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An appeal to nature is a rhetorical technique for presenting and proposing the argument that "a thing is good because it is 'natural', or bad because it is 'unnatural'." [1] In debate and discussion, an appeal-to-nature argument can be considered to be a bad argument, because the implicit primary premise "What is natural is good" has no factual meaning beyond rhetoric in some or most contexts.
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Pinker goes on to explain that "[t]he moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on.
Not all moral systems appeal to a human telos or purpose. This is because it is not obvious that people even have any sort of natural purpose, or what that purpose would be. Although many scientists do recognize teleonomy (a tendency in nature), few philosophers appeal to it (this time, to avoid the naturalistic fallacy).
The term naturalistic fallacy is sometimes used to label the problematic inference of an ought from an is (the is–ought problem). [3] Michael Ridge relevantly elaborates that "[t]he intuitive idea is that evaluative conclusions require at least one evaluative premise—purely factual premises about the naturalistic features of things do not entail or even support evaluative conclusions."
For instance, the appeal to poverty is the fallacy of thinking that someone is more likely to be correct because they are poor. [25] When an argument holds that a conclusion is likely to be true precisely because the one who holds or is presenting it lacks authority, it is an "appeal to the common man". [26]
An appeal to nature is a form of argument that depends on an understanding of nature as a source of intelligibility for its claims, and which relies on the normative or ethical content of that concept for its cogency and/or validity. You don't need anything more, the rest should be moved to an article on fallacies.
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