The Fallacy of Inferences from One Moral System to Another

The well-known tool for detecting a naturalistic fallacy is G. E. Moore's open question argument from the famous §13 of his Principia Ethica (1903, 15). Just as Moore used the argument to show that the word ‘good’ must denote a non-natural quality, it can be shown that the term ‘human dignity’ in a legal system purporting to treat major moral systems with the same respect must denote something else than the meaning attributed to human dignity within a particular system. Just as Moore could meaningfully ask whether something conducive to pleasure, for example, is really good, it can be meaningfully asked whether it is really an expression of human dignity that a person is autonomous, that he is created in the image of God, that he is favoured by Allah, that he must be a working individual.

Just as Mackie observed in the second chapter of his Ethics that the meaning of good seems to be relative to egocentric commendations (1977, 55, 64), the meaning of human dignity seems to be relative to the perspective of certain moral systems.

It should be noted that the fallacy committed here is closely connected with the naturalistic fallacy of deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Moreover, when we contemplate this fallacy more closely, we learn that the temptation consists not so much in inferring a deontic ought from a factual statement. That would be impossible. Persons are rather tempted because they have grown up with a certain moral system, and therefore they tend to generalize the standards of that moral system as being valid also for people of other moral systems or for a legal system. This can easily be done without deriving a deontic ought from a factual statement. The way such persons argue is rather as follows:

This seems to be a logically correct syllogism as long as the tacit assumptions in parentheses are not made explicit. Its premises and conclusion consist only of factual statements.