ABSTRACT
The Naturalistic Fallacy is considered to be the biggest single obstacle to any attempt to argue for a rational basis to ethics or for the possibility of naturalism. Without going into the fine details of scholarship about its provenance, suffice it to say that meta-ethics cites the following authorities, which are roughly historically sequenced: Hume, Moore, logical positivism, the first wave of language analysis, ethical relativism based on the "form of life" argument. This chapter briefly assess each of these influences, and concentrates on the Naturalistic Fallacy as it is shaped and structured by the demand of formal logic in terms of logical derivability or strict implication which is shown as part of the positivist influence at work in moral discourse. It looks at some recent attempts to combat this influence. The chapter discusses main currents sustaining the fact/value distinction to see if any light could be thrown on the problem posed by the Naturalistic Fallacy in moral philosophy.
