Re: Naturalistic Fallacy
Craven de Kere wrote:joefromchicago wrote:
Craven de Kere wrote:In naturalistic fallacies the premise is that what is "natural" is good, without having established that it is actually so.
No, that isn't it either (although it can be an example of it).
Yes, it
is.
Moore on the naturalistic fallacy wrote:the supposition that good can be defined by reference to a natural object
Ah, grasshopper, you have still failed to snatch the pebble. I've read
Principia Ethica, I've given some serious thought to Moore's ethical theory, and I like to think that I have a pretty good grasp of it. Moore certainly thought that "good" could not be defined by reference to any natural object, but he also believed that it could not be defined by reference to any
unnatural object either. As he explained in section 10 of the
Principia:
It may be true that all things which are good are [i]also[/i] something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not "other," but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the "naturalistic fallacy" and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose.
So, in other words, Moore is not defining the naturalistic fallacy an "is-ought" problem (as you erroneously claimed above), but rather as a problem of defining what is, for Moore, something indefinable.