The Naturalistic Fallacy: What It Is, and What It Isn’t



February 23, 2017The Naturalistic Fallacy: What It Is, and What It Isn’t1. In Principia Ethica Moore defended some controversial claims in normative ethics – claims about what makes actions morally right. He also defended some controversial claims in axiology – claims about what makes one state of affairs better in itself than another. But perhaps the profoundest and most controversial claims Moore made in Principia Ethica are claims in metaethics – claims about the nature of the fundamental value properties. Among these metaethical claims are claims concerning the naturalistic fallacy. If we put the most important of these into the simplest, most concise form, they are that ‘the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy’ and ‘it must not be committed.’ Additionally, we might add that Moore claimed that virtually all writers on ethics have committed this fallacy. While there is substantial agreement that these are among the central points Moore wanted to make in Principia Ethica, there is substantial disagreement about what Moore was thinking of when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. There is also substantial disagreement about whether his claims about the naturalistic fallacy – whatever it may be -- deserve to be taken seriously. Some praise Moore’s discussion extravagantly; others dismiss it as a contemptible mess. In spite of these significant differences of opinion, commentators agree that arguments concerning the naturalistic fallacy played a big role in 20th Century Anglophone moral philosophy. My main aim here is to present a clear formulation of the doctrine that Moore had in mind when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. I want to show that it is not the mess that some have claimed it to be. I will also discuss some things that some commentators have claimed that Moore had in mind in these contexts. I acknowledge that in some cases that Moore’s pen might have slipped; he made some remarks that could easily lead to misunderstandings about the nature of the naturalistic fallacy. In yet other cases, it seems to me, commentators have attributed to Moore things that he never said or even suggested. I also want to discuss some of the most serious questions about the naturalistic fallacy that remain even after we have a sufficiently clear understanding of what it is. 2. Some passages. There are several key passages in Principia Ethica in which Moore seems to be giving – or strongly hinting at -- an account of what he means by ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Since I will be referring to these passages in this paper, it will be convenient to have them readily available. So I provide several of them here. In each case the passage is quoted from the revised edition of Principia Ethica (Cambridge 1993), edited and with an introduction by Thomas Baldwin.A. ‘… 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 other properties 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 endeavor to dispose.’ (Moore 1993: 62)B. ‘But if [a man] confuses ‘good,’ which is not in the same sense a natural object, with any natural object whatever, then there is a reason for calling that a naturalistic fallacy; its being made with regard to ‘good’ marks it as something quite specific, and this specific mistake deserves a name because it is so common.’ (Moore 1993: 65)C. ‘The naturalistic fallacy always implies that when we think ‘this is good,’ what we are thinking is that the thing in question bears a definite relation to some one other thing. But this one thing, by reference to which good is defined, may be either what I may call a natural object – something of which the existence is admittedly an object of experience – or else it may be an object which is only inferred to exist in a supersensible real world. … [In Chapters II and III] I shall deal with theories which owe their prevalence to the supposition that good can be defined by reference to a natural object; … [In Chapter IV I shall deal with theories that purport to define good by reference to a metaphysical object.] It should be observed that the fallacy, by reference to which I define ‘Metaphysical Ethics,’ is the same in kind; and I give but one name, the naturalistic fallacy.’ (Moore 1993: 90-1)D. ‘… the naturalistic fallacy – the fallacy which consists in identifying the simple notion which we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion.’ (Moore 1993: 109)E. ‘[Mill] commits the naturalistic fallacy in identifying ‘desirable’ with ‘desired’’. (Moore 1993: 160)F. [Moore is talking about the idea that the full significance of ethical statements cannot be made apparent without a metaphysical examination of the true self or the rational universe. He says] ‘Such an assertion involves the naturalistic fallacy. It rests on the failure to perceive that any truth which asserts ‘This is good in itself’ is quite unique in kind – that it cannot be reduced to any assertion about reality, and therefore must remain unaffected by any conclusions we may reach about the nature of reality. This confusion as to the unique nature of ethical truths is, I have said, involved in all those ethical theories which I have called metaphysical.’ (Moore 1993: 165)G. “… [We] find Green explicitly stating that ‘the common characteristic of the good is that it satisfies some desire.’ If we are to take this statement strictly, it obviously asserts that good things have no characteristic in common, except that they satisfy some desire – not even, therefore, that they are good. And this can be only the case, if being good is identical with satisfying desire; if ‘good’ is merely another name for ‘desire-satisfying’. There could be no plainer instance of the naturalistic fallacy.” (Moore 1993: 189) H. ‘Almost all ethical writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy – they have failed to perceive that the notion of intrinsic value is simple and unique; …’ (Moore 1993: 222)I. ‘The naturalistic fallacy has been quite as commonly committed with regard to beauty as with regard to good; … It has been even more commonly supposed that the beautiful may be defined as that which produces certain effects upon our feelings; …’ (Moore 1993: 249) J. There is a passage on page. 70 (in Sect 14) of Principia Ethica where Moore is talking about Sidgwick’s interpretation of Bentham. Sidgwick apparently said that Bentham had defined ‘right’ as meaning ‘conducive to the general happiness’. Moore says a number of very dark things in this passage, but among them he seems to say that if Bentham had defined ‘right’ in this way, and if some other conditions were satisfied, then he would have committed the naturalistic fallacy.There are lots of other passages in which Moore talks about the naturalistic fallacy; and even a few in which he seems to be giving an account of what the fallacy is. However, it does not seem to me that it is essential to cite every one of these passages here. So far as I can tell, there is not much in these other passages that goes interestingly beyond what can be found in the passages I have cited. 