e evolutionary challenge.Worries about the compatibility of evolution and morality are not new-even Darwin had them. A number of recent arguments revive these concerns. ese evolutionary debunking arguments take the following form: you just believe what you do because you evolved to, therefore you're not justi ed in believing what you do. ey typically target evaluative realism: the view that evaluative facts are attitude-independent-that what is valuable is valuable whether or not we happen to value it. 1 e worry is that just as evolutionary forces shaped our eyes and ears, so they shaped our evaluative attitudes. But, the debunker argues, we have no reason to think that these forces would track the attitude-independent evaluative truths that the realist posits. 2 Worse yet, we seem to have a good reason to think that they wouldn't: evolution selects for characteristics that increase genetic tness-not ones that correlate with the evaluative truth. Plausibly, the attitudes and judgments that increase a creature's tness come apart from the true evaluative beliefs. If this is so, then it seems that evolutionary forces have had a distorting effect on our evaluative attitudes. e debunker concludes, insofar as we are realists and insofar as the evolutionary facts are thusand-so, we are not justi ed in our evaluative beliefs.Evolutionary debunking arguments are sometimes meant to establish just this: evaluative skepticism. Other times the skeptical conclusion is in the service of the greater goal of undermining evaluative realism. In either case, the debunker must rst establish that learning about the evolutionary origin of our evaluative beliefs gives us, qua realists, good reason to worry about our evaluative beliefs. I will argue that the considerations she puts forth cannot give us such reason. I will conclude that there is little hope for distinctly evolutionary debunking arguments. is is bad news for the debunker who hoped that the cold, hard scienti c facts about our origins would undermine our evaluative beliefs. e Debunker's Argument.1 1 is understanding of realism follows the evolutionary debunking literature. Similar de nitions can be found in metaethics more generally (see Shafer-Landau [2005] 15 on 'stance-independence'). For present purposes, evaluative propositions are of the form: that X is a normative reason to Y, that one should or ought to X, that X is good, valuable or worthwhile, that X is morally right or wrong, and so on. Evaluative attitudes include (conscious or unconscious) beliefs in evaluative propositions, as well "as desires, attitudes of approval and disapproval, unre ective […] tendencies such as the tendency to experience X as counting in favor of or demanding Y, " etc. (Street [2006] 110).2 From here on I'll drop the 'attitude-independent' quali er on evaluative attitudes or truths.

Evolutionary debunking arguments move from a premise about the influence of evolutionary forces on our moral beliefs to a skeptical conclusion about those beliefs. My primary aim is to clarify this empirically grounded epistemological challenge. I begin by distinguishing among importantly different sorts of epistemological attacks. I then demonstrate that instances of each appear in the literature under the 'evolutionary debunking' title. Distinguishing them clears up some confusions and helps us better understand the structure and potential of evolutionary debunking arguments.

We often hear such casual accusations: you just believe that because you are a liberal, a Christian, an American, a woman… When such charges are made they are meant to sting—not just emotionally, but epistemically. But should they? It can be disturbing to learn that one's beliefs reflect the influence of such irrelevant factors. The pervasiveness of such influence has led some to worry that we are not justified in many of our beliefs. That same pervasiveness has led others to doubt whether there is any worry here at all. I argue that evidence of irrelevant belief influence is sometimes, but not always, undermining. My proposal picks out ordinary, non‐skeptical cases in which we get evidence of error. It says that, in those cases, evidence of irrelevant influence is epistemically significant. It shows how respecting evidence of error is compatible with the epistemic lives we see ourselves living. We are fallible creatures, yes, but we are also capable and intelligent ones. We can recognize and correct for our own error so as to improve our imperfect, yet nevertheless robust, epistemic lives.

No abstract

Should learning we disagree about p lead you to reduce confidence in p? Some who think so want to except beliefs in which you are rationally highly confident. I argue that this is wrong; we should reject accounts that rely on this intuitive thought. I then show that quite the opposite holds: factors that justify low confidence in p also make disagreement about p less significant. I examine two such factors: your antecedent expectations about your peers' opinions and the difficulty of evaluating your evidence. I close by proposing a different way of thinking about disagreement.