ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between moral realism, so understood, and best hypotheses about the evolution of moral cognition. Much empirical work has been done on the evolution of morality. Moral facts thus understood would exist independently of any specific agent's recognition of those facts. Humans develop one way of thinking about the world, a folk understanding, via socialization in temporally and geographically variable epistemic communities: we develop folk understandings of the physical, biological, and social world. In science, reduction is the claim that the facts in one domain are less explanatorily fundamental than the facts in another. Vindication is possible, as is elimination, but the most important upshot is that mixed cases are possible too, meaning it is a mistake to frame the discussion as a choice between reduction and elimination. Folk moral theories will be a mixed case. Moral thinking on this account is not fully vindicated, but nor is it entirely debunked as a mere adaptive fiction.
