In this series, we’ve been looking at ideas that are dismissed too quickly. “Fallacy!” is the label applied, as if the accusation alone settles the matter. The word has power, and rightly so. A knowledge of fallacies is critical to blocking attempts at manipulation from others and avoiding argumentative mistakes ourselves. But sometimes the label is a substitute for real engagement with the ideas of others, and in those cases, it’s better to see how a fallacy isn’t always a fallacy, so to speak.
One of the charges in contemporary debate is the “naturalistic fallacy.” You might hear it lodged against someone who claims that a practice is good because it is natural, often through appealing to biology, psychology, or evolution. As with the tu quoque, the naturalistic fallacy names a real mistake, but it’s also easy to misapply. Understanding when the appeal to nature involves only empty rhetoric requires a bit more care than the slogan suggests.
It helps to locate the naturalistic fallacy within a category I’ve already marked out in this series. It’s what we might call a heuristic fallacy (e.g. confirmation biases, illusions, etc.). Unlike formal fallacies, which involve invalid logical structure, or even standard informal fallacies, which involve recognizable patterns of faulty reasoning, heuristic fallacies function more like intellectual warning signs. They don’t claim to identify a deductive error so much as to flag a serious mistake in how we move from one kind of consideration to another. To accuse someone of committing the naturalistic fallacy is not to say they’ve violated a formal or informal rule of logic; it’s to say they’ve made a significant misstep in reasoning about value, typically by sliding too quickly from facts about the world to conclusions about what is good or right.
The “fallacy” was named by G.E. Moore in the early 20th-century, as he pushed back on the larger influence of philosophical naturalism and evolutionary ethics, born of the success and acclaim modern science was enjoying late in the preceding century. Moore perceived that too many people were talking as if “good” and “natural” were the same thing, or even that something is good because it is natural. In this way, the naturalistic fallacy seems to be a version of David Hume’s contention that one cannot legitimately reason from an “is” claim to an “ought” claim. The moral naturalist has nowhere to turn under this pressure. If science discovers what exists and what exists ultimately falls within the realm of the scientific (and is exhausted by it), then the moral naturalist can never properly assert belief in an ought statement, at least not without committing the naturalistic fallacy.
William Frankena however, in his comprehensive treatment, tells us that the heart of the matter is that ethical considerations are alleged to be “different in kind from non-ethical ones.” This entails the ban on deriving an “ought” claim from “is” claim, but it also more broadly urges the proposition that ethical characteristics are not definable in terms of the non-ethical. Even more generally, the alleged problem might be more aptly called a “definist” fallacy, according to Frankena.
The definist fallacy lies in “confusing or identifying two properties, of defining one property by another, or of substituting one property for another.” Deriving “ought” from “is,” then, is forbidden by Moore because it confuses one kind of property for another, (namely, goodness, which is its own property, with another) not primarily because it is an invalid inference. Furthermore, Frankena tells us that the core insight of the naturalistic fallacy does not involve the assertion that ethical characteristics are “absolutely indefinable.”
Not only are moral characteristics not necessarily indefinable, but according to Moore, the mistake he identified wasn’t limited to naturalistic worldviews. He argued that “metaphysical ethics,” which take moral properties to be non-natural and residing in “supersensible reality” also commit the fallacy. To flesh this out, on the one hand, an example of a naturalistic definition of morality would be to equate goodness with pleasure. But people take pleasure in all sorts of things, including gambling, drug abuse, and all manner of debauchery. It certainly doesn’t follow that these things are good. On the other hand, being commanded by God, who is outside nature, is also not the same property as goodness. At least in terms of pure conception, God could command anything, including things we currently take as evil.
What is goodness, then? Whatever it is, to Moore, it’s of its own kind, truly sui generis. That’s the main lesson of Moore’s diagnosed mistake. Naturalistic and non-naturalist worldviews can both run afoul of this insight, so, not only is the naturalistic fallacy not a fallacy, “naturalistic” is a poor name for it, something Moore himself eventually acknowledged.
