Human nature and goodness › What has happened to the gap between facts and values?

Foot wants to challenge an account of evaluation that separates it entirely from facts about living things. The strategy is to examine descriptions whose intelligibility already involves a creature's needs and characteristic activities. She is not offering the bare inference that something happens in nature, so it ought to happen.

The difference can be expressed without relying on a slogan about "is" and "ought." Observing that many people abandon commitments establishes a fact about conduct. Explaining why reliable commitments are needed for a form of shared activity introduces a different kind of consideration. The second explanation concerns the activity's requirements and the people whose lives depend on them.

A critic can still ask whether the proposed account of human needs is correct and whether it supports the moral conclusion. Those are substantive questions. Labeling the account naturalistic does not answer them; neither does treating all reference to human nature as an obvious fallacy.

The argument therefore shifts some of the work into specifying human good. Which needs have been identified? Whose experience has been included? How does the proposed virtue address those needs? A convincing answer has to develop these connections. It cannot acquire authority merely through the word "natural."