On Messick and Naturalism: A Rejoinder to Fort

Professor Fort (1999) imagines a dispute over the moral importance of certain facts, with David Messick and himself on one side and Donna Wood and me on the other. He has identified an important issue—ethical naturalism—but that issue is not a point of disagreement between Messick and me.Fort has some interesting ideas about how Messick’s views might help in creating organizations that are moral communities. Beyond noting that those ideas constitute the most important part of his essay and merit consideration, I shall not comment on them.Moral philosophers who are naturalists—I am one—hold that there is no bright line between ought-statements and is-statements and that empirical facts have implications for moral facts. So, for example, that a certain practice helps a community survive is a strong sort of reason for claiming that it is a morally good practice, other things being equal. But most naturalists do not claim that any practice that has arisen by virtue of evolution is ipso facto a morally good practice even if it does serve some purpose. Nor does ethical naturalism have a characteristic view of the extent to which our evolutionary history, as opposed to our rational deliberation, determines what we do.