January 8, 2016

The Naturalistic Fallacy: What It Is, and What It Isn’t

Third Draft

1. Introductory Comments. There is substantial disagreement about what Moore was thinking of

when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. There is also substantial disagreement about whether

his claims about the naturalistic fallacy – whatever it may be -- deserve to be taken seriously.

Some praise Moore’s discussion extravagantly; others dismiss it as a contemptible mess.1 In

spite of these significant differences of opinion, there is near-universal agreement that arguments

concerning the naturalistic fallacy played a big role in 20th Century Anglophone moral

philosophy. My main aim here is to present a clear formulation of the doctrine that Moore had in

mind when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. I want to show that it is not the mess that some

have claimed it to be. I will also discuss some things that some commentators have claimed that

Moore had in mind in these contexts. I acknowledge that in some cases that Moore’s pen might

have slipped; he made some remarks that could easily lead to misunderstandings about the nature

of the naturalistic fallacy. In yet other cases, it seems to me, commentators have attributed to

Moore things that he never said or even suggested. I also want to discuss some of the most

serious questions about the naturalistic fallacy that remain even after we have a sufficiently clear

understanding of what it is.

2. Some passages. Here are some passages from Principia Ethica in which Moore seems to be

giving – or strongly hinting at -- an account of what he means by ‘naturalistic fallacy’. In each

case the passage is quoted from the revised edition of Principia Ethica (Cambridge 1993), edited

and with an introduction by Thomas Baldwin.

1 In his account of the naturalistic fallacy, Baldwin says “… Moore’s discussion is hopelessly confused”; he characterizes Moore’s views as “a mess”. (Baldwin 1990, pp 70-71) In his critical discussion in the Preface, Moore accuses himself of being ‘very confused in the book’. (In Baldwin 1993, p. 16) He pleads guilty to several confusions about the naturalistic fallacy. My own view is that Moore is too hard on himself.

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A. “… Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which

are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other

properties they were actually defining good; that these other properties were simply not ‘other,’

but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic

fallacy’ and of it I shall now endeavor to dispose.” (62)

B. “But if [a man] confuses ‘good,’ which is not in the same sense a natural object, with any

natural object whatever, then there is a reason for calling that a naturalistic fallacy; its being

made with regard to ‘good’ marks it as something quite specific, and this specific mistake

deserves a name because it is so common.” (65)

C. “The naturalistic fallacy always implies that when we think ‘this is good,’ what we are

thinking is that the thing in question bears a definite relation to some one other thing. But this

one thing, by reference to which good is defined, may be either what I may call a natural object –

something of which the existence is admittedly an object of experience – or else it may be an

object which is only inferred to exist in a supersensible real world. … [In this chapter] I shall

deal with theories which owe their prevalence to the supposition that good can be defined by

reference to a natural object; … [In a later chapter I shall deal with theories that purport to

define good by reference to a metaphysical object.] It should be observed that the fallacy, by

reference to which I define ‘Metaphysical Ethics,’ is the same in kind; and I give but one name,

the naturalistic fallacy.” (90-1)

D. “… the naturalistic fallacy – the fallacy which consists in identifying the simple notion which

we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion.” (109)

E. “[Mill] commits the naturalistic fallacy in identifying ‘desirable’ with ‘desired’”. (160)

F. [Moore is talking about the idea that the full significance of ethical statements cannot be

made apparent without a metaphysical examination of the true self or the rational universe. He

says] “Such an assertion involves the naturalistic fallacy. It rests on the failure to perceive that

any truth which asserts ‘This is good in itself’ is quite unique in kind – that it cannot be reduced

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to any assertion about reality, and therefore must remain unaffected by any conclusions we may

reach about the nature of reality. This confusion as to the unique nature of ethical truths is, I

have said, involved in all those ethical theories which I have called metaphysical.” (165)

G. “… [We] find Green explicitly stating that ‘the common characteristic of the good is that it

satisfies some desire.’ If we are to take this statement strictly, it obviously asserts that good

things have no characteristic in common, except that they satisfy some desire – not even,

therefore, that they are good. And this can be only the case, if being good is identical with

satisfying desire; if ‘good’ is merely another name for ‘desire-satisfying’. There could be no

plainer instance of the naturalistic fallacy.” (189)

H. “Almost all ethical writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy – they have failed to

perceive that the notion of intrinsic value is simple and unique; …” (222)

I. “The naturalistic fallacy has been quite as commonly committed with regard to beauty as with

regard to good; … It has been even more commonly supposed that the beautiful may be defined

as that which produces certain effects upon our feelings; …” (249)

J. There is a passage on p. 70 (in Sect 14) where Moore is talking about Sidgwick’s

interpretation of Bentham. Sidgwick apparently said that Bentham had defined ‘right’ as

meaning ‘conducive to the general happiness’. Moore says a number of very dark things in this

passage, but among them he seems to say that if Bentham had defined ‘right’ in this way, and if

some other conditions were satisfied, then he would have committed the naturalistic fallacy.

There are lots of other passages in which Moore talks about the naturalistic fallacy; and even a

few in which he seems to be giving an account of what the fallacy is. However, it does not seem

to me that it is essential to cite every one of these passages here. So far as I can tell, there is not

much in those passages that goes interestingly beyond what can be found in the passages I have

cited.

