Connie Rosati (Arizona): Normativity and the Naturalistic Fallacy
In Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore famously accused ethical naturalists of committing the “naturalistic fallacy.” Critics charged that this was no fallacy at all, and that the open question argument, which Moore deployed to defeat naturalism, depended on a mistaken view of analysis. In what was originally intended to be the preface to the second edition of Principia, Moore discussed some of the many confusions in the book, abandoning some of his earlier claims and attempting to more clearly formulate others. After examining Moore’s discussion of the naturalistic fallacy in the preface, as well as competing views about the nature of normativity, I explore how naturalists might proceed to develop more plausible forms of naturalism.
Location
Coombs Seminar Room A