Robert J. Richards and the Naturalistic Fallacy
Robert J. Richards
In his A Defence of Evolutionary Ethics, Robert J. Richards attempts to provide a model of evolutionary ethics that does not commit the “naturalistic fallacy”. That is to say, he attempts to demonstrate how, given only facts about evolved human behavior, we can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, without that inference being in anyway fallacious.
In the first part of his essay, Richards mounts a series of biological claims (which he asks the reader to suppose and not to question) with a single central point: evolution has constructed human beings to act for the community good (i.e. to act altruistically). In other words, human beings have as a matter of fact evolved to behave altruistically. With this claim taken as axiomatic, Richards moves on to propose the central argument for an evolutionary ethics that does not commit the Moore-an “naturalistic fallacy”. A general derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, he claims, is possible via descriptive causal laws. Borrowing the account from Gewirth, he defines ‘ought’ as meaning “necessitated or required by reasons stemming from some structured context” (p.287). Accordingly, Richards claims, we can derive the necessity of the moral behavior on strictly causal grounds. Given the evolutionary constitution of the human, moral behavior “ought to occur”; just as a stone “ought to fall down” if dropped from the top of a building. Morality is a necessary causal outcome of evolutionary developments; an ‘ought’ of human nature, derived in a non-fallacious manner.
