The Naturalistic fallacy reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Naturalistic fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy is the alleged logical fallacy of believing that moral goodness is (is identical to) any simple or complex natural property, or of defining 'goodness' in terms of any simple or complex natural property. The stock example of a natural property is pleasure; ethical hedonism, for example, which is the view that everything good either is or results in pleasure, might (but need not) be construed as a definition of 'good' in terms of a natural property. On that construal, the ethical hedonist would be said to have committed the naturalistic fallacy.

Despite his use of the name "naturalistic fallacy", G. E. Moore claimed that the very same fallacy was committed by theorists who take supernatural or metaphysical properties (rather than natural properties) to serve as the basis for ethics. Given that Moore's real targets are semantic reductionism (the position that the term 'good' may be defined with non-moral terms and concepts), and metaphysical reductionism (the position that the property goodness is identical to, or constituted by, non-moral properties), a better label for the alleged error might be "the reductionist fallacy". The important lesson, for Moore, is that the term 'good' and the property goodness are semantically and metaphysically sui generis.

It is, as is well known, entirely contentious to call the view in question a fallacy; to do so begs the question in favor of ethical non-naturalism. It was so called by G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica, on grounds that the view always rested on a mistake--an instance of the so-called paradox of analysis--that was brought out in Moore's famous open question argument. (Details of this need to be swiped from ethical non-naturalism.)

N.B. Many people use the phrase "naturalistic fallacy" to characterize inferences of the form "This behavior is natural; therefore, this behavior is morally acceptable" or "This behavior is unnatural; therefore, this behavior is morally unacceptable". Such inferences are common in discussions of homosexuality and cloning, to take two examples. (See this article on homosexuality by Massimo Pigliucci) While such inferences may indeed be fallacious, it is important to realize that Moore is not concerned with them. He is instead concerned with the semantic and metaphysical underpinnings of ethics.

This use of the term "naturalistic fallacy" to describe the deduction of an ought from an is, has inspired the use of mutually reinforcing terminology which describes the converse (deducing an is from an ought) either as the "reverse naturalistic fallacy" or the "moralistic fallacy".

See open question argument; ethical non-naturalism; meta-ethics; value theory; G. E. Moore; Philosophical naturalism.

This is the "Naturalistic fallacy" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.