Concept
Ethical naturalism
Overview
Ethical naturalism (also called moral naturalism or naturalistic definism) is a position in metaethics that holds that moral properties or facts are reducible to, or constituted by, natural properties (as understood within philosophical naturalism) and can in principle be investigated using empirical or scientific methods. It is generally regarded as a form of moral realism, since it maintains that moral statements can be true or false depending on features of the natural world.
Ethical naturalism contrasts with ethical non-naturalism, which maintains that moral properties are not reducible to, or constituted by, natural properties, and with forms of moral anti-realism, which deny the existence of objective moral facts.
Different versions of ethical naturalism identify moral properties with different kinds of natural properties, such as human well-being, preferences, or pleasure.
The position has appeared in several ethical traditions, including some forms of utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and evolutionary ethics. In contemporary metaethics it is often associated with views such as Cornell realism. Ethical naturalism has also been the subject of significant criticism, most notably G. E. Moore's open-question argument, which challenges the claim that moral properties can be fully defined in natural terms.
Debates about ethical naturalism also concern whether moral inquiry can be continuous with empirical investigation and scientific explanation, or whether moral concepts cannot be fully reduced to descriptive accounts of the natural world.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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And so it has the same object matter as Practical Wisdom; yet the two faculties are not identical, because Practical Wisdom has the capacity for commanding and taking the initiative, for its End is “what one should do or not do:” but Judiciousness is only apt to decide upon suggestions (though we do in Greek put “well” on to the faculty and its concrete noun, these really mean exactly the same as the plain words)…
Aristotle, The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
States what Ethical naturalism is; the author is tied to Ethical naturalism in the knowledge graph.
But all philosophy is either cognition on the basis of pure reason, or the cognition of reason on the basis of empirical principles. The former is termed pure, the latter empirical philosophy. The philosophy of pure reason is either propædeutic, that is, an inquiry into the powers of reason in regard to pure à priori cognition, and is termed critical philosophy; or it is, secondly, the system of pure reason—a…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Ethical naturalism is.
To suppose that values are ideal because they are so eternally given is the contradiction in which objective idealism has intrenched itself. Objective ontological teleology spells machinery. Reflective and volitional, experimental teleology alone spells ideality.[43] Objective, rationalistic idealism breaks upon the fact that it can have no intermediary between a brutally achieved embodiment of meaning (physical in…
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
States what Ethical naturalism is.
Philosophers who discussed Ethical naturalism
- G. E. Moore
- Gilles Deleuze
- Roy Bhaskar
- Open-question argument
- Science of morality
- Rosalind Hursthouse
- Sharon Street
Related ideas
- Moral nihilism
- G. E. Moore
- Hedonism
- Metaethics
- Eudaimonia
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Natural law
- Objectivism
- Sam Harris
- R. M. Hare
- Evolutionary ethics
- Virtue ethics
- Aristotle
- Utilitarianism
- Altruism (ethics)
- Naturalism (philosophy)
- Richard Boyd
- Consequentialism
- Ethical egoism
- Moral realism
- Fact–value distinction
- David O. Brink
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.