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Peterdjones comments on A reply to Mark Linsenmayer about philosophy - Less Wrong
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Mark makes a good point here:
TLDR: Science deals with "is". Since there is an is-ought gap, there is still plenty for philosophy to say about "ought".
Except that, as I'm positive you already know, to get out of the is-ought bind all you have to do is specify a goal or desire you have. The ought-statement flows logically from the is-statement (which science tells us about) and the goal/desire statement (which science is getting increasingly good at telling us about).
No, that's would , not ought. I oughtn't act on all my desires.
Could you humor me and and explain the difference?
I am strugglig witht that, because it is so obvious.We sometimes morally condemn people for acting on their desires. The rapist acts on a desire to rape. We condemn them for it, which is to say we think they ought not to have acted on their desires. So what they ought to do is not synonynous with what they desire to do.
AFAICS, the only way to get confused about this is to take "ought" to mean "instruimentaly ought". But no one who believes in the is-ought gap thinks its about instrumental-ought.
I thank you for taking the time and replying anyway. :)
What we are condemning isn't their resulting 'ought' statement per se, but rather that their reasoning went awry somewhere along the way.
The reason you shouldn't rape someone is a result of some sort of computation (maybe not the best word for it, but whatever):
Is: What the rapist believes about the world. + Desire/Goal/Value: What a perfectly informed and perfectly rational version of said rapist would value or desire. = Ought: The rapist should not have raped.
When we condemn the rapist, we are trying to show that he has some mistake in his first or second step. but not in the 'ought' statement, which is just the product of the first two statements.
Although this doesn't seem to be where we are disagreeing, I will note that the solution I gave is one I've seen often used to resolve is-ought problems even with instrumental 'oughts'.
Remember that this is about your claim that science can inform us abut oughts. How can a science conducted by imperfectly rational scientists inform us what desires a perfectly ratioanal agent would have? And while we're on the subject, why would rationality constrain desires?
When we condemn someone, we are sayig they morally-ought not to have done what they did. You are taking "ought" as if only had an instrumental meaning?
Instrumental oughts are the easy case.
Science can't tell us anything about how to be more rational? Is that your claim?
After breaking down the equation for how one gets to an 'ought' statement, I think it's obvious how science can help us inform our 'oughts'. You seem to agree, more or less, with my assessment of the calculation necessary for reaching 'ought' statements, and since science can tell us things about each of the individual parts of the calculation, it follows that it can tell us things about the sum as well.
Hmm... After thinking about it, it seems more likely that rationality belongs to the 'is' box, and reflectiveness/informativeness belong in the the 'desire/goal' box. Duly noted.
I'm not sure I understand what you are objecting to.
I think the claim is that science can't tell us how to become "perfectly rational". Science can certainly tell us how to become "more rational", but only if we already have a specification of what "more rational" is, and just need to figure out how to implement it. I think most of us who are trying to figure out such specifications do not see our work as following the methods of science, but rather more like doing philosophy.
I was responding to you claim:
"perfectly informed and perfectly rational"
You have shifted the ground from "perfect" to "better".
That's because you are still thinking of an "ought* as an instrumental rule for realising personal values, but in the context of the is-ought divide, it isn't that, it is ethical. You still haven't understood what the issue is about. There are cirrcumstances under which I ought not to do what I desire to do.
The better it gets, the closer it gets to perfect. Eventually, if science can tell us enough about rationality, there's no reason we can't understand the best form of it.
I'm a Moral Anti-Realist (probably something close to a PMR, a la Luke) so the is-ought problem reduces to either what you've been calling 'instrumental meaning' or to what I'll call 'terminal meaning', as in terminal values.
There's nothing more to it. If you think there is, prove it. I'm going with Mackie on this one.
Yes, like I've said. When your beliefs about the world are wrong, or your beliefs about how best to achieve your desires are wrong, or your beliefs about your values are misinformed or unreflective, then the resulting 'ought' will be wrong.
Is there really so much to say about "ought"?
All you can and must do is introduce something you assume as an axiom, and then you reason from there. You can't (by definition) motivate your axioms against some other set, and the reasoning is straight-forward by the standards of most philosophy.
So for instance, Peter Singer's version of utilitarianism is an internally consistent product of some particular minimal set of axioms. If you fiddle with the axioms to re-introduce species-specific morality, okay you'll get different results --- but it won't be terribly hard to reason out what the resulting ethical position is given the axioms.
Yes. Metaethics is very complex.
I don't see why not. In fact, I also don't see why it should be axioms all the way down. Metaethicisiss often start with a set of first-order ethical intutions. and use those to test axioms.