Fallacy · Leaning on the wrong support
Appeal to nature
Also called: “Natural means good”
Assuming that what is natural is good or safe, and what is artificial is bad.
What it is
Nature includes arsenic, earthquakes and poison ivy. Medicine, glasses and clean water are all artificial. Whether something is natural tells us where it came from, not whether it helps or harms.
An example
“It’s made from plants, so it can’t have side effects.” Many powerful drugs, and many poisons, come from plants.
How to spot it
The word “natural” is doing the work of a safety test or a moral argument.
How to answer it
“Natural or not, what does the evidence say it does?”
When it is not a fallacy
Where something comes from can be a clue worth checking: a plant used safely for centuries has a track record. The record is the evidence, not the word “natural”.
Printable sheet of all fallacies
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A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Appeal to nature.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/fallacies/appeal-to-nature. Accessed 13 November 2026.