ethical naturalism

ethical naturalism, in ethics, the view that moral terms, concepts, or properties are ultimately definable in terms of facts about the natural world, including facts about human beings, human nature, and human societies. Ethical naturalism contrasts with ethical nonnaturalism, which denies that such definitions are possible. Because ethical naturalists believe that moral claims are ultimately about features of the natural world, which are generally amenable to scientific study, they tend to embrace moral realism, the view that moral claims are not merely expressive statements but are literally true or false.

An example of a naturalistic ethical theory is John Stuart Mill’s version of utilitarianism, according to which action is morally right to the extent that it tends to produce happiness (or pleasure, broadly construed) and morally wrong to the extent that it fails to produce happiness or tends to produce unhappiness (or pain, broadly construed).

The English philosopher G.E. Moore offered two famous objections to ethical naturalism. Moore first claimed that naturalists were guilty of the “naturalistic fallacy,” which consists of invalidly drawing normative conclusions from descriptive premises. Thus, from the fact that an action has a certain natural property (e.g., that it maximizes happiness), naturalists infer that it has a certain normative property (e.g., it is morally right). Because such inferences are rationally unsupported, according to Moore, naturalists are guilty of a fallacy. Naturalists responded to the objection by noting that the inferences need not proceed solely from descriptive premises; they may also rely on assumptions of the form “Whatever action has natural property X is morally right” (e.g., “Whatever action maximizes happiness is morally right”).

A second objection by Moore, known as the “open question argument,” was that any naturalistic account of a moral property must face the difficulty of explaining how it is that a person who understands both the naturalistic account and the moral property may still coherently (without contradiction) question whether the moral property is present when the natural one is. For example, a person who understands what it is to maximize happiness and what it means for an act to be morally right may still wonder whether a particular action that maximizes happiness is morally right. If being morally right really does consist in maximizing happiness, however, such a question would not be “open,” or in principle undecided, in such a way. Instead, it would be like the incoherent question, “Is this unmarried man a bachelor?” In response to the open-question argument, ethical naturalists have noted that the exact meanings of moral terms might not be obvious to people who nevertheless understand them and use them correctly.