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3. Moore’s discussion of the naturalistic fallacy is, in some spots, not quite as crystal clear as we

might like it to be. Before attempting to state what I take to have been Moore’s view in the

book, it may be useful to point out some unfortunate features of Moore’s writing style. In my

view, some of the controversy surrounding the naturalistic fallacy might be due to Moore’s

sloppy writing. In most cases it is pretty easy to see what Moore intended to say, and it is

similarly easy to replace the careless formulations with tidier ones. Some of the main infelicities

that we need to keep in mind:

a. Use and mention. Sometimes Moore seems to be talking about words (esp. the word

‘good’, as in A and maybe C) but he doesn’t put these words into quotation marks or otherwise

make it clear that he was intending to be mentioning these words. Other times (as in B, E) he

does put expressions into quotation marks, but it is clear that he did not intend to be talking about

the expressions. He meant to be talking about the concepts expressed by the expressions. And

he seems to be inconsistent in this. I will try to abide by a familiar policy concerning use and

mention.

b. Properties, predicates, concepts, meanings, notions, objects…. The ontological

terminology is somewhat obscure. I will try to avoid confusion here. I will use ‘property’

uniformly for such things as yellowness, squareness, the property of being something we desire

to desire, goodness, etc. Moore makes a lot of remarks about natural “objects” (as in B and C

above). It’s not clear whether, when he speaks of “objects”, he means to be talking about the

things that have the properties, or whether instead he means to be talking about the properties

themselves. I prefer to use the term ‘object’ for the physical objects and concrete events that

have the properties; I prefer to use the term ‘property’ for the properties that these objects have.

A similar problem arises in the case of ‘predicate’. I think Moore uses ‘predicate’ to mean

property. (see for example bottom of p. 84) I will use the term ‘predicate’ for certain linguistic

items such as the final pair of words in the sentence ‘This orange is yellow’, or the final seven

words in the sentence ‘pleasure is something that we desire to desire’.

c. Talking about properties. The naturalistic fallacy is clearly (at least in one of its main

instances) a view about intrinsic goodness (a property that Moore subsequently tried to target in

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the Preface to the never-completed second edition of Principia Ethica2, and a property that he in

that later place called ‘G’). As Moore makes clear in the Preface, he wanted to say that it is a

mistake to identify G with any natural property, or any metaphysical property.3 Alas, in

Principia Ethica Moore had no consistent way of referring to this property. Sometimes (as in A)

he used the term ‘goodness’ to refer to it. On other occasions (as in A,B,C, and I) he left off the

‘-ness’ and simply used the term ‘good’ as a name for the property. This seems to me to violate

a rule about “jamming”: you can’t take a predicate expression (e.g., ‘is good’) and simply jam it

into a position that requires a noun (for example, as is done in the sentence ‘good is simple’).

Instead, we should abide by what I call “the ness-ity-hood principle”: when you want to refer to a

property, find a predicate expression that expresses it, and then add “-ness” or “-ity” or “-hood”

and make other changes as appropriate. This would permit use of the term ‘goodness’ as a name

for the property, but it would not permit the use of ‘good’ as a name for it. (Thus we can say

‘goodness is simple’.)4 On yet other occasions (also in B) Moore presumably meant to refer to

this same property, but he put the word ‘good’ inside single quotation marks. This suggests to the

modern reader that Moore meant to be referring to the word ‘good’; but the context makes it

clear that he is talking about the property.

d. Analysis vs definition vs reduction vs identification vs confusion … In some of the

most salient passages (e.g., D, E, and G) Moore seems to be claiming that the naturalistic fallacy

is the mistake of identifying goodness with some other property. In other passages he uses

different terminology. Thus, in A, C, and I he suggests that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake

of defining goodness by reference to some other property. And in F he speaks of reducing

goodness to another property; in B is speaks of confusing goodness with another property. This

multiplicity of terms might breed confusion. I will try to stick with just two main terms: when 2 The Preface appears on pp. 2 – 27 of the Baldwin edition of Principia Ethica. I will refer to this document as “the Preface”. There is a helpful critical synopsis of the Preface in section I of Casimir Lewy’s ‘G.E. Moore on the Naturalistic Fallacy’, which appears on pp. 292-303 of G. E. Moore: Essays in Retrospect ed. by Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz, George Allen and Unwin London and New York 1970.3 See, for example, the passage on p. 14 where Moore identifies some “important propositions to which I wish to call attention”. One of these is that ‘… ethical propositions do involve some unanalyzable notion which is not identical with any natural or metaphysical property.’ Throughout most of the Preface Moore writes as if the naturalistic fallacy is exclusively about intrinsic goodness, but in this passage he extends it to cover “ethical propositions” in general.4 Alternatively, you can put ‘the property of being…’ in front of it, yielding ‘the property of being good’. This method works just as well, but involves more verbiage.

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speaking of an alleged mistake about properties, I will say that the naturalistic fallacy is the

mistake of identifying an evaluative property with a natural or metaphysical property; when

speaking about a corresponding mistake about words, I will say that the naturalistic fallacy is the

mistake of trying to define some evaluative term by appeal entirely to natural or metaphysical

terms.

e. ‘Is’ of identity vs. ‘is’ of predication. Moore himself tried to point out that there is a

crucial difference between these two ways of using ‘is’.5 One important line of argument turns

on it. He knew it and tried to emphasize it, but his inconsistent procedure concerning the naming

of properties sometimes makes it unclear whether a certain sentence is an identity sentence

(“pleasantness = goodness”) or whether instead it a predication (“pleasure is good”). I will try to

avoid confusion on this.

f. Semantic terminology. Moore sometimes writes in such a way as to suggest that an

ordinary predicate expression such as ‘is yellow’ in a sentence such as ‘this orange is yellow’

names (or denotes or refers to) yellowness. That seems to me to be a possible source of trouble.

I will say that such predicate expressions express yellowness; and that only a nominal expression

such as ‘yellowness’ actually names (or denotes or refers to) yellowness.

4. Some commentators have claimed that Moore gives several distinct and incompatible

accounts of the naturalistic fallacy.6 In other cases, we find that different commentators attribute

fundamentally different accounts to Moore – one saying that Moore gave a certain account of the

naturalistic fallacy, and the other saying that Moore gave a completely different account of the

same fallacy. I think, however, that there is one main idea that stands at the root of most of

Moore’s thought about the naturalistic fallacy. I acknowledge that Moore himself did not always

put it in precisely the way I am going to put it, but I hope nevertheless to present something that

may be viewed as a sympathetic reconstruction of what he did say.

