Ancient Wisdom
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It is often advanced that there is homosexuality practiced by animals and therefore it is 'natural' for humans to do the same.
But in the animal kingdom, incest, cannibalism and public defecation are also natural. Does that give licence to humans to do the same?
Hume's famous passage in the Treatise of Human Nature where he posits a basic distinction between "is" and "ought", between the descriptive and the normative does not make the same point as G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, from where the term "Naturalistic Fallacy" originates. This is not the place to even begin to survey the intricate philosophical issues connected to the Naturalistic Fallacy and ethical naturalism. The point here is merely to suggest that there are difficulties in both extreme stances in the debate, vz. naive naturalism on one hand, extreme anti-naturalism on the other. Naive naturalism is what was rightly denounced by Hume when he points to the unanalysed and unsubstantiated deduction from "is" to "ought", from the descriptive to the prescriptive. It is perhaps easy to see this as a mistake in the abstract, but it is far more difficult to avoid the trap when discussing some particular concrete problem and examples of illegitimate naturalism are easily found in many b
..found in many bioethical discussions.
But in the animal kingdom, incest, cannibalism and public defecation are also natural. Does that give licence to humans to do the same?
Hume's famous passage in the Treatise of Human Nature where he posits a basic distinction between "is" and "ought", between the descriptive and the normative does not make the same point as G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, from where the term "Naturalistic Fallacy" originates. This is not the place to even begin to survey the intricate philosophical issues connected to the Naturalistic Fallacy and ethical naturalism. The point here is merely to suggest that there are difficulties in both extreme stances in the debate, vz. naive naturalism on one hand, extreme anti-naturalism on the other. Naive naturalism is what was rightly denounced by Hume when he points to the unanalysed and unsubstantiated deduction from "is" to "ought", from the descriptive to the prescriptive. It is perhaps easy to see this as a mistake in the abstract, but it is far more difficult to avoid the trap when discussing some particular concrete problem and examples of illegitimate naturalism are easily found in many b
..found in many bioethical discussions.