Ethical Naturalism and the Error of Conflating Base Properties with Resultant Properties

Ethical Naturalism is the view that properties like goodness, badness, right and wrong are reducible to natural properties. For instance, "ø-ing is bad" might be nothing more than the fact that ø-ing produces more on-balance suffering than pleasure. Natural properties like suffering and pleasure constitute goodness/badness. Recently, William FitzPatrick has argued that certain forms of ethical naturalism make the error of conflating resultant properties (goodness) with base properties (e.g., pain, pleasure). 

To see why this might be an error, consider evaluations of goodness in other contexts. Suppose I evaluate a computer and conclude that it is a good computer. I might explain that the computer is good because it has various properties -- e.g., fast processing, plenty of storage space, high quality graphics, etc. But it would be a mistake to think that the property goodness is identical to those properties. After all, a lot of non-computer things are good but lack the previously mentioned properties. A car can be good even though it lacks high quality graphics. Moreover, a property can be good in one context and bad in another. Sharpness is good for a knife set but bad for a play toys, suggesting that there is more than mere sharpness to the goodness of a knife. Hence, goodness is not identical to a set of good-making properties. To think otherwise is to confuse good-making properties with goodness itself. As the computer and knife cases show, that is a mistake. 

According to FitzPatrick, the fact that F is good more plausibly involves something complex -- to wit, F has a set of properties, N, that make it satisfy the standards of excellence for F's. Part of the standards of excellence for knives is that they cut. Sharpness allows a knife to satisfy that standard, so sharpness can explain why a knife is good. In general, evaluations of goodness change depending on standards of excellence. For these reasons, FitzPatrick thinks that Ethical Naturalists (and their critics) should view goodness as more than (i.e., not merely naming or identical to) a set of natural properties. Instead, goodness is better understood as a complex property. F's being good means that F has the property of having N and thereby satisfying the relevance standards. 

Footnotes:

[1] FitzPatrick, "Skepticism About Naturalizing Normativity: In Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism" (2014).