5 I take this to be one of the main points Moore tries to make in Section 12, pp. 64-66.6 Baldwin, for example, says that Moore gave at least three different accounts of the nature of the naturalistic fallacy. See p. 70 of Baldwin’s G. E. Moore.

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My reconstruction makes essential use of three controversial notions. The first of these is the

concept of the evaluative property. Moore took intrinsic goodness to be an evaluative property;

similarly for moral obligatoriness and moral rightness; and similarly for beauty. Additionally, in

a discussion of Mill’s Proof (cited in passage E above), he seems to be assuming that the

property of being desirable is an evaluative property. Some will recognize these as normative

properties. Others – perhaps those who believe in a “fact/value gap” – will say that these are all

properties from the “value” side of the gap.

The second controversial notion is the concept of the natural property. Yellowness, being

something we desire to desire, being more evolved, etc. are all cited by Moore as natural

properties. He took a few stabs at saying what makes it correct to categorize a property as

natural, but (as he himself made clear in the Preface) his stabs missed their mark. I will return to

this later. At any rate, properties in this group belong on the “fact” side of the fact/value gap.

The third controversial notion is the concept of the metaphysical property. These are properties

that are somehow associated with “supersensible realities”. Perhaps they are properties such as

the property of being approved by God. Moore says (in C above) that whereas we can observe

natural objects with our senses, we can at best infer the existence of metaphysical objects. They

are “supersensible”.

Moore characterizes the natural and the metaphysical in such a way as to make it clear that he

thinks that these two classes of properties exclude each other. No property is both natural and

metaphysical. It’s possible to have empirical evidence that shows that a certain object has a

natural property; it’s not possible in the same way to have empirical evidence that shows that an

object has a metaphysical property. It would be question-begging at this point to make any

assumptions about the relations between evaluative and natural properties, or about relations

between evaluative and metaphysical properties. The naturalistic fallacy itself is a thesis about

how these are related. A naturalist would say that there is partial overlap: some property is both

natural and evaluative. Moore, of course, denies this. We may understand the main point Moore

was making when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy to be that you make a mistake if you say

that the evaluative overlaps either with the natural or with the metaphysical.

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5. With all this as background, I will now state what I take to be the broadest and most inclusive

formulation of Moore’s “fundamental thesis”:

NF: A person commits the naturalistic fallacy iff he or she identifies some evaluative property

with some naturalistic or metaphysical property.

Most of the passages quoted earlier are consistent with this interpretation. (I admit that there are

a few places where the fit is not so obvious. I discuss them below.)

Let us look first at passage B. In this passage Moore focuses on just one evaluative property –

intrinsic goodness. He says that if a person confuses this property with any natural “object”, then

he or she has committed the naturalistic fallacy. I take it, then, that Moore is here describing

perhaps the most familiar instance of the naturalistic fallacy. It is the mistake of identifying

intrinsic goodness with some natural property.7

Note that what is said in B is not a definition of the naturalistic fallacy. Though it may be one of

the most familiar instances, there are instances that involve other evaluative properties. We may

understand Moore’s point to have been that this is just one way of committing the naturalistic

fallacy. If you make this mistake about intrinsic goodness, then you have committed the

naturalistic fallacy. Given my formulation NF, (and given the assumption that intrinsic goodness

is an evaluative property), it follows that the mistake identified in passage B is indeed an

instance of the more general mistake described in NF. Making this narrower mistake is just one

way of making the broader mistake. But Moore explicitly says that there are other ways of

committing the naturalistic fallacy.

One of these other ways is described in passage E. Moore evidently thought that Mill meant to

say that the property of being desirable is identical to the property of being desired.8 The

7 This is an unfortunate case in which Moore uses ‘object’ where it seems pretty clear that he would have expressed his idea better if he had used ‘property’.8 I assume that passage E illustrates Moore’s penchant for making it seem that he is talking about words when the context makes it clear that he is talking about properties.

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attribution of this view to Mill is dubious. Let’s just focus on the alleged mistake. Moore

plausibly thought that the property of being desirable is an evaluative property. He also thought

that the property of being desired is a natural property – presumably whether or not something

has this property is a question for psychology, which Moore takes to belong with the natural

sciences. So if a person were to say that the property of being desirable is identical to the

property of being desired, he or she would have identified an evaluative property (desirability)

with a natural property (the property of being desired). Thus, he or she would have committed

an instance of the naturalistic fallacy as characterized by NF. Moore accuses Mill of committing

the naturalistic fallacy in this way.

Another closely related instance of NF can be seen in passage G. By way of some not-very-

plausible argumentation, Moore ends up saying that Green is committed to the view that “being

good is identical to satisfying desire’; that ‘good’ is just another name for ‘desire-satisfying”. He

concludes by claiming that ‘there could be no plainer instance of the naturalistic fallacy’.

Again, the alleged mistake conforms to the pattern identified in NF. We need only assume that

the property of being good is an evaluative property, and that the property of being desire-

satisfying is natural. With these assumptions in place, Green’s alleged identification of the

properties is a case of someone’s saying of some evaluative property, that it is identical to some

natural property. (I have no idea if Green actually committed the naturalistic fallacy in this

form.) My point is merely that this specific identity claim conforms to the pattern indicated by

NF.

Moore makes it clear in passage C that the same fallacy would be involved if goodness were

identified with a metaphysical property rather than with a naturalistic one. (I will later return to

the question about how we are to characterize metaphysical properties.) He is evidently sensitive

to the fact that there is something a bit misleading about using the name ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in

cases in which the property identified with goodness is metaphysical rather than naturalistic. But

he chooses to use the same name for mistakes of both types. Since he is aware of the extended

usage, and warns the reader explicitly, it would be somewhat churlish to make a point of

criticizing him for it. The attentive reader will not be misled.

