The Argument of Ethical Naturalism

2014

Ethical naturalism, the theory claiming that natural facts and especially facts concerning human nature play a justificatory role in ethics, is not very popular amongst moral philosophers. Especially in countries where Kant's influence is large, the charge of naturalistic fallacy is often made against it. The aim of this paper is to show that this charge misses the point: every ethical theory is at a certain level based on pure facts, natural or not, and natural facts concerning human nature are particularly suited for this role. The arguments in favour of ethical naturalism rely on a concept of human nature that includes basic desires related to ends we ought to pursue, as Aristotle and the Scholastics already saw long ago.

The most influential interpretation of Kant’s ethical thought in the last thirty years has been in terms of constructivism ; consequently, the Categorical Imperative has been interpreted as a procedure and the general metaethical perspective attitude among Kantians has been anti-realistic. In fact, Kant explicitly rejects attempts at grounding morality in anthropology (e.g. KrV B 869-870) or in sensible experience (MS, AA 6, 215, 217). Yet some scholars have recently challenged this interpretation , a number of thinkers of Kantian inclination in the recent past have tried to develop rather realistic frameworks for normative ethical theories and still others have criticized the presumed anti-naturalism of Kant’s thought in general . Nonetheless, the appeal to the notion of nature is recurrent in many of Kant’s texts on ethics and it seems that, in a sense, a Kantian foundation of morality needs to define a meaning of nature which is connected with the basis of the normative power of practical reason and is implied in its structure. There is reason to think that the idea of natural law, which has been rather abandoned in the constructivistic interpretation, can be the starting point for a better interpretation of Kant’s ethical thought and for a consistent normative theory. In order to show the feasibility of this perspective I will first try to make clear the difference between the Kantian kind of appeal to nature and that implied, on the one hand, in contemporary «ethical naturalism» and, on the other, in traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic naturalism (classical naturalism). I will then take distance from the constructivistic interpretations of Kant’s ethical thought and try to show, rather briefly, the essential structure of what can be called a «realism of freedom», which is, I believe, the core of Kantian ethics. The idea of freedom as real and inscribed in the nature of practical reason is then recognized as the basis of morality, through the argument from the Fact of Reason.

Ethics in Progress, 2019

Modern ethics has to face the problem of how to accommodate the requirement for intersubjectively justified and accepted (valid) moral norms and values with the high-paced development of science and knowledge-based societies. This highly discussed opposition between what is morally eligible and what is scientifically correct may lead to stating that modern ethics is – rhetorically speaking – a dying figure. For it is impossible – after the Kantian-Copernican turn in epistemology and ethics – to defend the theological view that there exist certain universal and objective moral obligations. Yet, due to the rapid development of experimental sciences and the accomplishments of analytic philosophy, modern ethics are faced with the threat of either being reduced to a descriptive field of knowledge or becoming a shadow of its own past glory with no significance. Under these conditions, an attempt to defend ethics in its naturalistic form seems out of question. Still, the ethical naturalism may prove that – in the given state of social, scientific, and philosophical development – it is possible to successfully defend the view that ethical sentences express a certain type of proposition that may be proven true due to some objective natural features, independent of human opinions.

Philosophical writings, 1999

Why is Human Nature still an interesting topic? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that Human Nature is expected to serve both as an anchor of ontological explanation and as a compass for action orientation. In its double role, human nature provides ample room for intellectual manoeuvres, but little prospects for a pleasant philosophical journey.

Interdisciplinary Environmental Review (6:2) pp. 51-61, 2004

In this paper I consider a naturalistic account of what makes a character trait a virtue. After clarifying the account in some detail, I offer replies to several objections to it. I argue that although the account has promise, it also has limitations and areas in need of development that its proponents must address.

Philosophy, 2009

John McDowell has argued that for human needs to matter in practical deliberation, we must have already acquired the full range of character traits that are imparted by an ethical upbringing. Since our upbringings can diverge considerably, his argument makes trouble for any Aristotelian ethical naturalism that wants to support a single set of moral virtues. I argue here that there is a story to be told about the normal course of human life according to which it is no coincidence that there is agreement on the virtues. Because we are creatures who arrive at personhood only by learning from others in a relation of dependency, we cannot help but see ourselves as creatures for whom non-instrumental rationality is the norm. Those who train others in personhood must view the trainee's interests as having a value independent of their interests and must imbue the trainee with a sense of that value. Extending and preserving the sense of self-worth that we must acquire if we are to acquir...

