Aristotelian Conceptions of the Good Life and the Naturalistic Fallacy

Abstract

Aristotelian conceptions of the good life are often criticized from several ethical positions, like G.E. Moore’s anti-naturalism or emotivism and prescriptivism. Aristotelians are accused of committing the naturalistic fallacy when they make a moral evaluation of features, actions, intentions and faculties of human beings. In this paper, I examine and refute Alfonso Gómez-Lobo’s strategy to reject that accusation; then, I propose another strategy and I argue that inclusivist Aristotelian conceptions of the good life could be freed from such criticism if they appeal to the concept of “brute facts relative to” as proposed by G.E. Anscombe.