Donal writes [first citing part of a newspaper obituary]
Natural goodness can apply as well to physical parts of living beings as to their actions: to say that a tree has good roots, in her analysis, is logically the same as to say that a person performs a good deed. The underlying logic has to do with the assumption that good roots or good actions are those that are necessary in the lives of individuals of that species. Moral goodness should therefore be understood as the natural>flourishing of humans as living beings.
the following.
Let the bollix commence. The first claim in the above paragraph is off the rails:- "to say that a tree has good roots, in her analysis, is logically the same as to say that a person performs a good deed." No. To say that ethically a tree ought to have "good roots" is (perhaps) logically equivalent to saying 'It is morally good that the tree has good roots' ['good' being used in two logically different senses here, the first ethical, the second 'factual']; and to say 'It is morally good that the tree has good roots' is to make an ethical claim that may be said therefore to share a 'logical sameness' with other ethical claims. But to say that a tree has 'good' roots in the non-ethical factual sense that, say, it is primed to survive a 'bad' winter better than a tree with 'bad' roots, is to make no ethical claim at all - and whatever might be said about superficial similarities in logical form between such a claim and the claim that someone has done something _ethically_ 'good', because the 'naturalistic fallacy' is indeed a kind of logical fallacy these two kinds of claim are not at all "logically the same".
As Foot nowhere said what was reported above the criticism of it is /a fortiori/ not a criticism of a philosophical view held by her. Whether anyone else believes it,
I don't know.The 'Naturalistic Fallacy,' in ethics was presented in G. E. Moore's /Principia Ethica/, in 1903. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives an account of it, of which this is part.
In the first three chapters Moore sets out his criticisms of ‘ethical naturalism’. At the core of these criticisms is the thesis that the position involves a fallacy, the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, of supposing that goodness, which Moore takes to be the fundamental ethical value, can be defined in naturalistic terms, in terms, say, of pleasure or desire or the course of evolution. As against all such claims Moore insists that goodness is indefinable, or unanalysable, and thus that ethics is an autonomous science, irreducible to natural science or, indeed, to metaphysics. Moore's main argument against the possibility of any such definition of goodness is that when we confront a putative definition, such as that to be good is to be something which we desire to desire, we can tell that this is not a claim that is true by definition because its truth remains for us an ‘open question’ in the sense that it remains sensible to doubt it in a way which would not be possible if it were just a definition which makes explicit our understanding of the words. The merits of this argument are questionable...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/#3 Robert Paul The Reed Institute
