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I am starting a new thread to respond to Brick’s post on the “Is (nice) nihilism compatible with Harris’s scientific view of morality?” thread.
Brick Bungalow - 15 March 2012 10:35 AM
Is—————————————————-Ought.
I have yet to hear anyone connect them. I think the best and most consistent moral position is to own ones preferences as preferences and act upon them. Without calling them anything else.
I don’t like it but I do accept it.
IS and OUGHT are easy enough to connect.
Here is the formula:
IS + Moral Theory = OUGHT (in the sense of the moral theory)
As an example of IS lets use the natural fact:
the Earth is rotating around the Sun.
Now lets take a really simple made up objective theory.
the Natural-Fact Theory: We have reason to believe natural facts.
This theory is adequate to produce an ought. To be clear when we apply the theory we should specify its sense in the sentence. In this case we will call it the natural-fact sense.
In the natural-fact sense, we ought to believe the Earth rotates around the Sun.
Once someone specifies the sense, the is and the ought are connected by the definitions within the theory that the sense refers to.
Although it is true that we do not possess all of the facts in the universe, and one day we may find the World does not rotate around the sun, and we are all in a vat of fluid like the Matrix and images have been fed into out brain all along, for now, the Earth rotating around the Sun is a natural-fact and the Natural-Fact Theory was objectively applied in the sentence.
It is true that in other senses, one may conclude we ought to believe something else, or we should not use ought at all. That is why it is important to specify the sense of moral theory that is being used when invoking ought.
Another argument I hear often is “maybe the criteria is objective, and you may be correct in that sense, but you subjectively choose to use the theory.” Although that is a point worth considering, that argument does not change the fact that in the Natural-Fact sense, we ought to believe the World rotates around the Sun.
You presented one method of connecting IS and OUGHT, but there are many ways—I could invent a new one in 5 seconds.
Another way of looking at this problem is by posing this question: OUGHT people connect IS to OUGHT in the way you described?
This question is self-reflexive. Within your proposed system, obviously the system advocates its own use. But there are many self-reflexively consistent systems.
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In every debate I’ve seen with Sam Harris he somehow manages to evade talking about this issue. I’ve never understood if he thinks people ought to organize their entire life around maximizing wellbeing. (Caveat: I haven’t read his latest book).
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Personally, I’m proud to be partially selfish. On a day to day basis, I actively make decisions that improve the wellbeing of my wife, myself and my kids, without equally improving someone else’s life. From my experience, there’s no benefit going down the philosophical rabbit hole about “ought I act selfish?”. I think that’s just a software glitch of curious minded people—we always have to ask “why?”.
The only way I can see is by appealing to the wishes of ones interlocutor. You tell me that your wish is map your thoughts to reality in the most coherent fashion possible. Which is an IS statement about your own sense of OUGHT. I can then list further oughts that correspond to whatever information was volunteered. Otherwise, you are presuming such motivation. Essentially smuggling a consensus into the equation. Asserting an ought as a universal. Maybe I’m not following your line of reasoning…
The earth is rotating around the sun. That is a description of a fact. However, there is no reason that the earth OUGHT to rotate around the sun. That would be a prescription that does not follow from the description. We are all glad that the earth rotates around the sun for it provides life for our planet and we are here, but there is no reason that it ought to be that way, unless one chooses to invoke metaphysical reasoning.
The natural world cannot get from the described to the prescribed without supernatural agency. It is what it is, and there is no reason it ought to be another way. Game theory supports Humes Law. The prisoners dilemma for instance. Without interjecting something subjective into the equation, description does not get us to prescription.
We are human…..the universe is not. It is the great chasm between the two entities. We, as abstract thinking primates, cannot apply ought to the universe. The universe just is, and all we can do is describe what we observe in the universe, we cannot decide what it ought to be like.
The earth is rotating around the sun. That is a description of a fact. However, there is no reason that the earth OUGHT to rotate around the sun. That would be a prescription that does not follow from the description. We are all glad that the earth rotates around the sun for it provides life for our planet and we are here, but there is no reason that it ought to be that way, unless one chooses to invoke metaphysical reasoning.
The natural world cannot get from the described to the prescribed without supernatural agency. It is what it is, and there is no reason it ought to be another way. Game theory supports Humes Law. The prisoners dilemma for instance. Without interjecting something subjective into the equation, description does not get us to prescription.
We are human…..the universe is not. It is the great chasm between the two entities. We, as abstract thinking primates, cannot apply ought to the universe. The universe just is, and all we can do is describe what we observe in the universe, we cannot decide what it ought to be like.
