Assess the claim that moral truth is based on natural facts.
Assess the claim that moral truth is based on natural facts.
The attempt to assert that there are natural facts, the concept that is termed naturalism, is a form of moral realism. Naturalism is empiricist in inspiration. It essentially regards ethical concepts as derived from experience and not given to use by reason a priori. So the naturalist looks to the world in search of moral facts and values, hoping to show that moral judgements are really judgements about natural facts that we can discover. In terms of cognitivism, this also means that our moral judgements express certain beliefs about the world, because they refer to some sort of fact, and hence they are capable of being true or false. For some critics of naturalism, most notably G.E Moore, what the naturalist is trying to do is to convert all our talk of morals into talk about something we can understand better, namely natural facts about the world and human beings. In this sense naturalism is a reductive doctrine. It says that moral values can be reduced to, or explained in terms of something else. Naturalistic theories all agree that we can analyse moral terms such as "good" and explain them in other terms - but they disagree on the precise explanation of these terms, in other words there is no consensus as to what the natural properties are that moral terms refer to.
For example, psychological egoism states that people cannot help but act in their own self interest and "good " is whatever people perceive to be in their own interest. Non-egoistic naturalism might agree that "nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure" (Bentham, 1982), but claim that therefore every person needs to maximise the happiness for all - utilitarianism. But those two steps are not necessarily compatible. Why not?
Classical utilitarianism therefore needs to argue, either that maximising happiness for all is an "enlightened act of self interest", or that through natural
The attempt to assert that there are natural facts, the concept that is termed naturalism, is a form of moral realism. Naturalism is empiricist in inspiration. It essentially regards ethical concepts as derived from experience and not given to use by reason a priori. So the naturalist looks to the world in search of moral facts and values, hoping to show that moral judgements are really judgements about natural facts that we can discover. In terms of cognitivism, this also means that our moral judgements express certain beliefs about the world, because they refer to some sort of fact, and hence they are capable of being true or false. For some critics of naturalism, most notably G.E Moore, what the naturalist is trying to do is to convert all our talk of morals into talk about something we can understand better, namely natural facts about the world and human beings. In this sense naturalism is a reductive doctrine. It says that moral values can be reduced to, or explained in terms of something else. Naturalistic theories all agree that we can analyse moral terms such as "good" and explain them in other terms - but they disagree on the precise explanation of these terms, in other words there is no consensus as to what the natural properties are that moral terms refer to.
For example, psychological egoism states that people cannot help but act in their own self interest and "good " is whatever people perceive to be in their own interest. Non-egoistic naturalism might agree that "nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure" (Bentham, 1982), but claim that therefore every person needs to maximise the happiness for all - utilitarianism. But those two steps are not necessarily compatible. Why not?
Classical utilitarianism therefore needs to argue, either that maximising happiness for all is an "enlightened act of self interest", or that through natural