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torekp comments on 'Is' and 'Ought' and Rationality - Less Wrong
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No. The distinction between those viral behaviors that tend to contribute to the virus replicating and those viral behaviors that do not contribute does issue from science. It is not a metaphor to call actions that detract from reproduction "mistakes" on the part of the virus, any more than it is a metaphor to call certain kinds of chemical reactions "exothermic". There is no 'open question' issue here - "mistake", like "exothermic", does not have any prior metaphysical meaning. We are free to define it as we wish, naturalistically.
So much for the practical ought, the version of ought for which ought not is called a mistake because it generates consequences contrary to the agent's interests. What about the moral ought, the version of ought for which ought not is called wrong? Can we also define this kind of ought naturalistically? I think that we can, because once again I deny that "wrong" has any prior metaphysical meaning. The trick is to make the new (by definition) meaning not clash too harshly with the existing metaphysical connotations.
How is this for a first attempt at a naturalistic definition of the moral ought as a subset of the practical ought? An agent morally ought not to do something iff it tends to generate consequences contrary to the agent's interests, those negative consequences arising from the reactions of disapproval coming from other agents.
In general, it is not difficult at all to define either kind of ought naturalistically, so long as one is not already metaphysically committed to the notion that the word 'ought' has a prior metaphysical meaning.
I think this is right, except possibly for the part about no prior metaphysical meaning. The later explanation of that part didn't clarify it for me. Instead, I'll just indicate what prior meaning I find attached to the idea that "the virus replicated wrongly."
In biology, the idea that organs and behaviors and so on have functions is quite common and useful. The novice medical student can make many correct inferences about the heart by supposing that its function is to pump blood, for example. The idea preceded Darwin, but post-Darwin, we can give a proper naturalistic reduction for it. Roughly speaking, an organ's function is F iff in the ancestral environment, the organ's performance of F is what it was selected for. Various RNA features in a virus might have functions in this sense, and if so, that gives the meaning of saying that in a particular case, the viral reproduction mechanism failed to operate correctly.
That's not a moral norm. It's not even the kind of norm relating to an agent's interests, in my view. But it is a norm.
There was a pre-existing meaning of "biological function" before Darwin came around. So, a Darwinian definition of biological function was not a purely stipulative one. It succeeded only because it captured enough of the tentatively or firmly accepted notions about "biological function" to make reasonably good sense of all that.
I think I see the source of the difficulty now. My fault. BobTheBob mentioned the mistake of replicating with errors. I took this to be just one example of a possible mistake by a virus, and thought of several more - inserting into the wrong species of host, for example, or perhaps incorporating an instance of the wrong peptide into the viral shell after replicating the viral genome.
I then sought to define 'mistake' to capture the common fitness-lowering feature of all these possible mistakes. However, I did not make clear what I was doing and my readers naturally thought I was still dealing with a replication error as the only kind of mistake.
Sorry to have caused this confusion.