More than that, we can’t even say we OUGHT to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun without an “IF.” That is, If we want such and such then we ought to believe the Earth goes round the Sun. I can imagine conditions where we would not want to believe this, even though it is true.
The earth is rotating around the sun. That is a description of a fact. However, there is no reason that the earth OUGHT to rotate around the sun. That would be a prescription that does not follow from the description. We are all glad that the earth rotates around the sun for it provides life for our planet and we are here, but there is no reason that it ought to be that way, unless one chooses to invoke metaphysical reasoning.
The natural world cannot get from the described to the prescribed without supernatural agency. It is what it is, and there is no reason it ought to be another way. Game theory supports Humes Law. The prisoners dilemma for instance. Without interjecting something subjective into the equation, description does not get us to prescription.
We are human…..the universe is not. It is the great chasm between the two entities. We, as abstract thinking primates, cannot apply ought to the universe. The universe just is, and all we can do is describe what we observe in the universe, we cannot decide what it ought to be like.
More than that, we can’t even say we OUGHT to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun without an “IF.” That is, If we want such and such then we ought to believe the Earth goes round the Sun. I can imagine conditions where we would not want to believe this, even though it is true.
I agree we cannot say the World ought to rotate around the Sun, that is not my point. I also agree that at the beginning of Is/Ought chains, one will bump into something subjective or that is hard to explain, and if that is Hume’s only point then I cannot prove him wrong. I often argue the mere fact of wanting our species to survive for billions more years gives us a multitude of Is/Ought’s.
It is possible that is subjective, but it is also possible we are the only conscious creatures in the universe and thereby have some vital role to play billions of years from now that we do not currently understand. The truth is we just don’t know.
One thing is for sure, we are in the early stages of our possible evolutionary tract. I believe it is pretty arrogant to decide we have everything figured out and that we know for a fact that we have no objective reason to continue. I believe the fact that we do not know give us an objective reason to work the chains of is(s) and ought(s) from this very basic goal, even if the objective bases is that we need more time to figure out if it really matters. And while we are here, we have objective reasons to avoid unnecessary suffering and to pursue well being. These reasons alone give us plenty of oughts to get to work on.
Personally, I’m proud to be partially selfish. On a day to day basis, I actively make decisions that improve the wellbeing of my wife, myself and my kids, without equally improving someone else’s life. From my experience, there’s no benefit going down the philosophical rabbit hole about “ought I act selfish?”. I think that’s just a software glitch of curious minded people—we always have to ask “why?”.
I agree with most of what you say here. I have a wife, kids and friends that occupy special places in my heart. I treat them and they treat me in special ways that cannot be duplicated in the impartial sense.
This fact alone should not steer anyone away from objective philosophy. Sidgwick and Parfit both explicitly acknowledge that there are many times when the impartial point of view is in direct conflict with the personal/partial point of view. Neither claim it is immoral to choose either side in that conflict except for extreme cases of unnecessary harm to others.
By describing yourself as ‘partially selfish’, I am inferring that you do consider the impartial point of view, you are just saying that you do not necessarily feel bound by it all the time.
There are all sorts of sentimental or moralistic avenues to try and compel a consensus of value. Essentially appealing to emotion. Sometimes in the guise of appealing to logic. But these are not arguments. They are appeals to emotion. If they succeed, great. You have argued successfully for an ought. If the listener isn’t swayed, you have not.
Most commonly, they are an essentially logical argument with the moral concern unstated and assumed. Connecting an action and an outcome. And simply assuming that said outcome is undesirable rather arguing for its undesirability. This fails because it assumes what it stakes to prove.
Another common tactic is blackmail. To frame a moral argument in a hyperbolic fashion. As if the challenge the listener to disagree with it. “You wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses with you?” , “Think of the children” Assuming that there is line no one would ever cross and making analogy with that imaginary line. It’s probably a correct guess in the case of any healthy person but, as above, it isn’t an argument.
My suspicion is that values and sympathies can only ever be appealed to. Never argued for. And this is the reason that the common arguments you hear are so blatantly fallacious.
IS + Moral Theory = OUGHT (in the sense of the moral theory)
Your forumla is simplistic. I don’t think anything like simple addition is capable of transforming the facts of the world into moral actions in particular case. It’s got to be something like O = M(I), where M is some excruciatingly non-trivial function.