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Moore gives four examples of philosophers who identified intrinsic goodness with metaphysical

properties.9 First he seems to claim that the Stoics identified intrinsic goodness with the property

of being in accord with some mysterious “supersensible reality”; then he claims that Spinoza

made the same mistake when he said that intrinsic goodness is identical to the property ‘of being

more or less closely united with Absolute Substance by the “intellectual love” of God’; then he

claims that Kant made this mistake when he said that the Kingdom of Ends is the ideal.

Presumably Moore is imagining that Kant said that “ideality” (an evaluative property) is

identical to some unidentified metaphysical property that somehow involves the Kingdom of

Ends; and finally he says that “modern writers” make this mistake when they identify the

property of being “the final end” (presumably an evaluative property) with the property of

realizing our true selves (presumably a metaphysical property).

Given the assumption that the specified properties are all properly metaphysical, it should be

clear that each of the four cited claims is an instance of NF. In each case, the philosopher in

question would have been identifying an evaluative property (intrinsic goodness) with a

metaphysical property. So all these cases conform to my interpretation.

In passages C and I and several other passages scattered through Principia Ethica, Moore seems

to want to understand the naturalistic fallacy in semantic terms. The transition from the

ontological version that I have been discussing to the semantic version is straightforward. Just a

few familiar assumptions are needed: first, we need to assume that predicate expressions (in

simple first-order uses) express properties. Thus ‘is yellow’ expresses yellowness; ‘is

intrinsically good’ expresses intrinsic goodness, etc. We may assume that if the property

expressed by a predicate expression is evaluative, then the expression is an evaluative

expression. If the property expressed by a predicate expression is a natural or metaphysical

property, then that predicate expression is a naturalistic or metaphysical expression, as the case

may be. We may also assume that if a predicate expression is a conjunction or disjunction or

other combination of natural (metaphysical) expressions, then it is natural (metaphysical).10

9 All on p. 164.10 This leaves a question about how to characterize expressions that have a natural component and a metaphysical component, such as ‘is pleasant or approved by God’. So far as I know, Moore does not

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In its semantic form, then, the naturalistic fallacy is the claim that some evaluative predicate

expression is synonymous with some natural expression or with some metaphysical expression.

Thus, for example, if someone were to say that ‘is intrinsically good’ means the same as ‘is

pleasant’ he or she would have committed an instance of the semantic version of the naturalistic

fallacy. The same could be said for someone who says that ‘is desirable’ means the same as ‘is

desired’ (see passage E); or someone who says that ‘is beautiful’ means the same as ‘produces

certain effects on our feelings’ (see passage I).

Earlier (in J) I mentioned a passage in which Moore is claiming that Bentham committed the

naturalistic fallacy.11 Moore discusses the accusation that Bentham said that the word ‘right’

means ‘conducive to the general happiness’. Given reasonable assumptions, this would be a

clear instance of the semantic form of NF. The assumptions are (i) that ‘is right’ is an evaluative

expression; (ii) that ‘is conducive to the general happiness’ is a natural expression; and that when

we say that one expression “means” another, we are saying that the two expressions have the

same meaning.

6. Earlier I said that some commentators have claimed that the naturalistic fallacy is something

significantly different from the thing identified by NF. I also suggested that there is little or no

evidence in Principia Ethica to support these claims. I now turn to a consideration of some of

the most popular misinterpretations.

6a. Some have said that Moore’s idea was that you commit the naturalistic fallacy if you try to

derive an ought from premises that are all isses. If this claim is true, my proposed NF would be

inadequate. Instead, we would have to attribute this to Moore:

NF(i/o): A person commits the naturalistic fallacy iff he or she purports to derive an ‘ought’

statement from premises that are all ‘is’ statements.

discuss this question.11 The passage appears on p. 70 in Baldwin 1993. Moore seems to be attributing the interpretation of Bentham to Sidgwick.

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Perhaps someone would say that Moore gave two independent accounts of the naturalistic

fallacy. Sometimes it was NF and sometimes it was NF(i/o).

Here is a passage from the first paragraph of John Searle’s Philosophical Review paper on

deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’:

IT IS often said that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." This thesis, which comes

from a famous passage in Hume's Treatise, while not as clear as it might be, is at least clear

in broad outline: there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class

of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves entails any statement of

value. Put in more contemporary terminology, no set of descriptive statements can entail an

evaluative statement without the addition of at least one evaluative premise. To believe

otherwise is to commit what has been called the naturalistic fallacy.12

Searle goes on to provide a series of controversial examples allegedly showing that it is possible

to derive an “ought” statement from a set of premises that are all “is” statements. His aim is to

show that in some cases the derivation is not fallacious.

Several commentators, critics, writers of encyclopedia articles and others have agreed with

Searle on this point: they have said that Moore said that a person commits the naturalistic fallacy

iff he or she purports to derive an ought from a bunch of premises that are all ises. Some have

said that this is what Moore had in mind when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy.13

12 John Searle, “How to Derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Jan., 1964), pp. 43-58.13 See, for example, the article on “Naturalistic Fallacy” in Encyclopedia.com where the author says:

‘…this notion is an expression of the philosophical argument that … one cannot infer from is to ought, nor can one make an inference from scientific observations to ethical arguments. Any such attempt means committing the naturalistic fallacy. Historically, David Hume (1711–1776) and G. E. Moore (1873–1958) were the primary advocates of the invalidity of a moral argument based on such an inference.’

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Those who admire Moore might be disappointed if it could be shown that Moore had said that

is/ought inferences are all fallacious. For, as Prior has shown,14 there are plenty of cases where

such inferences are perfectly OK; it might not be a logical fallacy at all. It might not be a

mistake of any kind. But there is no need for Mooreans to be disappointed: Moore never

described the naturalistic fallacy in the way Searle and these others have claimed. It is simply a

false attribution.

Demonstrating that Moore never committed himself to NF(i/o) might be a bit tricky. I don’t

know how I could decisively prove that. But this is what I have done: I have diligently searched

through Principia Ethica looking for evidence that might support the notion that Moore

understood the naturalistic fallacy as something like NF(i/o).15 I found no such evidence.

