naturalistic fallacy

Noun

naturalistic fallacy (plural naturalistic fallacies)

1. The fallacious belief that something is automatically good because it is natural or automatically bad because it is unnatural.
   • No, we do not have to put moral reasoning in a special category and use transcendental premises, because the posing of the naturalistic fallacy is itself a fallacy. For if ought is not is, what is?1998 April, Edward O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality”, in The Atlantic
   • It is easy to fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, which suggests that because the companies are successful, they must also be right.2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 11, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

   Synonyms:

   appeal to nature

2. Any attempt to define "good" verbally, instead of treating it as an undefined term, in terms of which other terms are defined.
   • Yet a mistake of this simple kind has commonly been made about good. It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what...1903, G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica