PHI 110RS Critical Thinking and Naturalistic Fallacy

Naturalistic fallacy

In philosophical ethics, the term naturalistic fallacy was introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.^[1] Moore argues it would be fallacious to explain that which is good reductively, in terms of natural properties such as pleasant or desirable.

Moore’s naturalistic fallacy is closely related to the is–ought problem, which comes from David Hume‘s A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40). However, unlike Hume’s view of the is–ought problem, Moore (and other proponents of ethical non-naturalism) did not consider the naturalistic fallacy to be at odds with moral realism.

The naturalistic fallacy should not be confused with the appeal to nature fallacy, which is exemplified by forms of reasoning such as “Something is natural; therefore, it is morally acceptable” or “This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesirable.” Such inferences are common in discussions of medicine, sexuality, environmentalism, gender roles, race, and carnism.

Different common uses

The is–ought problem

The term naturalistic fallacy is sometimes used to describe the deduction of an ought from an is (the is–ought problem).^[2]

In using his categorical imperative, Kant deduced that experience was necessary for their application. But experience on its own or the imperative on its own could not possibly identify an act as being moral or immoral. We can have no certain knowledge of morality from them, being incapable of deducing how things ought to be from the fact that they happen to be arranged in a particular manner in experience. PHI 110RS Critical Thinking and Naturalistic Fallacy

Bentham, in discussing the relations of law and morality, found that when people discuss problems and issues they talk about how they wish it would be as opposed to how it actually is. This can be seen in discussions of natural law and positive law. Bentham criticized natural law theory because in his view it was a naturalistic fallacy, claiming that it described how things ought to be instead of how things are.

Moore’s discussion

According to G. E. Moore‘s Principia Ethica, when philosophers try to define good reductively, in terms of natural properties like pleasant or desirable, they are committing the naturalistic fallacy.

…the assumption that because some quality or combination of qualities invariably and necessarily accompanies the quality of goodness, or is invariably and necessarily accompanied by it, or both, this quality or combination of qualities is identical with goodness. If, for example, it is believed that whatever is pleasant is and must be good, or that whatever is good is and must be pleasant, or both, it is committing the naturalistic fallacy to infer from this that goodness and pleasantness are one and the same quality. The naturalistic fallacy is the assumption that because the words ‘good’ and, say, ‘pleasant’ necessarily describe the same objects, they must attribute the same quality to them.^[3]

— Arthur N. Prior, Logic And The Basis Of Ethics

In defense of ethical non-naturalism, Moore’s argument is concerned with the semantic and metaphysical underpinnings of ethics. In general, opponents of ethical naturalism reject ethical conclusions drawn from natural facts.

Moore argues that good, in the sense of intrinsic value, is simply ineffable: it cannot be defined because it is not a natural property, being “one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever ‘is’ capable of definition must be defined”.^[4] On the other hand, ethical naturalists eschew such principles in favor of a more empirically accessible analysis of what it means to be good: for example, in terms of pleasure in the context of hedonism.

That “pleased” does not mean “having the sensation of red”, or anything else whatever, does not prevent us from understanding what it does mean. It is enough for us to know that “pleased” does mean “having the sensation of pleasure”, and though pleasure is absolutely indefinable, though pleasure is pleasure and nothing else whatever, yet we feel no difficulty in saying that we are pleased. The reason is, of course, that when I say “I am pleased”, I do not mean that “I” am the same thing as “having pleasure”. And similarly no difficulty need be found in my saying that “pleasure is good” and yet not meaning that “pleasure” is the same thing as “good”, that pleasure means good, and that good means pleasure. If I were to imagine that when I said “I am pleased”, I meant that I was exactly the same thing as “pleased”, I should not indeed call that a naturalistic fallacy, although it would be the same fallacy as I have called naturalistic with reference to Ethics. PHI 110RS Critical Thinking and Naturalistic Fallacy

— G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica § 12

In §7, Moore argues that a property is either a complex of simple properties, or else it is irreducibly simple. Complex properties can be defined in terms of their constituent parts but a simple property has no parts. In addition to good and pleasure, Moore suggests that colour qualia are undefined: if one wants to understand yellow, one must see examples of it. It will do no good to read the dictionary and learn that yellow names the colour of egg yolks and ripe lemons, or that yellow names the primary colour between green and orange on the spectrum, or that the perception of yellow is stimulated by electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of between 570 and 590 nanometers, because yellow is all that and more, by the open question argument.

