The Naturalistic Fallacy Is Modern

The Anti-naturalistic Fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s ‘law’ are frequently appealed to for the purpose of drawing limits around the scope of scientific inquiry into ethics and morality. These two objections are shown to be without force. Thus two highly influential obstacles are removed from naturalizing ethics. The relative merits of moral skepticism and moral realism are compared. Moral skepticism and some for...

Notes and Commentary Hayek, Logic, and the Naturalistic Fallacy

In his paper titled “Did Hayek Commit the Naturalist Fallacy?” published in the September 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Erik Angner develops three theses. The first is that Friedrich Hayek’s own writings and those of competent commentators give plentiful evidence that Hayek appears to have inferred values from facts. (The appears is stressed because Angner himsel...

On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology

The naturalistic fallacy is mentioned frequently by evolutionary psychologists as an erroneous way of thinking about the ethical implications of evolved behaviors. However, evolutionary psychologists are themselves confused about the naturalistic fallacy and use it inappropriately to forestall legitimate ethical discussion. We briefly review what the naturalistic fallacy is and why it is misuse...

The “banzhaf Fallacy” Fallacy

How Fallacious is the Consequence Fallacy?

In Williamson (2007), Timothy Williamson argues against “the tactic of criticizing confidence in a theory by identifying a logical consequence of the theory (not itself a logical truth) whose probability is not raised by the evidence” (232-233). He dubs it the consequence fallacy. In this paper, we will show that Williamson‟s formulation of the tactic in question is ambiguous. On one reading of...