Regardless, goodness is its own thing, and not something else, but we can’t seem to resist the effort to ground it in something else. We can see how efforts to equate goodness with pleasure can miss the mark. Still, the question of whether goodness is defined by identification with another property is not settled. So, the charge of the naturalistic fallacy falls flat in the face of someone proposing such a definition, reductionist or otherwise. The accusation of a naturalistic fallacy is lodged when someone defines goodness in any way other than by invoking goodness from the start or reduces goodness to something else. But what we’re left with is a kind of stand-off between people who simply disagree on the nature of moral properties.
Moore introduced the naturalistic fallacy in his magnum opus released in 1903, Principia Ethica (PE). One can’t go very far down the road with the naturalistic fallacy without also encountering Moore’s Open Question Argument, also introduced in PE. The two are getting at something similar.
Moore claims that it’s plausible to say, “When we think A is good, we are thinking that A is one of the things we desire to desire,” but that it still makes sense to ask, “Is it good to desire to desire A,” and that this question is as tracible as the question “Is A good?” In other words, as is commonly used to illustrate the point, it still makes sense to ask, “is pleasure good?” The question of pleasure’s goodness is open. So, when confronted with the statement “pleasure is good,” it is legitimate to ask, “is it good to desire pleasure,” and this is as intelligible as the question “is pleasure good?”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tell us that “I know he is a bachelor but is he unmarried?” is not an open question. It wouldn’t make sense to make that inquiry. On the other hand, when goodness is equated with some other property, according to Moore, it always makes sense to ask the further question of “But is it good?” A statement like “it was pleasurable” can easily be met with “Is pleasure good?” Basically, any other property will eventually yield examples we resolutely find bad. The complexities in existence and goodness are heterogeneous or diverse enough to resist collapsing into one another fully, despite some overlap at times. The Open Question Argument gets further into the insight that the identification of the Naturalistic Fallacy kicks off.
Alas, the Open Question Argument meets the same fate. That is, it risks begging the question against those offering a definition or reduction to simply call the question open (and a fallacy) and leave it at that. It rests on the same presumption that’s made at the outset by Moore, namely, the failure of definist and reductionist accounts of goodness.
Frank Snare attempts to rescue the Moorean devices a bit in “The Open Question as a Linguistic Test.” Snare points out that it would be “linguistically odd” to assert that goodness is always present with pleasure. It’s not that pleasure isn’t often good, but that the two don’t always travel together, at least in regard to how we treat those characteristics in our discourse.
This shifts the burden back to the hedonist (or anyone offering a reductive definition) because their use of the word “goodness” veers significantly from common usage, as can be revealed by Moore’s arguments (with Snare’s minor adjustment). But no fallacy is at play, even in the weaker sense. What’s left is a kind of pressure-applying note that moral terms are sometimes used in odd ways (for example, by equating goodness with pleasure). The naturalistic fallacy spots the issue, the Open Question Argument articulates the problem, but both have been reduced to weak heuristics rather than gotcha defeaters in argument.
Even with this weakened arsenal, the Moorean has to be careful. Often in syllogisms imbedded in discourse, there is a suppressed premise (i.e. an enthymeme). In our typical case, as explained in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, charity demands that we “should understand ‘X is pleasant, therefore X is good’ as an enthymeme whose suppressed premise is ‘Whatever is pleasant is good’.” This saves reductive definitions from the crude charge of a fallacy, but extending charity further, we could even see the possibility that goodness is being treated by our interlocutors as a complex property in suppressed premises, and context sensitive. This would allow such phrases as “let nature run its course,” to pass without suspicion, as we all feel is appropriate at times. Perhaps when fully articulated, we may discover that we hold similar moral intuitions. The kneejerk accusation of a fallacy can be an obstacle to this kind of mutual understanding.
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