Bernard Williams called Moore’s use of the term naturalistic fallacy, a “spectacular misnomer”, the question being metaphysical, as opposed to rational.^[5]

Appeal to nature

Main article: Appeal to nature

Some people use the phrase, naturalistic fallacy or appeal to nature, in a different sense, to characterize inferences of the form “Something is natural; therefore, it is morally acceptable” or “This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesirable.” Such inferences are common in discussions of medicine, homosexuality, environmentalism, and veganism.

The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce the naturalistic fallacy because they want to describe the natural world honestly, without people deriving morals about how we ought to behave (as in: If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, it must be OK).

— Steven Pinker^[6]

Criticism

See also: Is–ought problem § Responses

Bound-up functions

Some philosophers reject the naturalistic fallacy and/or suggest solutions for the proposed is–ought problem.

Ralph McInerny suggests that ought is already bound up in is, in so far as the very nature of things have ends/goals within them. For example, a clock is a device used to keep time. When one understands the function of a clock, then a standard of evaluation is implicit in the very description of the clock, i.e., because it is a clock, it ought to keep the time. Thus, if one cannot pick a good clock from a bad clock, then one does not really know what a clock is. In like manner, if one cannot determine good human action from bad, then one does not really know what the human person is.^{[7][page needed]}

Irrationality of anti-naturalistic fallacy

Certain uses of the naturalistic fallacy refutation (a scheme of reasoning that declares an inference invalid because it incorporates an instance of the naturalistic fallacy) have been criticized as lacking rational bases, and labelled anti-naturalistic fallacy.^{[8][page needed]} For instance, Alex Walter wrote:

“The naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s ‘law’ are frequently appealed to for the purpose of drawing limits around the scope of scientific inquiry into ethics and morality. These two objections are shown to be without force.”^[9]

The refutations from naturalistic fallacy defined as inferring evaluative conclusions from purely factual premises^[10] do assert, implicitly, that there is no connection between the facts and the norms (in particular, between the facts and the mental process that led to adoption of the norms). PHI 110RS Critical Thinking and Naturalistic Fallacy

Effects of putative necessities

The effect of beliefs about dangers on behaviors intended to protect what is considered valuable is pointed at as an example of total decoupling of ought from is being impossible. A very basic example is that if the value is that rescuing people is good, different beliefs on whether or not there is a human being in a flotsam box leads to different assessments of whether or not it is a moral imperative to salvage said box from the ocean. For wider-ranging examples, if two people share the value that preservation of a civilized humanity is good, and one believes that a certain ethnic group of humans have a population level statistical hereditary predisposition to destroy civilization while the other person does not believe that such is the case, that difference in beliefs about factual matters will make the first person conclude that persecution of said ethnic group is an excusable “necessary evil” while the second person will conclude that it is a totally unjustifiable evil. The same is also applicable to beliefs about individual differences in predispositions, not necessarily ethnic. In a similar way, two people who both think it is evil to keep people working extremely hard in extreme poverty will draw different conclusions on de facto rights (as opposed to purely semantic rights) of property owners depending on whether or not they believe that humans make up justifications for maximizing their profit, one who believes that people do concluding it necessary to persecute property owners to prevent justification of extreme poverty while the other person concludes that it would be evil to persecute property owners. Such instances are mentioned as examples of beliefs about reality having effects on ethical considerations.^[11][12]

Inconsistent application

Some critics of the assumption that is-ought conclusions are fallacies point at observations of people who purport to consider such conclusions as fallacies do not do so consistently. Examples mentioned are that evolutionary psychologists who gripe about “the naturalistic fallacy” do make is-ought conclusions themselves when, for instance, alleging that the notion of the blank slate would lead to totalitarian social engineering or that certain views on sexuality would lead to attempts to convert homosexuals to heterosexuals. Critics point at this as a sign that charges of the naturalistic fallacy are inconsistent rhetorical tactics rather than detection of a fallacy.^[13][14]

