Challenges to naturalism

Question 1

What does Hume suggest if ethical propositions can be found in the natural world?

Answer 1

Then ethical statements are no more than descriptions of the world.

Question 2

What does Hume state in “A Treatise of Human Nature”?

Answer 2

Stated that what we observe in the natural world (‘is’ statements) gives us a picture of what the world is like, but we cannot infer from these what the world ought to be like.

Question 3

The fundamental of the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ problem

Answer 3

You cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. You cannot take a statement or fact and infer a moral action - this is logically flawed because what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be are unrelated.

Question 4

How does Hume describe the ‘ought’ statement?

Answer 4

It is prescriptive and comes from our feelings about the facts in front of us. It isn’t a moral fact.

Question 5

Phillip Stratton-Lake’s lobster analogy

Answer 5

• science may be able to tell us lobsters feel pain when they are boiled alive
• but it cannot tell us that boilings lobsters alive is wrong, we cannot know this empirically.

Question 6

What does GE Moore claim in ‘Principia Ethica’?

Answer 6

Claimed that it is an error to define an ethical property in the same way as a natural one.

Question 7

What is the word ‘good’ according to GE Moore?

Answer 7

Good is sui generis (unique). It is like the colour yellow, simple and cannot be broken down into constituent parts for definition.

Question 8

What does Moore say about recognising goodness?

Answer 8

We intuitively recognise goodness when we see it as we similarly recognise yellowness when we see it. This doesn’t mean the notion of goodness can be defined.

Question 9

What does Moore say about never finding a definition of goodness?

Answer 9

You will never find a definition that doesn’t reduce and limit the idea of goodness.

Question 10

“my answer is that…”

Answer 10

“good is good and that is the end of the matter.”

Moore

Question 11

Moore’s criticism that is influenced by Hume

Answer 11

• Moore says that using a non-moral premise to establish a moral conclusion is an error or fallacy
• e.g. a baby is born, I feel happy, so I state that we ought to have babies to be happy.

Question 12

The open question argument

Answer 12

• attempts to conflate morality with a natural property will always produce an open question, but a definition should always produce a closed question.
• thus a moral quality can never be ‘good’ because it is never absurd to question whether that quality is good.