Ethics are not waiting to be discovered in the cosmos. They are not universal constants encoded in the fabric of reality, nor are they handed down from transcendent realms. This much is obvious to anyone not trapped in metaphysical fantasies. But what follows from this recognition is not moral relativism or nihilism, it is the necessity of naturalist ethics.
Ethics are human constructions, forged through experience, reflection, and the demands of living together. This makes them not arbitrary, but accountable—accountable to reality, to evidence, to the actual consequences of our actions in the world we inhabit.
The Idealist Dodge
Here we encounter the standard idealist maneuver: "Science doesn't tell us what ought to be." This phrase sounds sophisticated, but it conceals a profound confusion. The problem is not that science fails to deliver moral truths—the problem is that nothing "tells us" what ought to be, because "ought" is not the kind of thing that gets "told."
To say “science can’t derive an ought from an is” only sounds damning if you believe “ought” is something hovering above the world, waiting to be extracted. But this entire framing is a residue of supernatural thinking: it assumes that “ought” refers to an intrinsic, objective feature of the universe that we must either access or forever lack. This is the real philosophical sleight-of-hand--the assumption that ethics are meaningless unless they are extra-human.
But the “ought” in moral discourse is not a fact in the world like a quark or a tree; it is a function of our goals, our capacities, and our shared conditions. It emerges not from metaphysics but from meaningful coordination: how shall we live, given the realities of what we are? Once you see that, the “is-ought” problem collapses, not because we’ve solved it, but because we’ve outgrown it.
The language gives the game away. “What ought to be” smuggles in a mystical presumption: that there is a realm of value beyond human judgment, waiting to be uncovered like scientific law. But the truth is far more liberating: the “ought” is not discovered, it is constructed. It is a tool, a lens, a framework we devise to help navigate the world intelligently, ethically, and sustainably.
This idealist sleight-of-hand has dominated moral philosophy for centuries: first, invent a supernatural category ("ought," "duty," "the good"), then puzzle over how to access it, then declare that empirical methods are inadequate to the task. But the entire “problem” is born of a mistake. The moral realm doesn’t float above nature; it arises within it, as an evolved and evolving response to the realities of conscious, social life.
Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as an Ought — no transcendent imperative, no moral gravity pulling us toward the good. There is only such a thing as an ought: a practical, human judgment made in context, in response to suffering, need, and possibility. It is not declared by the universe. It is reasoned, argued, negotiated, and earned. And it’s precisely because it isn’t handed down that it matters so deeply. We choose it. We build it. We live with its consequences.
What Ethics Actually Is
So what are ethics, really? They are our best attempts to understand how to live well given what we know about ourselves, each other, and the world. They emerge from our recognition that we are vulnerable, interdependent, and capable of both tremendous harm and tremendous good. Done intelligently, they are tested not in abstract reasoning but in lived experience, in the consequences of our actions for real people in real circumstances.
This is where naturalism becomes not just useful but essential. If ethics is about reducing suffering and promoting flourishing, then we need to know what suffering and flourishing actually are. We need to understand how human beings develop, how they are harmed, how they heal. We need to study the effects of different social arrangements, different practices, different ways of treating each other.
Take the question of corporal punishment. The naturalist doesn't ask what Kant or Mill or divine command theory has to say about hitting children. The naturalist asks: what happens when we hit children? And the answer is clear from decades of research: it increases aggression, impairs emotional regulation, damages attachment, raises risks for anxiety and depression, and alters brain development in measurable ways.
That's not moral decoration on top of some abstract principle. That is the moral case. The reason not to hit children isn't that it violates some transcendent law, but that it causes real harm to real people in ways we can document and understand.
The Supremacy of Evidence
This is why naturalist ethics is not just another approach among many, it is the only approach that takes morality seriously. Every other system ultimately appeals to authority (divine command, tradition, pure reason) or gives up on truth altogether (relativism, emotivism). Only naturalism grounds ethics in what we can know about human needs, human consequnces, and the conditions for well-being.