Universally normative allegations of varied harm

A criticism of the concept of the naturalistic fallacy is that while “descriptive” statements (used here in the broad sense about statements that purport to be about facts regardless of whether they are true or false, used simply as opposed to normative statements) about specific differences in effects can be inverted depending on values (such as the statement “people X are predisposed to eating babies” being normative against group X only in the context of protecting children while the statement “individual or group X is predisposed to emit greenhouse gases” is normative against individual/group X only in the context of protecting the environment), the statement “individual/group X is predisposed to harm whatever values others have” is universally normative against individual/group X. This refers to individual/group X being “descriptively” alleged to detect what other entities capable of valuing are protecting and then destroying it without individual/group X having any values of its own. For example, in the context of one philosophy advocating child protection considering eating babies the worst evil and advocating industries that emit greenhouse gases to finance a safe short term environment for children while another philosophy considers long term damage to the environment the worst evil and advocates eating babies to reduce overpopulation and with it consumption that emits greenhouse gases, such an individual/group X could be alleged to advocate both eating babies and building autonomous industries to maximize greenhouse gas emissions, making the two otherwise enemy philosophies become allies against individual/group X as a “common enemy”. The principle, that of allegations of an individual or group being predisposed to adapt their harm to damage any values including combined harm of apparently opposite values inevitably making normative implications regardless of which the specific values are, is argued to extend to any other situations with any other values as well due to the allegation being of the individual or group adapting their destruction to different values. This is mentioned as an example of at least one type of “descriptive” allegation being bound to make universally normative implications, as well as the allegation not being scientifically self-correcting due to individual or group X being alleged to manipulate others to support their alleged all-destructive agenda which dismisses any scientific criticism of the allegation as “part of the agenda that destroys everything”, and that the objection that some values may condemn some specific ways to persecute individual/group X is irrelevant since different values would also have various ways to do things against individuals or groups that they would consider acceptable to do. This is pointed out as a falsifying counterexample to the claim that “no descriptive statement can in itself become normative”.^[15][16]

The Grue Paradox

The “grue paradox,” originally conceived by Nelson Goodman in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast makes things even worse for the HD account of justification of universal statements by any amount of particular empirical evidence.

Typically the scientist will not be considering a single hypothesis but will be looking for which hypothesis is “best confirmed” by the available evidence. The grue paradox shows us, that if we eliminate induction  (as the HD-ist hoped to do) as a means of justification, for every hypothesis that is confirmed by some body of evidence, there are an infinite number of alternative hypotheses inconsistent with the first which are all equally well confirmed by that same evidence. Thus, based on the empirical evidence there is no justification for regarding the evidence as ever confirming one hypothesis more than another one!

This is a “paradox” because of course scientists frequently make judgments that the evidence confirms one hypothesis more favorably than another.

Here’s how the paradox was presented by Goodman:

Take as our example this time the hypothesis that:

“All emeralds are green.”

Clearly this hypothesis is confirmed by observations of green emeralds, i.e. its “positive instances.” Now consider a rival hypothesis:

“All emeralds are grue.”

Here “grue” is a new predicate which is defined as the property of being green before the year 2100 and blue afterwards. Thus this second hypothesis that all emeralds are grue will be confirmed by any observation of a green emerald before the year 2100, because “grue” means by definition being green before 2100. Of course, since all observational evidence available is before the year 2100, all the evidence we have confirms the grue hypothesis exactly as much as it confirms the green hypothesis!

Of course picking the year 2100 is absurdly arbitrary; we could have picked any date. So, in effect, there are an infinite number of alternative hypotheses (each of which would have the emeralds changing color at a different future date) which are all equally well confirmed by the observed positive instances of green emeralds. Since our justification for accepting a hypothesis as confirmed is the empirical evidence, it follows paradoxically that we have no rational justification for picking one hypothesis as better confirmed than an infinite host of alternatives!
NOTE: Obviously, this does not reflect what really is the case in science. The hypothesis that all emeralds are green is in fact considered highly confirmed and accepted by all mineralogists, whereas no one believes “All emeralds are grue.”

Why do we consider “green” as “reasonable” but “grue” as utterly “absurd”?
The reason seems obvious: no one has ever observed gems changing color on an arbitrary date in the past, so no one has any grounds for expecting any gem to change from green to blue in the year 2100.

But to say this is just to say that we expect the future will resemble the past (the principle of the uniformity of nature),
which is of course the heart of Hume’s problem of induction. No doubt science proceeds on this assumption of the uniformity of nature, but our task is to justify it. Yet the only way to justify it is to reason from the evidence which we have accumulated from the past, and that of course is to assume the very point which is at issue, namely the reliability of inductive inference from the past to the future. We must conclude that the confirmationist has
not escaped the problem of induction, and so Goodman calls this “grue paradox” the “new riddle of induction.”

