy of the
name. One can thus take seriously evolutionary insights into human
cognition without having to dispense with, in the same motion, moral
truths.24
University of North Carolina, Wilmington Received: July 2007

Revised: January 2008
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The Caveman&#39;s Conscience

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On: 23 December 2010

Australasian Journal of Philosophy