Naturalistic Ethic
Even though there are several schools of Naturalistic ethic, they all have one major quality in common – recognition of Nature as the main guiding force of our lives. Naturalists try to understand Nature and how Nature and humanity are linked together. Adherents of Naturalism try to convince people to shift their attitude toward the need to follow the laws of nature as a principle of moral conduct. There are three major schools of Naturalism. The first school strives for “returning back to nature” in order to enjoy a simple life and find out the truth by communion with nature, which is considered to be the teacher for all people. The second school recognizes that the Nature has inner soul. For example, stoics believed that Nature possesses rational (comprehensible by human mind) and positive divine power and all events in people’s lives are predetermined by it. Thus, people should give in to their fates and react in a positive and rational way toward unforeseen circumstances because everything happens for a reason and for the best. The third school advocates evolutionary theory as the basis for ethical conduct. Followers of this theory argue that people should learn their behavior from the evolutionary model of natural world. Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest was applied to social context. The ethical conduct is considered to be right when people or government do not interfere to help weak “species” survive. As a result, the most developed, smart and enterprising people will prevail and as social evolution progresses, they will form a superior society.
As opposed to Naturalism, the ethical theory of duty occupies a completely different domain. Immanuel Kant, the major advocate of this ethical approach, argues that a person should base his or her actions on universal principles of conduct (moral laws) rather than emotional inclinations. In order to measure the ethical rightness of someone’s actions, we should consider that person’s will (hence, the name of the theory – “intentionalism”) but not the consequences that follow from his or her actions. Furthermore, any person should be able to defend his or her action as moral if he or she can affirm that all people at all times should perform the same action (in other words, an individual action is moral if it is moral as a universal law). Kant calls this the categorical imperative. When a rule of conduct is universalized it becomes a moral law and it is everyone’s duty to act according to that law. Another important point Kant makes when he asserts that people should treat others as “mainly as ends rather than means” which means that we cannot use other people as objects to reach our goals.
While the Naturalist position may indeed seem natural, I think it has significant drawbacks. One of my objections is that the Naturalist theory bases its conclusions on laws of nature that we may not fully understand or scientific assumptions that, highly plausible as they may be, are not yet fully scientifically proven. Thus, universal moral laws seem to follow from theories that may not yet have been proven to be universal laws of nature.
Kant’s theory is not without serious flaws either. For instance, ignoring the consequences of one’s actions may result in breaking one universal law as a result of following another. In other words, universal moral laws may be in conflict with one another (such as preservation of life vs. telling the truth), which would present a person with an impossible moral choice. Another objection is that neither of universalizability or morality seems to follow from the other, rather, universalizable principles and moral principles just seem to overlap a lot. In addition, the criterion of reversibility designed to distinguish between moral and immoral universalizable principles involves indirectly considering consequences of actions.
If I had to choose only one of these theories, I would choose Kant’s ethic of duty. His categorical imperative lets us take into account all cultures, religions and societies when determining which moral laws are truly universal. It also assumes a sense of duty not only toward following universal moral laws but also toward treating people “always as an end and never as a means only.”
In my opinion, the main obstacle in Kantian approach lies in his understanding of universality. “Universal” as “having no exceptions or qualifications” may lead to an empty set of universal moral laws. Rather, I think one should consider almost-universal laws, where “almost” stands for “in all but a negligible set of cases,” and a “negligible set” is a set that can be ignored when considering the totality of cases (e.g. for our purpose of establishing universality). In other words, an almost-universal law is a law that would be universal if a negligible set of cases were ignored. That would seem to resolve the situations where universal moral laws contradict one another as those situations should be few and far between compared to the totality of all possible cases. That is not to say that the negligible set should contain few situations, period; only a minute part of all possible situations. This also seems to resolve the case of self-sacrifice, which, even though it looks moral in many situations, cannot be universalized. It may be argued that those many situations are still within a negligible set compared to the totality of all situations in which it is theoretically possible to practice self-sacrifice, and thus self-sacrifice as a universal law is not moral.