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Surprise Test Paradox by Roy Sorensen

A teacher announces that there will be a surprise test next week. A student objects that this is impossible: “The class meets on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If the test is given on Friday, then on Thursday I would be able to predict that the test is on Friday. It would not be a surprise. Can the test be given on Wednesday? No, because on Tuesday I would know that the test will not be on Friday (thanks to the previous reasoning) and know that the test was not on Monday (thanks to memory). Therefore, on Tuesday I could foresee that the test will be on Wednesday. A test on Wednesday would not be a surprise. Could the surprise test be on Monday? On Sunday, the previous two eliminations would be available to me. Consequently, I would know that the test must be on Monday. So a Monday test would also fail to be a surprise. Therefore, it is impossible for there to be a surprise test.”

Can the teacher fulfill her announcement? We have an embarrassment of riches. On the one hand, we have the student’s elimination argument. (For a recent formalization, see Holliday 2017.) On the other hand, common sense says that surprise tests are possible even when we have had advance warning that one will occur at some point. Either of the answers would be decisive were it not for the credentials of the rival answer. Thus we have a paradox. But a paradox of what kind? ‘Surprise test’ is being defined in terms of what can be known. Specifically, a test is a surprise if and only if the student cannot know beforehand which day the test will occur. Therefore the riddle of the surprise test qualifies as an epistemic paradox.

Paradoxes are more than edifying surprises. Professor Statistics announces she will give random quizzes: “Class meets every day of the week. Each day I will open by rolling a die. When the roll yields a six, I will immediately give a quiz.” Today, Monday, a six came up. So you are taking a quiz. The last question of her quiz is: “Which of the subsequent days is most likely to be the day of the next random test?” Most people answer that each of the subsequent days has the same probability of being the next quiz. But the correct answer is: Tomorrow (Tuesday).

Uncontroversial facts about probability reveal the mistake and establish the correct answer. For the next test to be on Wednesday, there would have to be a conjunction of two events: no test on Tuesday (a 5/6 chance of that) and a test on Wednesday (a 1/6 chance). The probability for each subsequent day becomes less and less. (It would be astounding if the next quiz day were a hundred days from now!) The question is not whether a six will be rolled on any given day, but when the next six will be rolled. Which day is the next one depends partly on what happens meanwhile, as well as depending partly on the roll of the die on that day. PHI 110RS Critical Thinking and Naturalistic Fallacy

This riddle is instructive and will be referenced throughout this entry. But the existence of quick, decisive solution shows that only a mild revision of our prior beliefs was needed. In contrast, when our deep beliefs conflict, proposed amendments reverberate unpredictably. “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back” (Hein 1966).

The solution to a complex epistemic paradox relies on solutions (or partial solutions) to more fundamental epistemic paradoxes. The surprise test paradox, which will be disassembled in stages throughout this essay, conveniently illustrates this nesting of paradox within paradox. Inside the surprise test is the lottery paradox; inside the lottery paradox is the preface paradox; inside the preface paradox is Moore’s paradox (all of which will discussed below). In addition to this depth-wise connection, there are lateral connections to other epistemic paradoxes such as the knower paradox and the problem of foreknowledge.

There are also ties to issues that are not clearly paradoxes – or to issues whose status as paradoxes is at least contested. Some philosophers find only irony in self-defeating predictions, only cognitive illusion in the Monty Hall problem, only an embarrassment in the “knowability paradox” (discussed below). Calling a problem a paradox tends to quarantine it from the rest of our inquiries. Those who wish to rely on the surprising result will therefore deny that there is any paradox.

The surprise test paradox has yet more oblique connections to some paradoxes that are not epistemic, such as the liar paradox and Pseudo-Scotus’ paradoxes of validity. They will be discussed in passing, chiefly to set boundaries.

We can look forward to future philosophers drawing edifying historical connections. The backward elimination argument underlying the surprise test paradox can be discerned in German folktales dating back to 1756 (Sorensen 2003a, 267). Perhaps, medieval scholars explored these slippery slopes. But let me turn to commentary to which we presently have access. PHI 110RS Critical Thinking and Naturalistic Fallacy