In my opinion, Hume is absolutely correct if he is interpreted merely as saying that one cannot assert that a state of affairs that is, is a state of affairs that ought to be. Nor, in my opinion, is he incorrect if he is interpreted as saying that a moral rule that currently exists is a moral rule that ought to exist. It is arguable in my opinion whether he is incorrect if interpreted as saying that it is impossible to determine universally true moral axioms from an existing state of affairs. I’m personally skeptical of the possibility of stating any universally true moral axiom in any way that can be used by a human being as a guide for action in a particular state of affairs.
The only way Hume can clearly be incorrect, in my opinion, is if he is interpreted as saying that it is not possible to determine instrumentally effective moral rules from an existing state of affairs, where “instrumentally effective rules” are those that optimize quality of life for persons who follow them. In this statement, moral rules are determined inductively, are approximate, are relative, and may result in less-than-optimal actions in certain cases. Hume notoriously distrusted induction, so he may well have had this view. We, who live 150 years after Darwin, are (or should be) much more comfortable with induction.
I think the dissonance over ‘ought’ might boil down to an inconvenient familiarity. Oughts are very useful to human culture. And human beings are introduced to the concept early and often. So that it becomes intuitive. Making it difficult to disentangle later on when confronted with the inevitable fact that human preferences are most definitely not a huge lever in the universe. They do not compete in any meaningful sense with the natural laws that regulate matter in motion. They barely compete with one another when isolated by geography and culture. Its a bitter pill to swallow that cherished notions of right and wrong are so fleeting, fragile and easily washed away. I totally understand why people have an impulse to cling to them and defend them as something more robust than what they really are.
i settled this to my satisfaction in another thread months ago.
as far as i am concerned is > ought settles itself upon a full consideration of what it means to be a thinking, self-aware intelligence. the capacity to perceive, intelligently organize, and manipulate one’s surroundings creates an innate relative moral structure within one’s mind, meaning that, in moral terms only, any “is” that one adopts at the individual level automatically becomes “ought.”
that it need outside consideration or any kind of “group approval” is totally irrelevant, excepting considerations for survival (which most of us take for granted but can and should be viewed as a personal choice, though as personal choices go it is quite hard to argue with several billion years of evolutionary imperative to live).
the argument surrounding what “ought” to be is really an argument about morality, which very likely nobody can or will win, since morality itself is a shifting sand of overlapping needs and desires and i would be very surprised if any human or computer could some day completely wrap their mind around it.
but i believe the struggle for moral truth will, should we as a species live long enough, transform into the struggle for moral freedom, with existence structured upon the foundation of guaranteed survival and a sovereign space within which to operate freely as long as one’s actions do not jeopardize the survival or freedom of anyone else.
it just seems, to me, to be a question of how much space… virtual space or real space? and what if we create life-like artificial intelligence? should we be permitted to destroy it?
They [“oughts”] do not compete in any meaningful sense with the natural laws that regulate matter in motion. They barely compete with one another when isolated by geography and culture. Its a bitter pill to swallow that cherished notions of right and wrong are so fleeting, fragile and easily washed away. I totally understand why people have an impulse to cling to them and defend them as something more robust than what they really are.
I understand your point: “The sun ought to revolve around the earth” clearly will never manifest in reality no matter how much you command it or believe it to be so. However this doesn’t imply that all ought statements are in conflict with ‘natural laws’. What part of “I ought to win this race” is in competition with ‘natural laws’? Also what part of “I ought to win this race” is fragile? There’s no experiment you can perform to disprove it. If you have a hard time holding this belief, this is a property about you as the agent holding the belief, and is not true for all agents.
I think there’s this implicit belief of philosophers that statements like “I ought to win this race” because it’s not universal, or backed by empirical evidence, that nobody should believe it with strong unshakable conviction. In other words, “all beliefs not backed by evidence or reason ought not be believed fervently”. However this is not objectively true, this is your belief about beliefs.
I personally while fully embracing Hume’s framework, express deep competitive drive to win, or hold strong moral convictions of right and wrong without having or needing reasons for them. These deep convictions are probably the most important facets of my reality—the most meaningful aspects of my experience. Having these convictions creates a constant drive to take action and shape reality to my will. I do this while full well knowing that these beliefs aren’t backed by reasons. After all, what is the reason that “children suffering is bad”?
If all of our convictions are solely about facts, no one will desire particular outcomes over others. This is toxic IMO.
IS + Moral Theory = OUGHT (in the sense of the moral theory)
Your forumla is simplistic. I don’t think anything like simple addition is capable of transforming the facts of the world into moral actions in particular case. It’s got to be something like O = M(I), where M is some excruciatingly non-trivial function.