This book entitled Goodness and Nature is concerned with the question of naturalism in ethics. Naturalism is the view that good and bad, right and wrong, are real matters of fact or knowledge that can in principle be determined by some reference to ‘nature’. This question is among the most important that any student of modern moral philosophy has to face. This book’s search for a solution to its difficulties, however, has required going outside the limits within which that question was originally posed. In fact, it is one of the principal messages of the book that it is these limits themselves that constitute most of the problem. The effort to think beyond the limits of modern moral philosophy has, in my case at any rate, proved to be also the effort to think back into an ancient tradition of philosophy which flourished for so many centuries beforehand, and which modern philosophers have largely rejected. For this reason this book is an unashamedly ancient book. It might even be called an essay in discarded ideas. There are, of course, differing views about how to approach the problems raised by modern moral philosophy. It is my conviction that a return to ancient ideas is the most helpful and the most fruitful, as will, I hope, become evident from the way my argument develops from the first to the final chapters. The ancient tradition that I am following provides, I contend, just the concepts and distinctions necessary to resolve the puzzles that have gathered themselves about the question of naturalism. These puzzles are genuine and philosophically instructive; that is why they need to be faced and answered squarely. To argue round them, or to dismiss them before getting to grips with them, is to run the risk of hindering philosophical understanding. Accordingly, the early chapters of this book are concerned with writings that appeared and provoked most controversy several decades ago. For this seeming anachronism I make no apology; it is in these writings that the puzzles find their most instructive, not to say classic, expression. A Supplement to this edition of Goodness and Nature is appended in a separate file. The Supplement that did not appear in the book when it was first published but its addition is meant to provide more of the background and evidence for the argument presented in chapter 5 of the book, the chapter entitled ‘Historical Origins’. That chapter can, to be sure, stand by itself in its place in Goodness and Nature independently of the Supplement. But since it makes claims, and presents a progression of thought, that are relatively controversial within the context of the debate about naturalism in ethics, it may excite an interest and a skepticism that some readers may wish to have more fully satisfied or answered. The Supplement is meant to supply that wish. The chapters and their contents cover the same ground as was covered in chapter 5 of Goodness and Nature but in greater detail, ranging over a fuller review of the important thinkers, and spelling out more of the relevant elements and implications. The Supplement can, therefore, stand by itself too, and need not just be read as an addition to Goodness and Nature (even though it contains several references to that book). In any event, interested readers should find on the Contents page of the Supplement enough information about what the Supplement contains to guide as well as, one hopes, to spark interest. The book with supplement is also available from my website aristotelophile.com and in print from Amazon.com

This paper proves that Aquinas has a means of demonstrating and deriving both moral goodness and the natural moral law from human nature alone. Aquinas scientifically proves the existence of the natural moral law as the natural rule of human operations from human nature alone. The distinction between moral goodness and transcendental goodness is affirmed. This provides the intellectual tools to refute the G.E. Moore (Principles of Ethics) attack against the natural law as committing a "naturalistic fallacy". This article proves that instead Moore commits the fallacy of equivocation between moral goodness and transcendental goodness in his very assertion of a "naturalistic fallacy" by the proponents of the natural moral law. In the process the new deontological/kantian theory of natural law as articulated by John Finnis, Robert George, and Germain Grisez is false historically and philosophically. Ethical naturalism is affirmed as a result.

Aristotelian naturalists may have diverging interpretations of Aristotle's idea that the good life for a human being is a life of activity in accordance with the virtues. Such is the case of John McDowell (McDowell 1998) and Philippa Foot (Foot 1978). One important question here is whether Aristotelian naturalism in moral philosophy commits one to the idea of a good, or goods, which are natural to humans qua humans. Naturalism is a very widespread position in contemporary analytic philosophy yet not always very clearly spelled out. In order to search for clarity regarding what one means by naturalism, I explore several strands of McDowell's case for second-nature naturalism as a position in moral philosophy. I then assess an argument put forward against it by Bernard Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Williams 1985). Building on a suggestion by Alan Thomas in Value and Context – The nature of moral and political knowledge (Thomas 2006) and complementing it with a view of rationality inspired by S. Stich (The Fragmentation of Reason, Stich 1990) I end with a proposal on how to keep Aristotelianism in moral philosophy.

We're human beings. That is to say we are an organic life form, living, breathing, moving, hurting and mending, doing and suffering beings. It would be an odd moral philosophy that loses sight of this fact. The paper is concerned with a contemporary Aristotelian position in moral philosophy, defended originally by Philippa Foot (2001) and subsequently by Michael Thompson (2003, 2004, 2008), that aims to put this fact at the heart of our philosophical reflections about morality. This strand of neo-Aristotelianism1 is of special interest from a Kantian perspective for a number of reasons. Both ethics are objectivist. Whereas Kantian ethics, at least as it is usually presented, is rationalist, absolutist and abstract, the neo-Aristotelian version has its roots in nature, addresses human beings as natural beings, and is attentive to the particulars of human life.2 Perhaps the best way to capture the difference from which others flow is that nature and reason are not contraries in the neo-Aristotelian account, rather it is natural for human beings to be rational, to reason about the good, and act on the basis of practical reasoning. From a contemporary perspective, this is particularly attractive because it allows for a naturalistic defence of moral value that fits within the broader trend towards 'liberal' or 'expansive' naturalism.3 Finally, because natural goodness rather than moral legislation is the guiding notion, the problem of the authority of the moral law, a problem originally identified by Elisabeth Anscombe (1958) as being particularly tricky for Kant's moral philosophy, simply does not arise for Aristotelianism. In summary, Aristotelian ethics has the resources to address a range of first as well as second order ethical questions precisely in those areas in which Kantian ethics is traditionally supposed to be weak. My aim in this chapter is to examine some of these questions, narrowing my remit to those concerning the nature of the good and the authority of norms. In particular, I want to motivate and sketch a non-naturalist