Naturalism

In Hugh LaFollette - (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory. Blackwell (2000)
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Abstract

Twentieth century philosophy began with the rejection of naturalism. Many modern philosophers had assumed that their subject was continuous with the sciences, and that facts about human nature and other such information were relevant to the great questions of ethics, logic, and knowledge. Against this, Frege argued that “psychologism” in logic was a mistake. Logic, he said, is an autonomous subject with its own standards of truth and falsity, and those standards have nothing to do with how the mind works or with any other natural facts. Then, in the first important book of twentieth century ethics, Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore also identified naturalism as the fundamental philosophical mistake. Moore argued that equating goodness with any of the natural properties of things is “inconsistent with the possibility of any Ethics whatsoever”. Frege, Moore, and other like-minded thinkers inaugurated a period in which logic and language were the dominant philosophical subjects and confusing conceptual with factual issues was the greatest philosophical sin. During this period, philosophy was thought to be independent of the sciences. This may seem a strange notion, especially where ethics is concerned. One might expect moral philosophers to work in the context of information provided by psychology, which describes the nature of human thinking and motivation; sociology and anthropology, which describe the forms of human social life; history, which traces the development of moral beliefs and practices; and evolutionary biology, which tells us something about the nature and origins of human beings. But all these subjects were counted as irrelevant to the philosophical understanding of morality

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Citations of this work

Moral psychology: Empirical approaches.John Doris & Stephen Stich - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Altruism.Stephen Stich, John M. Doris & Erica Roedder - 2010 - In John M. Doris & The Moral Psychology Research Group (eds.), Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford University Press.
On the (in)significance of Hume’s Law.Samuele Chilovi & Daniel Wodak - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):633-653.
The Evolution of Psychological Altruism.Gualtiero Piccinini & Armin Schulz - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (5):1054-1064.
An argument against reduction in morality and epistemology.Jeremy Randel Koons - 2006 - Philosophical Investigations 29 (3):250–274.

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References found in this work

Values and Secondary Qualities.John McDowell - 1985 - In Ted Honderich (ed.), Morality and Objectivity. London: Routledge. pp. 110-129.
Values and Secondary Qualities.John McDowell - 1997 - In Thomas L. Carson & Paul K. Moser (eds.), Morality and the Good Life. Oup Usa.
Some of the Main Problems of Ethics.C. D. Broad - 1946 - Philosophy 21 (79):99-117.

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