#meta-ethics

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Hume's Guillotine

The "is-ought problem," also known as Hume's Law or Hume's Guillotine, is a fundamental philosophical issue that addresses the relationship between descriptive statements (what is) and prescriptive or normative statements (what ought to be). The problem was articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his work "A Treatise of Human Nature" in 1739.

Key Aspects of the Philosophy of the Is-Ought Problem

Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Statements:

Descriptive Statements (Is): These are factual statements about the world. They describe how things are. Examples include "Water boils at 100°C" or "Humans need food to survive."

Prescriptive Statements (Ought): These are normative statements that prescribe how things should be. They reflect values, ethics, or duties. Examples include "People ought to help those in need" or "One should tell the truth."

Hume's Formulation:

David Hume observed that many philosophical arguments attempt to derive prescriptive conclusions from descriptive premises. He argued that there is a fundamental logical gap between statements about what is and statements about what ought to be. According to Hume, you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is" without introducing some additional normative premise.

Implications for Ethics and Morality:

The is-ought problem has significant implications for moral philosophy. It challenges the notion that objective moral truths can be derived from purely empirical observations. This has led to debates about the foundation of moral principles and the role of reason and emotion in ethical judgments.

Responses to the Is-Ought Problem:

Naturalistic Fallacy: Some philosophers argue that attempts to derive moral principles directly from natural facts commit the "naturalistic fallacy." This term, popularized by G.E. Moore, refers to the mistake of defining moral terms in purely naturalistic terms.

Moral Realism: Moral realists argue that there are objective moral truths that exist independently of human beliefs or feelings. They seek to establish a rational basis for bridging the is-ought gap.

Constructivist Approaches: Constructivists propose that moral principles are constructed through rational deliberation, social agreements, or cultural practices, rather than being derived from natural facts.

Virtue Ethics: Some ethical theories, like virtue ethics, focus on the development of moral character and virtues, arguing that moral principles can be grounded in the nature of human flourishing.

Contemporary Debates:

The is-ought problem continues to be a central topic in meta-ethics and the philosophy of language. Philosophers explore whether and how normative statements can be grounded in empirical reality, the role of human psychology in moral reasoning, and the nature of ethical language and meaning.

Conclusion

The philosophy of the is-ought problem challenges us to carefully examine the foundations of our moral and ethical beliefs. By highlighting the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive statements, it invites ongoing reflection on how we justify our moral principles and the ways in which we connect facts about the world with our values and duties.

[parrhesiablog]

In the twentieth century, everything once held in high esteemhuman nature, science, truth, objective knowledge, art, philosophy, religion, m0rality-had to be debunked. Psychologists sought to show that Man, once considered 'the rational animal', was fundamentally irrational. Freudians found us filled with lust and socially destructive impulses; Marxists found human history dominated by greed and exploitation; sociobiologists found all aspects of human life dominated by 'selfish' drives to reproduce. All three groups found human beings massively self-deceived and considered such supposedly spiritual pursuits as art, religion, and philosophy to be covers for something shallower and far less noble than they appear. Many have remarked on how tiny and insignificant humanity is, how foolish we once were to think ourselves the center of the universe, and how ignorant and helpless we are. Many philosophers, who had once seen their discipline as a rational pursuit of fundamental truths about the nature of reality and our place in it, now denied that philosophy could tell us anything of such truths, if such truths even existed. One influential school of thought declared that philosophers could do no more than discuss how people use words, and that metaphysics, theology, and ethics were all 'meaningless'. Other philosophers declared that there is no such thing as truth, that we can never know it, that we are fundamentally irrational, and/or that objectivity is impossible. American intellectuals attacked what were once their country's most revered forebears-such as Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington-as hypocrites, bigots, and exploiters; they attacked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution similarly. And Western intellectuals attacked Christianity more than any other religion. Modern thinkers have sought to tear down their own society's heros, its religion, its philosophy, its economic and political system-in short, its values.

I do not plan to explain all the intellectual developments mentioned in the preceding paragraph; I rely on the reader's familiarity with contemporary intellectual culture to recognize most of what I have just mentioned. Nor do I plan to discuss their intellectual merits-in some cases, the attitudes may have been justified, while in others they were not. My point here is that, whatever else may be said about them, all those cultural developments have at least one thing in common: cynicism. Western culture of the past fifty years must be among the most cynical cultures in world history. And that thoroughgoing cynicism has made the widespread acceptance of ethical intuitionism impossible in our culture, whatever the intellectual merits of the theory. A culture that insists that humans are fundamentally selfish and ignoble will never accept any account of moral motivation. A culture that declares the notions of truth, knowledge, and objectivity delusory will never accept my account of moral knowledge. And a culture that seeks to tear down all values will never accept moral realism. Subjectivism, non-cognitivism, and nihilism have been popular, in short, because they offer the modern mind the perverse pleasure of debunking morality.

