Date: May 13, 2008
To: The usual suspects
From: John Bryant (john@thebirdman.org)
Re: Birdman's Weekly Letter #480: The
Naturalistic Fallacy Is Fallacious
Contents: Opinion (as always)
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The Naturalistic Fallacy Is Fallacious
Author's Note: This is my third attempt to untangle this Gordian knot. I hope I have finally got it right.
"Of each piece of writing, ask the following question: Is it about empirical facts which can be verified by observation; or is it about matters of taste or opinion? If neither, then it is metaphysics; toss it forthwith into the fire." --AJ Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (paraphrase)
It is a property of the primitive mind to confuse fact and value, and in particular to think that something valued by the valuer must of necessity be valued by others, thus converting a personal opinion ("I value this") into a sort of 'fact' ("This is valuable") in the valuer's mind. This sort of silliness has long been recognized, and the ancient Latin proverb De gustibus non est disputandum ("There is no argument about taste") has warned us since Roman times that just because we believe something is best does not make it best in some universal sense. And yet people continue to argue over taste, in part because taste is based to some extent on objective fact: A woman is beautiful in part because of her fruit-ripe swellings, and the more they swell, the more we think they're swell (up to a point, of course -- no pun intended). It is these considerations which underlie the philosophical debate over what GE Moore called the Naturalistic Fallacy, and over an important special case identified by David Hume long before Moore's time, the so-called derivation of 'ought' from 'is'.
A. The Naturalistic Fallacy -- The General Case
The Naturalistic Fallacy in its most general form is the proposition that one can correctly derive a value statement (ie, a statement of opinion, or values) from a set of purely factual statements. The general idea behind identification of the Naturalistic Fallacy is that there is a natural wall of separation between facts and values, because facts are objective and fixed, while values may change from moment to moment at the whim of the person who holds them, and may vary from person to person. From these observations, it would be absurd to think that a value could be inferred from a fact simpliciter.
An example of the Naturalistic Fallacy is deriving or inferring
a) Exercise is good
from the purely factual statement
b) Exercise promotes health
where we note that 'Exercise is good' is a value statement. More particularly, (a) means
c) I value exercise
which of course is a value statement.
(Note: Apparently contrary to the above, many people would accept the inference from (b) to (a) because they assume the existence of a suppressed premise
d) Whatever promotes health is good
Which would then be a perfectly valid inference.)
There is, however, an objection to the above, which is the contention that value statements are not, upon analysis, actually value statements, but instead are factual ones -- an objection which I shall call the Objectivity Objection. For example, when we assert that exercise is good, what we are really saying is that exercise is one of those experiences which falls into at least one of several categories, which together we label 'good'. Such categories include somatic stimulation, increasing muscle strength, increasing lung capacity, keeping the weight down, etc, etc, etc. Thus to make the value statement that exercise is good is actually to make a factual statement which says that exercise falls into at least one of several categories which the speaker has designated 'good'.
The argument here may perhaps be better elucidated by considering the matter of beauty, another value-laden concept. As the old saying goes, 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' (a special case of "De gustibus..."), which is to say that beauty is a subjective matter, not an objective or factual one. It is possible to claim, however, that beauty is actually a matter of fact, because science knows many of the characteristics which constitute beauty -- proportion, symmetry, juxtaposition of complementary colors, etc -- and that while not everyone 'sees' things exactly the same, the fact that the same things are considered beautiful by almost everyone shows that the 'subjective' judgment of beauty is actually heavily dependent on the objective facts of proportion, symmetry and the like. This, then, constitutes the Objectivity Objection for beauty.
Given the above considerations, it may truly be said that philosophy is on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, we base our worldview on the presumption that facts are fixed and objective, while values/opinions are variable and may change from person to person and moment to moment; but on the other hand, we see that values/opinions have an objective basis, and because of this, we are continually tempted to transit from (b) to (a) while interpreting (a) as a universal statement rather than as the purely personal opinion (c). Indeed, this dilemma is intimately involved in the process of how we determine what are said to be facts: The scientific world deems something to be a 'fact' only by a process of so-called 'peer review' in which several 'peers' of the scientific realm offer their opinions, and then by a majority vote, transmogrify the opinion of the writer of a scientific paper into a scientific 'fact', or else establish that it is not yet so. Clearly, the notions of fact and value are intimately related, and the attempt by Moore and his allies to build a wall of separation between them falls flat at the very starting gate. As I have said elsewhere, there may be an objective world 'out there' where facts are fixed and opinions are variable, but the best we can do from an epistemological viewpoint is to say that fact is the asymptote of opinion.