3. Some quirks in Moore’s writing style. Moore’s discussion of the naturalistic fallacy is, in some spots, not quite as crystal clear as we might like it to be. Before attempting to state what I take to have been Moore’s view in the book, it may be useful to point out some unfortunate features of Moore’s writing style. Some of the controversy surrounding the nature of the naturalistic fallacy might be due to Moore’s sloppy writing. In most cases it is pretty easy to see what Moore intended to say, and it is similarly easy to replace the careless formulations with tidier ones. Some of the main infelicities that we need to keep in mind:a. Use and mention. Sometimes Moore seems to be talking about words (especially the word ‘good’, as in A and maybe C) but he doesn’t put these words into quotation marks or otherwise make it clear that he was intending to be mentioning these words. Other times (as in B and E) he does put expressions into quotation marks, but it is clear that he does not intend to be talking about the quoted expressions. He means to be talking about the concepts expressed by the expressions. Thus it appears that he does not have any consistent policy about use and mention. Surely it would be tidier to follow current practice – quotation marks for mentioned expressions; no quotation marks for used expressions.b. Properties, predicates, concepts, meanings, notions, objects…. Moore’s ontological terminology is somewhat obscure. I will try to avoid confusion here. I will use ‘property’ uniformly for such things as yellowness, squareness, the property of being something we desire to desire, goodness, etc. Moore makes a lot of remarks about natural “objects” (as in B and C above). It’s not clear whether, when he speaks of “objects”, he means to be talking about the things that have the properties, or whether instead he means to be talking about the properties themselves. I prefer to use the term ‘object’ for the physical objects and concrete events that have the properties; I prefer to use the term ‘property’ for the properties that these objects have. A similar problem arises in the case of ‘predicate’. I think Moore uses ‘predicate’ to mean property. (See, for example, the passage at the bottom of Moore 1993: 84.) I will use the term ‘predicate’ for certain linguistic items such as the final pair of words in the sentence ‘This orange is yellow’, or the final seven words in the sentence ‘pleasure is something that we desire to desire’. c. Talking about properties. The naturalistic fallacy is clearly (at least in one of its main instances) a view about intrinsic goodness (a property that Moore subsequently tried to target in the Preface to the never-completed second edition of Principia Ethica, and a property that he in that later place called ‘G’). As Moore makes clear in the Preface, he wanted to say that it is a mistake to identify G with any natural property or with any metaphysical property. Alas, in Principia Ethica Moore had no consistent way of referring to this property. Sometimes (as in A) he used the term ‘goodness’ to refer to it. On other occasions (as in A,B,C, and I) he left off the ‘-ness’ and simply used the term ‘good’ as a name for the property. This seems to me to violate a rule about “jamming”: you can’t take an adjective (e.g., ‘good’ as it appears in the sentence ‘pleasure is good’) and simply jam it into a position that requires a noun (for example, as is done in the sentence ‘good is simple’). Instead, we should abide by what I call “the ness-ity-hood principle”: when you want to refer to a property, find an adjective that expresses it, and then add “-ness” or “-ity” or “-hood” and make other changes as appropriate. This would permit use of the term ‘goodness’ as a name for the property, but it would not permit the use of ‘good’ as a name for it. (Thus we can say ‘goodness is simple’.) On yet other occasions (also in B) Moore presumably meant to refer to this same property, but he put the word ‘good’ inside single quotation marks. This suggests to the modern reader that Moore meant to be referring to the word ‘good’; but the context makes it clear that he is talking about the property.d. Analysis vs. definition vs. reduction vs. identification vs. confusion … In some of the most salient passages (e.g., D, E, and G) Moore seems to be claiming that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of identifying goodness with some other property. In other passages he uses different terminology. Thus, in A, C, and I he suggests that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of defining goodness by reference to some other property. And in F he speaks of reducing goodness to another property; in B he speaks of confusing goodness with another property. This multiplicity of terms might breed confusion. I will try to stick with just two main terms: when speaking of an alleged mistake about properties, I will say that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of identifying an evaluative property with a natural or metaphysical property; when speaking about a corresponding mistake about words, I will say that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of trying to define some evaluative term by appeal entirely to natural or metaphysical terms.e. ‘Is’ of identity vs. ‘is’ of predication. Moore himself tried to point out that there is a crucial difference between these two ways of using ‘is’. One important line of argument turns on it. He knew it and tried to emphasize it, but his inconsistent procedure concerning the naming of properties sometimes makes it unclear whether a certain sentence is an identity sentence (‘pleasantness = goodness’) or whether instead it a predication (‘pleasure is good’). I will try to avoid confusion on this.f. Semantic terminology. Moore sometimes writes in such a way as to suggest that an ordinary predicate expression such as ‘is yellow’ in a sentence such as ‘this orange is yellow’ names (or denotes or refers to) yellowness. That seems to me to be a possible source of trouble. I will say that such predicate expressions express yellowness; and that only a nominal expression such as ‘yellowness’ actually names (or denotes or refers to) yellowness.4. What the naturalistic fallacy is. Some commentators have claimed that Moore gives several distinct and incompatible accounts of the naturalistic fallacy. In other cases, we find that different commentators attribute fundamentally different accounts to Moore – one saying that Moore gave a certain account of the naturalistic fallacy, and the other saying that Moore gave a completely different account of the same fallacy. I think, however, that there is one main idea that stands at the root of most of Moore’s thought about the naturalistic fallacy. I acknowledge that Moore himself did not always put it in precisely the way I am going to put it, but I hope nevertheless to present something that may be viewed as a sympathetic reconstruction of what he did say.My reconstruction makes essential use of three controversial notions. The first of these is the concept of the evaluative property. Moore took intrinsic goodness to be an evaluative property; similarly for moral obligatoriness and moral rightness; and similarly for beauty. Additionally, in a discussion of Mill’s Proof (cited in passage E above), he seems to be assuming that the property of being desirable is an evaluative property. Some will recognize