Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Naturalistic fallacy
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Irrationality of anti-naturalistic fallacy=== The [[Fallacy fallacy|belief that naturalistic fallacy is inherently flawed has been criticized as lacking rational bases]], and labelled anti-naturalistic fallacy.<ref>Casebeer, W. D., "Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition", ''Cambridge, MA: MIT Press'', (2003)</ref>{{page needed|date=February 2016}} 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."<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Walter | first1 = Alex | year = 2006 | title = The Anti-naturalistic Fallacy: Evolutionary Moral Psychology and the Insistence of Brute Facts | journal = Evolutionary Psychology | volume = 4 | pages = 33β48 | doi = 10.1177/147470490600400102 | doi-access = free }}</ref> That is because said beliefs implicitly assert 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).<ref name="nat-fal"> {{citation | work= TheFreeDictionary | title= naturalistic fallacy | url = http://www.thefreedictionary.com/naturalistic+fallacy }}.</ref> However, philosophers show that these connections are inevitable. A very basic example is that if people view rescuing people as morally correct, this would shape their beliefs on what constitutes danger and what situations warrant intervention. For wider-ranging examples, if 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. Similarly, if two people think it is evil to keep people working extremely hard in extreme poverty, they will draw different conclusions on de facto rights (as opposed to purely semantic rights) of [[property]] owners. The latter is dependent on whether they believe property owners are responsible for the aforementioned exploitation. One who accepts this premise would conclude that it is necessary to persecute property owners to mitigate exploitation. The one who does not, on the other hand, would conclude that the persecution is unnecessary and evil.<ref>Susana Nuccetelli, Gary Seay (2011) "Ethical Naturalism: Current Debates"</ref><ref>Peter Simpson (2001) "Vices, Virtues, and Consequences: Essays in Moral and Political Philosophy"</ref>
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)