Volume 22, Number 3
September 2022
ARTICLE

Evolution, Utilitarianism, and Normative Uncertainty: The Practical Significance of Debunking Arguments

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Volume 22, Number 3, September 2022, Pages 338–354
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v22i3.1266
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Abstract

It has been argued that evolutionary considerations favor utilitarianism by selectively debunking its competitors. However, evolutionary considerations also seem to undermine the practical significance of utilitarianism, since commonsense beliefs about well-being seem like prime candidates for evolutionary debunking. We argue that the practical significance of utilitarianism is not undermined in this way if we understand the requirements of practical rationality as sensitive to normative uncertainty. We consider the view that rational decision-making under normative uncertainty requires maximizing expected choiceworthiness, as well as the possibility that different theories’ choiceworthiness rankings are not all interval-scale measurable or intertheoretically comparable. Finally, we suggest how evolutionary considerations may increase the practical significance of utilitarianism even if belief in utilitarianism is debunked by evolutionary considerations, so long as belief in competing theories is undermined to an even greater extent.
Copyright © 2022 Andreas L. Mogensen and William MacAskill
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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