these as normative properties. Others – perhaps those who believe in a “fact/value gap” – will say that these are all properties from the “value” side of the gap.The second controversial notion is the concept of the natural property. Yellowness, being something we desire to desire, being more evolved, etc. are all cited by Moore as natural properties. He took a few stabs at saying what makes it correct to categorize a property as natural, but (as he himself made clear in the Preface) his stabs missed their mark. I will return to this later. At any rate, properties in this group belong on the “fact” side of the fact/value gap.The third controversial notion is the concept of the metaphysical property. These are properties that are somehow associated with “supersensible realities”. Perhaps they are properties such as the property of being approved by God. Moore says (in C above) that whereas we can observe natural objects with our senses, we can at best infer the existence of metaphysical objects. They are “supersensible”. Moore characterizes the natural and the metaphysical in a couple of different ways, but in general it appears that he assumed that these two classes of properties exclude each other. No property is both natural and metaphysical. In passage C above he seems to say that while it’s possible to have empirical evidence that shows that a certain object has a natural property; it’s not possible in the same way to have empirical evidence that shows that an object has a metaphysical property. It would be premature at this point to make any assumptions about the relations between evaluative and natural properties, or about relations between evaluative and metaphysical properties. The claim that there is a naturalistic fallacy itself is a thesis about how these are related. A naturalist would say that there is partial overlap: some property is both natural and evaluative. A defender of “metaphysical ethics” would presumably claim that there is a different overlap: according to this view some property is both metaphysical and evaluative. Moore, of course, denies both of these claims. He insists that there is no overlap of either sort. No evaluative property is natural; no evaluative property is metaphysical.With all this as background, I will now state what I take to be the broadest and most inclusive formulation of Moore’s “fundamental thesis”:NF: A person commits the naturalistic fallacy iff he or she identifies some evaluative property with some naturalistic or metaphysical property.I intend to understand NF broadly, so as to include a couple of slightly different versions. We may imagine, as an example, a case in which a person says that intrinsic goodness is identical to pleasantness. Such a person has mentioned a specific evaluative property (intrinsic goodness, in this example) and a specific naturalistic property (pleasantness, in this example). The person claims that they are the same property. I will say, in a case such as this, that the person has committed a fully specific form of the naturalistic fallacy. He committed it by mentioning specific properties of the relevant sorts and saying that they are identical. But I will say that a person might commit a more generalized form of the fallacy. Imagine a person who says “Every evaluative property is identical to some natural property”. Then, without mentioning any specific evaluative property, or any specific natural property, the person has committed a slightly different version of the naturalistic fallacy. The second person has committed a fully generalized form of the fallacy and not a fully specific version as the first person did. Most of the passages quoted earlier are consistent with my interpretation. (I admit that there are a few places where the fit is not so obvious. I discuss them below.) But let’s start by reviewing some of the clearest cases.We can start with passage B. In this passage Moore focuses on just one evaluative property – intrinsic goodness. He says that if a person confuses this property with any natural “object”, then he or she has committed the naturalistic fallacy. I take it, then, that Moore is here describing perhaps the most familiar instance of the naturalistic fallacy. It is the mistake of saying that intrinsic goodness is identical to some natural property.Note that what is said in B is not a definition of the naturalistic fallacy. Though it may be one of the most familiar instances, there are instances that involve other evaluative properties, such as moral rightness or beauty. We may understand Moore’s point to have been that this is just one way of committing the naturalistic fallacy. If you make this mistake about intrinsic goodness, then you have committed the naturalistic fallacy. Given my formulation NF, (and given the assumption that intrinsic goodness is an evaluative property), it follows that the mistake identified in passage B is indeed an instance of the broader mistake described in NF. Making this narrower mistake is just one way of making the broader mistake. But Moore explicitly says that there are other ways of committing the naturalistic fallacy.One of these other ways is described in passage E. Moore evidently thought that Mill meant to say that the property of being desirable is identical to the property of being desired. The attribution of this view to Mill is debatable. Let’s just focus on the alleged mistake. Moore plausibly thought that the property of being desirable is an evaluative property. He also thought that the property of being desired is a natural property – presumably whether or not something has this property is a question for psychology, which Moore takes to belong with the natural sciences. So if a person were to say that the property of being desirable is identical to the property of being desired, he or she would have identified an evaluative property (desirability) with a natural property (the property of being desired). Thus, he or she would have committed an instance of the naturalistic fallacy as characterized by NF. Moore accuses Mill of committing the naturalistic fallacy in this way.Another closely related instance of NF can be seen in passage G. By way of some not-very-plausible argumentation, Moore ends up saying that Green is committed to the view that “being good is identical to satisfying desire’. This seems to be a slightly confused way of saying that the property of being good is identical to the property of being something that satisfies desire. He concludes by claiming that ‘there could be no plainer instance of the naturalistic fallacy’. Again, the alleged mistake conforms to the pattern identified in NF. We need only assume that the property of being good is an evaluative property, and that the property of being desire-satisfying is natural. With these assumptions in place, Green’s alleged identification of the properties is a case of someone’s saying of some evaluative property, that it is identical to some natural property. (I have no idea if Green actually committed the naturalistic fallacy in this form.) My point is merely that this specific identity claim conforms to the pattern indicated by NF in its doubly specific form.Moore makes it clear in passage C that the same fallacy would be involved if goodness were identified with a