The Naturalistic Fallacy http://bit.ly/2HNqunJ
In a recent post I asked the question of how many more articles on “natural” wine must we endure — and here I seem to have added to the burden. Before I am accused of hypocrisy I want to state clearly that this post is more about philosophy and culture than it is about wine.
So why write it? Because I believe that words and ideas — and how we use them — matter. I’ve written on this topic before. I tend to agree with my friend Tom Wark, who writes about the subject frequently, most often disparaging the vagueness and emotionality of the term, as well as the implied pejorative that wines not claiming this ill-defined mantle are somehow “unnatural.”
What set me off in the present is that Robert Parker has apparently declared that “natural” or “authentic” wine is an undefined scam that will be exposed as a fraud, because “most serious wines have no additives.” My first thought when I read this was: then why don’t we stop calling wines with no additives “natural” or “authentic” and call them “serious” instead? But I jest.
I recently came across this video of Sicilian winemaker Frank Cornelissen on defining “natural” — and also re-stating the right of the consumer to know what “natural” means: I can find nothing to fault under the definition Cornelissen proposes: no added SO2, no added yeast, no added acid, no added anything.
However I believe the advocates of “natural” and “authentic” have no intention of shrugging off the mantle of ambiguity, and ethical superiority implied by these labels in favor of a hard-and-fast definition. The more honest among advocates will admit that they subscribe to a Potter Stewart-ish definition: it really isn’t all that important that a wine bearing the mantle be produced with zero additives, so long as it tastes “natural” and “authentic.”
Herein lies the crux of the issue. Aside from the hardcore practitioners, to advocates of “natural”/”authentic” the term is less about complete praxis than it is about intent. It’s not really about whether the winegrower is certified organic (grapes are NOT chemical free, just sprayed with things OK for “organic”) or Demeter-certified (bioD preps produced and sold in bulk to others, rented ruminants, no intensive culture — Steiner and especially Fukuoka are spinning in their graves), or whether there actually are zero “additives” used in every wine. It’s about the intent conveyed to the advocates of “natural”/”authentic” by the storytelling of the producers, and the inherent “goodness” of that intent as perceived by these advocates.
Logical Shortcomings
It is that presumptive “goodness” that lies at the heart of the philosophical underpinnings of the “natural”/”authentic” fad. Advocates of “natural”/”authentic” commit two classic logical fallacies from the outset of the debate: the Appeal to Tradition — that something is inherently good because it was done in the past — and the Appeal to Nature — that a thing is inherently good because it comes from Nature or is perceived to be “natural.”
Even a cursory reading of rhetoric, philosophy, ethics and history shows that “goodness” does not derive from these fallacious pleadings. Both of these Appeals have been used to defend everything from slavery to the divine right of kings, religious persecution, bigotry and sexism. “Natural” wine may not have the scale of these great scourges of the human condition, but an argument that cannot support a large thing is equally impotent to defend a small one.
George Moore believed that “goodness” is a fundamental property that can’t be defined by derivation from other principles (rather like a color — we can describe the physics that cause something to appear yellow under ordinary light, but the concept and experience of “yellow” is irreducible, and indescribable to someone who has not experienced it). Moore rejected the notion that goodness is derived from nature or natural principles, calling that belief the “naturalistic” fallacy. Nature is neither good not bad, and things derived from nature are only good or evil by intent.
While philosophers, including Moore himself, have struggled with the assertion of the irreducibility of good, many different schools of thought converge on the principle that “goodness” does not derive from something simply being beautiful or pleasurable, nor yet from something supporting or satisfying an external relational belief system. Emmanuel Kant asserted that the only unqualifiedly good thing is a good will — that the goodness of an action is a matter of the intentions of the agent acting rather than the consequences or effects of the action.
Which brings me back to the question of the perception by “natural/authentic” wine advocates of the intent of the producers they have anointed with their belief.
The billions of our fellows for whom the natural state of existence is a life that is poor, nasty, brutish and short must certainly look up to those who advocate so strongly for “naturalness” in wine. After all, these advocates are doing nothing less than seeking Aufheben — raising up — for all of humanity. Sarcasm intended.