Overcoming the Naturalistic Fallacy
On the open-question argument, goodness, the objectivity of moral truths, and the science of morality.
The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of writers, philosophers, and artists who met at the homes of the novelist Virginia Woolf and her relatives in the Bloomsbury district of London. The group is remembered for the large number of significant 20th-century figures attached to it. In addition to Woolf, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the novelist E.M. Forster were some of its members. Their discussions focused on the nature of beauty, goodness, and truth, where their core beliefs were shaped by G.E. Moore. Moore’s influence was profound, almost incredible in retrospect. Keynes described his Principia Ethica as a “stupendous and entrancing work, the greatest on the subject”. “I almost worship him as if he were a god,” wrote a young Bertrand Russell, philosopher and Nobel laureate, “I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody.”
The fundamental ethical value, according to Moore, is goodness. But goodness is indefinable. Moore rejected any attempt to reduce goodness to a naturally occurring property such as pleasure or happiness. In Principia Ethica, he famously wrote: “If I am asked, ‘What is good?’ my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked ‘How is good to be defined?’ my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it.” We know the good ultimately through a direct apprehension, through intuition. When someone asks why it would be wrong to torture a baby if the act were sanctioned by religious beliefs or yielded consequences that maximize overall utility, and you reply, “Because it just is!”, you are invoking your intuition.
Against those who argue that good is the same as, say, pleasure, Moore used what is called the open-question argument. When “bachelor” is defined as an unmarried man, and one asks “Is an unmarried man a bachelor?”, it is like asking “Is a bachelor a bachelor?”. Once we know that someone is a bachelor, we can be certain he is unmarried, so the question is “closed”. But the same is not true when we try to define “good” in natural terms. Suppose we say, “Good means pleasant”. The question “Is what is pleasant good?” still seems meaningful. Once we have established that a thing is pleasant, we can still doubt whether it is really good, so the question remains “open”.
Moore maintained that this would be true of any natural property used to define goodness, such as desire, well-being, or being evolutionarily advantageous. We might think that preventing climate change or defeating a corrupt politician is good because these actions would prolong our survival, and we may be right, but is prolonging our survival identical to goodness, or does it only possess the independent property of goodness in the way that my trousers possess the color black? As in Plato’s theory of Forms, individual instances of good things partake in goodness, while goodness itself exists somewhere in the Platonic realm beyond the natural world. Attempts to define goodness through a natural property constitute a fallacy: the naturalistic fallacy.
If Moore is right, then the scientific enterprise, which has been extraordinarily successful in bringing under a naturalistic framework so much that was previously seen as mysterious or immaterial, encounters a major setback. Here’s an area where the scientific method can’t help us, since no observation or experiment can settle what is good. We would have to rely on a mysterious thing called “intuition”. Moore’s own intuitions led him to see inherent value in friendship and the appreciation of beauty. What if someone sees inherent value in social justice and non-violence? How does one resolve fundamental differences that arise from conflicting intuitions? We can at best reach consensus, but that is not the same as establishing the truth.
Whatever one thinks of Moore’s arguments, which have been criticized by many philosophers, the general idea that ethical conclusions cannot be derived from anything not itself ethical remains a serious problem. It is worth seeing if we can overcome it. I believe we can. I will argue that certain properties have both subjective and objective dimensions simultaneously, and that goodness is one such property. It seems mysterious and appears non-natural so long as our understanding of its constitution remains incomplete.
To understand what I mean, let’s consider another property, similar but less contentious: physical largeness. Suppose we apply the open-question argument to it. If someone defined “large” as everything over 4 feet in length, we could still ask “Is everything over 4 feet in length large?” The question would be meaningful; the properties are not identical. In fact, we can easily imagine many objects less than 4 feet in length that are still large (e.g. a large pencil), or objects over 4 feet in length that are not (e.g. a small rocket). The same would be true for any size that is proposed. Following Moore’s logic, we would have to conclude that largeness is a simple property irreducible to, and underivable from, any natural property.
This cannot be right. Largeness is a natural property that we commonly recognize and treat as such.
The ambiguity arises because “largeness” refers both to an objective dimension of a body, measured in units like inches or feet, and to a subjective dimension, determined by a range we have in mind that is specific to the kind of thing in question. It is for this reason that a pencil and a rocket can both be large, despite one being much larger than the other. We can be more precise by getting rid of the subjective dimension altogether in our description. Instead of calling it large, we can simply say, “The pencil is 8 inches in length”.
Using this analogy, we would have to find out how something we call “good” can be described without its subjective component, just as we described something we call “large” without appealing to subjectivity. If we can do this, it would allow us to overcome the naturalistic fallacy.
