Moral judgments do not represent moral facts

It is a matter of live debate in contemporary metaethics whether there are knowable moral truths.

Moral judgments do not purport to represent moral facts 
but instead just express emotions, attitudes or commitments.

Evolutionary explanations for morality in the empirical sense are offered at different levels, and this makes for very different explanatory projects with different implications. Some typical explananda in accounts of “the evolution of morality” are:

1. The general capacity for normative judgment and guidance, and the tendency to exercise this capacity in social life;
2. The capacity for certain sentiments and the ability to detect them in others;
3. The tendency to experience and to be motivated by certain sentiments in certain types of situation;
4. The tendency to make certain particular kinds of moral judgment or inference, or to have certain characteristic moral intuitions (i.e., a ‘moral sense’);
5. The tendency to exhibit certain particular types of behavior in certain types of situation (as a result of D);
6. The tendency of societies to exhibit certain particular systems of norms or types of practice (due to D and E).

It is uncontroversial that there will be evolutionary explanations of some sort for the very general capacities and tendencies in A and B: we are evolved creatures, and our psychological capacities, like other complex capacities, are outcomes of evolutionary processes. But this does not by itself settle whether these capacities and tendencies are themselves adaptations, having evolved through natural selection because of their adaptive effects. That is the most common view (further explored below), but there are alternatives.

It is possible, for example, that our capacity to make moral judgments is a spin-off (side-effect or by-product) of our non-moral intellectual capacities, which latter are adaptations.[3] On this view, we tend to make moral judgments because we are intellectual and reflective creatures, not because natural selection has specifically given us this moral capacity and tendency as an adaptation; the role of natural selection would be indirect, supplying more general capacities as adaptations, from which specifically moral tendencies spring independently (Ayala 2006; Prinz 2008, Machery and Mallon 2010)

The deeper point, however, is that whichever position one takes on the role of natural selection in the emergence of generic capacities for moral judgment, this does not settle how best to account for other, more specific tendencies, such as C-F. In particular:

• Even if (1) our capacity and tendency to make moral judgments is an adaptation that evolved through natural selection, it remains possible that (2) the content of particular moral judgments is derived autonomously, i.e., free from causal shaping by particular elements in our evolutionary background—in roughly the way that the contents of our beliefs in physics or philosophy seem to be (see section 2.4 below).
• Alternatively, even if (1*) our capacity and tendency to make moral judgments is not itself an adaptation, it remains possible that (2*) the content of particular moral judgments is deeply shaped by evolved emotional dispositions that have affected the content of moral judgments since human beings began making them. Such emotional adaptations may thus have influenced cultural norms throughout history and may continue to influence our moral judgments, and hence our behavior, today.