Treating morality as evolved explains its particular blind spots

The argument

A second argument offered for this position turns on the pattern of moral failure rather than moral success. Whatever account of morality one holds, proponents note, the failures are oddly consistent. People respond far more strongly to a single identified victim than to a great many unidentified ones. Harm done by one's own hand registers more heavily than equal or greater harm done at a distance through a chain of intermediaries. Obligations to those nearby feel urgent and obligations to the distant feel optional, even when the cost of discharging them is identical. Future people barely register at all. These are not random errors; they form a recognisable shape. The argument is that the shape is the shape of the conditions under which the faculty was assembled. A disposition tuned for small groups, in which almost everyone encountered was a face, almost every harm was proximate, and almost no action had consequences beyond a lifetime, would be expected to produce exactly this profile when transplanted into a world of strangers, institutions and long causal chains. Accounts that treat morality as received law or as flexible social construction have more difficulty here, proponents argue: a given law would not be expected to come with systematic bias toward the near and visible, and a freely constructed code would be expected to vary in its blind spots rather than to share them across societies that constructed independently. Defenders present this as the position's strongest explanatory claim, and they draw a practical conclusion from it. If the moral sense is equipment calibrated for conditions that no longer obtain, then its silence is not evidence of permission, and much of moral progress consists in building arguments, rules and institutions that correct for known distortions in the instrument, as has arguably happened whenever a circle of concern was widened against the grain of immediate feeling.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents question both the data and the inference. The biases described, they argue, may reflect what people can know and act on rather than what they care about: proximity carries information and responsibility that distance does not, so weighting it may be reasonable rather than defective. They also note that the position cuts against itself. If the instrument is as distorted as the argument says, the moral convictions used to identify the distortions must come from somewhere other than the instrument, and the account does not say where. Rivals add that widely shared blind spots are also what widely shared circumstances would produce.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Some of the pattern may be justified rather than biased, since nearness brings knowledge, control and specific responsibility that distance does not. [Rejecting P3] Societies do not construct independently, since they face similar problems and borrow heavily, so shared blind spots are expected on a constructionist account too. [Rejecting C] The argument needs a standard outside the instrument to call the pattern distortion at all, and identifying morality with the instrument leaves no room for one.