This has become such a knee-jerk response (not meant as a slight to you juggler as I have a great deal of respect for your position) that I really think that people need to better understand Moore's meaning. It's a bit of a two edged sword. Moore held that "what is good" is an open question and that approval of "x" and disapproval of "x" can both be true.
I'm interested in "natural" only insomuch as it sculpts our sense of morality. The response to this typically is "evolution can tell us why we feel something is right but it doesn't tell us if it is right".
To which I would retort, what does? If morality isn't a priori then it isn't absolute. Moral truth for me can be different than moral truth for you. As Moore said, it is possible that I can approve of "x" and you disapprove of "x" and we can both be right.
Does that mean that morality is strictly relative?
According to Michael Shermer and Joshua Green and others, humans have near universal mechanisms for morality. We have empathy, the capacity for compassion and theory of mind.
These are natural and if we want to understand why nearly all of us have some sense that it is wrong to cause harm then we need to look to nature.
Absent that you've got to show why morality is a priori or you've got to demonstrate a supernatural basis for morality.
I appreciate your remarks. I think you're going way beyond the comments I was responding to.
I'm NOT arguing that it's immoral to eat meat. I'm simply arguing that the fact that we CAN eat meat does not argue one way or the other whether we SHOULD eat meat. If that were the case, you could as well argue the position that a couple of these people thought I was making (which I'm not): the fact that you CAN live without eating meat, means you SHOULD refrain from eating meat.
It would also be the naturalistic fallacy for me to argue that since vegetarianism came later in our development (what biologists might call a "derived" character), it is more advanced.
I do have my own theories about morality, and I'll happily summarize my thoughts. I think morality is very much akin to language. There is an innate capacity (related to brain structures and functions) and then there is the external or conventional aspect. In language these two would be the capacity and tendency to learn language versus the specific human languages--English, Spanish, etc.--that have developed by convention) As with language, the variation in the conventional morality (the norms or standards of society) do vary, but not a whole lot.
As with language, our capacity for morality and the specific conventions evolved as adaptations for living in social groups. I also think it's tied up with our capacity and tendency to infer intention, and our ability to empathize with others. We can easily imagine ourselves in the other's place. Most people I know extend that moral thinking and empathy easily to their household pets. Some of us just carry it further.
For me this sense of empathy with animals, plus some of my own logical thinking, led to my position. (A lot of the justifications for eating meat that I grew up with were based on supernatural ideas that I rejected--e.g. "animals don't have souls" and "God gave man dominion over the animals to exploit as we will".)
At any rate, I reject the idea that our "nature" determines morality--no more than our brains pre-determine what language we might learn (though it certainly limits what our brains can do linguistically--I think Pinker has it down to relatively few "switches" that can go one way or the other as far as grammar). In other words, choice and societal conventions have to be involved.
If there is no choice, then there is no debate, right? We would all just act the only way we can act.