- Michael Huemer. Ethical Intuitionism. pp.242-243

[jadagul]

My shittiest philosophy opinion:

There's a consensus among analytic philosophers of ethics that ethical philosophy is coherent, for the same reason there's a consensus among astrologers that astrology works.

[atrahasis]

This is Me Rambling about Meta-ethics and Stuff

I'm going to regret this post.

I'm not good with this "effortpost" thing, so i’m going to ramble about this topic, stream-of-consciousness style. I promise confusion.

Disclaimer: I have no formal training in philosophy and did not read much on related subjects prior to writing this. Others have definitely done these subjects more justice.

Content warning: This post may or may not contain bullet biting or uncomfortable ideas. Also, this is a terrible post.

So one of the central questions in meta-ethics is the metaphysics of morality, right? To me, the metaphysics of morality has never seemed to be a difficult problem. That which I call ‘morality’ appears to just consist of individual’s moral preferences. Moral rightness in this sense then refers to either what one intrinsically morally prefers or to conclusions following from said preferences.   

Basically, I don’t know what this moral realism thing is about. Like, it appears when normal folk talk about moral rightness/truth, they seem to be talking about a sort of truth akin to empirical truth or mathematical truth. But ‘moral truth’ doesn’t appear to have the same characteristics as these other truths that would make moral truth like these other truths. 

You can go ahead and declare moral truth to be all about maximising the number of positive sum interactions or about maximising the timespan of human existence or about minimising neurally-measured pain. But saying moral truth is about X still lacks that truth-aptness of empirical and mathematical truth. How does one even go about proving this truth.

Basically, i’m not even sure what moral realists are trying to convince me of.

I should not be mistaken as saying that morals do not affect outcomes. Different moral preferences may lead to different actions/policies, and different policies would lead to different outcomes. 

Don’t know why I felt the need to say this but I did.

So if I were to label my meta-ethics, i’m probably a non-cognitivist. 

I’ll anticipate a number of questions/concerns for the non-cognitivist here. 

The first is on how intrinsic these moral sentiments are to the individual, which would in turn affect which moral statements the individual accepts as true. Or, how much can one person’s moral makeup differ in said person given different contexts. On this I am agnostic. 

The second is about how much should we expect for humanity’s moral preferences to vary, from person-to-person Some have warned against overestimating human moral variance but I don’t know. I think as long as we’re philosophizing here, we may as well consider the most extreme hypotheticals.

The third is the concern that the rejection of ‘moral rightness’ will lead to some sort of moral relativism, an acceptance of all moral stances since their based on these intrinsic preferences anyway. Well i’m not a moral relativist, since I can’t be made to prefer just any moral stance. To be fair, believing in moral non-cognitivism probably has nudged the moral stances of some individuals. That Jonathan Haidt fellow claims to have moved towards the center as a result of his moral psychology studies. Although an alternate response would be to view those morally far from you to be irredeemably evil.

Which brings us to this concern: Wouldn’t this just mean that morality, moral arguments, disagreements, these morality wars, may as well be a zero-sum free-for-all? Hmmmmm. More on this later perhaps?

Moral realism seems popular though. I suspect this is due to folks feeling that moral truth has this sort of nature to it that makes it similar to empirical/mathematical truth. 

If I may be allowed to be accusatory: I suspect that a number, perhaps a lot, of moral realists oppose non-cognitivism because they fear of the consequences of such a belief. They fear a slide into moral relativism. 

I shouldn’t be the one to point this out but, believing that belief X is wrong because of the psychological consequences of having said belief, is bad justification for X being wrong. That’s belief in belief. 

Is this were the case, than i’d just put ‘moral non-cognitivism’ into the same category as ‘atheism’, ‘arguments against free will’, ‘arguments against Dweckian growth mindset’, ‘Darwininan natural selection’ and ‘Charles Murray-ism’ as positions prone to opposition from believers-in-belief.

The thing is, moral conversion is definitely a thing. I’m not sure as to the underlying mechanism for moral conversion. Perhaps it’s a terminal/instrumental values kind of thing, whereby only individuals’ instrumental values change. Or perhaps humans’ terminal values are somewhat malleable.  

