Can observation of nature enable me to discover moral truths? Poet William Wordsworth seems to think so in his poem The Tables Turned. When one carefully examines the content and fallacies of this claim, though, it becomes quickly apparent that this is a totally absurd epistemological position.
"Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife" (81), Wordsworth proclaims, recommending that the reader "Let Nature be your teacher. / She has a world of ready wealth" (82). But he goes so far as to insist that "One impulse from vernal wood / May teach you more of man; / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can" (82).
Really? How can observing a forest or countryside, or any other environment for that matter, tell me if rape, pride, sexism, murder, or greed is wrong, much less if moral obligations even exist? It can't! Nature can at most inform me of what my senses perceive and how nature operates, but it will never tell me how things should be, only how they are. This claim suffers from the non sequitur fallacy (it does not follow from observing nature that something is right or wrong), the naturalistic fallacy (something is not necessarily good just because it is natural and one cannot derive an ought from an is), and begging the question (just how nature allegedly communicates moral truths is not clarified).
It also must be acknowledged that the natural world contains some animals which eat their mates (female preying mantises kill their male partners during sex and eat them), rape children (sea otters rape baby seals), and kill representatives of other species for food (lions). If observe spousal abuse, cannibalism, and rape in the animal kingdom, have I in any way found evidence that spousal abuse, cannibalism, and rape are good or bad? Not at all! Wordsworth not only commits a slew of fallacies, but he also doesn't even confront or hint at the brutality and cruelty in the natural world!
Perhaps I can find some examples of actions worth imitating in the animal kingdom (like the discipline of ants), yet nature itself can neither tell me if morality exists nor, if it does, what exactly is good and what is evil. At most I can discover examples of virtue in nature after learning of their existence and nature elsewhere. The idea that nature can reveal prescriptive moral obligations is a position logically indefensible, theologically erroneous, and based on subjective and fallacious extrapolations from anecdotal perceptions.
Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth, William. Trans. Stafford, Fiona. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.
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