Consider how we now understand trauma, addiction, mental illness, social cooperation, child development, all crucial to ethical thinking, all discoveries of empirical investigation. The philosophical tradition gave us elaborate theories about duty and virtue and the good life, but it was psychology and neuroscience that revealed what actually helps people flourish and what devastates them.
This doesn't mean we simply read off moral conclusions from scientific data. It means we build our moral frameworks on the foundation of what we can actually know about human nature and human needs. We don't pretend that "is" automatically becomes "ought"—we recognize that without understanding what "is," our "ought" is just wishful thinking.
The Idealist Trap
The persistent separation of facts and values, of science and ethics, serves the interests of those who want to preserve moral authority without empirical accountability. It allows them to make claims about right and wrong that can never be tested, never be refuted, never be improved by evidence.
But this separation is false. Our values emerge from our experience of reality. Our sense of what matters is shaped by what we learn about what helps and what harms. The idea that we can have meaningful ethics while ignoring the best available knowledge about human beings is not philosophical sophistication, it is willful ignorance.
The naturalist case is simple: if we care about morality, we must care about truth, and if we care about truth, we must care about evidence. If we want to reduce suffering, we must understand what suffering is. If we want to promote flourishing, we must study what makes flourishing possible. The alternative is not deeper wisdom, it is moral fantasy.
Building Ethics on Solid Ground
None of this reduces ethics to science or eliminates the need for moral reasoning. Naturalist ethics still requires reflection, imagination, argument, and choice. But it requires these things to be grounded in reality rather than floating in abstraction.
We still have to decide what kind of life is worth living, what kind of society is worth building, what sacrifices are worth making for what gains. The idealist wants to treat these as non-empirical questions—matters of pure value judgment that exist in some special domain beyond scientific inquiry. But this is another mystification.
Consider our most cherished moral concepts. "Dignity" sounds elevated and abstract until you ask what it actually means: protection from humiliation, recognition of agency, freedom from degrading treatment. These aren't metaphysical properties, they refer to measurable aspects of human experience. When we say dignity matters more than efficiency, we're really saying that people suffer in specific, documentable ways when treated like tools rather than persons.
"Freedom" seems like a transcendent value until you examine why we value it: because excessive control leads to psychological damage, because autonomy is crucial for human development, because societies that balance freedom and risk consistently produce better outcomes for human flourishing. The justification for freedom is ultimately empirical.
Even "equality" doesn't rest on abstract principles but on evidence: that extreme inequality correlates with worse outcomes for everyone, that it breeds instability and violence, that it converts wealth into political power and undermines democratic institutions.
Our loftiest moral claims collapse into empirical concerns once we examine them honestly. Values don't float above the world, they are constructed responses to it, grounded in what we've learned about what helps and what harms conscious beings.
The naturalist builds ethics the way an engineer builds a bridge, not by ignoring the properties of materials and the laws of physics, but by understanding them thoroughly and working within their constraints. The result is not a limitation but a liberation: a moral framework that can actually bear the weight of human experience.
The idealist pretends that moral reasoning can proceed independently of facts about human nature and social reality. But scratch any moral argument and you find empirical assumptions beneath. The idealist's "pure" values turn out to be implicit theories about what makes life go well or badly, theories that can be tested, refined, or discarded based on evidence.
This is why naturalist ethics represents not just a different approach but a necessary evolution in moral thinking. We have learned too much about human nature, about suffering and flourishing, about the consequences of different ways of living, to continue pretending that moral truth exists in some realm beyond empirical investigation.
The idealist asks: "How can science tell us what ought to be?" The naturalist replies: "How can we decide what ought to be without understanding what is?" And in that difference lies the future of serious moral thinking.
Ethics are what we build when we choose to care about reality rather than fantasy, when we choose evidence over authority, when we choose to ground our moral commitments in the world we actually inhabit rather than the world we imagine we should inhabit.
The choice is not between science and morality. It is between reality and illusion. And in that choice, naturalism is not just preferable— it is inevitable!
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