Perhaps my largest moral conversion was during my religious apostasy. I’m not sure what gives Divine Command Theory this particular power that it has. I do however remember not being comfortable with some of God’s commands so perhaps i’m overestimating this power of DCT.

Regardless, those interested in converting others to their moral side might want to look into the underlying processes of moral conversion.

So, are the moral wars zero-sum. Not necessarily. It’s conceivable that two individuals may come to support the same policies using different moral justifications.  

Also, perhaps a collection of individuals with different moral preferences may be able to live somewhat harmoniously. Here’s an analogy: Praying mantis’ (the insect) values differ greatly from my own. However, their existence does not endanger things that I do value and thus, I leave them alone. Should the same praying mantises be human-sized human-eaters, then would I have a problem with their ‘values’. Similarly, other humans with values different from my own, i am okay with, as long they do not threaten things that I do value. It’s when they do threaten things I value, do we have a problem here.

Suppose if a Hitler clone gets his hands on reproductive cloning technology. He then seeks to outnumber other humans by flooding the Earth with Hitler clones. The Hitler population may endanger the population of other humans. From my point-of-view, extinction of non-Hitler humans by way of Hitler-clones is morally equivalent to human extinction by other means. There’s no reason for me to prefer Hitler clones over the grey goo.

All said, the zero-sum idea does somewhat color my view.

I am however somewhat optimistic that my values will live on in future humans, that future humans would not have values wildly differing from my own. I’m not sure what informs this optimism.

It’s entirely possible that some moral modes were more suited to past environments, from an evo-psych point-of-view. I suspect this is the case with conservative values, specifically in-group preference, out-group suspicion. Perhaps conservative values were better suited to the hunter-gatherer era when prisoner’s dilemma scenarios were low in iteration count, perhaps often being one-off. I just don’t see these values being well-suited to societies with more complex organisation.  

Perhaps you may think that punishing moral deviants, such as psychopaths, to be tyranny of the majority. I’m not sure I care to be honest.

So far i’ve been suggesting that individuals may differ in their moral makeup. 

This is not to say that I believe that an individual’s moral makeup is comprised of a coherent set of moral sentiments. I believe the opposite is true. This fact is implied when people talk about moral dilemmas. 

So, an individual’s quest to find out the ‘correct’ moral position in a moral dilemma, is perhaps just the individual trying to find a position that causes the least ‘internal dissonance’, so to speak. 

But atrahasis, couldn’t your positions here be used to justify social darwinistic policies of some sort?

Well, i’m against restricting others’ reproductive rights, and against killing others for fear of them breeding, as matters of principle.

We shouldn’t however avoid difficult bio-ethical questions adjacent to these topics though. We’re going to have to answer questions like whether it’s okay to delete psychopathy-linked genes in designer babies, or is reproductive human cloning in pursuit of proliferating one’s values okay?

[liskantope]

Sometime in the last week, someone here (I can’t remember who) linked to this essay.  I’m putting it here because I found it a really helpful explanation of a possible framing of meta-ethics, one which I feel I’ve been leaning towards but was unable to express lucidly.  Some points came across a little hazily for me, but really it should probably be viewed less as an attempt at ironclad argumentation and more as an explanation of one way to go about forming axioms.  (There are also several words in here that I didn’t know existed in those particular forms, such as arguendo and construal, so that was fun.)

[jadagul]

femmenietzsche replied to your post: evolution-is-just-a-theorem: cptsdcarlosdevil: ...

Would the discovery that unimaginable suffering is woven into the fabric of the universe really not faze you?

I mean, if by “suffering” you mean something that I care about, like actual people being in pain, then it would bother me quite a lot.

My problem with the suffering-in-physics argument is that it expands the definition of “suffering” enough that it covers a lot of things I don’t care about.  It really is a form of Scott’s [Worst Argument in the World](http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html?nojs=1): “People being in pain is bad; we call that “suffering”; electron repulsion has some traits in common with people being in pain, so we can also call that “suffering”; therefore, since people being in pain is bad, electron repulsion is also bad.”

An Unsong-like world of eternal miserable personal Hell would be extremely disturbing to me.  But the attempt to equivocate between that and the sorts of things that Tomasik actually talks about seems to be a form of deeply-confused base-stealing.

[sensiblephilosophy]

Metaethics w/ Michael Huemer

[sensiblephilosophy]

Thoughtology: Episode 20, Russ Shafer-Landau, on Moral Realism