There are very few passages in Principia Ethica in which Moore talks explicitly about the

meaning of ‘ought’ or the concept of moral obligation. This may seem surprising, since we

might expect that he would want to say that ‘ought’ is like ‘is intrinsically good’ in the relevant

respect; surely his view must have been that ‘ought’ cannot be defined in purely natural or

metaphysical terms. That would be a pretty straightforward instance of the semantic version of

NF.

So far as I have been able to determine, there is only one passage in Principia Ethica that might

bear on the question whether Moore understood the naturalistic fallacy to be anything like

NF(i/o). That is the passage in Sect 77 where Moore is talking about some ideas that he thinks

he has found in Kant. In this passage, he mentions the allegedly Kantian idea that “…when I say

‘You ought to do this’ I must mean ‘You are commanded to do this, …’ He goes on to say ‘Now

that this is an error has been already shewn in Chapter I.” Moore does not explicitly mention the

14 A.N. Prior (1960) “The autonomy of ethics”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 38:3, 199-206.

15 Here’s how I did it: I have a searchable electronic copy of Principia Ethica. I used a variety of search terms: ‘ought’, ‘is/ought derivation’, ‘Hume’s Law’, ‘facts and values’, ‘values and facts’, etc. For each of these terms, I reviewed all the passages containing the term. I did not find any passage in which Moore said – or even strongly suggested – that the naturalistic fallacy is the fallacy of trying to derive an ought from a bunch of isses. There was only one interestingly suggestive passage. I discuss that in the text.

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naturalistic fallacy in this passage – he merely alludes in this way to some unidentified passage

in Chapter I.16 Nor does he say much about derivations of ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’

statements, but I am prepared to assume that “the error” that Moore had in mind was the

semantic version of the naturalistic fallacy.

Thus, if Moore was talking about the naturalistic fallacy in this passage, then it is reasonable to

conclude that he is still understanding the naturalistic fallacy to be a mistake about the meanings

of some expressions. Specifically, in this passage the mistake would occur in the claim that ‘you

ought to do this’ means the same as ‘this has been commanded’. I assume that ‘you ought to do

this’ is an evaluative expression, and ‘you have been commanded to do this’ is a naturalistic

expression. Thus, the passage is consistent with saying that Moore took the naturalistic fallacy

to be the mistake indicated by the semantic version of NF, and not the alleged mistake indicated

by NF(i/o).

How might NF(i/o) be thought to come into the picture? Here I must engage in some

speculation. Consider this argument:

Argument A

1. You have been commanded to keep your promises.

2. Therefore, you ought to keep your promises.

Suppose some commentator were to say that in the passage under consideration, Moore says in

effect that arguments like Argument A are fallacious. And suppose the commentator were to say

that this shows that Moore sometimes understood the naturalistic fallacy in the way indicated by

NF(i/o).

16 The editor of the 1988 Prometheus Books edition of Principia Ethica says that the “error” to which Moore alludes here is the naturalistic fallacy. I am inclined to agree.

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I cannot find anything quite like Argument A in the passage in question.17 Nor can I find Moore

saying anything about whether such arguments are fallacious. But of course Argument A is

fallacious. It is of the form: P, therefore Q.

Suppose the commentator were to say that Moore must have had something like Argument A in

mind (though he never said it). Suppose also that the commentator were to say that Moore must

have thought the argument was really an enthymeme; and that Moore must have thought that

with the missing premise added, it looks like this:

Argument B

1. You have been commanded to keep your promises.

2. You ought to keep your promises iff you have been commanded to keep your promises.

3. Therefore, you ought to keep your promises.

Furthermore, (the commentator might have thought) Moore must have supposed that premise (2)

is to be defended by claiming that ‘you ought to keep your promises’ means the same as, or can

be defined as, ‘you have been commanded to keep your promises’. Voila! Moore claims that the

naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of deriving an ‘ought’ from premises that are all ‘ises’. The

commentator might then conclude that NF(i/o) is an adequate interpretation of something Moore

maintained in Principia Ethica.

This all seems to me to be wild and unjustifiable speculation. It involves confusions and

misattributions. I agree that Argument B is problematic. But it seems to me that the mistake in

Argument B is not the error of reasoning in the argument as a whole. After all, the argument is

valid. Nor is it a case of deriving an ought from premises that are all ises. Note that (2) certainly

looks at least partially “oughty”.

17 Moore does mention that some advocates of metaphysical ethics think that ‘ethical conclusions may be obtained by enquiring into the nature of a fundamentally real Will…’ (Baldwin 1993, 179)

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Thus there is no justification for saying, on the basis of this passage, that Moore thought that the

naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of deriving an ‘ought’ statement from premises that are all ‘is’

statements.

It seems to me that what’s going on in this passage does not require any additions or adjustments

to NF. It seems to me that it makes more sense to assume that in this passage Moore was

alluding to the “meta-mistake” that would arise if a philosopher were to defend premise (2) in

Argument B by saying that ‘you ought to keep your promises’ means the same as ‘you have been

commanded to keep your promises’. But if that is the mistake “involved” in the argument, then

that mistake is clearly an instance of the semantic form NF. On this interpretation, Moore is

again saying that the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake one makes when one says that a certain

evaluative term means the same as a certain naturalistic term. This is just another instance of

NF. Thus, there is no need to suppose that Moore also understood the naturalistic fallacy in the

way indicated by NF(i/o).

