Naturalistic fallacy is an expression found for the first time in Principia Ethica, a work published in 1903 by the English philosopher George Edward Moore. According to it, the concept of good which is at the basis of moral discourse is a simple concept and can not be further defined.
When you claim to identify it with some natural property, such as useful or pleasant, it falls into the naturalistic fallacy, which includes both the naturalistic ethical theories and the ethical metaphysical theories. The choice of a solution can not entirely exclude the other ones.
It is possible to escape this contradiction by adopting the intuitionistic solution by Moore for which the good is sensed as the yellow color: in this way, you will know what it is and there are no alternative solutions. Moore soon realized that his solution, by virtue of intuitionism, could lead to subjectivist drifts: he pleaded this risk by focusing on the fact that the good is absolute, it expresses an intrinsic and universal value.
In this way, any possible subjectivism is reset at the start. However, a new problem showed up: given that the good is universal, absolute and independent, which is its nature? Certainly, it cannot have an empirical nature, because if it did it would fall into the naturalistic fallacy; but neither can it be metaphysical, because otherwise you would re-awaken the metaphysical fallacy. The solution is then advanced by Moore in recognizing that ‘good’ has an ontological status equal to that of Platonic ideas and numbers, which are absolute and objective without being either empirical or metaphysical: in this sense, the ‘good’ is just as number four.
In later writings, Moore would soften his position, by arguing that the good depends on the intrinsic nature of things; in this way, he will approach Aristotelianism from Platonism... ".
In the explanation of the onset of the 'naturalistic fallacy', one moves from 'having to be' which is the term used by Kant to indicate what is required by the moral law, regardless of any condition of fact and the entire order of nature. The moral law is an expression of reason in its practical use, that is, determining the will. The duty to provide what the law says to man, be reasonable but finite, exposed then to the empirical influences of subjective motives and subjective inclinations, is expressed in the imperative form.
Therefore, the ‘need to be' indicates "the relationship between the objective laws of the will in general and the subjective imperfection of the will."
Then, since the moral imperative is not subject to any end, nor is placed by the faculty of desire, it addresses people in categorical terms, that is unconditioned, and then it is intended: "because you have to."
It is by virtue of this duty that the possibility of action properly human is deducted: not the physical possibility to act, which belongs - as Kant says – to the order of causes and effects, but it is the moral possibility to fullfil the moral law or not, that qualifies man as a moral entity. Between the world of being - that is, of what is the way it is, according to the laws of nature - and the world of 'having to be'- that is of what is required by the moral law - an absolute hiatus opens up, the same as Hume had pointed out, denouncing the naturalistic fallacy which is to take prescriptive propositions, that is related to having to be, from descriptive propositions, related to what it is .
The precondition of learning what is good and what is not has caused a lot of problems within human reasoning. When we are born, there is no knowledge of "good" and "evil." Such concepts are learned and can apply to both truthful knowledge and untruthful knowledge. That is to say, anybody can be convinced that something harmful to them is good, at least until they experience the consequences.
Morality is an absolute when it is properly understood, and it has nothing to do with good and evil. Good and evil are judgments of the intellect, but morality is a condition of the body.
Morality is those actions and behaviors that lead to the good health and well-being of individuals and communities. Morality is also applicable to any species of life, and to any group of species.
Morality is the condition required so that life may flourish. Morality is the source of health and happiness, which is required for the living to continue to want to live and to be able to live. Without the condition of morality, life becomes unhealthy, unhappy, and eventually ceases.
Humans are presently in an incredibly immature state of understanding and consider morality to be judgment. The mere passing of a law to say what is good and bad, acceptable and non-acceptable, is widely considered to be the establishment of morality. However, morality has no dependency on human laws and it has nothing to do with human judgment. Morality is simply those actions and behaviors that lead to the good health and well-being of individuals and communities. Morality exists exactly as the condition for life.
I share the philosopher Luigi Baldi’s thinking that “the problem of the naturalistic fallacy should be considered in the light of the notions of nature and reality that are assumed and, more generally, of the physical and metaphysical conception in which they are part.
The Scottish philosopher starts from the typically modern assumption and, in his empirical case, that the intellect must programmatically foreclose knowledge of any truth that goes beyond the data strictly resulting from sense experience, just having the opportunity to revise the latter to formulate concepts that are reduced to be only names, predictable signs, with no ontological consistency as such.