metaphysical property rather than with a naturalistic one. (I will later return to the question about how metaphysical properties are to be characterized.) He is evidently sensitive to the fact that there is something a bit misleading about using the name ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in cases in which the property identified with goodness is metaphysical rather than naturalistic. But he chooses to use the same name for mistakes of both types. Since he is aware of the extended usage, and warns the reader explicitly, it would be somewhat churlish to make a point of criticizing him for it. The attentive reader will not be misled.Moore gives four examples of philosophers who (he claims) identified intrinsic goodness with metaphysical properties. First he seems to claim that the Stoics identified intrinsic goodness with the property of being in accord with some mysterious “supersensible reality”; then he claims that Spinoza made the same mistake when he said that intrinsic goodness is identical to the property ‘of being more or less closely united with Absolute Substance by the “intellectual love” of God’; then he claims that Kant made this mistake when he said that the Kingdom of Ends is the ideal. Presumably Moore is imagining that Kant said that “ideality” (an evaluative property) is identical to some unidentified metaphysical property that somehow involves the Kingdom of Ends; and finally he says that “modern writers” make this mistake when they identify the property of being “the final end” (presumably an evaluative property) with the property of realizing our true selves (presumably a metaphysical property). Given the assumption that the specified properties are all properly metaphysical, it should be clear that each of the four cited claims is an instance of NF. In each case, the philosopher in question would have been identifying an evaluative property (intrinsic goodness; or “ideality”, or “finality”) with a metaphysical property. So all these cases conform to my interpretation.In passages C and I and several other passages scattered through Principia Ethica, Moore seems to want to understand the naturalistic fallacy in semantic terms. The transition from the ontological version that I have been discussing to the semantic version is straightforward. Just a few familiar assumptions are needed: first, we need to assume that predicate expressions (in simple first-order uses) express properties. Thus ‘is yellow’ expresses yellowness; ‘is intrinsically good’ expresses intrinsic goodness, etc. We may assume that if the property expressed by a predicate expression is evaluative, then the expression is an evaluative expression. If the property expressed by a predicate expression is a natural or metaphysical property, then that predicate expression is a naturalistic or metaphysical expression, as the case may be. We may also assume that if a predicate expression is a conjunction or disjunction or other combination of natural (metaphysical) expressions, then it is natural (metaphysical).In its semantic form, then, Moore’s claim is this:NF(s): A person commits the Naturalistic Fallacy iff he or she claims that some evaluative expression is synonymous with some naturalistic expression, or with some metaphysical expression.Thus, for example, if someone were to say that ‘is intrinsically good’ means the same as ‘is pleasant’ he or she would have committed an instance of the semantic version of the naturalistic fallacy. The same could be said of someone who says that ‘is desirable’ means the same as ‘is desired’ (see passage E); or of someone who says that ‘is beautiful’ means the same as ‘produces certain effects on our feelings’ (see passage I).Earlier (in J) I cited a passage in which Moore claims that Bentham committed the naturalistic fallacy. Moore discusses the accusation that Bentham said that the word ‘right’ means ‘conducive to the general happiness’. Given reasonable assumptions, this would be a clear instance of NF(s). The assumptions are (i) that ‘is right’ is an evaluative expression; (ii) that ‘is conducive to the general happiness’ is a naturalistic expression; and that when we say that one expression “means” another, we are saying that the two expressions have the same meaning.5. Some misunderstandings of the naturalistic fallacy. Earlier I said that some commentators have claimed that the naturalistic fallacy is something significantly different from the thing identified by NF or any of the variants I have described. I also suggested that there is little or no evidence in Principia Ethica to support these claims. I now turn to a consideration of some of the most popular misinterpretations.5a. Some have said that Moore’s idea was that you commit the naturalistic fallacy if you try to derive an ought from premises that are all isses. If this claim is true, NF is inadequate. Instead, we would have to attribute this to Moore:NF(i/o): A person commits the naturalistic fallacy iff he or she purports to derive an ‘ought’ statement from premises that are all ‘is’ statements. Perhaps someone would say that Moore gave two independent accounts of the naturalistic fallacy. Sometimes it was NF and sometimes it was NF(i/o).Here is a passage from the first paragraph of John Searle’s Philosophical Review paper on deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’:IT IS often said that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." This thesis, which comes from a famous passage in Hume's Treatise, while not as clear as it might be, is at least clear in broad outline: there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves entails any statement of value. Put in more contemporary terminology, no set of descriptive statements can entail an evaluative statement without the addition of at least one evaluative premise. To believe otherwise is to commit what has been called the naturalistic fallacy.Searle goes on to provide a series of controversial examples allegedly showing that it is possible to derive an “ought” statement from a set of premises that are all “is” statements. His aim is to show that in some cases the derivation is not fallacious.Several commentators, critics, writers of encyclopedia articles and others have agreed with Searle on this point: they have said that Moore said that a person commits the naturalistic fallacy iff he or she purports to derive an ought from a bunch of premises that are all ises. Some have said that this is what Moore had in mind when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy.Those who admire Moore might be disappointed if it could be shown that Moore had said that is/ought inferences are all fallacious. For, as Prior has shown, there are plenty of cases where such inferences are perfectly OK; it might not be a logical fallacy at all. It might not be a mistake of any kind. But there is no need for Mooreans to worry: Moore never described the naturalistic fallacy in the way Searle and these others have claimed. It is simply a false attribution.Demonstrating that Moore never committed himself to NF(i/o) in Principia Ethica might be a bit tricky. Perhaps I could go through the book sentence by sentence and show, in each case, that the sentence in question does not commit Moore to NF(i/o). That would make for a long and boring