6b. At the time of Principia Ethica Moore maintained that intrinsic goodness is a simple,

unanalyzable property. He repeatedly said that it was not complex. So it is no surprise that he

said that it is a mistake to identify intrinsic goodness with a complex property. Some have said

that his view was that if you make this mistake, you commit the naturalistic fallacy.18 That is,

they say that Moore was committed to this:

NF(c): A person commits the naturalistic fallacy iff he or she says that intrinsic goodness is a

complex property.19

18 Tom Regan says this in his article “Moore, G.E.” in the Encyclopedia of Ethics Vol II Becker & Becker, p. 821. Regan says “Moore marshals a number of arguments that purport to prove Good’s indefinability. … Moore claims that any attempt to define Good commits the “naturalistic fallacy””. Regan goes on to say that “the naturalistic fallacy … has nothing in particular to do with naturalism.” Regan does not mention any other possible interpretation of the naturalistic fallacy. Baldwin says that Moore gave three distinct accounts of the naturalistic fallacy. According to the first of these, to commit the naturalistic fallacy is “to deny that goodness is indefinable”. (Baldwin, 1990, 70)

19 In its semantic form, this claim is roughly equivalent to the claim that ‘intrinsically good’ can be defined , or given a semantic analysis.

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I have searched diligently through Principia Ethica. I found dozens of passages where Moore

says that intrinsic goodness is simple and unanalyzable. So of course I recognize that he thought

that anyone who said that it is complex would be making a mistake, or committing a “fallacy”.

But it’s one thing to say that Moore thought that this would be a fallacy; it’s quite another thing

to say that Moore thought that this would be the naturalistic fallacy. I did not find any passage

where he clearly identifies the naturalistic fallacy as the mistake of saying that goodness is

complex.

I must acknowledge that there is one passage where Moore gets dangerously close to saying that

the naturalistic fallacy is this mistake about complexity.20 I have in mind the already quoted

passage H from Section 104 where Moore says:

H. “Almost all ethical writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy – they have failed to

perceive that the notion of intrinsic value is simple and unique; …” (222)

The use of the dash suggests that what comes after means the same as what comes before, and

that suggests an understanding of the naturalistic fallacy as the mistake indicated by NF(c). In

my view, it would have been better if Moore had replaced the dash with ‘furthermore’.

(Additionally, I see no point in saying that intrinsic value is “unique”. If everything is what it is

and not another thing, everything is unique. Why bother to mention it?) If we make these two

changes, we end up with:

H’: Almost all ethical writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy; furthermore they have

failed to perceive that the notion of intrinsic value is simple …

H’ seems to me to be an excellent conjunction of two of the main things that Moore wanted to

say about the concept of intrinsic value. The part before ‘furthermore’ says in effect that ethical

writers have committed the naturalistic fallacy with respect to that concept. The part after

‘furthermore’ says that they have committed what we may call the “complexity fallacy” with

respect to it as well.20 On p. 18 of the Preface Moore himself cites some further evidence of this confusion. This is a case in which I think he is being needlessly hard on himself.

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There are several passages in Principia Ethica where Moore suggests that he is prepared to

consider the idea that intrinsic goodness might be complex. Consider, for example, this passage:

‘[The naturalistic] fallacy, I explained, consists in the contention that good means nothing but

some simple or complex notion, that can be defined in terms of natural qualities.’ (Baldwin, 125

some emphasis added, FF)

Perhaps a persnickety copy editor would insist that this sentence could be improved. Maybe

Moore should have said “[The naturalistic] fallacy, I explained, is committed by anyone who

contends that ‘good’ expresses some simple or complex notion that can be defined in terms of

natural or metaphysical qualities.” (emphasis again added) But the point remains the same:

Moore already toyed with the notion that intrinsic goodness might be complex.

Once he fully recognized the difference between the naturalistic fallacy and the complexity

fallacy, Moore made it clear that his real interest is in the former; he was not interested in the

latter. In the Preface (p. 6) he says that he is not ‘at all anxious to insist that G is “indefinable” in

the sense of “unanalyzable”…. I think it was a pure mistake to lay so much stress as I did upon

the question whether it is or not.’ Evidently, after having given it further thought he no longer

cared very much about the complexity fallacy. His commitment to the naturalistic fallacy, on the

other hand, remained firm.

In light of the absence of compelling texts, as well as Moore’s subsequent remarks about the

complexity fallacy, I think it is reasonable on balance to reject NF(c) as an interpretation of

Moore’s view about the naturalistic fallacy.

6c. Some have said that Moore said that you commit the naturalistic fallacy iff you identify

intrinsic goodness with something distinct from itself. For example, in Bloomsbury’s Prophet

Tom Regan says ‘The “naturalistic fallacy” is the name that Moore gives to any attempt to

identify Good with something distinct from itself.’ (193) Of course, Moore did think that

intrinsic goodness is distinct from every natural and every metaphysical property, so if someone

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were to claim that intrinsic goodness is identical with some such property, he or she would have

committed the naturalistic fallacy and would have identified intrinsic goodness with something

that is distinct from intrinsic goodness. But the heart of the mistake in such a case would not be

that the person identified intrinsic goodness with something distinct from itself. A person could

do that while not committing the naturalistic fallacy. (Consider a person who says that intrinsic

goodness is identical to moral obligatoriness. This person identifies intrinsic goodness with

something that is distinct from itself, but he or she does not commit the naturalistic fallacy.)

It must be admitted that there are some passages in which Moore seems to say that the

naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of identifying goodness with something distinct from goodness.

A good example is the already-quoted passage D:

D. “… the naturalistic fallacy – the fallacy which consists in identifying the simple notion

which we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion.” (109)

This passage is troublesome for several reasons. First of all, there is no real need for Moore to

mention that goodness is a “simple notion”. Of course he thought it to be simple. But he

thought a lot of things about it. No need to confuse the issue by mentioning them here. The

second problem in this passage is that Moore seems to be saying that the naturalistic fallacy just

is this mistake about identifying goodness with something else. He did think that anyone who

commits the naturalistic fallacy with respect to goodness does identify goodness with something

distinct from itself; and that would surely be a mistake. But as I see it, he would have been on

firmer ground if he had made it clear that this instance of the naturalistic fallacy involves a more

specific misidentification – the identification of goodness with a natural or metaphysical

property. Finally, I think Moore sometimes leaves the impression that the naturalistic fallacy is

always a mistake about goodness. But, as we have seen, he clearly thought that it occurs in

connection with beauty, obligatoriness, desirability, rightness and other evaluative properties.