This means that you cannot know as definite any law both physical and metaphysical, as universal and necessary, being able to reach - at the maximum - assessments based on probability.
This obviously applies even more to ethics: I cannot get with the rational instrument a moral law, a concept of ‘good’, that may be considered certain, i.e. precisely universal and necessary. "
If I may, I’d add to my previous comment that Moore claims that the moral philosopher should mainly devote himself to analyze the meaning of the fundamental moral terms, such as "good". Since Moore believes that "good" is a moral notion immediately clear and well-defined, to describe "good" by the expression "what produces pleasure," in the manner of the utilitarians, means making a naturalistic fallacy
The precondition of learning what is good and what is not has caused a lot of problems within human reasoning. When we are born, there is no knowledge of "good" and "evil." Such concepts are learned and can apply to both truthful knowledge and untruthful knowledge. That is to say, anybody can be convinced that something harmful to them is good, at least until they experience the consequences.
Morality is an absolute when it is properly understood, and it has nothing to do with good and evil. Good and evil are judgments of the intellect, but morality is a condition of the body.
Morality is those actions and behaviors that lead to the good health and well-being of individuals and communities. Morality is also applicable to any species of life, and to any group of species.
Morality is the condition required so that life may flourish. Morality is the source of health and happiness, which is required for the living to continue to want to live and to be able to live. Without the condition of morality, life becomes unhealthy, unhappy, and eventually ceases.
Humans are presently in an incredibly immature state of understanding and consider morality to be judgment. The mere passing of a law to say what is good and bad, acceptable and non-acceptable, is widely considered to be the establishment of morality. However, morality has no dependency on human laws and it has nothing to do with human judgment. Morality is simply those actions and behaviors that lead to the good health and well-being of individuals and communities. Morality exists exactly as the condition for life.
Quite a remarkable “lecture” on morality! I hope to share with you some thoughts that came to my mind.
The moral law, according to which man becomes respectable and ‘enriched’, is independent of man himself; it does not receive its legitimacy and its value from flawlessness nor happiness, which can be reached by obeying it.
Unfortunately, we have contracted a serious illness, amorality, the total indifference to everything and everyone, dressed by massive doses of superficiality and banality that colors everything gray, enveloping us in a thick fog and blurring the ability to distinguish between white and black, good and evil, right and wrong, true and false. All without any sense of guilt or shame.
Remembering my classic studies, I found a school book where it was said: “
Tacitus that even then observed: 'Corruptissima res publica, plurimae leges', in a state that is at the top of corruption, the number of laws is endless. With the extension of the rules, morality is not increased but the cunning in evading them increases and therefore thrives not only the class of lawyers but also the traffic of bribery, deceit, evasions. It was another famous French thinker, Montesquieu, who wrote a book entitled The Spirit of Laws, observing that "useless laws weaken the necessary ones." It has, thus, a paradoxical effect, when the rules are increasing, it happens that in growth is not order but anarchy, confusion and above all corruption
Those are profound insights, which appear self-evident to me.
No cultural system can be perfect, but I agree that a system instilling a deep appreciation for morality and its effect on life would be far more beneficial than an endless list of laws, rules, and regulations.
Yes it can Maestro, if you will pardon my simplistic theorizing.The assumption of the temporal drives the assertions underlying the naturalistic fallacy. If all good is indivisible conceptually then it must not be temporally contingent. This appears to lead to a Wittgensteinian reductio but does not. The assertion that the good is nonreducible is an absolute statement and so holding time as a constant is allowed in this game. When time is held as a constant, the good becomes invisible, suspended in relations between events (which are themselves relations between objects). Further, if looked at more closely, the idea of good as temporally dependent relation necessitates the existence of a third object or party. There must be three objects in order to generate two events and finally one determination of the good. (One of these objects can conceivably be a temporally preceding member transformed via Hercletian flux). In any case, for your argument to proceed, the good is necessarily divisible by virtue of time. This will lead to assertions that you are taking a consequentialist view. This may or may not be the case for you. If it is not it can easily be argued that consequentialism is a self defeating paradigm in that it presumes a single standard of the good. If more than one standard of the good coexist then consequentialism self destructs.
