A Level Religious Studies - Idiot's Guide to Naturalism

Idiot’s Guide to Naturalism

Naturalism is the view that

1.     Ethical terms can be defined or explained using the same ‘natural’ terms we use in maths and science

2.     Morals can be based on the same kind of observation of the world as used in science

3.     All ethical statements can be translated into non-ethical ones

Naturalists are absolutists. Morals are not about opinions and points of view and are objectively true. For example: ‘euthanasia is evil’ – they are expressing a moral truth, not an opinion.

A person uses their senses and logic to conclude ethical truths. Moral truths are facts like numbers. You can conclude something is wrong from observation and analysis. Moral facts aren’t views or opinions, nor are they based on spiritual or intuitive sense. When you observe something is wrong, it’s a moral fact of the universe.

Theological naturalists, like Thomas Aquinas, link goodness to divine will and the kind of creatures God made humans to be. For them, adultery is wrong as it limits or prevents human flourishing.

Hedonistic naturalists link goodness to pleasure or happiness: the thing that causes happiness is right. Moral statements are justified by something else.

F.H. Bradley

F. H. Bradley

Naturalism linked claims about moral truth to the rise of modern science and the idea that truths about the world we live in can be proved. He stated that our duty is universal and is objective with real identity and that is realises the whole person, teaching us to ‘identify others and ourselves with the station we fill; to consider that ass good, by virtue of that to consider others and ourselves good too’. (Ethical Studies,1876)

Bradley says morals are observable and that the social order and your position in that decides your moral duties. The position is a structure of reality.

Is this correct?

Roles of men and women changed in the twentieth century, hierarchical social roles came under pressure. The concepts of class, fixed gender roles and institutions such as marriage changed. Bradley’s fixed moral social order is therefore questionable.

Naturalism can maintain absolutism if it labels the breakdowns (family breakdowns linked to social order in Western society and marriage breakdown) as moral failures.

David Hume – Criticised it

David Hume

Hume said that all knowledge comes from our sense experiences (5 senses). We can allow our imagination to make connections between cause and effect so if we see something happen a lot, we imagine the cause will result in the same effect later e.g. sunrise means sunset. Hume argued that moral claims are not derived from reason, rather sentiment. He rejected the idea that moral good or evil can be explained by reason. He suggests that morals produce or prevent actions, but reason is impotent in matters of morality. Hume disagreed with Aquinas.

Hume’s Law

Hume saw that writers would move from ‘is’ statements to ‘ought’ statements. A person tells a lie and the philosophers say ‘you ought not to lie’. Hume’s Law is that you cannot go from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’. An example of this would be that oranges are an excellent source of vitamin C which is good for you (descriptive), therefore you ought to eat them as they will keep you healthy (prescriptive).

Philippa Foot

Philippa Foot

Philippa Foot suggested that moral evil is ‘a kind of natural defect’. She argued that when we call a person a ‘just man’ or ‘honest woman’ we are referring to something, to a person who recognises certain things (promise keeping, helping person) as things that are powerful reasons to act. A moral person has qualities which are the reasons they carry out a certain action – this can be observed. We know if someone cannot keep a promise.

Foot thinks that there are virtues or behaviours that aim at some good – an idea from Aristotle. Key thing is that she thinks these virtues can be observed by watching how a person acts when thinking of them. Someone who acts with honesty in mind is honest, and the honesty can be identified through observation. We can perceive the moral absolutes that empiricists argue we cannot measure.

Foot uses Artistotle’s observation that the natural world includes a good way of doing stuff. It offers patterns of excellence and defect, related to function and purpose of living things. These apply to morality:

1.     There is a life cycle consisting of self-maintenance and reproduction.

2.     These two things can be achieved differently in each species depending on how they feed, develop and how they reproduce.

3.     From this, norms can be deduced e.g. swiftness of deer, night vision of owl.

4.     Applying these norms to individual members of the species means members can be judged to be effective or not. An owl with poor night vision is a defective owl.

Foot says: ‘oaks need to have deep sturdy roots: there is something wrong with them if they do not’.

J. L. Mackie

J. L. Mackie

Mackie was a philosopher who found difficulty with claims about absolute or natural approaches to morality. In his book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), he says it is possible to describe an institution from the outside e.g. social practice of promising or making chess moves. The institution demands that promises are kept. However, we can make observations from the inside. For example, ‘don’t break a promise John’, or ‘don’t move that rook as it will leave your king in check’. Mackie argued the injunction to not break promises depends on the rules of the institution having already being accepted.

The rules themselves are not facts, they are accepted to varying degrees by all those in the institution.

The degree to which moral rules can be applied depends on the relationship with the people affected e.g. more inclined to keep promise to family than to strangers. Following rules of an institution is not the same as acting logically in response to agreed facts. It is acting according to social expectations; it is responding to an understanding of the demands to be made and what will be approved of. Mackie believes that moral rules can be observed but believes they are based on tradition rather than being absolute constructs.

Strengths

·       Empirical with a scientific basis, so evidence is available to everyone.

·       It is a simple concept, for the reason that 'good' does not have to be defined (since we already know it).

·       It prevents a solid guideline that can be followed in every situation.

Weaknesses

·       Moore says that to define an ethical judgement as a factual one is erroneous, but also that to define “goodness” as the greatest pleasure or the most happiness propagates the naturalistic fallacy because such definitions are not possible.

·       One cannot use a non-moral premise to establish a moral conclusion — you cannot go from observing pleasure to saying that goodness is pleasure, and likewise, a metaphysical premise like God cannot bring about a moral conclusion. According to Moore, “everything is what it is and not another thing”; the good is the good — not pleasure or happiness — and it can’t be broken down into pleasure, happiness or some other description.

·       It is impossible to agree on the definition of “good” and “evil”.

·       Laws cannot be enforced in communities, because not everyone abides by the same definition of “good” and “bad”.

·       It is too simplistic

·       Doesn’t allow for moral dispute. If the majority think something is good, the judgement cannot be wrong. Opinions might change but it is still correct as the statement is an expression of differing attitudes at a time.

·       Bradley’s suggestion that morals were a feature of the concrete universe no longer carries much weight outside religious groups. It doesn’t stand up to new science in quantum physics where traditional approaches to the universe are challenged by things like the chaos theory.

·       Naturalistic fallacy

Ethical theories that link closely

The Naturalistic Fallacy (G.E. Moore)

·       We cannot identify goodness (ethical statement) with a natural quality – statement about the world (non ethical statement).

·       To claim moral statements can be verified or falsified = commit naturalistic fallacy

·       Cannot infer from a description of how the world ‘is’ to how the world ‘ought’ to be

·       ‘Is’ are factual objective statements, ‘ought’ are ethical statements of value.

·       Cannot use facts to work out how we ought to act.

Utilitarianism

An example of a naturalistic ethical theory is John Stuart Mill’s version of utilitarianism, according to which action is morally right to the extent that it tends to produce happiness (or pleasure, broadly construed) and morally wrong to the extent that it fails to produce happiness or tends to produce unhappiness (or pain, broadly construed).