Thus it seems to me that it would have been better if Moore had said:

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D’: “… the naturalistic fallacy – the fallacy that a person commits when he or she identifies the

notion that we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion – specifically a naturalistic or

metaphysical notion.”]

He might also have added, just to avoid confusion, a remark to the effect that a person could

commit the naturalistic fallacy by identifying any other evaluative property with a purely

naturalistic or metaphysical property.

6d. Some have said that Moore abused the English language when he used the term ‘fallacy’ in

the name of this thing. For example, Bernard Williams says this:

“Those who attempted to define goodness were said to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It is

hard to think of any other widely used phrase in the history of philosophy that is such a

spectacular misnomer. In the first place, it is not clear why those criticized were committing

a fallacy (which is a mistake in inference) as opposed to making what in Moore’s view was

an error, or else simply redefining a word.” (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 121)

Williams and these others say that you have a fallacy only when you have an error in reasoning –

a logical mistake.21 Supercilious pedantry is annoying in all cases, but it is especially annoying

when it’s mean-spirited and demonstrably wrong. A quick look at any respectable dictionary of

the English language should make it clear that ‘fallacy’ is correctly used just to mean

‘falsehood’, ‘error’, ‘mistake’. It has been used in this way for hundreds of years. Of course, as

many (but not all) of these dictionaries point out, some fallacies involve logical errors; but there

is no justification for the claim that it would be a “spectacular misnomer” to use the word in a

case in which no such fallacious inference is involved. Here are some definitions:

21 Moore discusses this point in the Preface (20-21) and says that if he were to use the expression ‘naturalistic fallacy’ again, he would ‘expressly point out that in so using the term ‘fallacy’ I was using it in an extended, and perhaps improper sense’. I am embarrassed but I have to admit that I made this same mistake about the meaning of ‘fallacy’ in my Introductory Ethics (p. 195). My only excuse is that I was still a young man back in 1978; perhaps I had not yet learned to confirm my linguistic intuitions by checking in a dictionary before pontificating about the meanings of words. If I were to revise that book, I would start by deleting the whole section entitled “The Naturalistic Fallacy” (pp. 194-9). That section is simply a wreck.

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The Oxford English Dictionary22 gives ‘a false statement’ as a synonym of ‘fallacy’. This

appears (among some other alleged synonyms) in the OED’s account of the primary sense of

‘fallacy’. Citations go back to 1481.23 A few lines later when it comes to the third main sense of

‘fallacy’ the OED discusses logical fallacies, or mistakes in inference. The earliest citation of

‘fallacy’ being used in this logical sense is dated 1552.

Cambridge Dictionaries On-line24 give a simple definition: it defines a fallacy as a false belief.

This is followed by an example of the word being used in this sense: ‘It is a common fallacy that

only men are good at math’.

Oxford Dictionaries25: A mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound argument: the notion

that the camera never lies is a fallacy.

Macmillan Dictionary26 adds a slight twist: According to it a fallacy is an idea or belief that is

false but that many people think is true.

One modest application of the principle of charity allows us to assume that when Moore said that

those who identify goodness with a natural or metaphysical property are committing a fallacy, he

did not mean to say that they were committing a logical fallacy. He just meant to say that they

were believing something false. His usage was beyond reproach then, and it is still beyond

reproach now.

7. I have proposed that (in its fundamental ontological form) Moore’s thesis was that someone

commits the naturalistic fallacy if he or she identifies an evaluative property with a property that

is either natural or metaphysical. Earlier I called this ‘NF’. Obviously, we cannot fully

understand the import of NF if we don’t understand what is meant by saying that a property is

“natural” or that it is “metaphysical”. In Principia Ethica Moore devoted a few paragraphs to 22 I found this citation at http://findwords.info/term/fallacy. They reproduce the OED’s definition of ‘fallacy’.23 Thus Moore was too hard on himself when he suggested that he might have used ‘fallacy’ in an improper sense. There was nothing improper about his usage.24 http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fallacy25 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/fallacy26 http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/fallacy

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the attempt to explain these concepts. Unfortunately, as Moore subsequently acknowledged in

the Preface, his efforts were not successful.

As a first step toward distinguishing the natural from the metaphysical, Moore says:

The naturalistic fallacy always implies that when we think ‘This is good,’ what we are

thinking is that the thing in question bears a definite relation to some one other thing. But this

one thing, by reference to which good is defined may be either what I may call a natural

object—something of which the existence is admittedly an object of experience—or else it

may be an object which is only inferred to exist in a supersensible real world. (90)

This is intended to be a distinction between two kinds of object. Some objects are “objects of

experience”. I suspect that Moore was thinking of such things as ordinary physical objects and

events; perhaps an experience of pleasure or a beautiful painting. Such things can be perceived;

they form the subject matter for natural sciences and psychology; we know that one is present (or

at least we have good reason to believe that one is present) when we see, or feel, or otherwise

experience it. Such objects may be considered “natural”. Other objects exist only in a

“supersensible world”. These cannot be perceived; at best we can infer that such things exist.

These objects form the subject matter of theology and abstract metaphysics. I suspect that

Moore was thinking of such things as God, or the Absolute, or someone’s “true self”, or numbers

or other such abstract objects. He called these objects ‘metaphysical’.

At the time when he was writing Principia Ethica Moore apparently endorsed a metaphysical

view according to which ordinary natural objects exist in time, while the objects that exist in the

“supersensible world” do not exist in time. This allegedly gives us yet another way to

understand the distinction between these two sorts of object. Moore says:

If we consider whether any object is of such a nature that it may be said to exist now, to have

existed, or to be about to exist, then we may know that that object is a natural object, and that

nothing, of which this is not true, is a natural object. Thus, for instance, of our minds we

should say that they did exist yesterday, that they do exist to-day, and probably will exist in a

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minute or two. We shall say that we had thoughts yesterday, which have ceased to exist now,

although their effects may remain: and in so far as those thoughts did exist, they too are

natural objects. (92-3)

So much for the distinction between natural and metaphysical objects. But as we have seen, the

naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy involving alleged misidentification of properties, not of objects.

