Is the "naturalistic fallacy" a fallacy?

[Ron Webb]

Obviously there are natural things that are very dangerous, and manufactured things that are benign, but it still seems to me that the odds are strongly in favour of natural source things being safer than non-natural.

I mean, if you were to go out into the natural environment and randomly pick something -- a leaf, a beetle, a pebble -- put it in your mouth and try to eat it, you probably wouldn't do yourself any terrible harm. On the other hand, if you were to take a random sample of a substance found in a factory or a chemical supply store, you'd be taking a much bigger risk.

So it seems to me that if a product can legitimately claim to be "natural", while not an absolute guarantee of safety, it does give me greater confidence that it probably won't hurt me. (Even if it does me no good either.)

What do you think?

 

[Donn]

Why pick a factory or chemical store? Why not a supermarket? I can't quite put my finger on it, but I smell a fallacy in your argument.

 

[Pulvinar]

What do you think?

I think if you stumbled upon a bakery in the middle of a desert with cactus you'd form a quite different opinion of the odds...

 

[Ron Webb]

Why pick a factory or chemical store? Why not a supermarket? I can't quite put my finger on it, but I smell a fallacy in your argument.

Because manufactured items in a supermarket have already passed stringent safety tests, so they are not a random sample. Besides which, a supermarket contains a mix of natural and manufactured substances.

 

[Ron Webb]

I think if you stumbled upon a bakery in the middle of a desert with cactus you'd form a quite different opinion of the odds...

Sorry, I don't think I understand your point. All I can say is that the odds of stumbling upon a bakery are probably pretty slim, so once again your sample is badly skewed.

Oh, and cactus? They are mostly edible as far as I know. Getting stuck with a thorn is no fun, but I don't think it would do you any long-term harm.

 

[ctamblyn]

Define random. If you picked a point on the Earth's surface uniformly at random, it is most likely to be in the middle of a big patch of undrinkable water.

 

[phildonnia]

It seems likely that our bodies evolved to handle most substances that they might come across in the environment that they evolved in. Thus, it would not be surprising that the chemicals produced by nature are largely harmless. And even those that are harmful can be expected to taste unappetizing. Obviously, there are exceptions; evolution is often satisfied with a simple general solution that works 99% of the time.

Since we are now exposed to chemicals that did not exist until very recently, and which our bodies might not have the machinery to deal with, it's a legitimate policy to be more skeptical of synthetic substances than natural ones.

But this is not the Naturalistic Fallacy as I understand the term. The Naturalistic Fallacy is to say that synthetic substances are ipso facto bad. Some have generalized the concept to "going from 'is' to 'ought'"; for example, "We did not evolve to consume Aspartame, therefore, we ought not to."

But I would not characterize it as the Naturalistic Fallacy to say "We did not evolve to consume Aspartame, therefore we should be very cautious about having everybody on the planet eat a whole bunch right now."

 

[Ron Webb]

Define random. If you picked a point on the Earth's surface uniformly at random, it is most likely to be in the middle of a big patch of undrinkable water.

Seawater is not undrinkable. It's not going to hydrate you, but it's not poisonous. Sure, if you drink too much it will make you sick, but then most things will make you sick if you eat/drink too much. I'd rather take my chances drinking seawater than the effluent from a chemical factory.

 

[Kid Eager]

Seawater is not undrinkable. It's not going to hydrate you, but it's not poisonous. Sure, if you drink too much it will make you sick, but then most things will make you sick if you eat/drink too much. I'd rather take my chances drinking seawater than the effluent from a chemical factory.

Whut? How is this even relevant?

I'd rather take my chances drinking distilled water than the effluent from a Black Bear...

 

[blutoski]

Obviously there are natural things that are very dangerous, and manufactured things that are benign, but it still seems to me that the odds are strongly in favour of natural source things being safer than non-natural.

I mean, if you were to go out into the natural environment and randomly pick something -- a leaf, a beetle, a pebble -- put it in your mouth and try to eat it, you probably wouldn't do yourself any terrible harm. On the other hand, if you were to take a random sample of a substance found in a factory or a chemical supply store, you'd be taking a much bigger risk.

So it seems to me that if a product can legitimately claim to be "natural", while not an absolute guarantee of safety, it does give me greater confidence that it probably won't hurt me. (Even if it does me no good either.)

What do you think?

I think you've misinterpreted the naturalistic fallacy. The general form of the fallacy is:

P1: X is natural
P2: whatever is natural is good
C: therefore X is good


eg:

P1: [Smallpox killing and scarring children] is natural
P2: whatever is natural is good
C: therefore [Smallpox killing and scarring children] is good <- completely fails the common sense sniff test


eg:

P1: [Volcanoes erupting and wiping out the families in Pompeii] is natural
P2: whatever is natural is good
C: therefore [Volcanoes erupting and wiping out the families in Pompeii] is good


It's fallacious because it's a non sequitur.
The observation that something is natural does not impact our evaluation of its desireability.

 

[blutoski]

So it seems to me that if a product can legitimately claim to be "natural", while not an absolute guarantee of safety, it does give me greater confidence that it probably won't hurt me.

I think this is partly caused by living in a very human-shaped environment, and we are unaware of how dangerous nature was before we tamed animals and cultivated plants.

A great example of this is almonds. When we were in Africa a decade ago, my wife asked about a particular tree that had some fruit on it... it was a wild almond tree. She almost ate them, but was stopped just in time. Wild almonds are extremely poisonous. They grow a few of these trees on the property in order to kill ants.

The almonds we cultivate for food today are the product of perhaps ten thousand years of human genetic manipulation.


