Abstract:
Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (EDAs) contend that moral realism is untenable because our moral beliefs are products of natural selection rather than outputs of truth-tracking mechanisms, thereby lacking epistemic justification. This paper identifies and critiques four core assumptions underlying EDAs: the binary opposition between adaptation and truth, the thesis that origins determine epistemic status, the non-natural independence of moral truths, and the requirement of modal necessity. More importantly, the paper proposes an epistemically stratified defense model, demonstrating how moral knowledge can achieve reliability through the systematic interaction of three relatively independent mechanisms—evolved emotions, cultural filtering, and rational critique. This model exposes a fundamental flaw in EDAs: they erroneously equate the genetic origin of a belief with its entire epistemic basis. Building on this framework, the paper further develops a social-ecological moral realism, reconceiving moral truths as functional constraints embedded within socio-ecological niches, thus reconciling evolutionary science with moral objectivity. The argument presented here shows that: (1) the epistemically stratified model reveals how moral knowledge gains systemic reliability through cross-validation across three epistemic layers, bias correction, cross-cultural stabilization, and epistemic redundancy; and (2) ecological moral realism explains why evolution can track moral truths without invoking mysterious coincidences.