So we need an account of a distinction between natural and metaphysical properties. Moore

suggests a preliminary version of the needed distinction in a closely related passage:

This [naturalistic] method consists in substituting for good some one property of a natural

object or of a collection of natural objects; and in thus replacing Ethics by some one of the

natural sciences. … I have called such theories naturalistic because all of these terms denote

properties, simple or complex, of some simple or complex natural object;…. (92)

Thus Moore seems to want to explain the distinction between natural and metaphysical

properties by appeal to the distinction between natural and metaphysical objects. The

preliminary account then goes like this:

Dn1: F is a natural property =df. F is a property of a natural object or a collection of natural

objects.

Dm1: F is a metaphysical property =df. F is a property of a metaphysical object or a

collection of metaphysical objects.

This way of drawing the natural/metaphysical distinction is utterly unsatisfactory for Moore’s

purposes. Given natural assumptions, it entails that intrinsic goodness and beauty are natural

properties. Consider some delightful experience of pleasure; it is a natural object because it

exists in time and because it can be experienced and because it is proper subject for psychology;

but, according to a popular axiology, it has the property of being intrinsically good. So,

according to Dn1, intrinsic goodness is a natural property. A similar result concerning beauty

results from the assumption that some perceivable, temporally existent natural object is beautiful.

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The immediate implication is that there is nothing wrong with saying that intrinsic goodness and

beauty are natural properties – claims that Moore considered to be mistakes -- instances of the

naturalistic fallacy.

Moore recognized this, and moved on to a more complex way of drawing the distinction. He

said:

… I do not deny that good is a property of certain natural objects: certain of them, I think,

are good; and yet I have said that good itself is not a natural property. Well, my test for these

too also concerns their existence in time. Can we imagine good as existing by itself in time,

and not merely as a property of some natural object? For myself, I cannot so imagine it,

whereas with the greater number of properties of objects—those which I call the natural

properties—their existence does seem to me to be independent of the existence of those

objects. They are, in fact, rather parts of which the object is made up than mere predicates

which attach to it. If they were all taken away, no object would be left, not even a bare

substance: for they are in themselves substantial and give to the object all the substance that

it has. But this is not so with good. If indeed good were a feeling, as some would have us

believe, then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic

fallacy. (Baldwin, 93)

Moore seems to have been thinking that natural properties are substantial parts of the natural

objects that have them, and that as a result these properties can exist on their own, even if the

object of which they formerly were a part were to be destroyed. We might expect here that he

would contrast these natural properties to metaphysical ones, perhaps like this:

Dn2: F is a natural property =df. F characterizes natural objects; when F does characterize a

natural object, F is a part of the object characterized; it is possible for F to exist

independently in time.

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Dm2: F is a metaphysical property =df. F characterizes metaphysical objects; when F does

characterize a metaphysical object, it is not a part of that object; it is not possible for F to

exist independently in time.

Thus we would have a contrast between natural and metaphysical properties and this would help

us to understand the significance of NF. Unfortunately, that is not what Moore does. Instead, he

contrasts natural properties with the single evaluative property intrinsic goodness. He says that

each natural property could exist on its own without the underlying substance it characterizes,

but that “good” could not continue to exist on its own in this way. This leaves the distinction

between natural properties and metaphysical properties undrawn.

In the Preface Moore castigates himself for his “hopelessly confused” attempts to give an

account of the nature of natural properties. (13) He points out (in effect) that the second account

of naturalness is “utterly inconsistent with the former one”.27 He then proceeds to suggest that

natural properties are ones with which it is the business of the natural sciences and psychology to

deal (or which can be defined in terms of such), and that metaphysical properties are ones that

stand to metaphysical objects in the same relation that natural properties stand to natural objects.

He does not say what that relation is.

This all seems to me to be disappointing. However, it also seems to me that (as Moore suggests)

even if we cannot define ‘natural’ and ‘metaphysical’, we may nevertheless have some idea of

what sorts of properties belong in these classes. If so it is possible for us to have a tentative

grasp of what Moore had in mind when he spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. In its central form, it

is the mistake (as he sees it) that a person commits if and only if he or she identifies an

evaluative property with either a natural property or a metaphysical property. In a closely related

form, it is the mistake a person commits if and only if he or she claims that an evaluative

predicate means the same as some natural or metaphysical predicate or some combination

thereof.

27 For an incisive discussion of all this, see the second half of Broad’s ‘Certain Features in Moore’s Ethical Doctrines’ in the Schilpp volume. Moore comments on Broad’s discussion on pp. 581-592 of his ‘A Reply to My Critics’ in the same volume. He seems to think the most of Broad’s objections are right on the mark.

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The naturalistic fallacy is not the mistake of trying to derive an ‘ought’ statement from premises

that are all ‘is’ statements; though someone might commit the naturalistic fallacy when trying to

defend a premise in such an inference. Nor is it the mistake of identifying intrinsic goodness

with a complex property – I called that mistake ‘the complexity fallacy’. There is a closely

linked semantic version of the complexity fallacy; that is the mistake of saying that ‘is

intrinsically good’ can be analyzed, or defined.

There was a huge amount of debate about the naturalistic fallacy after the publication of

Principia Ethica. Some of that debate is based on a correct understanding of what Moore had in

mind when spoke of the naturalistic fallacy. Unfortunately, quite a lot of that debate seems to

have been based on misunderstandings about what the naturalistic fallacy actually was intended

to be. I leave it to others to assess the significance of the various strands in that debate. I also

leave it to others to determine whether Moore succeeded in demonstrating that the naturalistic

fallacy is actually a fallacy. I take it that that’s a project for a different paper.28

28 I suggested my views on this other question in my paper ‘The Open Question Argument: What It Is, and What It Isn’t’.

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