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Remark by Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos re ethics and evolution

Way back when I read Cosmos and Mind  and discovered that Sharon Street rejects "mind-independent" moral truths for the most interesting reason.  She says the moral theory is inconsistent with natural selection because there's no reason to think that natural selection would put us in touch with mind-independent truths. So she concludes that Darwinians, such as herself, must avoid giving an exalted status to these sorts of claims.

Some thoughts on that: first of all, wouldn't one who arrives at such a conclusion (evolution is true, therefore ethics ain't as true as we thought) about moral claims arrive at a similar conclusion regarding causal claims?  How could one, therefore, claim to know the sort of necessary truths that characterize science.  How can Sean Carroll say with confidence that Laplace is right if natural solution provides no plausible scenario in which knowing math and science would be advantageous?

I suppose one could always argue that such knowledge is just a more complicated version of particular knowledge, but that counter doesn't seem to support the type of determinism that so enamors Mr. Carroll.  Is the awareness of determinism a more complicated version of our knowledge of contingent facts?  Is the awareness of universality a more complicated version of our knowledge of particulars?

On the other hand, the problem might be resolved by clarifying "mind-independent."  Maybe this way of characterizing higher level truths is deeply flawed in a manner analogous to how Kant's talk of a "Ding-an-Sich." Maybe such truths are not to be thematized as being true independent of all minds but rather as capable of being known by all other rational minds.

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