discussion. Instead, I will simply report what I have done: I have diligently searched through the book looking for evidence that might support the notion that Moore understood the naturalistic fallacy as something like NF(i/o). I found no such evidence.There are only a few passages in Principia Ethica in which Moore talks explicitly about the meaning of ‘ought’ or the concept of moral obligation. In Section 17 Moore suggests that when we say that someone, S, ought to do something, A, what we mean is that there is nothing else that S could do instead of A that would produce a greater balance of good over evil. Thus, Moore has given an analysis of the concept of obligation, but it is not purely naturalistic. The concept of intrinsic value plays an essential role in the analysis. He repeats this claim later in Section 89, though he uses different terminology. So it appears that Moore thought that the concept of obligation can be analyzed, but that the analysis makes essential use of a normative concept. But Moore does not mention the naturalistic fallacy in these passages; he does not say ‘therefore, anyone who tries to derive a statement of obligation from statements of facts is arguing fallaciously – such arguments involve the naturalistic fallacy.’So far as I have been able to determine, there is only one passage in Principia Ethica that might bear on the question whether Moore understood the naturalistic fallacy to be anything like NF(i/o). That is the passage in Section 77 where Moore is talking about some ideas that he thinks he has found in Kant. In this passage, he mentions the allegedly Kantian idea that “…when I say ‘You ought to do this’ I must mean ‘You are commanded to do this, …’” He goes on to say ‘Now that this is an error has been already shewn in Chapter I.’ Moore does not explicitly mention the naturalistic fallacy in this passage – he merely alludes in this way to some unidentified passage in Chapter I. Nor does he say much about derivations of ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements, but I am prepared to assume that “the error” that Moore had in mind was the semantic version of the naturalistic fallacy, NF(s).Thus, if Moore is talking about the naturalistic fallacy in this passage, then it is reasonable to conclude that he is still understanding the naturalistic fallacy to be a mistake about the meanings of some expressions. Specifically, in this passage the mistake would occur in the claim that ‘you ought to do this’ means the same as ‘this has been commanded’. I assume that ‘you ought to do this’ is an evaluative expression, and ‘you have been commanded to do this’ is a naturalistic expression. Thus, the passage is consistent with saying that Moore took the naturalistic fallacy to be the mistake indicated by NF(s), and not the alleged mistake indicated by NF(i/o). How might NF(i/o) be thought to come into the picture? Here I must engage in some speculation. Consider this argument:Argument A1. You have been commanded to keep your promises.2. Therefore, you ought to keep your promises.Suppose some commentator were to say that in the passage under consideration, Moore says in effect that arguments like Argument A are fallacious. And suppose the commentator were to say that this shows that Moore sometimes understood the naturalistic fallacy in the way indicated by NF(i/o).I cannot find anything quite like Argument A in the passage in question. Nor can I find Moore saying anything about whether such arguments are fallacious. But of course Argument A is fallacious. It is of the form: P, therefore Q.Suppose the commentator were to say that Moore must have had something like Argument A in mind (though he never said it). Suppose also that the commentator were to say that Moore must have thought the argument was really an enthymeme; and that Moore must have thought that with the missing premise added, it looks like this:Argument B1. You have been commanded to keep your promises.2. If you have been commanded to keep your promises, then you ought to keep your promises.3. Therefore, you ought to keep your promises. 1,2 MPFurthermore, (the commentator might have thought) Moore must have supposed that premise (2) is to be defended by claiming that ‘you ought to keep your promises’ means the same as, or can be defined as, ‘you have been commanded to keep your promises’. Voila! Moore claims that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of deriving an ‘ought’ from premises that are all ‘ises’. The commentator might then conclude that NF(i/o) is an adequate interpretation of something Moore maintained in Principia Ethica.This all seems to me to be wild and unjustifiable speculation. It involves confusions and misattributions. I agree that Argument B is problematic. But it seems to me that the mistake in Argument B is not any error of reasoning in the argument as a whole. After all, the argument is valid. Nor is it a case of deriving an ought from premises that are all ises. Note that (2) certainly looks at least partially “oughty”. Thus there is no justification for saying, on the basis of this passage, that Moore thought that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of deriving an ‘ought’ statement from premises that are all ‘is’ statements. It seems to me that what’s going on in this passage does not require any additions or adjustments to NF. It seems to me that it makes more sense to assume that in this passage Moore was alluding to the mistake that would arise if a philosopher were to defend premise (2) in Argument B by saying that ‘you ought to keep your promises’ means the same as ‘you have been commanded to keep your promises’. But if that is the mistake involved in the argument, then that mistake is clearly an instance of the semantic form of NF, NF(s). On this interpretation, Moore is again saying that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake one makes when one says that a certain evaluative term means the same as a certain naturalistic term. Thus, there is no need to suppose that Moore also understood the naturalistic fallacy in the way indicated by NF(i/o).5b. At the time of Principia Ethica Moore maintained that intrinsic goodness is a simple, unanalyzable property. He repeatedly said that it was not complex. So it is no surprise that he said that it is a mistake to identify intrinsic goodness with a complex property. Some have said that his view was that if you make this mistake, you commit the naturalistic fallacy. That is, they say that Moore was committed to this:NF(c): A person commits the naturalistic fallacy iff he or she says that intrinsic goodness is a complex property. I have searched diligently through Principia Ethica. I found many passages where Moore says that intrinsic goodness is simple and unanalyzable. So of course I recognize that he thought that anyone who said that it is complex would be making a mistake, or committing a “fallacy”. But it’s one thing to say that Moore thought that this would be a fallacy; it’s quite another thing to say that Moore thought that this would be the naturalistic fallacy. I did not find any passage where he clearly identifies the naturalistic fallacy as the mistake of saying that goodness is complex.I must acknowledge that there is one passage where Moore gets dangerously