At the base of the Naturalistic fallacy in ethic there is the naturalistic fallacy of thinking that we litterally live into the naturalist world described by the multiple natural sciences. Lets call this world : the physical world. The natural science are limited to what the scientific method can produce. When someone become a scientist, that person need to wear the lens of the scientific method and all that person can see with these lens are 3th person observables and all this person is allowed to invent are models relating these 3th person observables and the physical world can only include such models. This physical world is not only these models which are only a set of mathematical models but what these 3th person observable point to. Because of the falsifiability critera for any model to be scientific, it litterally mean that none of these models can be considered absolutely true but they are our best approximation models. These models are not so much models of the world but model on how to manipulate aspects of the world. None of these models are directly observable, they were all created for the purpose to explain phenomenal 3th person observable relations. It is because they are not observable that they are not certain.
But all of us do live into a subjective 1th person world that our body interaction make possible. Although aspect of this 1th person world belong to the physical world, the part that can be measured, 3th person observed, most of it does not belong to the physical world, taken to be the world of relation between 3th person observables.
If you open your eyes, you see the scene in front of you. The first think to notice about this visual awareness is that it cannot be denied, cannot be voluntary change, it is absolutly certain to exist. This is very different from scientific knowledge. It is phenomenally factual and certain. All what the sciences have discovered in the last 200 years allow to explain but only explain how the physical aspects of the scence influences some physiological aspects in you brains. This is all in the physical world and absolutely nothing in this description explain that you see, are aware of the scene. Why should we be surprise? What we see is intrinsically a 1th person observable and all the science can talk about are 3th person observables. A large part of our world stems from the interaction of our body and this is the 1th person world and most of it cannot enter the physical world. Most of the world we live, the world of the 1th person is not the world that science by its method can study and so is not the physical world. Science will progress but will not change what it is , a science of the 3th person. Trying to find reason in the physical world on how we should behave in our world stem from the basic naturalist fallacy that we live in the natural world as described by the sciences. None of what we really care about in the world of our life exist in the physical world, can be observed nor be part of a model of that world. Even the word caring about does not make any sense for an entity of the 3th person world. So trying to find answers on how to achieve what we care about are not going to be found in the 3th person world. The simple act of a human to wear his scientific lens immediatly erace all the trace of the most important aspect of our human world we care about, it erace any trace of life, caring, loving, agency, even touching, seeing, free will, mother, father, all of that become invisible beyond these lens. But wearing these lens is absolutly necessary to technically manipulate the world, there lie the necessity of these lenses and only there.
The real discoverers of what we care about in the world we live as humans , the world of care for each other, are our prophets, our poets , our novelists, our artists, our mothers and fathers and they all have a focus on alleviating the suffering of others instead of a focus on alleviating our own personal suffering. It is strange that a civilisation turn towards the 3th person understanding has 1th person focus on suffering while the previous civilisation focus was more on 1th person understanding and more 3th person focus on suffering. Pierce called this transition : a tansition from a gospel of love to a gospel of greed.
Good discussions. Morality and ethics are the glues and enrichments of well being to a healthy society. It is a right mindset of hyper consciousnesses of a philosophy " it is because we are that I am " giving more importance to the welbieng of the collective structure that guarantees the good of the elements or individuals, contrary to " it is because I am that we are" which does not guarantee the good of the structure but that of the elements or individuals.
You are all assuming that the naturalistic fallacy is a genuine problem. But Moore's Open Question Argument, the basis of the alleged fallacy, rests on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of necessity that were seriously challenged by Kripke's Naming and Necessity, and are no longer taken as read. There is no block on an empirically based ethics.
As Tucci says, the term "naturalistic fallacy" was invented by GE Moore in Principia Ethica to denote defining "the good" in naturalistic terms. Thus, Moore's example of the fallacy was JS Mill's definition of the good as that which is able to elicit desire. Moore said this confused what can be desired but might not be good with what deserves to be desired because it is good. A utilitarian, Moore regarded moral conduct as conduct that promotes the good.
However, since WD Ross's The Right and the Good, "naturalistic fallacy" has been understood to mean any attempt to deduce "ought" from "is" and said to have been first forbidden by David Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature. Defining moral conduct as the doing of duty, Ross denies that its measure is the good and accuses Moore of naturalistic fallacy for thinking so. Like Kant, Ross thought that duty is what is dictated by Moral Law, a principle of Reason created abd implanted in the human mind by God.