In my opinion, Hume is absolutely correct if he is interpreted merely as saying that one cannot assert that a state of affairs that is, is a state of affairs that ought to be. Nor, in my opinion, is he incorrect if he is interpreted as saying that a moral rule that currently exists is a moral rule that ought to exist. It is arguable in my opinion whether he is incorrect if interpreted as saying that it is impossible to determine universally true moral axioms from an existing state of affairs. I’m personally skeptical of the possibility of stating any universally true moral axiom in any way that can be used by a human being as a guide for action in a particular state of affairs.
The only way Hume can clearly be incorrect, in my opinion, is if he is interpreted as saying that it is not possible to determine instrumentally effective moral rules from an existing state of affairs, where “instrumentally effective rules” are those that optimize quality of life for persons who follow them. In this statement, moral rules are determined inductively, are approximate, are relative, and may result in less-than-optimal actions in certain cases. Hume notoriously distrusted induction, so he may well have had this view. We, who live 150 years after Darwin, are (or should be) much more comfortable with induction.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Your post prompted me to check out a Stanford page on Hume, and further look at the way Hume’s position on Is and Ought has been interpreted. After reading the Author’s comments, I think think the following quote best represents what Hume was trying to say.
… one cannot make the initial discovery of moral properties by inference from nonmoral premises using reason alone; rather, one requires some input from sentiment. It is not simply by reasoning from the abstract and causal relations one has discovered that one comes to have the ideas of virtue and vice; one must respond to such information with feelings of approval and disapproval. Note that on this reading it is compatible with the is/ought paragraph that once a person has the moral concepts as the result of prior experience of the moral sentiments, he or she may reach some particular moral conclusions by inference from causal, factual premises (stated in terms of ‘is’) about the effects of character traits on the sentiments of observers. They point out that Hume himself makes such inferences frequently in his writings.
This view also dovetails with his basic subjective philosophy where he acknowledges a role for reason and facts.
Hume maintains against the rationalists that, although reason is needed to discover the facts of any concrete situation and the general social impact of a trait of character or a practice over time, reason alone is insufficient to yield a judgment that something is virtuous or vicious. In the last analysis, the facts as known must trigger a response by sentiment or “taste.”
As you pointed out, it is easy to argue that time has proven Hume’s position on induction false. As time continues to allow for research, science is finding that subjective feelings of sentiment and taste are themselves pre-programmed routines burnt into our cellular structure by evolution and events within our personal mesocosm during our brief life.
The more we learn, the more we are able to logically connect is and ought to our own benefit, and foresee the peril of ignoring the connections. Science and rational thought allows us to discover the natural roots of our subjective feelings and how they serve us or hurt us as we continue to evolve.
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As you pointed out, it is easy to argue that time has proven Hume’s position on induction false. As time continues to allow for research, science is finding that subjective feelings of sentiment and taste are themselves pre-programmed routines burnt into our cellular structure by evolution and events within our personal mesocosm during our brief life.
The more we learn, the more we are able to logically connect is and ought to our own benefit, and foresee the peril of ignoring the connections. Science and rational thought allows us to discover the natural roots of our subjective feelings and how they serve us or hurt us as we continue to evolve.
Hume is considered the paradigm skeptical philosopher. Any good skeptics expect to be proven wrong from time to time, and welcome a good proof of a point of view that they considered attractive but unfounded. Nonetheless, his distrust of induction should continue to serve as a warning, because induction still is not as well understood as deduction. The hallmark of our age might be exactly the callous use of erroneous induction to promote political agendas to those not skilled in induction or, for that matter, in any logic at all. Perhaps the best counterargument is that our age is not particularly unique in that respect. Long live skepticism, I doubt it will ever become obsolete.
Damasio’s work, et al, effectively proved the need for emotion in human decision making, effectively proving Hume on target with respect to one of your quoted blocks. It remains to be conclusively demonstrated that processes of biological evolution are sufficient to explain humans’ moral sensibilitied, but I’m convinced such a demonstration will be made some day, perhaps in my lifetime. I’m not sure whether or not evolution has been proven to be an inductive process, but if not, I likewise expect that to happen some day. Those two demonstrations will finally put to rest the rationalist-empiricist debate, or at least move the last scholarly dregs of it somewhere else (apart from philosophy 101, from whence it should never be separated).
i settled this to my satisfaction in another thread months ago.
