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This article is a study of naturalistic reasoning in the analyses by Henry Sidgwick and George Edward Moore concerning the usefulness of ordinary ethical rules. Background evolutionary assumptions and observations of the natural conditions of typical human interaction play a decisive role, as well as a specific attention to cognitive limitations in the human species. More recent decision-theoretic and economic analyses can sometimes bring more precision to remarkable insights of these authors. They illustrate the connection between classical philosophical arguments and the economic approaches to information and decision.