Moralistic fallacy

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The moralistic fallacy is an inversion of the appeal to nature. Whereas the appeal to nature states that "X is natural, therefore it is good" or "X is unnatural, therefore it is bad", the moralistic fallacy consists of saying "X is good, therefore it is natural" or "X is bad, therefore it is unnatural." The way a person thinks things should be is asserted to be, in fact, how they are.

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[edit] Examples

  • PETA and other animal rights activists who view killing animals to eat their meat as immoral have argued that humans lack a physiological need for it, or even more absurdly that alcohol is healthier than animals' milk.
  • Some feminists may go beyond merely saying men and women ought to have equal opportunities to asserting that they do everything equally well, or that women do everything better.
  • Communists deem capitalism to be unjust and "contradictory." They also argue that not only is the communist economic system viable but its development is scientifically inevitable, any arguments to the contrary being dismissed as false consciousness or made by capitalist lackeys. Scientific findings that contradict Marxist ideology are deemed "bourgeois pseudoscience."
  • Infidelity is viewed as immoral by many, and so it must not be natural to desire other people than one's monogamous partner.
  • Some fundamentalists' statements about Darwinism or homosexuality (which, in that latter case, also use the reverse).

The concern has been that evidence contradicting such moral values will lead to people justifying this behavior, since it is "natural". While understandable, this has led to instances in which research that contradicts them caused people uncomfortable with it to engage in denialism. In the realm of religion it can take the form "God is good, therefore He does not support X, which I view as bad." Alternately, it would be theoretically possible for an atheist to make the opposite fallacious argument (as they are alleged to by some theists) that "I view God (or His commands) to be bad, therefore He does not exist."

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