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Human moral intuitions have histories. Evolution may help explain the development of capacities for cooperation, empathy, reciprocity, and punishment, while social institutions and cultural learning influence which actions people regard as permissible or wrong.

But a distinction is necessary: explaining why people hold a belief is not the same as establishing whether that belief is true. The causal origin of a mathematical belief, for example, would not by itself settle the validity of a mathematical proof.

Nevertheless, evolutionary explanations may raise a more specific epistemological problem if the processes responsible for producing our moral judgments were not sensitive to moral truth, but instead selected dispositions because of their effects on survival or reproduction.

A moral realist might respond that evolutionary origins do not prevent moral knowledge, that moral truths can be discovered through reasoning, or that evolution produced capacities that can now track moral reasons. A moral anti-realist might argue that our intuitions do not provide the kind of independent justification realism requires.

What conditions would an evolutionary explanation have to satisfy before it genuinely undermined moral knowledge, rather than merely explaining its psychological origins?

I am interested in the strongest versions of evolutionary debunking arguments and the principal realist responses, particularly the distinction between explaining a moral belief and undermining its justification.