CONCLUSION

     Allan Gibbard has nudged philosophy closer to an accurate understanding of human normativity by enticing readers to accept the seemingly radical notion that our normative practices might be grounded in biological evolution. The fact that I dispute the sufficiency of his explanation should in no way detract from the importance of its intent.

     I have presented a considerable laundry list of complaints about Gibbard's norm-expressivism. The vast majority simply support my general contention that Gibbard was influenced by prevailing views about humanity that were incompatible with his Galilean project. I fully expect most readers to be similarly influenced, and my unenviable task has been to persuade readers to consider giving up even more of their comfortable preconceptions than Gibbard was inclined to abandon.

     What I hope the reader has considered, however unpalatable or unusual or radical it may have seemed, is that human normativity -- the deliverances of some mechanism or mechanisms within us (unless normativity astoundingly turns out to be independent of natural influence) -- can be explained in exactly the same way as are other human capabilities, such as sensory perception: as adaptations responding to objective values (such as survival and reproduction).

     Gibbard explains human normativity by virtue of its evolutionary adaptivity. Evolutionary advantage in the coin of benefits from coordination is the proximate cause or impulse behind the development of human normativity. He doesn't explain, however, why adaptivity matters.

     I hope I have corrected that oversight. My claim is that adaptivity is a response to objective features of the world -- not by any means a radical claim for biologists. Those features are simply manifestations of Life as a reflexively functional process, and include individual lives with their own reflexive functionality. This continual pursuit by Life of its own intrinsic value is the ultimate cause behind the eventual development of human normativity.

     I have attempted to include enough expert support for my account of the rather schizophrenic nature of human judgment to keep it from being dismissed as an interesting but unpersuasive theory. Just as an overriding concern with the function of human perceptual mechanisms was needed before naive realism could be replaced by a scientific epistemology, so a comparable concern with the function of human judging mechanisms is needed before our folk psychology of judgment can be replaced by a scientifically grounded one.

     Any theory of human normativity that fails to appreciate the evolved functional roles of, and conflicts among, the three mechanisms of normative judgment we've discussed (limbic evaluation, intuition and heuristics from a right-hemisphere/limbic "coalition", and methodical reasoning of the left hemisphere) is doomed to fail at explaining apparent discrepancies and internal conflicts of judgment. Gibbard reaches just such an impasse. He treats limbic evaluation as part of an 'animal control system' playing no direct role in human normative judgment, which he views as a fundamentally linguistic process. He also treats heuristics and intuition as deliverances of reason -- the first flawed, and the second more trustworthy than are the methodical reasonings I advocate. Indeed, as we've just seen, he mistrusts methodical reasoning -- worrying that its unassailable judgments might not be acceptable to us.

     This reveals an important metaphilosophical concern: judgments about judgment will differ according to which judging mechanism produces them. A preference by Gibbard for the intuitive mechanism would nicely explain his attraction to norm-expressivism and its attendant semantic dualism. The problems inherent in semantic dualism rightly concern Gibbard and his critics, yet dualistic uses persist. To borrow the doctor's advice to a patient who complained, "It hurts when I do this," I'll just say, "Don't do that!"

     Our evolutionary tale of three mechanisms of judgment casts neither evaluation nor intuition/heuristics as designed to deliver truth; instead, they deliver responses that have been useful to our ancestors under the conditions they experienced, but in ways that have systematically confused us about their nature.

     On the other hand, methodical reasoning can deliver truth -- not often with respect to the physical world itself, but at least with respect to the logical arguments we construct. It can also probe into the functional workings of the other two mechanisms, discover what makes them valuable, and then seek ways to pursue that value directly.

     The older judging mechanisms, using what I have called a 'displaced response strategy' (pursuing pleasing mental states as ends in themselves, rather than cognitively appreciating and directly pursuing the biological values those states evolved to procure) introduce much normative error in today's manmade environment, for they are not adapted to it. But when a species emerges into sentience, its development of a cognitive apparatus introduces a new strategy for dealing with value in the environment: building metaphysical models of the self, external events, and the complex relations among these elements. Intrinsic value can then be cognitively represented and appreciated as intrinsic, instrumental value as instrumental, etc. Once a theory of value is integrated successfully into a comprehensive metaphysics, questions of morality (Which action should be pursued in this situation?) can be addressed through epistemic investigation (What are the relevant facts present?) and theoretical application (How might the facts together with possible courses of action causally affect the values to which one is committed?).

     The methods just described require learning (and applying) the relations among norms, principles, and rules (the explanation of which is relegated to Appendix A) in order to justify rather than merely demand some prescribed action or moral stance.

     That is my foremost prescription for normative methodology. My prescription for moral inquiry, by now, may be obvious. The pursuit of objective value, from a stance of objectivity, may be the single best way to make one's life count.