Mohamed R. answered • 08/10/21
Bachelor degree in English with experience in philosophy tutoring.
Ethical naturalism is the tendency to believe that moral statements are reducible to the natural properties in the empirical world. For instance, the "good" can be defined as the "pleasant" or the "desirable". This ethical view encounters critical responses, mainly from G.E. Moore with his "Naturalistic Fallacy", Mackie with his "Error theory," David Hume in his "Is-ought gap" theory.
Bentham is one of the proponents of Ethical naturalism. Bentham claims that humans do seek pleasure and avoid pain, thus pleasure is the good and pain the bad, thus we ought to act to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. G.E. Moore directly targets Bentham, claiming that the proposition "Good is pleasure" being replaced by "pleasure is good" can finally be substituted by "Good is good", which is a tautology rather than a moral statement. This "Naturalistic fallacy", Moore maintains, is what undermines the validity of Ethical naturalism.
The Error theory by Mackie also maintains that there are no moral objective facts. Instead, moral statements are simply emotive statements. For instance, I might state that something is right or wrong depending on how I approve or disapprove of it.
David Hume, likewise, states that we cannot derive moral statements from factual statements because the two statements are different in nature. While moral statements are prescriptive in nature, the factual statements are descriptive.
