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Living according to nature: isn’t that a logical fallacy?
“Zeno was the first (in his treatise On the Nature of Man) to designate as the end ‘life in agreement with nature’ (or living agreeably with nature), which is the same as a virtuous life, virtue being the goal towards which nature guides us.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.87)
Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, was not actually the first one to argue that life should be lived in agreement with nature, as we find the idea in Plato’s Republic, at 428e. In fact, pretty much all the Hellenistic philosophies, as well as at least some Eastern traditions (e.g., Daoism) are established on essentially the same foundation.
These philosophies do differ, however, in how exactly they cash out the slogan. What does it mean to live according to nature? For the Stoics, for instance, it meant to use reason in order to live prosocially, because they took reason and prosociality to be fundamental to human nature. The Epicureans, by contrast, thought that pleasure, and especially absence of pain, where fundamental, so that’s how they interpreted the idea of living naturally.
Who was right? Actually, that’s not what I want to discuss today, though I think that they all got something right. It is certainly true that human beings are capable of reason and are naturally prosocial. It is also true that we seek pleasure and avoid pain. And, following the Aristotelians, it is likewise the case that we flourish if we have access to some external goods like health, education, and money. As I said, though, this is a discussion for another time.
What I’d like to explore now is whether the notion of living in agreement with nature is philosophically sound at all. In other words, we’re going to engage in a bit of meta-ethics. If it turned out that the approach suffers at the meta-ethical level, then there would be no point in discussing the subtle differences among Aristotelians, Epicureans, Stoics, and so forth.
Perhaps the most obvious objection to living according to nature is that it sounds suspiciously like a well known informal logical fallacy, the appeal to nature. One commits an appeal to nature when one argues that something is good because it is natural. The argument goes like this:
