Yeah anon, you dont have time… you can avoid what I wrote if you want to.
Hume is saying that moral claims are categorically different than descriptive claims, he isn’t saying that morality falls out of heaven, again I’ve never said that he is saying that. You insist to misrepresent what I’m saying, then you don’t even acknowledge a fundamental question like “how do you define what morality is?” at all. What the fuck sort of place is this, anyway?
Whoa, slow down. I don’t have a slick moral theory that I can relate to you in a single post. That doesn’t mean I can’t talk about how you’ve completely misrepresented Hume.
I didn’t claim that you say that Hume thinks that morality falls out of heaven. I’m saying that Hume says you can’t rationally determine an ought from an is. You’ve stated your own views on morality, and they don’t conflict with Hume’s criticism of rationalist philosophers.
Exactly.
Morality is only a perspective on a bunch of "is"s. Technically speaking morality doesn’t even exist, it’s just a kind of motivating-incentivizing phenomenon that humans developed to rationalize things, control each other ad homogenize social relations.
The division that Hume inserts between is-statements (about “what is”) and ought-statements (about “what I want”) is a false division.
First, I edited my post after you quoted here. I changed “can” to “can’t” - bad typo! 
Hume inserts such a division into his own moral theory? Where? Point me to where he does this.
Okay. That’s not what Hume was writing about, as several people have pointed out.
I don’t see anything useful in this revelation. It doesn’t help anyone make decisions.
Are you disagreeing with him? Because elsewhere you say
No. Wants are not irreducible.
Morality is only a kind of perspective, like an idea, like a goal. What you “ought” to do is the result of what you are and how-why you are. To say that something is moral or immoral is only to say a certain facet of your “is”, your “how-why” which obviously very quickly moves out beyond the narrow bounds of “you” alone.
The many contradictions of moral sentimentalities and dilemma situations are not problematic at all.
Ought ≡ what “should be”.
Is ≡ what exists.
“Ought” doesn’t mean what you “want”, but rather what you “should want”, hence it’s association with morality and prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Saying that moral sentiments are not solely derived from reason is accurate, of course, but it is not accurate to say that morality is a-rational. The object of “morality” is a perspective of reason upon feelings, and of feelings upon reason; it is one purview in which these two relations meet (the other such purview being philosophy). But when you limit your conceptual thinking to “will, passions, reason” you only have so far you can go.
Emotions are also rational, and reason is also emotional. Reason and emotions, “thinking and feeling” are black-box concepts that hinder more than help the philosopher, but we get into the habit of using them because it’s easier than trying to get down to what is really happening. They come from the same phenomenon, namely sensation. Conscious sense. Sensation is always a binary relation and implies at the least an essentializing duality, a divide, and usually implies a whole cascade of hierarchal divisions, theses and syntheses. The division itself is the epistemically primary entity, the anti-synthesis, but it is not the ontologically primary entity.
Right. And what you “should” want is based on what you are. It is based on your particular needs as such-and-such an organism, in terms of both your general type (species) and your individual nature.
I would say they are not problematic, if, they can be integrated within an encompassing, coherent world view. Otherwise, different moral perspectives may present problems of conflict resolution.
Adjustments due to different perspectives may work if the adjustments are understood within their contexts. These adjustments are not always understook, sometimes, they are only ad hoc automatic responses, with little relevance to anything else but the basic application at hand.
And finally, referential systems have to differentiate between exclusive and inclusive content, vis observed and recognized relevant and consistent elements.
Hume views morality as a concrete thing, something about which other authors attempt to speak correctly or incorrectly as if they were talking about a set of empirical facts. Because morality is this real entity to Hume, just like for him “will” is a real entity he takes issue with the improper way in which other philosophers make moral claims; which is to say, that those claims about a supposed real entity are not justified (make no claim to be connected to an empirical justification, such as “is” statements do). Hume’s mistake is in treating morality is this real thing, as if the concept “morality” refers to an actual thing. Morality is a label, a category and nothing more, it does not actually refer to anything explicitly at all. Morality is a word that we use to label certain of our motives, feelings and ideas, in an attempt to make sense of these (usually in an attempt to not have to understand them to the point where such understanding would interfere with the convenience of our emotional and intellectual apathies).