close to saying that the naturalistic fallacy is this mistake about complexity. I have in mind the already quoted passage H from Section 104 where Moore says: H. ‘Almost all ethical writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy – they have failed to perceive that the notion of intrinsic value is simple and unique; …’ (Moore 1993: 222)The use of the dash suggests that what comes after means the same as what comes before, and that suggests an understanding of the naturalistic fallacy as the mistake indicated by NF(c). In my view, it would have been better if Moore had replaced the dash with ‘furthermore’. Additionally, I see no point in saying that intrinsic value is “unique”. If everything is what it is and not another thing, everything is unique. Why bother to mention it? If we make these two changes, we end up with:H’: Almost all ethical writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy; furthermore they have failed to perceive that the notion of intrinsic value is simple …H’ seems to me to be an excellent conjunction of two of the main things that Moore wanted to say about the concept of intrinsic value. The part before ‘furthermore’ says in effect that ethical writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy with respect to that concept. The part after ‘furthermore’ says that they have committed what we may call the “complexity fallacy” with respect to it as well.There are several passages in Principia Ethica where Moore suggests that he is prepared to consider the idea that intrinsic goodness might be complex. Consider, for example, this passage: ‘[The naturalistic] fallacy, I explained, consists in the contention that good means nothing but some simple or complex notion, that can be defined in terms of natural qualities.’ (Moore 1993:125); some emphasis added, FF)Perhaps a persnickety copy editor would insist that this sentence could be improved. Maybe Moore should have said “[The naturalistic] fallacy, I explained, is committed by anyone who contends that ‘good’ expresses some simple or complex notion that can be defined in terms of natural or metaphysical qualities.” (emphasis again added) But the point remains the same: Moore already toyed with the notion that intrinsic goodness might be complex.Once he fully recognized the difference between the naturalistic fallacy and the complexity fallacy, Moore made it clear that his real interest is in the former; he was not interested in the latter. In the Preface (p. 6) he says that he is not ‘at all anxious to insist that G is “indefinable” in the sense of “unanalyzable”…. I think it was a pure mistake to lay so much stress as I did upon the question whether it is or not.’ Evidently, after having given it further thought he no longer cared very much about the complexity fallacy. His commitment to the naturalistic fallacy, on the other hand, remained firm.In light of the absence of compelling texts, as well as Moore’s subsequent remarks about the complexity fallacy, I think it is reasonable on balance to reject NF(c) as an interpretation of Moore’s view about the naturalistic fallacy. 5c. Some have said that Moore said that you commit the naturalistic fallacy iff you identify intrinsic goodness with something distinct from itself. For example, in Bloomsbury’s Prophet Tom Regan says ‘The “naturalistic fallacy” is the name that Moore gives to any attempt to identify Good with something distinct from itself.’ (Regan 2012: 193) Of course, Moore did think that intrinsic goodness is distinct from every natural and every metaphysical property, so if someone were to claim that intrinsic goodness is identical with some such property, he or she would have committed the naturalistic fallacy and would have identified intrinsic goodness with something that is distinct from intrinsic goodness. But the heart of the mistake in such a case would not be that the person identified intrinsic goodness with something distinct from itself. A person could do that while not committing the naturalistic fallacy. (Consider a person who says that intrinsic goodness is identical to moral obligatoriness. This person identifies intrinsic goodness with something that is distinct from itself, but he or she does not commit the naturalistic fallacy.) It must be admitted that there are some passages in which Moore seems to say that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of identifying goodness with something distinct from goodness. A good example is the already-quoted passage D: D. ‘… the naturalistic fallacy – the fallacy which consists in identifying the simple notion which we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion.” (Moore 1993: 109)This passage is troublesome for several reasons. First of all, there is no real need for Moore to mention that goodness is a “simple notion”. Of course he thought it to be simple. But he thought a lot of things about it. No need to confuse the issue by mentioning them here. The second problem in this passage is that Moore seems to be saying that the naturalistic fallacy just is this mistake about identifying goodness with something else. He did think that anyone who commits the naturalistic fallacy with respect to goodness does identify goodness with something distinct from itself; and that would surely be a mistake. But as I see it, he would have been on firmer ground if he had made it clear that this instance of the naturalistic fallacy involves a more specific misidentification – the identification of goodness with a natural or metaphysical property. Finally, I think Moore sometimes leaves the impression that the naturalistic fallacy is always a mistake about goodness. But, as we have seen, he clearly thought that it occurs in connection with beauty, obligatoriness, desirability, rightness and other evaluative properties. Thus it seems to me that it would have been better if Moore had said:D’: “… the naturalistic fallacy – the fallacy that a person commits when he or she identifies the notion that we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion – specifically a naturalistic or metaphysical notion.” He might also have added, just to avoid confusion, a remark to the effect that a person could commit the naturalistic fallacy by identifying any other evaluative property with a purely naturalistic or metaphysical property.5d. Some have said that Moore abused the English language when he used the term ‘fallacy’ in the name of this thing. For example, Bernard Williams says this:“Those who attempted to define goodness were said to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It is hard to think of any other widely used phrase in the history of philosophy that is such a spectacular misnomer. In the first place, it is not clear why those criticized were committing a fallacy (which is a mistake in inference) as opposed to making what in Moore’s view was an error, or else simply redefining a word.” (Williams 1985: 121)Michael Ridge seems to commit himself to this idea in (Ridge 2014). After citing the “spectacular misnomer” remark from Williams, Ridge says: ‘The so-called Naturalistic Fallacy is no fallacy at all.’ He also mentions that Frankena had made the same claim back in 1939.Williams and these others say that you have a fallacy only when you have a “mistake in inference” – a logical mistake. Supercilious pedantry is annoying in all cases, but it is especially annoying when it’s mean-spirited and demonstrably wrong. A quick look at any respectable dictionary of the English language should make it clear that ‘fallacy’ is correctly used just to mean ‘falsehood’, ‘error’, ‘mistake’. It has been used in this way for hundreds of years. Of course, as many (but not all) of these dictionaries point out, some fallacies involve logical errors; but there is no justification for the claim that it would be a “spectacular misnomer” to use the word in a case in which no such fallacious inference is involved. Here are some definitions:The Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘a false statement’ as a synonym of ‘fallacy’. This appears (among some other alleged synonyms) in the OED’s account of the primary sense of ‘fallacy’. Citations go back to 1481. A few lines later when it comes to the third main sense of ‘fallacy’ the OED discusses logical fallacies, or mistakes in inference. The earliest citation of ‘fallacy’ being used in this logical sense is dated 1552. Cambridge Dictionaries On-line give a simple definition: it defines a fallacy as a ?false ?belief. This is followed by an example of the word being used in this sense: ‘It is a ?common fallacy that only men are good at ?math’.Oxford Dictionaries: A mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound argument: the notion that the camera never lies is a fallacy.Macmillan Dictionary adds a slight twist: According to it a fallacy is an idea or belief that is false but that many people think is true.One modest application of the principle of charity allows us to assume that when Moore said that those who identify goodness with a natural or metaphysical property are committing a fallacy, he did not mean to say that they were committing a logical fallacy. He just meant to say that they were believing something false. His usage was beyond reproach then, and it is still beyond reproach now.6. Natural properties; metaphysical properties. I have proposed that (in its fundamental ontological form) Moore’s thesis was that someone commits the naturalistic fallacy if he or she identifies an evaluative property with a property that is either natural or metaphysical. Earlier I called this ‘NF’. Obviously, we cannot fully understand the import of NF if we don’t understand what is meant by saying that a property is “natural” or that it is “metaphysical”. In Principia Ethica Moore devoted a few paragraphs to the attempt to explain these concepts. Unfortunately, as Moore subsequently acknowledged in the Preface, his efforts were not successful. As a first step toward distinguishing the natural from the metaphysical, Moore says:The naturalistic fallacy always implies that when we think ‘This is good,’ what we are thinking is that the thing in question bears a definite relation to some one other thing. But this one thing, by reference to which good is defined may be either what I may call a natural object—something of which the existence is admittedly an object of experience—or else it may be an object which is only inferred to exist in a supersensible real world. (Moore 1993: 90)This is intended to be a distinction between two kinds of object. Some objects are “objects of experience”. I suspect that Moore was thinking of such things as ordinary physical objects and events; perhaps an experience of pleasure or a beautiful painting. Such things can be perceived; they form the subject matter for natural sciences and psychology; we know that one is present (or at least we have good reason to believe that one is present) when we see, or feel, or otherwise experience it. Such objects may be considered “natural”. Other objects exist only in a “supersensible world”. These cannot be perceived; at best we can infer that such things exist. These objects form the subject matter of theology and certain components of abstract metaphysics. I suspect that Moore was thinking of such things as God, or the Absolute, or someone’s “true self”, or numbers or other such abstract objects. He called these objects ‘metaphysical’. At the time when he was writing Principia Ethica Moore apparently endorsed a metaphysical view according to which ordinary natural objects exist in time, while the objects that exist in the “supersensible world” do not exist in time. This allegedly gives us yet another way to understand the distinction between these two sorts of object. Moore says:If we consider whether any object is of such a nature that it may be said to exist now, to have existed, or to be about to exist, then we may know that that object is a natural object, and that nothing, of which this is not true, is a natural object. Thus, for instance, of our minds we should say that they did exist yesterday, that they do exist to-day, and probably will exist in a minute or two. We shall say that we had thoughts yesterday, which have ceased to exist now, although their effects may remain: and in so far as those thoughts did exist, they too are natural objects. (Moore 1993: 92-3) While much remains obscure or doubtful, let us provisionally accept this as a rough guide to the way in which Moore was trying to conceive the distinction between natural and metaphysical objects. But as we have seen, the naturalistic fallacy is intended to be a fallacy involving alleged misidentification of properties, not of objects. So we need an account of a distinction between natural and metaphysical properties. Moore suggests a preliminary version of the needed distinction in a closely related passage:This [naturalistic] method consists in substituting for good some one property of a natural object or of a collection of natural objects; and in thus replacing Ethics by some one of the natural sciences. … I have called such theories naturalistic because all of these terms denote properties, simple or complex, of some simple or complex natural object;…. (Moore 1993: 92)Thus Moore seems to want to explain the distinction between natural and metaphysical properties by appeal to the distinction between natural and metaphysical objects. Perhaps the preliminary account is something like this:Dn1: F is a natural property =df. F is a property of a natural object or a collection of natural objects.Dm1: F is a metaphysical property =df. F is a property of a metaphysical object or a collection of metaphysical objects.This way of drawing the natural/metaphysical distinction is utterly unsatisfactory for Moore’s purposes. Together with some uncontroversial assumptions, it entails that intrinsic goodness and beauty are natural properties. Consider some delightful experience of pleasure; it is a natural object because it exists in time and because it can be experienced and because it is proper subject for psychology; but, according to a popular axiology, it has the property of being intrinsically good. So, according to Dn1, intrinsic goodness is a natural property. A similar result concerning beauty results from the assumption that some perceivable, temporally existent natural object is beautiful. The immediate implication is that there is nothing wrong with saying that intrinsic goodness and beauty are natural properties – claims that Moore considered to be mistakes -- instances of the