chapter 3

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E T H I C A L N AT U R A L I S M
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nicholas l. sturgeon

The term ethical naturalism has been used by philosophers as a name for a
number of quite dierent views, only a few of which are the topic of this essay.
Philosophers writing about ethics standardly draw a distinction between rst-
order and second-order questions. First-order questions are about which actions
are right or wrong, which actions, character traits, and institutions good or bad,
and the like. Second-order questions are about the status of the rst-order ques-
tions: what their subject matter is, whether they have objective answers, what kind
of evidence is relevant in addressing them. Most of the doctrines called natural-
ism, including the ones on which I shall focus, fall in the second of these cate-
gories, though not all do. To begin with several that I shall identify only to put
aside, the ancient sophists initiated a debate about whether morality exists by
nature or by convention, and the term naturalism can of course be used for
view that the correct answer is by nature. Although this dispute is hard to pin
down, it is presumably a second-order one. A related viewa rst-order doctrine,
and perhaps the one introductory students most often think of when introduced
to the termis that moral goodness or rightness consists in following nature, or
in acting according to nature. This rather vague thesis, too, is one with a long
philosophical pedigree. As Joseph Butler noted, it could mean, a bit more pre-
cisely, either that virtuous actions are ones that conform (in some sense to be
explained) to the nature of things, or that they are the ones that conform more
specically to human nature. The Stoics held both versions of this view; Butler
followed Aristotle in emphasizing a view of the latter sort (Butler, 1900, Preface
and Sermons 13).