What does it mean to live according to nature?

The Stoics, the Platonists, and the Epicureans agreed: we should live in agreement with nature. But what does that mean?

Image from nature.org.

“Again, to live according to virtue is equivalent to living according to the experience of natural events, as Chrysippus says in the first book of his work On Goals. For our natures are parts of the nature of the universe. This is why the goal becomes to live according to nature, that is, according to our own nature and that of the universe.” (Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.88)

Chrysippus of Soli, the guy mentioned by Diogenes Laërtius in the quote above, was the third head of the Stoic school, and one of its most influential exponents. But other prominent Greco-Roman philosophers, including the Platonist Cicero and Epicurus, agreed with the general sentiment: we ought to live “in agreement with nature.”

Meaning what, exactly? There is a lot of confusion about this catchy phrase that is justly considered a crucial mantra for the Stoics. I’m going to try to clarify why the phrase does not mean at least three things that it is sometimes taken to mean, finally arriving at what I think is a good and useful sense in which it should be taken.

I. No tree hugging

The first thought that might come to a modern reader upon hearing that we should live in harmony with nature is to run naked into a forest and start hugging trees. Or if not that, at least that the phrase refers to some kind of conscious environmentalism that we ought to practice.

As much as a healthy respect for the environment is surely a good idea, and even though naked tree hugging could be fun (depending on the weather), this is most definitely not what the ancient Stoics understood Chrysippus to be advising.

If anything, the Stoics—together with many other philosophical schools—thought that nature is the result of some kind of intelligent providential design. From which it followed that plants and animals are around in order to serve human needs, a position that is hard to reconcile with modern environmentalism (though some of my colleagues have tried).

II. No appeal to nature

The second, and most common, misconception about living according to nature is that it means that whatever is natural is ipso facto good. That notion, however, ought to be easy to reject, since it corresponds with a well known logical fallacy known as the appeal to nature.

That natural does not equal good and, conversely, that “unnatural” (meaning, made by humans) does not mean bad is easy to demonstrate by example. A lot of entirely natural living organisms are very dangerous for our health, from several viruses and bacteria to poisonous mushrooms. Moreover, many artificial creations are clearly good for us, like vaccines and scores of medicines.

Of course, there are also examples of natural things that are good for us (lots of foodstuff, like leafy vegetables, lean meat, etc.) and of artificial things that are not (tons of industrial chemicals, social media). So no straightforward connection can be made between natural / artificial on the one side and good / bad on the other side.

III. Yes, we can derive an ought from an is

Things get a bit more tricky when people start talking about the naturalistic fallacy, a possibility famously raised by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), where he wrote:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it’s necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

It isn’t entirely clear whether Hume was arguing that one cannot bridge the is/ought gap, as it is often called, thus deriving values from facts. But he certainly did point out that if someone does that then they owe us an explanation of how, exactly, they make the connection.

Sometimes we find modern scientists and science popularizers, like Steven Pinker, getting on board with the notion that bridging the is/ought gap is fallacious:

“The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce the naturalistic fallacy because they want to describe the natural world honestly, without people deriving morals about how we ought to behave (as in: If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, it must be OK).” (Q&A: Steven Pinker of ‘Blank Slate’)

But Pinker here is making a mistake, describing the appeal to nature and confusing it with the (alleged) naturalistic fallacy. They are not the same thing, because to say that our values can be derived from facts about nature is not at all equivalent to simply stating that whatever is natural is also good. Indeed, if we don’t get our values from facts about the natural world, where do we get them from?

IV. Naturalistic ethics and its rivals

Let’s step back for a moment and ask ourselves the sort of question that philosophers gleefully use fancy language to describe. Let us talk about meta-ethics!

Meta-ethics is the study of the nature of ethics itself. Roughly speaking, there are three ways to look at it: realism, anti-realism, and naturalism. Although they all come in a number of varieties, these are pretty much the only three games in town, so to speak.