naturalistic fallacy.Moore recognized this, and moved on to a more complex way of drawing the distinction. He said:… I do not deny that good is a property of certain natural objects: certain of them, I think, are good; and yet I have said that good itself is not a natural property. Well, my test for these too also concerns their existence in time. Can we imagine good as existing by itself in time, and not merely as a property of some natural object? For myself, I cannot so imagine it, whereas with the greater number of properties of objects—those which I call the natural properties—their existence does seem to me to be independent of the existence of those objects. They are, in fact, rather parts of which the object is made up than mere predicates which attach to it. If they were all taken away, no object would be left, not even a bare substance: for they are in themselves substantial and give to the object all the substance that it has. But this is not so with good. If indeed good were a feeling, as some would have us believe, then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. (Moore 1993: 93)Moore seems to have been thinking that natural properties are substantial parts of the natural objects that have them, and that as a result these properties can exist on their own, even if the object of which they formerly were a part were to be destroyed. We might expect here that he would contrast these natural properties to metaphysical ones, perhaps like this:Dn2: F is a natural property =df. F characterizes natural objects; when F does characterize a natural object, F is a part of the object characterized; it is possible for F to exist independently in time.Dm2: F is a metaphysical property =df. F characterizes metaphysical objects; when F does characterize a metaphysical object, it is not a part of that object; it is not possible for F to exist independently in time.Thus we would have a contrast between natural and metaphysical properties and this would help us to understand the significance of NF. Unfortunately, that is not what Moore does. Instead, he contrasts natural properties with the single evaluative property intrinsic goodness. He says that each natural property could exist on its own without the underlying substance it characterizes, but that “good” could not continue to exist on its own in this way. This leaves the distinction between natural properties and metaphysical properties undrawn.In the Preface Moore castigates himself for his ‘hopelessly confused’ attempts to give an account of the nature of natural properties. (Moore 1993:13) He points out (in effect) that the second account of naturalness is ‘utterly inconsistent with the former one’. He then proceeds to suggest that natural properties are ones with which it is the business of the natural sciences and psychology to deal (or ones that can be defined in terms of such), and that metaphysical properties are ones that stand to metaphysical objects in the same relation that natural properties stand to natural objects. He does not say what that relation is.This all seems to me to be disappointing. However, it also seems to me that (as Moore suggests) even if we cannot define ‘natural’ and ‘metaphysical’, we may nevertheless have some idea of what sorts of properties belong in these classes. If so, it is possible for us to have a tentative grasp of what Moore had in mind when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. In its central form, it is the mistake (as he sees it) that a person commits if and only if he or she identifies an evaluative property with either a natural property or a metaphysical property. In a closely related form, it is the mistake a person commits if and only if he or she claims that an evaluative predicate means the same as some natural or metaphysical predicate or some combination thereof. The naturalistic fallacy is not the mistake of purporting to derive an ‘ought’ statement from premises that are all ‘is’ statements; though someone might commit the naturalistic fallacy when trying to defend a premise in an expanded version of such an inference. Nor is it the mistake of identifying intrinsic goodness with a complex property – I called that mistake ‘the complexity fallacy’. There is a closely linked semantic version of the complexity fallacy; that is the mistake of saying that ‘is intrinsically good’ can be analyzed, or defined. Nor is it the mistake of trying to identify an evaluative property with something distinct from itself. There was a huge amount of debate about the naturalistic fallacy after the publication of Principia Ethica. Some of that debate is based on a correct understanding of what Moore had in mind when spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. Unfortunately, quite a lot of that debate seems to have been based on misunderstandings about what the naturalistic fallacy actually was intended to be. I leave it to others to assess the significance of the various strands in that debate. I also leave it to others to determine whether Moore succeeded in demonstrating that the naturalistic fallacy is actually a fallacy. I take it that that’s a project for a different paper.Works CitedBaldwin, Thomas (1990) G.E. Moore. Routledge: London and New York.Broad, C.D. (1942) ‘Certain Features in Moore's Ethical Doctrines’. In P. A. Schilpp (1942), 41–68.Duncan, Elmer (1970) ‘Has Anyone Committed the Naturalistic Fallacy?’ The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 1/2 (Spring and Summer), 40-46.Feldman, Fred (1978) Introductory Ethics. Prentice-Hall: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.______ (2005) ‘The Open Question Argument: What it Isn't; and What it Is’. Philosophical Issues 15, 2005, Normativity, 22-43.Frankena, W., (1939) ‘The Naturalistic Fallacy’. Mind, 48: 464–477.Casimir Lewy, (1970) ‘G.E. Moore on the Naturalistic Fallacy’. In G. E. Moore: Essays in Retrospect ed. by Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz, George Allen and Unwin London and New York 292-303.G. E. Moore, (1993 [1903] Principia Ethica Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Baldwin. _______ ‘Preface’ Intended for publication in the second edition of Principia Ethica; appears on pp. 2 – 27 of the 1993 Baldwin edition of Principia Ethica. I refer to this document as “the Preface”._______ (1942) ‘A Reply to My Critics’. In Schilpp (1942).A.N. Prior (1960) ‘The Autonomy of Ethics’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 38:3, 199-206.Tom Regan (1992) ‘Moore, G.E.’. In the Encyclopedia of Ethics Vol II Becker & Becker, 821.______ , (2012) Bloomsbury’s Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy. Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock. [Reprint of 1986 edition by Temple University Press.] Ridge, Michael, (2014) ‘Moral Non-Naturalism’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta?(ed.), URL = <, P.A. (ed.), (1942). The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (The Library of Living Philosophers). Evanston: Northwestern University.John Searle (1964) ‘How to Derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’’. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 43-58.Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ................
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