as far as i am concerned is > ought settles itself upon a full consideration of what it means to be a thinking, self-aware intelligence. the capacity to perceive, intelligently organize, and manipulate one’s surroundings creates an innate relative moral structure within one’s mind, meaning that, in moral terms only, any “is” that one adopts at the individual level automatically becomes “ought.”
that it need outside consideration or any kind of “group approval” is totally irrelevant, excepting considerations for survival (which most of us take for granted but can and should be viewed as a personal choice, though as personal choices go it is quite hard to argue with several billion years of evolutionary imperative to live).
the argument surrounding what “ought” to be is really an argument about morality, which very likely nobody can or will win, since morality itself is a shifting sand of overlapping needs and desires and i would be very surprised if any human or computer could some day completely wrap their mind around it.
but i believe the struggle for moral truth will, should we as a species live long enough, transform into the struggle for moral freedom, with existence structured upon the foundation of guaranteed survival and a sovereign space within which to operate freely as long as one’s actions do not jeopardize the survival or freedom of anyone else.
it just seems, to me, to be a question of how much space… virtual space or real space? and what if we create life-like artificial intelligence? should we be permitted to destroy it?
I think your causal analysis sucks.
For one thing, you throw out “innate” without any reference to where “innate” comes from. If the moral structure is innate, does it happen whenever an entity can “perceive, intelligently organize, and manipulate” its surroundings? If the moral structure is innate, yet comes from those, it must be a logical necessity. In what way is a moral structure a logical necessity for any entity with epistemological and executive ability? You haven’t shown how that is the case, you’ve only asserted that it is so.
For another, I maintain that morality is a totally useless appendage for any organism (used in the broad sense) that does not depend on the voluntary support of other organisms. I don’t need to prove that here, because your analysis depends on it being false, so you need to prove that it is false for your conclusiions to follow. Because only socially-dependent organisms exhibit morality (i.e., morality in a species implies social dependency in that species), group approval is probably necessary for any kind of morality. Group approval is definitely needed for instantiation of specific moral rules with respect to environmental features that are not innate. For example, humans have not yet had time to evolve an innate moral rule with respect to juggling bottles of nitro-glycerin. Prior education of neophytes and group disapproval of risky behavior are both necessary to avoid disastrous consequences.
They [“oughts”] do not compete in any meaningful sense with the natural laws that regulate matter in motion. They barely compete with one another when isolated by geography and culture. Its a bitter pill to swallow that cherished notions of right and wrong are so fleeting, fragile and easily washed away. I totally understand why people have an impulse to cling to them and defend them as something more robust than what they really are.
I understand your point: “The sun ought to revolve around the earth” clearly will never manifest in reality no matter how much you command it or believe it to be so. However this doesn’t imply that all ought statements are in conflict with ‘natural laws’. What part of “I ought to win this race” is in competition with ‘natural laws’? Also what part of “I ought to win this race” is fragile? There’s no experiment you can perform to disprove it. If you have a hard time holding this belief, this is a property about you as the agent holding the belief, and is not true for all agents.
I think there’s this implicit belief of philosophers that statements like “I ought to win this race” because it’s not universal, or backed by empirical evidence, that nobody should believe it with strong unshakable conviction. In other words, “all beliefs not backed by evidence or reason ought not be believed fervently”. However this is not objectively true, this is your belief about beliefs.
I personally while fully embracing Hume’s framework, express deep competitive drive to win, or hold strong moral convictions of right and wrong without having or needing reasons for them. These deep convictions are probably the most important facets of my reality—the most meaningful aspects of my experience. Having these convictions creates a constant drive to take action and shape reality to my will. I do this while full well knowing that these beliefs aren’t backed by reasons. After all, what is the reason that “children suffering is bad”?
If all of our convictions are solely about facts, no one will desire particular outcomes over others. This is toxic IMO.
It’s fragile because it only maps to human preference. It isn’t descriptive of any state of affairs except for a persons mental representation of a hypothetical future. It can be strident and tenacious of course but not argued for in any factual sense (my view) Attempts to compel moral consensus rely on affective appeals to common values. If those values are not present there simply isn’t anything more than disparate and individual preferences competing with one another. As the case would be in your race example. I ought to win the race. But so ought every other racer. It’s a fact that each strives to win but is it a fact that ‘I ought to win’? I doubt anyone is so generous in any other realm of reasoning. We don’t feel entitled to personal and mutually exclusive ‘facts’ about our investigation of nature. We expect that our conclusions will reach a natural convergence because properties of things are as they are. The case awaits our discovery. I see nothing like this in regard to morals.
