Interesting email:
Dear Mr. Goldberg,
I’m a professional philosopher, and I want to clear up a philosophy mistake in your vegetarianism post today. The “naturalistic fallacy” was the purported discovery of G.E. Moore, the ethical guru for the (not very conservative) Bloomsbury Group whose moral views helped form John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. Moore claimed that he’d found a mistake in all previous moral views, namely that they had committed the fallacy of deriving ethical conclusions from factual statements. Most philosophers today don’t buy that it is a fallacy to derive moral conclusions from factual premises. As Michael Ridge writes in this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, Moore’s “fallacy” is not technically a fallacy (because the form of the argument is valid) and his criticism of naturalistic arguments commits its own fallacy–it begs the question against naturalists:
“The naturalistic fallacy is very poorly named indeed (a point also made by Bernard Williams; see Williams 1985: 121-122). For not only is it not especially a problem for naturalists, it is also not really a fallacy even if Moore is right that it embodies a mistake of some kind. For it is highly uncharitable to charge anyone who advances the sorts of arguments to which Moore alludes as having committed a logical fallacy. Rather, charity demands that we interpret such arguments as enthymatic, and usually this is easy enough. For example, we should understand ‘X is pleasant, therefore X is good’ as an enthymeme whose suppressed premise is ‘Whatever is pleasant is good’. Nor must the non-naturalist even quarrel with such a suppressed premise. One can allow that goodness is itself a non-natural property but grant that all pleasant things necessarily have that non-natural property. What the non-naturalist must reject is the thesis that such suppressed premises are true in virtue of the identity of goodness with the natural property in question (being pleasant, in this case). So the so-called naturalistic fallacy is no fallacy at all. Rather, if Moore is right then the so-called naturalistic fallacy actually embodies a mistaken belief about the reducibility of goodness, perhaps the belief that ‘good’ just means ‘pleasant’ (or whatever). However, to suppose that whenever someone is metaphysically or semantically confused he is guilty of a ‘fallacy’ robs the term of its more standard and useful meaning. This point was made very clearly by W.K. Frankena in a landmark article published in Mind (Frankena 1939).
“Finally, as Frankena also nicely pointed out, it cannot be assumed at the outset that what Moore calls the naturalistic fallacy really is a mistake of any kind. For certain naturalists could then reasonably complain that the central question has been begged. The naturalist proposes a certain kind of definition of some moral term and the non-naturalist then simply asserts that anyone who thinks such definitions are possible is mistaken. If we want to find a non-question-begging argument against naturalism then we must look beyond the so-called “’naturalistic fallacy.’”
Here’s an example of a valid moral conclusion drawn from a factual premise: “Putting arsenic in a dog’s food will poison him [scientific fact]. It is wrong to poison dogs [moral premise]. Therefore, it is wrong to put arsenic in a dog’s food [moral conclusion].” Whether or not you agree that it’s wrong to poison dogs, there’s nothing invalid or fallacious about the argument.
So I don’t think Wesley Smith committed a mistake in moral reasoning. He just left implicit a key assumption: that the normal operations of our bodies reveal what it is morally permissible for us to do. Although that’s a controversial statement, it captures a bedrock principle of the influential school of moral philosophy known as natural law (members include Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Pope Benedict). It isn’t at all fallacious. Smith’s argument would defeat the arguments of the vegetarians if the burden of proof is on them, but it would require quite a bit more dialectical work if the burden of proof is on him.
Sincerely,
[Name withheld]