What are the advantages and disadvantages of using naturalistic explanations in ethics?

Naturalism

Advantages

• If verified, they are objective truths that apply to everyone. This means that goodness is held consistently throughout societies, and therefore allows for a level of justice
• We all live in the empirical world, and so goodness is knowable to us
• Scientific approach is favoured by modern society. By investigating the impact of an action and the impact it has on others, we have conclusive proof that something is good or bad
• Hedonic naturalists can define something good as something pleasurable. This is convincing as from our experience we know that we pursue things that are pleasurable. It is in keeping with Mill's idea of universalisability - that we ought to pursue things that are pleasurable for ourselves and for our wider society

Disadvantages

• We don't see that difference societies respond to these 'objective truths' in the same way. For example, sacrifice and the pain it brings are observable as abhorrent in our society, but may be seen as a point of worship in another
• The Is-Ought problem would challenge that science can be used to give moral values. We cannot move as readily from fact to value as we do - Hume believes that we skip a step. For example, we have evolved by reproduction between a man and a woman, therefore homosexuality is wrong because it doesn't further this. Hume argues that unless the 'jump' is explained, the argument falls short
• The Naturalistic Fallacy believes that defining good is a mistake. It is a simple notion, like yellow, and cannot be explained to someone who doesn't already know it. It is 'sui generis', of its own kind. This is convincing as it rests on the understanding that goodness can be a multitude of things, which we know from our experience to be true. If we could define one thing as good, such as pleasure, 'is pleasure good?' would be a contradictory question as it would be like asking 'is good good?' however, this is not the case
• The NF also is supported by the open-question argument. This states that if we define something as good, we should have a closed question. For example, 'is a mug used to drink liquids?' we answer with yes. However, we cannot respond to the question 'is pleasure good?' with a closed answer because it is multifaceted. Moore argues that it isn't reducible to one idea

Evaluation

Naturalism is wholly unconvincing. To define goodness as something we can empirically measure is a tempting notion, however in reality goodness is far wider than this and cannot be distilled to something like hedonic naturalists do with equating it to 'pleasure'. Whilst there are advantages, the challenges from More and Hume are too convincing, particularly those of More, in proving that goodness isn't something we can know from nature alone.