And Ray Comfort was pwnd a few years ago for a simlar display of ignorance: he described how perfect bananas were and that they must have been designed. Well, of course they're designed. Designed by humans. Wild bananas are downright inedible. They're not sweet, have hardly any fruit per pod, and they have hard seeds the size of grapeshot. But our ancestors saw potential and cultivated many varietals that are very delicious.

 

[ehcks]

Personally, I enjoy how the most powerful toxin known to man is entirely natural and produced by bacteria.

Nature sure knows best.

 

[Pulvinar]

Sorry, I don't think I understand your point. All I can say is that the odds of stumbling upon a bakery are probably pretty slim, so once again your sample is badly skewed.

Oh, and cactus? They are mostly edible as far as I know. Getting stuck with a thorn is no fun, but I don't think it would do you any long-term harm.

My point is that how you measure odds depends heavily on where you are. Obviously you're not spreading the odds evenly over the surface of the earth, as you're more likely to drown in an ocean before reaching land. But even the odds of landing in desert are still much greater than landing near a dangerous-chemical factory.

You can eat a cactus if you carefully cut it apart with a knife, but then a knife's not natural.

 

[ctamblyn]

Seawater is not undrinkable. It's not going to hydrate you, but it's not poisonous. Sure, if you drink too much it will make you sick, but then most things will make you sick if you eat/drink too much. I'd rather take my chances drinking seawater than the effluent from a chemical factory.

True, regarding seawater vs. factory effluent, but I thought we were talking about randomly selected substances. If I were to select something uniformly at random from the available mass of synthetic materials, I'd imagine that it's far more likely to be concrete or plastic than factory effluent. Perhaps not, perhaps someone here knows of some relevant statistics, but that's what a brief search suggested.

I'm not sure such a random selection is the best approach. I think (but it's your question in the end) that a fairer way to compare the natural with the synthetic would be to make like-for-like comparisons based on function, e.g. artificial food flavourings versus natural ones, or wool vs. nylon, or pasteurised vs. non-pasteurised milk.

That said, others here have addressed the actual naturalistic fallacy aspect of this much better, so I'm happy to bow out rather than pursue this angle.

 

[blutoski]

You can eat a cactus if you carefully cut it apart with a knife, but then a knife's not natural.

If you're lucky you could perhaps find an eolith^WP.

 

[lopeyschools]

Because manufactured items in a supermarket have already passed stringent safety tests, so they are not a random sample. Besides which, a supermarket contains a mix of natural and manufactured substances.

I think if you closer at the words I've bolded you'll realize why exactly it is we use regulations and testing rather then assuming natural things are good for you.

 

[ConspicuousCarl]

It seems likely that our bodies evolved to handle most substances that they might come across in the environment that they evolved in. Thus, it would not be surprising that the chemicals produced by nature are largely harmless. And even those that are harmful can be expected to taste unappetizing.

That last sentence is exactly why you are wrong. We evolved taste, smell, and even visual rules to help us avoid bad stuff. Otherwise we would be eating rocks and moldy animal corpses. Not to mention all of the easy insect and plant prey which evolved toxic defenses.

If you are lost in the woods, you sure as heck can't just grab stuff at random and eat it.

But that doesn't matter. You and the rest of the nature people are arguing that naturalism is a heuristic, which wouldn't make it cease to be a fallacy.

Furthermore, the naturalistic fallacy is never used in the context of jungle survival. It is used in he supermarket (which has been noted as containing carefully tested food) to make black and white categories.

 

[Ron Webb]

I'd rather take my chances drinking seawater than the effluent from a chemical factory.

Whut? How is this even relevant?

It's just another way of saying that I think a random sample of natural water (even seawater) is probably safer than a random sample of synthetic chemicals, i.e. natural is usually safer than synthetic.

 

[phildonnia]

That last sentence is exactly why you are wrong. We evolved taste, smell, and even visual rules to help us avoid bad stuff. Otherwise we would be eating rocks and moldy animal corpses. Not to mention all of the easy insect and plant prey which evolved toxic defenses.

If you are lost in the woods, you sure as heck can't just grab stuff at random and eat it.

But that doesn't matter. You and the rest of the nature people are arguing that naturalism is a heuristic, which wouldn't make it cease to be a fallacy.

Furthermore, the naturalistic fallacy is never used in the context of jungle survival. It is used in he supermarket (which has been noted as containing carefully tested food) to make black and white categories.

All points well taken.

Let me clarify my comment about "natural" bad stuff that tastes bad. I am saying that, for example, natural alkaloids are not strictly harmful because you're likely to spit them out if you get a taste. I would trust that reaction more in the woods than I would in, say, an ethylene glycol factory.

We are on the same page as far as the Naturalistic Fallacy being a fallacy. And I would agree that in the supermarket context, it is not a very useful heuristic for judging the healthiness of your food.

 

[Ron Webb]

But this is not the Naturalistic Fallacy as I understand the term. The Naturalistic Fallacy is to say that synthetic substances are ipso facto bad.

I think you've misinterpreted the naturalistic fallacy. The general form of the fallacy is:

P1: X is natural
P2: whatever is natural is good
C: therefore X is good

No, I think you're exaggerating the naturalistic position. Nobody is saying that synthetic substances are always bad, and nobody is saying that whatever is natural is always good. The argument is simply that in general, synthetic things are more likely to be harmful than natural things. Of course we all know there are exceptions.

The observation that something is natural does not impact our evaluation of its desireability.

I think it does. It doesn't decide the matter conclusively, but it does have an impact.