Between the two of them, Moore and Ross made a complete mess of things. Moore was right that "good" is not synonymous with "desired" but wrong to think that the good is independent of desire. As BF Skinner urged, the good is, rather, what reinforces desire. Thus, good tasting food is food that you want to taste again; good friends are friends you want to keep, and so on. In short, the good is what, having been tried, is desired again.
Moore was also wrong to think that the morally correct action is necessarily the one that maximizes utility. As Kant said and Ross reiterated, convicting an innocent man would be morally wrong even if it did more good than harm. However, Ross and Kant were mistaken to think that moral duty is dictated by either divine law or reason. Rather, your duty is what is required of you by the mores--i.e., the social customs and conventions-- to which you are subject as a member of a particular society.
So, what about ought and is? The question is made difficult by the ambiguity of the word "ought." In one usage, it denotes what promises to promote the good, as Moore thought. However; in another, it denotes what conforms to the requirements of morality, as Ross thought. As Ross saw but Moore did not, these are different things, so must be considered separately.
As it happens, "is" can follow from "ought" in both cases. You ought, other things being equal, to do what promises to promote the most good. That is the ought of reason. Call it ought-R. By contrast, you ought morally speaking to do what the applicable mores require of you. That is the ought of morality. Call it ought-M. Since reason and morality are not always the same, ought-R is regrettably not always equivalent to ought-M.
So, where is the naturalistic fallacy? It is, as Hume noted, the error of supposing that because X is done, X ought to be done. That is not a valid rule in either of the two senses of "ought" just delineated. But with a little care and a couple of distinctions, this error can be avoided.
There seems to be different understandings of what the naturalistic fallacy is. On one reading it is the move from "X is done" to "X ought to be done". On Moore's version it is identifying a good-making property with any natural property. On Ross's account it is any attempt to derive an ought from an is. On the last two versions the basic claim is that there is no conceptual, i.e., logical, connection between terms for good-making properties and terms for natural properties (Moore), or between descriptive statements and value statements (Ross/Hume).
The last two versions of the naturalistic fallacy are no longer pressing because while there may be no logical connections between is and ought statements, and no logical equivalence between terms for good-making properties and natural terms, there might very well be metaphysical connections. This is the import of Kripke's rediscovery of necessary a posteriori propositions. So it might very well be an open question as to whether 'good' ought to be analysed as 'desired', but this does not tell against the claim that the 'good' actually is what is desired (just as water is oxygen and hydrogen in a particular combination even though it was an open question whether water is H20).
it would be interesting to know who, if anyone, today actually commits the naturalistic fallacy as understood in the first version.
Max, although I fully agree with your premise and conclusion, I disagree with anybody who uses the word "moral" in the following context, "As Kant said and Ross reiterated, convicting an innocent man would be morally wrong even if it did more good than harm."
In my view, history has confused the definitions of morality and judgment. Morality is those actions and behaviors that contribute to the good health and well-being of individuals and communities. Judgment is a decision based on personal or public preference. Morality is the condition in which life (whether of an individual or group) prospers and has no judgmental quality to it at all. Either the behavior contributes to good health and well-being, or it does not.
To use consistent language, the above sentence could read that it is conscientiously wrong to convict an innocent man. "Morally wrong" is an oxymoron. Nothing that is moral is wrong, and neither is anything moral, right.
To live a moral life is not to live a judgmental or discriminatory life, but to live according to ways that promote health and happiness.
Only authoritarians have a need to judge others, yet everybody has a need to live a moral life.
Moore's prescription seems to me a combination of wishful thinking (that we might evade the necessity of untangling a Gordian knot of contradictory ethical considerations to arrive at tentative optimizations) and self-justification. Without having read Moore, I formed a similar conviction as a child: I can't explain why "the good" is good, but I know it when I see it. I suspect almost everyone has that belief, perhaps secretly. Declaring it to be intrinsically correct and therefore mandatory has exactly zero effect on what people choose to do; it is therefore a harmless indulgence. But we still have to untangle Gordian knots....
David,
Great point. I wish more people saw it that way.
