Naturalism, prescriptivism, and their reconciliation

Abstract

To present and defend an ethical theory is largely a delicate matter of putting things in the right order. The philosophical dialectic of charge and counter-charge may not perhaps be allowed to play itself out properly when the issues are so narrowly handled as they are so often in proposing ethical theories. Consider the fuguish arguments between the Naturalists and the anti-Naturalists the dialectical dispute over the issue of description and evaluation, facts and values. Each side so often appears victorious because each is correct but only at its particular stage of the dialectic. Where Kant and Hare, 1 as prescriptivists, ostensibly turn out to have a vacuous concept of reason which is allegedly inadequate to validate substantive universal moral principles, the naturalists substitute some sort of appeal to 'general welfare,' or 'happiness,' based upon human nature. And where such contemporary naturalists as Mrs. Foot ~ and Mr. Warnock,3 amongst others, appear to produce a question-begging concept of 'human welfare' or 'human nature' as I shall argue the prescriptivist, in the name of freedom and reason, produces the fact-value dichotomy once again as lying subtly concealed at the basis of any concept of 'nature.' Each thinks of itself as a self-evident improvement upon the other, and claims the virtue of having surpassed the other in the dialectic of philosophical debate. I propose to explore this dialectic with respect to one example and exhibit a kind of progress from, first, prescriptivism, to naturalism, then to some objections and remarks that may lead to a constructive compromise or synthesis of both. In other words, we may find it finally felicitous to say that both ethical theories are correct as far as they go, but that neither goes far enough, or, that each is adequate at a specific stage in the hierarchy of moral justification, but that the hierarchy is capped by neither.