A characteristic of goodness that might seem counterintuitive at first is that a thing is always good for someone. Nothing is ever good without being good for an entity capable of experience. Nothing is ever good from “the point of view of the universe”, an expression used by the classical utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick to justify an impartial, agent-neutral standpoint from which each person’s happiness counts equally. Moore, a student of Sidgwick, adopted it in his moral philosophy. In our own time, the philosopher Peter Singer defends the idea in a book with that title. But it seems to me that referring to a thing as good, without specifying the particular subject for whom it is good, is an incomplete description. Even when the same thing is good for both you and me, it is still a set of individual experiencers for whom it is good, and convergence is not guaranteed.
So what is it that makes a thing good for someone? When taking medicine is good for a sick child, reading the classics is good for an uninterested teenager, and being honest is good for all humans, are we using “good” in the same sense? I think we are. I propose that when we identify something as good for someone, we associate that thing with the extension of their happiness. Happiness is a state that all our concepts of positive experience approximate to varying degrees. It is experienced as an acceptance of what is, in contrast to dissatisfaction, which is experienced as resistance to what is in favor of what is not—what was, or what could be. Dissatisfaction is approximated to varying degrees by all our concepts of negative experience.
The state of happiness extends within us unless it is interrupted, either by dissatisfaction or by inertia. This extension plays, for goodness, a role similar to the role that the extension of matter plays for largeness.
In other words, just as, in regard to the size of a physical object, we can refer to it as large when viewed in relation to a range, larger when compared to another physical object, or, more precisely, as having such and such extension of matter as per some unit of measurement, so too, in regard to the value of a thing, we can refer to it as good for a person when viewed in relation to a range, better when compared to another thing, or, more precisely, as being associated with such and such extension of that person’s happiness.
Moore is right that judgments of value can be objectively true or false. It is possible to be wrong about what things are good. Since the association between a thing and the extension of happiness is independent of them, the goodness of a thing is independent of our desires, preferences, and judgments. The sick child who rejects his medicine and desires sweet treats instead disagrees with his mother from a failure to understand the consequences of not taking the medicine. The teenager who doesn’t feel excited about reading the classics and prefers popular novels instead fails to appreciate the many complex, subtle, and unexpected ways in which engaging with the classics would affect him over a lifetime. The person who rejects honesty for some immediate gains fails to recognize that honesty would make him whole overall, both internally and materially, even if he never finds out how.
These failures of judgment demonstrate that identifying the goodness of different things is a painstaking process of discovering certain facts about the natural world. As with all such facts, to discover them we have to rely not only on our own intelligence, but also on what others tell us, how they actually behave, wisdom handed down to us in various forms since time immemorial, and, more generally, on methods that help us understand how the world works.
There are many objections that can be raised against my position. One criticism, found in the philosopher Thomas Reid, asks: if goodness depends on our constitution, then wouldn’t a change in that constitution make immoral things moral? Another serious concern is this: if a thing is always good or bad only for someone, does that mean the universe “doesn’t care” about an act like the Holocaust, or that there might be beings for whom it is not bad at all?
I think we should be prepared to accept these implications, difficult and unsettling as they may seem. We attach so much importance to pain in our ethics precisely because our constitution is the way it is. The universe is neither indifferent to nor interested in human affairs, just as our knees are neither blind nor sighted. Likewise, there are, for instance, animals with different constitutions who live in remote parts of the world and whose good, as a result, cannot always be the same as that of humans, despite the convergences.
It is the countless ways our lives are interconnected and interdependent even when we live oceans apart, and the different paths through which the enablers of our happiness and dissatisfaction converge even when we do not, or cannot, understand them, that make injustice anywhere a concern for everyone, and ground the happiness of one in the happiness of the other. Such convergences arise, even though they are not guaranteed, because of the way the world is—just as material prosperity arises in a free market, even though it is not guaranteed by the government, because of the way the world is. But even if the convergences did not exist, it wouldn’t change the nature of goodness as a property, and we would have to accept that there is no reason to think the way the world is will always align with what we believe must be the case. We have already experienced this before in the history of ideas, such as with the theory of evolution by natural selection and quantum physics. Why should ethics be any different?
There are major implications of this view of goodness for the possibility of an objective science of morality. There are many more objections than those I have mentioned. I will be exploring both of these in future essays. For now, however, I conclude that Moore’s charge of a “naturalistic fallacy” is misplaced. Goodness, like largeness, is a natural property, open to inquiry through the same methods that have helped us understand atoms and galaxies.
Continue Reading:
→ Bryan Caplan on Ethical Intuitionism (podcast)
→ The Inescapability of Altruism
→ Review of Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn AttachmentsOther Projects:
→ Universal Open Textbook Initiative (free, multilingual textbooks)
→ Aesthete (visualize your taste — iOS app)