Can Moral Norms Be Derived from Nature? The Incompatibility of Natural Scientific Investigation and Moral Norm Generation

Can moral normative principles or statements of moral normative value be derived from nature? One way to characterize this project is as a look into whether or not the naturalistic fallacy is in fact a fallacy. Some argue that nature is our best resource for acquiring moral norms. There are at least two different approaches to deriving morally normative content from nature. The first is the general use of nature to establish the fundamental principles of naturalistic normative theories. These theories posit that the good exists in nature, and that it is a discoverable, natural entity, perhaps, such as beauty or pleasure, or some other natural entity. This first approach lends itself to straightforward teleological theories where moral actions maximize the good. The second approach uses nature to find specific examples of moral norms; once these examples are found, moral actions are the ones that imitate or somehow cohere well with them.