Jess,
This also brings up a great point. Our internal workings do not always lead to moral or even ethical conclusions. As a matter of fact many times it leads to what we think of as moral or ethical decisions which are exactly opposite to being true.
David,
''convicting an innocent man would be morally wrong even if it did more good than harm."
A state should ideally do with is good for society as a whole. If ''convicting an innocent man'' is good for society (in the short and long term) then the ideal state would go for it. So this show that justice would cease to be justice if in the hand of the state. So the admistration of justice has to be mostly about the guilt or not of the individual and if the individual is not guilty of wrong doing given the existing laws although the behavior of that individual was clearly against common good then recommendation to change the laws should be proposed to the legislative body.
You disagree with the expression:
''morally wrong''
because
'Morality is the condition in which life (whether of an individual or group) prospers and has no judgmental quality to it at all. Either the behavior contributes to good health and well-being, or it does not.''
In order to discern if we or society is by a behavior is contributing or not to such prosperous situation seems to require lot of judgement.
IMNSHO, "Truth" is always provisional and "morality" was invented as a substitute for ethics, which we humans are too cowardly, lazy & stupid to negotiate. (Not that there's any reason anyone should care about my opinion. :-)
Louis, I agree that judgment is warranted. I was merely making an ontological observation about the natures of morality and judgment. Each has its place, but it causes dysfunction in human discourse to confuse the two very different concepts, and treat them as though they were synonyms of each other.
Judgment is a natural extension of law and order. When rules are agreed upon or established by an authority, then the enactment of those rules occurs as judgments.
Judgment is based on a list of acceptable and non-acceptable actions and behaviors. These behaviors may represent varying degrees of morality, or may not. For example, cannabis may be medicinal and lead to health, but the abuse of it may lead to sickness and misery. The established laws of a society might then pass judgments about how cannabis may or may not be legally used.
If we do not clearly discriminate between the meanings of morality and judgment, then our discussions end up in never ending and circuitous arguments based on the shifting meanings and understandings of morality and judgment. When this happens, righteousness and a host of other human emotions manifest and further muddy the discussion.
By clearly separating the moral aspects of a behavior from its legal aspects it becomes possible to have a rational approach to both the morality and the judgment, each in their respective contexts. This would then remove much confusion and animosity that arises from combining the two unequal perceptions.
Mainz, Germany
Dear Tucci,
The problem of the "naturalistic fallacy" has long struck me as an artificial problem, or a problem chiefly puzzling to philosophers of particular traditions. In fact, everyone already has various working assumptions of a normative kind to which they are committed, for better or for worse, and the idea that we could back off from all normative assumptions and start over from the purely descriptive seems a mistake, though the need of this may figure as a presupposition of those puzzled by the "fallacy."
Using a mixture of normative and factual premises, we are able to argue for reform of normative standards, for instance, on the basis of prior assumptions. The idea that one would need to have an a prior identification of evaluative predicates with purely descriptive predicates in order to justify normative conclusions seems simply misleading.
H.G. Callaway
Dear Andrey Luchnik,
What is ‘fallacy’? I share the following answer:
‘Let us start from the English philosopher George Edward Moore. According to him – for example - the concept of ‘good’ which is at the basis of moral discourse is a simple concept and can not be further defined. When you claim to identify with some natural property such as ‘useful or pleasant’, you fall into the naturalistic fallacy, which includes both ethical naturalistic theories and the ethical metaphysical ones. The refutation of the naturalist theory rests on two assumptions:
• Semiotics; the distinction between descriptive speeches (indicative) and prescriptive ones (regulative or institutional). That view is also known as the Great Divide.
• Meta-ethical; the impossibility of transition with means merely logical from a descriptive discourse to one that is prescriptive. This thesis is a reformulation of Hume's law which claims to derive logically from premises, exclusively descriptive, prescriptive conclusions (that is having the function of guiding the behavior of individuals) or, conversely, descriptive conclusions from prescriptive premises.
To give a practical example, the reading of the laws governing the functioning of the Parliament, has revealed the contents of the laws which must approve them and the values which must depend on during the formulation of laws.
With a more extreme example, according to the Divisionist thesis, by the fact that Tom has rendered its promise to do something (description) does not derive in any way for him the obligation to do it (non-prescription).
Best wishes, Gianrocco Tucci
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