The Student Room Group
Reply 1
I think naturalistic fallacy is when you make an assumption that something is good because it happens in nature.

e.g. cancer is good because it's natural
Reply 2
nice thanks seems to make sense a bit now lol
tristan1000
Hey guys i am self teaching A2 AQA philosophy revising for my exams next month and so sometimes just reading the description fails to get through. I was wondering if anyone could explain in real simple terms perhaps with an illustration how they all work as they are making me hate meta ethics.


It's important to seperate the is/ought problem from the naturalistic fallacy.

Is/ought: you cannot infer from some 'is' fact to some 'ought' fact.E.g. it may be the case that 'cancer is painful' but we cannot infer from this that 'we ought to treat cancer'. There seems to be a problem moving from a descriptive statement to a prescriptive statement. Why does x being painful imply that we ought to try and cure x?

Naturalistic fallacy: You cannot define moral terms in naturalistic terms. You cannot define goodness in terms of pleasure because they don't mean the same thing. How do we know this? Because if they meant the same thing then we would be contradicting ourselves by saying 'x is good but not pleasurable' in the same way as we would contradict ourselves by saying 'John is a bachelor but isn't an unmarried man'. But it seems that we don't contradict ourselves in such a way. Therefore they don't mean the same thing and so moral terms cannot be defined in naturalistic terms. This is Moore's famed open question argument.
Reply 4
tomheppy
It's important to seperate the is/ought problem from the naturalistic fallacy.

Is/ought: you cannot infer from some 'is' fact to some 'ought' fact.E.g. it may be the case that 'cancer is painful' but we cannot infer from this that 'we ought to treat cancer'. There seems to be a problem moving from a descriptive statement to a prescriptive statement. Why does x being painful imply that we ought to try and cure x?

Naturalistic fallacy: You cannot define moral terms in naturalistic terms. You cannot define goodness in terms of pleasure because they don't mean the same thing. How do we know this? Because if they meant the same thing then we would be contradicting ourselves by saying 'x is good but not pleasurable' in the same way as we would contradict ourselves by saying 'John is a bachelor but isn't an unmarried man'. But it seems that we don't contradict ourselves in such a way. Therefore they don't mean the same thing and so moral terms cannot be defined in naturalistic terms. This is Moore's famed open question argument.


Thanks for this, I remember writing examples of the is/ought gap down in class but didn't explain what it actually was XD
very helpful :smile:

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