The above discussion now brings us to a second important matter, which is a special case of the Naturalistic Fallacy:
B. An Important Special Case: On Deriving 'Ought' From 'Is'
One of the most notable attempts to codify De gustibus in philosophy has been to identify an apparent but common error, first discussed by the celebrated empiricist philosopher David Hume, which is often described as saying that 'ought' cannot be derived from 'is', ie, that values, including especially moral values, cannot be derived from statements of fact. This was one of the original assertions of moral relativism, and in particular was evidently intended as a logical attack upon 'absolute values' and 'absolute truths' which are so popular among the religious set -- those whose certainty has given them a ferocious antinomian reputation for rape, rapine and torture in support of their beliefs. Thus we may concede that the identification of this error possessed a noble social purpose, and in this sense it is surely praiseworthy.
The only problem here is that the error identified by Hume is not necessarily an error. We have argued this already in discussing the Naturalistic Fallacy, but there are other considerations which also elucidate this notion. In particular, ought-statements are statements of value, and values are facts reflected in behavior. For example, we can deduce the 'values' of a lion by noting the time devoted to such matters as eating, sleeping and sex, among other things. We deduce the values of a human being in the same way. But what this means is that statements of value are 'is' statements, ie, statements of facts about behavior. Thus ought-statements are a subclass of is-statements, and is-statements can in general be derived from other is-statements.
The underlying insight that guides us here is that reference to psychological states (eg, values) is not strictly necessary in the scientific description or explanation of behavior, altho such reference is often highly convenient, at least in everyday affairs. This, as it happens, is the fundamental principle of behaviorism, an approach to psychology made famous by BF Skinner and his experiments with pigeons, especially the 'Skinner box'. The basic point of behaviorism is that only behavior, and not psychological states, are observable; thus if human behavior is to be treated scientifically, all reference to unobservables must be eliminated.
The point of behaviorism can be better appreciated by recognizing the tendency of pre-scientific men to anthropomorphize the facts of nature. One of the most famous anthropomorphisms is the statement that 'nature abhors a vacuum' -- an assertion implying that nature is some kind of person, and that this person has a boiling hatred of vacuums. It is easy in these more enlightened times to see the silliness of looking at things this way; but in order to avoid such anthropomorphism we are seemingly forced into the uncomfortable position of solipsism, ie, the belief that only I am conscious. This comes about because, as respecters of scientific objectivity, and therefore as supporters of behaviorism, we must reject or ignore (as you prefer) the belief that other animals (including humans) are conscious, and instead treat them as mere mechanisms whose behavior is simply to be observed and perhaps manipulated. In fact, however, behaviorism (or at least the most enlightened form of the doctrine) does not imply solipsism: Behaviorism is merely a way of discussing human behavior objectively, while remaining completely agnostic as to the presence of consciousness, 'values' and the like.
With the above considerations in mind, therefore, we ask, How do we derive 'ought' from 'is'? The general principle is that ought-statements are covert if-statements, and if-statements are factual, or is, statements. (We are speaking loosely here: Strictly speaking, a conditional (if-then) statement does not have the form 'x is y'.)
To explain, consider the commandment
(1) Thou shalt not kill
This is an imperative, or command, statement which expresses a value, to wit, that
(2) You ought not to kill.
However, (2) -- and for that matter (1) -- is equivalent to the covert if-statement
(3) If you kill, then you will be punished.
This, however, is a factual, or 'is', statement. But if (2) and (3) are equivalent, then we have a case of a value statement which is also a factual statement. But if factual statements and value statements can be equivalent, then in general each kind can be derived from the other, so it follows that 'ought' can be derived from 'is', QED.
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