Topics Logic

Question The "naturalistic fallacy" states that it is false to appeal to nature or naturalness in order to judge the goodness of something. Yet despite this being a fallacy, we see it crop up all the time in all spheres of life. Saying something isn't "natural" usually carries a negative connotation, and from foodstuffs to building materials to sexual practices, people use appeals to nature in order to condemn things. Since it seems appeals to nature are very popular, I wonder, is there a stream of thought that considers the naturalistic fallacy not to be a fallacy, but to be a proper form of argumentation? Are there philosophers or movements in philosophy which consider goodness to be clearly derivable from naturalness?

Accepted:
July 15, 2011

Comments

First, just a terminological point. The phrase "naturalistic fallacy" is usually used to mean the supposed fallacy of defining a moral term such as "good" in terms of non-moral properties. For example, if someone said that "good" means "produces happiness," they would be accused of committing the naturalistic fallacy. (Note, by that way, that even if "good" doesn't mean "produces happiness," it could still turn out that producing happiness is a genuine good.)

The worry you have is of a different sort: deciding whether something is right or wrong by deciding whether it's "natural." The most familiar case is probably homosexuality, which is sometimes said to be wrong because homosexuality isn't "natural."

You're right to be suspicious of that sort of reasoning. One problem is that what we see as "natural" is often not a matter of how things are in "nature" but of what we're used to. People have claimed that it's "unnatural" for women to perform certain jobs or for people of different races to marry. It's pretty clear that this was prejudice masquerading as argument. Homosexuality is suppose to be "unnatural" because same-sex relations can't produce children. That's true, of course, but it hardly amounts to a proof that it's wrong for people who are attracted to members of their own sex to act accordingly. Few are prepared to go as far as standard Roman Catholic theology and declare that any sexual act not "open to the possibility of procreation" is wrong. To which we could add: deliberate celibacy is "unnatural" in at least some obvious senses of that word.

We could go on but we won't. Instead, let's turn to the second part of your question: are their philosophical views according to which goodness is derivable from naturalness? At least roughly, the answer is yes: the "natural law" tradition in Roman Catholicism is the most obvious example. It's a big topic, but for our purposes, we can say this: natural law theorists hold that the world was created in accord with a providential design that, if followed, serves what is truly good. Further, it holds that we are endowed with a conscience that is at least broadly tuned to react in a way that fits the divinely created providential order, and that where conscience doesn't suffice, reason (sometimes with divine revelation to guide it) can fill in the gaps. And yes: on this view, birth control, homosexuality, masturbation come out as bad. However, so do many other things that are a lot more uncontroversially wrong.

Assessing natural law theories is far too big a job to be undertaken here and in any case, I'm in no position to do it. However, here's a point that might be worth noting. There are many views according to which goodness is closely related to what promotes our thriving. There's lots of room for hedges and qualifications here, but the idea doesn't seem altogether odd. However, what promotes our thriving obviously depends on our natures and how they fit into the rest of nature. By itself, this won't get you very far. In particular, it won't get you anywhere near showing that homosexuality is wrong or that women shouldn't be in certain jobs. But it's at least somewhere in the same continent as the more crude appeals to the natural in ethical thinking. And so even though mixing talk of morality and the "natural" is very tricky business, it doesn't follow that there's no responsible way to do it.