Because Hume does not see this, he assumes that morality must have the same kind of justification as Is-statements, and since it does not, he claims it must be a different kind of statement altogether, that its justification resides not in reason but in feelings, as he says in “wants”. He contrived the is-ought distinction in response to typical moralist philosophers because Hume was smart enough to see that these philosophers were full of shit when they talked about their morality, but was not smart enough to see that morality ITSELF was also full of shit. Hume’s is-ought distinction can perhaps best be read as his attempt to rescue morality, as his own need for morality to “mean something concrete”, to be a real thing.
The problem is that morality, despite being full of shit, comes from something that is not, that is very “concretely real”, which is to say, comes from our psychological and physiological necessities. Those things to which we act like the term “moral” refers do actually exist and matter, do have substance and import to us, but shunting them off into the label of morality is just as pointless as is Hume’s approach to build an edifice upon the notion that moral claims are “not rational”. Rather you deny the actual causal substance and source of “moral experiences” by establishing a morality or you deny it by establishing a categorical distinction between morality and everything else, you are obfuscating the real issue. The real issue here is the fact that moral sentiments and experiences are self-interpretations, which is to say self-sensations about ourselves, about WHAT we are and HOW-WHY we are that way. They are literally NOTHING more than this.
Actually, to be more specific, “ought” does mean what you want AND what you should want. What you “should” want is only a statement about what you want to want, about what your wants want or do not want-- it is a reflection of values and of valuation as such. Such a statement is basically only a relation between your wanting and the realities in which wanting finds itself and by which it is limited and conditioned.
In the common parlance:
The distinction between a watch and a person is valid. A watch is supposed to mark the time because a watch is nothing besides something which marks the time. Mo is right that when a watch is broken and it is used as a bookmark, it is no longer a watch but a bookmark. Its function is what it is.
Man is different. Unless you can define what a man is ‘meant to be’, you can not derive an “ought”.
Since philosophy is part of man, it’s going to be pretty difficult defining the “is” of man in such terms that an “ought” follows from it or reflects it.
Morality is precisely this attempt. Moralities try to define man as a utensil. “Man is the creation of God and ought to do Gods will”.
This discussion has avoided the central issue of morality, which is a collective interest in the individual.
True individualism only came to be with the advent of nihilism, when man could no longer believe that he was meant to do anything at all, and started to think that his “is” could mean anything - thus that it factually means nothing.
RM is attempting to define man as a coherent “is”, from which an “ought” follows - namely, man ought to do that which perpetuates his “is”. Man is a self-harmony, which must accumulate momentum by verifying its hopes and threats.
Value Ontology proposes that man is a self-valuing and thus, that all his oughts follow from whichever way he values himself.
He ought to breathe, in order to keep existing. But he doesn’t need to keep existing.
MM is right that there can be no ontological difference between is and ought, but I don’t think that this makes for a simple solution.
When the army values a man in terms of his force and controllability, this man ought to do his superiors bidding, which is to be a soldier, to fight under command. This is morality. The considerations that go through the head of the man are not. Morality is what you’re being told to do, it’s telling you what you ought to be. That’s what it has always meant. Now that people begin to think that they can perhaps define what they are for themselves, morality is no longer applicable.
Hume’s problem, along with what dominates the disagreement in this thread, is that the “is” is taken for granted.
I’ve long ago abandoned the concept “human” as the behavioral differences between two humans age far greater than the differences between an average human and an average chimp. Human is not a valid category of “is”, thus there is a great space for one human to tell another human what he ought to be.
Humans are clay, this is generally true. Can I conclude then that they ought to be molded?
No. I prefer to say that they ought to not be clay. Thus that their “ought” is diametrically opposed to their “is”.
And that is precisely the original of morality - to improve what is into what ought to be.
The very beginning of morality: A child is a helpless bundle of organic material. It ought to become a self-sustaining organism. That possibility is not implicit in its “is”. It is wholly forced upon it by a collective of which it is part. Thus, a mans “is” is derived from his “ought”, not the other way around.
Man survives his infancy only because someone else values his existence. He is embedded in an “ought” in order that he may be an “is”, and become aware of that. Thus nihilism is logically untenable, and only an extension of the Oedipus complex.
Finally we can move beyond the ground level.
As you say, man does not need to keep existing. His “need to” or “ought to” are products of what he IS, namely that man is an animal constructed with “instincts” that compel is heart to beat, his lungs to breathe, his mind to think, his body to move. These automatisms exist only because they tended in the past to further the survival of the species form, they do not exist because man or any other animal “wants” or “ought” to do these things.
