If something is natural does that mean it is good? While this essay will talk a bit about that question, and it’s inverse, that is not the primary concern. The thesis of this essay is instead that we should be aware of which assumptions we privilege in discussions, and to be especially cautious of buying into the frameworks others use. We all view the world through different conceptual frameworks, but not all frameworks are equal, we need to be careful about implicitly accepting the baggage other people’s claims carry.

Is something good if it is natural?

Full disclosure this is something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, but then Jullian Hazell went and wrote a great piece on this, so I put off my own discussion (and as such will keep mine brief).

 So does natural entail good? If we can show something occurs in nature does it mean we should favor it?

 Obviously no! Massive storms are naturally occurring, but no one thinks that hurricane Katrina or the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami were good in and of themselves, or even that they caused good things. This is a very obvious point. So obvious in fact I think it may be uncharitable to people who claim natural things are good, clearly they don’t just mean ‘if nature then good’, but I’ll touch on this in another time (subscribe to my blog!).

Is unnatural bad?

This is a related point, and one that I think people sometimes overlook. We often privilege that which occurs outside the human will, such as forests, bird nests, and the ocean, over human creations, such as cities, roads or consumer goods. Similarly people will sometimes smugly point out that something is a ‘social construct’.

My social relations are, unsurprisingly, social constructs. The fact that we have friends and treat and act with them in certain ways is just a construct, something we made up. Perhaps it serves an evolutionary purpose at times, but helping someone move a couch isn’t ‘natural’. We made up the expectations and the way we treat those we care about. This doesn’t make relationships any less valuable.

We made up governments, and money, and religious practices. Are these things less valuable or bad because of that? As someone with a job, who has voted in elections, and just went to the store to buy some potato chips, I’m pretty confident the social constructs we created can still be of worth. 

Why talk about this?

I want to give us a framework with which to view a different problem through, and I’m hoping what I’ve said so far is uncontroversial. Natural doesn’t necessarily entail good, and unnatural or socially constructed does not entail bad. To put it another way, there is no normativeelement to naturalness or unnaturalness. What actions, beliefs, and states of affairs should one take, have, or live in? When the answer is ‘this’ act, belief, or state of affairs the answer is normative (or when it is saying ‘not this’).

When someone says something natural is good they are imparting normativity, normativity that isn’t there simply because they showed that an act, belief, or state of affairs was natural. And sometimes we buy the normativity that was imparted on a claim. It is good to be tall (if you are a basketball player and want to win). Building houses is bad (if you want your skyline to remain unobstructed). Mothers caring for their children is natural, and good (for the child having a productive and happy life). All of these statements, whether or not you necessarily agree with them, contain a normative component.

As an aside, normativity often comes up in relation to ethics, because an ethical theory is normative (it tells us what is right or wrong, morally speaking), but normativity does not mean moral. Take our basketball example, that claim doesn’t have a moral component. People can want to win basketball games for non-moral reasons, and so the claim that we should desire height can be normative and non-moral. Something is normative when it says actions, beliefs, and states of affairs are good or desirable.

Snuck Normativity

So returning to the examples of normative claims I gave, you can see how each of those had additional context that in some sense justified or explained the normativity. This context isn’t present in claims like ‘eating meat is natural’, but in some sense it almost feels as if it is. If someone said to you “eating meat is natural” your first thought likely isn’t “could you please say more, that claim seems to be you just stating a fact, and just stating facts randomly isn’t particularly helpful.” You probably think “this person thinks it’s good to eat meat.” 

But you’ve bought into a normative framework when you think that, and you shouldn’t have. All the person really said was ‘the act of eating meat has the property of natural’. You’ve snucksome normativity into the claim, or perhaps they have.

And sometimes this is what the other person wants. We can think of the motte-and-bailey, when someone switches between an easily defended position and a controversial position, where one can be mistaken for the other. Sometimes people will use a motte-and-bailey, make some controversial claim and defend a much weaker or perhaps unrelated claim, and then move back to their controversial claim once they’ve defended the weaker claim. This Slate Star Codex post has some examples.

Sometimes you can get motte-and-bailey-ed but for normativity. “Eating meat is natural.” If you criticize someone who makes this claim by saying “natural does not entail normativity” they can reply to you “ah ha! I knew this, and of course I simply meant that eating meat has the property of natural” and then once you’ve backed off they’ll go back to saying eating meat is natural in a clearly normative way. So for one, be on the lookout for motte-and-normativity.

I think related here is the concept of a snuck premise, and perhaps a lot of what I’ve identified here is just another name for what we might call a snuck premise. Someone might make an empirical claim, or state a fact, and you’ll (perhaps reasonably) take it to also impart normative judgements. But in some sense what has happened is that someone has made an empirical claim and at the same time asserted a framework through which to view the world and that claim, and simply done it in one fell swoop. But if you aren’t careful to disentangle the two, you can become trapped. Sometimes people use this as a rhetorical technique, and sometimes people just do it by mistake, and just like in the case of a snuck premise we have to be careful when engaging someone who purposely or accidentally employs this rhetorical tactic.

so if I had to define my concept it would be as follows…

Snuck Normativity: When a claim, typically a non-normative one, is taken to entail some normative assessment or a normative assessment that isn’t directly implied by the claim

In practice

When someone says “eating meat is natural” your instinct shouldn’t be to show eating meat isn’t natural, it should be to say “so?” If you start engaging in an empirical debate about meat eating’s naturalness you’ve bought into the normative framework of someone else. You’re trapped. No amount of empirical debate will ever help you, because in some sense you’ve entered wonderland, the laws of physics don’t make sense anymore. Do you think if you could show eating meat is unnatural you would somehow make the other person change their mind? People who claim being gay is unnatural won’t suddenly believe gay marriage is good if you can show them that other animals have homosexual behavior. That person has snuck a normative claim in by using an empirical claim that had no inherent normativity, and by engaging you empower the assumptions they’ve brought into the conversation. You got snuck premised and motte-and-bailey-ed at the same time. They used an empirical claim as a trojan horse for their world view, when really you probably think that empirical claim has no actual bearing on the question at hand.

I’m currently taking a Women’s and Gender Studies class, and one of the lectures was about gender essentialism and how it’s wrong. This confused me, because it doesn’t actually matter if gender characteristics are based in biology; that has no bearing on if they’re good or bad. If someone at PragerU says “oh gender hierarchies occur in nature, and actually I can prove it just look at lobsters!” You shouldn’t respond by saying “No, lobsters don’t work that way at all”, you should respond by saying “So what?” In some sense my professor has bought into the framework of someone else. They didn’t say “gender essentialism is wrong because it doesn’t impart normativity, and people pretend it does” they pushed back empirically against essentialism. But do they really think their normative view that gender inequality is bad finds it justificatory and explanatory basis in whether there are biological gender differences? No. It’s irrelevant to their normative position.

What makes these examples particularly persnickety is that so many different rhetorical techniques are coalescing and occurring at once. You need to be on the lookout for when people use empirical claims as vehicles for getting someone to implicitly buy into certain assumptions. You need to be on the lookout for motte-and-baileys. And you need to be on the lookout for when someone uses these techniques to get you to buy their normative view. I can sneak in an essentialism entails good view by simply getting you to engage my empirical claims, when those don’t matter. I can get you to buy my normative assessments when nothing I’ve said is actually normative. Natural doesn’t mean good.

If a claim isn’t normative make sure you get someone to add a normative element before you question its normativity. If your own view isn’t dependent on those empirical facts it doesn’t make sense to quibble over them, move up a level and question whether their overall view is correct, facts or not.