There’s a famous, old philosophical precept, which I’ll attribute to David Hume, that holds that you cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. In other words, there’s nothing about the way the world is that tells you how it ought to be. In other words, no amount of descriptive fact will ever legitimately itself generate an evaluative conclusion.
This dogma—and dogma it is—has perpetrated on its hapless victims, (“Humeans”, let’s call them), the greatest possible stupidity. It would require that a Humean stand in dumb indecision before the question of whether a wrist watch that neither kept time nor kept anything was a ‘good’ wrist watch… because ‘good’ is an evaluative term, and keeping time is a descriptive fact about the world.
I’m curious if anyone has a single argument to bring to bear in defense of this unfortunate dogma…? A single argument…
I am a river, and sometimes a river has to wash away foul things…
I will testify that you certainly can deduce an “ought” from an “is”. But I know that such is not a trivial matter. You cannot do the habitual casting of good or bad attributes to common objects or acts. Only the abstract entities can be always good or bad. In the case of the watch that doesn’t keep time, the situation might declare that such a watch is good. It just isn’t good for that particular use.
The function of a watch is to keep time. If it doesn’t keep time, it’s not a good watch. You might find it to be an excellent baseball, writing utensil, or dildo, …but it’s still a bad watch. The evaluative notions are built right into the descriptive ones, and there is nary a distinction betwixt them.
Image a situation wherein being aware of the time passing is bad. Perhaps you are bored or nervous, mentally distracted by the passage of time. Your watch, perhaps ticking, merely keeps drawing your attention to that passage of time or otherwise makes you aware of it. Being aware of what a watch is designed to make you aware of, in that situation is a bad thing. Thus, in that unusual situation, a working watch is worse than a non-working watch and a “good watch” is one that either doesn’t work, or isn’t there.
I consider ‘is’ and ‘ought’ to come from the same original and mutual seed. I’m guessing what Hume tried to do is talk about a world separate from perception. Pure-objectivity, which itself shouldn’t have an ought. The idea of an ought not belonging to reality is, itself, just an idea. It is a construct placed on reality. The attempt seems to be that once we remove all value and emotion from reality, then that reality is more objective. It is like cutting off some fingers and saying the hand is now a pure and true hand. Removal of perceptive facilities wont enhance knowledge. A valueless reality isn’t more real than a valuable reality.
It is? …because if it is, you presumptuously misused the word “properly”.
And no case where you don’t want to know the time means the watch is bad, it just means you don’t want to know the time. See there’s this thing about wrist watches… you can take them off…
River, you are hitting on exactly what has cause ALL of the hooplah concerning the Humean versus the Kantian (which I am neither).
Note the difference between the red and blue concepts, yet it is the same word.
The blue refers to the subjective usefulness for helpfulness of something, whereas the red refers to a “proper condition” of something, whether useful or not.
That conflation of words is the entirety of the argument between Hume and Kant.
I don’t see a difference. A watch is useful only if it is functioning as a watch. You can use a watch for any number of things you might want to do, like play baseball, or use a dildo, but then you’re not using it as a watch. It might still be a good watch, but not because you can stick it in your cunt, and to the extent that it is a good watch, it has something to do with keeping time.
Ultimately, your tangent is borderline incoherent, and believe me, it is a tangent as far as I can tell. Two possibilities: I am too stupid to see your point, or else your tangent is derailing the thread. Either way, you should give up on me.
Good isn’t an evaluative term in the context of the watch. You gotta think of what the watch is supposed to do, and whether it performs its function. If you decide that “a good watch” is one that keeps time, then there’s nothing evaluative about it. It either keeps time or it doesn’t, and it’s either a good watch or it’s not.
I get what you’re trying to say here, that a Humean would have some kind of trouble making evaluative decisions, but I think the watch example sucks because it’s been used in so many other thought experiments that it can be confusing to the reader.
I think what they mean when they say you can’t derive an ought from an is, is that there is nothing about the actual state of things in the world from which you could properly infer that something ought be another way. Basically, you see the world, you decide it’s bad. You want it to be good, so you reason. But you’re not reasoning solely from the “is” you’ve encountered in the world, you’re actually adding all kinds of context and perspective. So you’re not really deriving the ought from the is you’re deriving the ought from the combination of your understanding of the is and some other things like your own view and preconceived notions about what the world ought to be like.