Want and ought come into the picture as derivatives, secondary issues. It is a conflation of causality and of context to suppose that a derivative conditions that from which it derives. Human life, action, thought, sentiment or society do not exist at the behest of psychological constructs. Rather these constructs, as forms of self-valuing interpretation, tend to exist at the behest of these. As Nietzsche said, “I do not eat because I am hungry, I am hungry because I eat.”
It is true what you say about man surviving infancy only because other men value him doing so. But the existence of these others and of their valuing only exists because of the infant, because of the past history of procreation and instinct. It is chicken and egg, to say here that the infant ONLY exists because of the valuing of others is to disregard the fact that the others exist also at the behest of infant-ism, of the fact of past reproductions and the prior existence of social forms. The individual shapes the society and the society shapes the individual, and neither is reducible to the other alone.
My point in this thread is that morality is not a “thing” that exists, it is not even as existential as a thought or a sentiment; it is a wisp, a specter, a lie we tell ourselves in order to justify and secure certain kinds of responses, habits, cognitions and ways of emoting or not emoting. The human self-valuing is just that, a self-valuing that is “human”, that occurs with respect to certain loose bounds of what is referred to as “human nature”. Because this nature cannot be pinned down and because it is highly variable from one person to another does not mean that no such nature exists. We might more properly define that nature in terms of common instinct-unconsciousness as well as in terms of extant language-structures (logos and perceptions) in which the individual grows up.
Yes, you are right, the “is” is taken for granted, but I see this error as categorical; what is taken for granted is the form of the is, the assumed upright relation between is and everything else, between man and himself, and between man and reality. This taking for granted is a consequence of naive empiricism, as I see it; naive realism, which is just a form of psychological self-validation and of weakness in philosophy (i.e. a form of religion, it is political).
Ought can be diametrically opposed to is, absolutely. It is often the case that our “oughts” do oppose the “is” of some context in which or alongside which oughts arise. This would make those oughts irrational (unless they succeed at reconstituting the is in their favor).
Hume’s mistake is the mistake of every naive realist, of every scientist who lacks philosophy, of every religious: it is the mistake of assuming prematurely, of inserting false divisions at the behest of a black and white rationality and pathology. The terms “is” and “ought” are highly problematic in themselves, as is the term “morality”, but until you eschew such distinctions as Hume and others write about these problems cannot be seen, let alone addressed.
Exactly. This is where thinking begins.
I thought that this thread might reveal how to get ‘ought’ from ‘is’ - something useful.
Instead it turns out to be another philosophy thread. 
…i.e. I hoped I would see the face of God and be saved.
Instead I was asked to think.
This is the sort of response you get here, MM - usually.
What made for moral conditions has always been environmental pressure. Morality was a way of communicating means to survival. That is dead now in our world. We’re back at plant-level - we can’t help being fed with what’s around us in abundance, we can’t really help surviving as a being that is derived from certain oughts being forced on us.
What about the hands that work on humanity as on wax? There are psychological constructs behind all cultivating institutions.
I take issue with using “infant” and “infant-ism” in the same causal context.
The continuation of an infants life is not a given by the fact of infancy itself. It is always a matter of valuing and choosing on the side of the parents and the society. In all individual cases, a life comes down to a choice made by others. True, these others are compelled by their recognition of their own origin, but being-valued is crucial in existing. The difficulty of coming to a full self-valuing with that knowledge is represented by the story of Oedipus.
It’s at best a form of creative freedom, a tool to help us shape what we are by imagining something is expected of us. Most of the time such constructs are rather a prison, but not always.
As man is not just his present condition, but the whole potential of his lifespan, morality can be seen as an instrument to influence what he is.
If there is any “ought” to speak of at all, it is the central agent, the “is” derives from it. That is because all surviving oughts are effective agents of power. A morality survives if it empowers the believer to become something he experiences as stronger, more worthy.
Yes, it’s quite recent that some thinkers began putting their categorical “is” in question. Nietzsche was the first, I believe.
And they often succeed. A being is not a single moment but a timespan, and an ought strategically placed in respect to the is can radically transform and empower that being.
Hume seems to have been on to the problem, seems to have run into it, but did not realize (by my knowledge) that indeed “is” is not a given. The same superstition that blindsided Descartes.
I hoped to see something valuable.
I don’t need to be asked … I already think.