naturalistic fallacy en · NOUN
Etymology
Introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.
Meanings
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The fallacious belief that something is automatically good because it is natural or automatically bad because it is unnatural.
No, we do not have to put moral reasoning in a special category and use transcendental premises, because the posing of the naturalistic fallacy is itself a fallacy. For if ought is not is, what is?
1998 April, Edward O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality”, in The Atlantic:It is easy to fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, which suggests that because the companies are successful, they must also be right.
2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 11, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
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Any attempt to define "good" verbally, instead of treating it as an undefined term, in terms of which other terms are defined.
Yet a mistake of this simple kind has commonly been made about good. It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not other, but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the naturalistic fallacy and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose.
1903, G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica:
Forms
| Spelling | Features | Labels | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| naturalistic fallacies | Number=Plur | lexicographic |