Both true. The swinging between good and bad resides only in thought. In this material world that man lives in, quantum leaps (such as taking off the watch) help him to understand himself and the world around so that the ‘good’ that guides a particular individual in his situations becomes better.
So far you guys I think are making a mistake.
You’re removing the ought, then saying it didn’t belong there in the first place.
Whether we see it or not, the ought is always there. It is a multiple thing, not a single existence, but everything in reality has a trajectory. It has properties. Values are not baseless, they are based ideally on reality. Not always, but, ideally, objects all have meaning, value and purpose.
For clarity: Hume’s argument is that a moral ought can’t be deduced from an is. It’s part of his attack on Rationalism, along with his problem of induction. Oughts have an implicit “If you want to do X, then -”; if you want to be in town before sundown, you ought to set off now, if you want to lose weight you ought to exercise. The implicit prefix of a moral ought is “if you want to be (morally) good, then -” and that is irreducible: one should want to be morally good, even when it may rationally go against one’s self-interest. That’s what most of being moral is about, for most people.
Some people see moral oughts as identical with pragmatic oughts - a person ought to be kind to others, just as a watch ought to keep time, or a knife ought to be sharp. This assumes some teleology to personhood, that every person has a purpose, which most philosophers of the last few centuries are reluctant to propose or defend, although a teleological view of humans is a broad concept and doesn’t necessarily entail objective or subjective morality. But I know no reason to think that Hume thought that a blunt knife was neither good nor bad; some things can have a purpose (being used by people for useful things) without everything having a purpose.
Because insofar as ought is used morally, there’s no X for “if you want to be X then you ought to be morally good” - it’s the root of the ought.
By way of illustration: “if you want to be in town before sundown, you ought to set off now” is dependent on “if you want to catch the new film you ought to be in town by sundown” is dependent on “if you like horror movies then you ought to see the new film” and the ought reduces to whether or not you like horror movies - there’s no further implication that you ought to like horror movies, to give the the suggestion of “setting off now” any normative force.
I’ve been reading MacIntyre. I read about the watch (and that a sea captain ought to do what a sea captain ought to do ), and I’ve read about 3/4 of After Virtue at this point. The thing is, a watch has a specific role. If it is performing some other role (maybe it doesn’t work and I’m using it as a bookmark) then in this context of talking about function, it is not a watch. It’s now a rather poor bookmark. So what makes something good or bad here is its usefulness to me, as I intend it to be used. MacIntyre goes on an on about roles (he would have us living in a Greek city-state I think), and so far the only place I’ve seen him question this approach is where he says of the Sophoclean protagonist, “He or she is what society takes him or her to be. But he or she is not only what society takes him or her to be; he or she both belongs to a place in the social order and transcends it.” Again, I’m about 3/4 of my way through the book, and I haven’t seen him address this issue of how anything can have a non-relative function - how anything can be good or bad in all contexts. Maybe he gets there, but I wonder… Maybe he’s just being coy about what he’s really selling. Where I’m at in the book, he’s discussing the virtue of charity, and I suspect this all leads towards the idea that we have to be good for God, in order to be good in all contexts. And who knows, maybe later in the book he’ll convince me of the need to invent God for this purpose.
After Virtue is a great book. I won’t ruin it all for you, but he’s not selling God or non-relative goodness; he’s a sort of objective relativist. The criticism of post-Cartesian philosophy is largely one of reifying individual morality. I should read it again.
Ah, OK, Thanks for the clarification. I do think there might be a way to fill in that statement though. If you want to be beneficent, you ought to be morally good. No?
), and I’ve read about 3/4 of After Virtue at this point. The thing is, a watch has a specific role. If it is performing some other role (maybe it doesn’t work and I’m using it as a bookmark) then in this context of talking about function, it is not a watch. It’s now a rather poor bookmark. So what makes something good or bad here is its usefulness to me, as I intend it to be used. MacIntyre goes on an on about roles (he would have us living in a Greek city-state I think), and so far the only place I’ve seen him question this approach is where he says of the Sophoclean protagonist, “He or she is what society takes him or her to be. But he or she is not