Q&A: An Objection to the Naturalistic Fallacy
An Objection to the Naturalistic Fallacy
Question
Hello and blessings. The philosopher Philippa Foot presents a naturalistic position and argues that there is no naturalistic fallacy. Her claim, more or less, is that if we speak using “thin” ethical concepts like good and bad, then indeed their meaning is not connected to concepts from the natural world. But other ethical concepts, “thicker” ones, are necessarily connected to descriptive meaning drawn from nature. She gives the following example:
Premise: This behavior is insulting (a natural fact)
Conclusion: This behavior is rude/crude (a non-natural ethical concept which, she claims, is necessarily connected to insult).
From this she argues that one can derive ethical conclusions from facts. My initial objection was that “rude” is not an ethical concept, since we do not use it for guidance, but it is neutral with regard to what ought to be done. And therefore it too is a kind of factual concept. But then I ran into the collapse of the moral domain, since in that case it includes only good and bad (or proper and improper), and all the other ethical concepts supposedly become genuinely ethical only when I define them using good and bad (or proper and improper).
I would be glad to hear your thoughts on Foot’s argument, and on my own thoughts in response to her argument.
Thanks in advance, and may your fast be easy and meaningful!
Answer
I don’t understand her claim. If “rude” is a judgment, then it does not follow from the fact. And if it is only a description, then we are back to the naturalistic fallacy. These are just word games.
Discussion on Answer
What you just wrote is identical to what you wrote before and changes nothing. My remarks still stand. If she means to argue in favor of ethical facts (ethical realism), then of course I agree. See article 456. But these examples about insult add nothing beyond any other ethical fact.
Even so, I will try to formulate and convey her position (and Putnam’s) a bit differently:
They argue that in language we use descriptions of reality (the natural one) and also evaluations, that is, judgments. In their view, it is impossible to make such an artificial distinction, because evaluation and description are intertwined in our language to the point that they cannot be separated. This artificial distinction (between descriptions of reality and ethical evaluations) is what creates the naturalistic fallacy.
If the claim is that every ethical concept gets its evaluative meaning from the fact that a priori we understand that it is bad, then indeed her argument fails, because we are assuming that rude is bad. But she argues that from the insult, and not a priori, we infer that something bad happened here—or in her words, something rude. From looking at nature, I understand that something bad happened, and I do not need this or that a priori explanation, but only a description of the fact in our natural world. In other words, just as non-naturalist realists say that they understand (for example, through contemplating the Idea of the Good) the ethical meaning of rude, so she claims that she understands the ethical meaning of rude from insulting behavior.
It may be that I am repeating the same thing again and again, but I am giving them the respect they deserve, because this is a productive and active discussion in meta-ethical discourse, and I value your opinion מאוד and therefore am trying to understand it fully.
Again, thanks in advance
Again I say that all of this is nothing but a semantic trick that bypasses the problem rather than solving it. There is no way to jump from facts to judgment. Period. The fact that the terminology uses concepts that carry evaluative weight changes nothing at all. It only shifts the problem to the decision to phrase something in that terminology. When you describe something as rude, there is a judgmental component in that, and the question is how you infer that from the facts.
She claims that the concept “rude” is necessarily connected to insult, and that this necessity allows us to derive an ethical conclusion from insult, namely that it is rude. The concept “rude” is an ethical concept from which, analytically, we understand that one should not act in that way. From here, I saw an insult and logically derived that one should not behave this way (because it is rude); that is, I derived an ethical statement from a natural fact, without assuming any further normative premise. So there is a fact from which I derive an ethical statement, and there is no naturalistic fallacy. All of this is according to her, of course. I hope it is clearer now. So the question still stands: how would you object to this argument?