ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
The Naturalistic fallacy fallacy
Framing her scientific argument, Churchland crafts a philosophical argument directly
engaging the common claim that science has no place in the discussion of ethics or
public policy. This claim takes various forms. Some forms are little more than
tautological “semantic wrangles,” such as “only humans have human morality,” or the
assumption that morality requires reasoning and reasoning requires language,
therefore only humans are moral. One common argument politely demonizes
scientific approaches as “scientism,” a vaguely-defined crime that serves to do little
more than distinguish “us” (humanists/theologians/policy-makers) from “them”
(scientists and interdisciplinary traitors like Churchland). Another tactic exploits a
passage from David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (3.1.1.27) that has been
decontextualized and over-simplified to say “you can’t get an ought from an is,” (i.e.
moral conclusions are not based on factual premises). Such mixing of factual
arguments with moral ones was dubbed the “naturalistic fallacy” by philosopher G.E.
Moore. We may think of plenty of cases in which