ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
ia Ethica, which was published in 1903. But what did Moore really mean when he
coined this term? Hilary Putnam believed that Moore had demonstrated that: “Good
was a ‘non-natural’ property, i.e., one totally outside the physicalist ontology of natural science,”12 and this interpretation has led many to assume that it is a fallacy to
claim that moral goodness is part of the natural world. But Putnam’s interpretation
was wrong and so all the follow-on assumptions don’t truly…follow on. Let’s unpack
the two terms in Moore’s phrase to see where Putnam went awry.
Moore “called the mistake of identifying an object of thought with its object a fallacy.
And if the object – with which one mistakenly identified the thought – happened to be
a natural object, as opposed to metaphysical entity, then the error became the naturalistic fallacy.”13 But Moore used the term “natural to refer to properties of the external
world. He contrasted natural with intuitive, which he used to refer to properties of the
mind – including objects of thought such as good. Hence when Moore claims that
good is not a natural property, he is simply restating the point that good is an intuitive
object of thought and not an objective feature of the outside world.”14 What Moore
was actually saying was the same thing as Hume. While Hume used perceptions in the
mind to point out where good resides, Moore rephrased slightly and used object of
thought as its location. And so just as Hume did nothing to rule out nature from driving our morality (in the form of human thought driven by our natural wants), neither
did Moore – at least not to anyone who discarded Descartes’ dualism long ago.
In fact, a survey of the literature reveals that there are eight so called naturalistic fallacies15 that include various interpretations of Hume and Moore, and none of them actually preclude an objective source of morality coming from natural human desires. As
Curry concludes in his paper Who’s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?:
Whenever someone uses the term “naturalistic fallacy,” ask them “Which one?,”
and insist that they explain the arguments behind their accusation. It is only by
bringing the ‘fallacy’ out into the open that we can break the mysterious spell that
it continues to cast over ethics.16
As John Mackie stated:
It is not for nothing that [Hume’s] work is entitled A Treatise of Human Nature,
and subtitled, An attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into
moral subjects; it is an attempt to study and explain moral phenomena (as well as
human knowledge and emotions) in the same sort of way in which Newton and his
followers studied and explained the physical world.17
As Daniel Dennett said:
If ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is,’ just what can it be derived from?…ethics
must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature – on a sense of what a
human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or
want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy.18
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