Alonzo Fyfe

Jade:

You bring up a number of interesting and relevant points, but I am having trouble piecing them together. I cannot see the structure of your argument.


Different types of OUght

It is true that there are different meanings of the word 'ought'. Yet, I do not see that this is a problem. We are concerned here with senses that have to do with prescriptivity, and a sense that is not prescriptive (e.g., the spyware example) are simply not relevant.

For example, there are also several definitions of the word 'right'. I see no reason to expect to require that an analysis must capture all of those senses, or that an analysis of one sense (e.g., the sense that means 'correct') must be held to fail because it cannot account for another sense (e.g., the sense that means 'the opposite of left').

Even with respect to prescriptive 'ought', there are different senses. I have given a general defintion, "is such as to fulfill the desires in question.'. Note the 'is' statement on the right side of the equation -- this is important. This is the link between 'is' and 'ought'.

Now, please also recognize that the 'desires in question' is determined in context, and can shift.

For example, if we are talking about practical 'ought', the desires in question are those of the agent who is contemplating the action. Whereas moral 'ought' considers all desires regardless of who has them. It is not uncommon for an act to be such as to fulfill a practical 'ought', but still not fulfill a moral 'ought'.

For example, if you want to rob a convenience store without being recognized, you ought to wear some sort of ski mask. Wearing a ski mask is "such as to fulfill the desires in question' where 'the desires in question" are those associated with not being recognized while robbing a convenience store. Yet, by no stretch of the imagination is this 'ought' a moral 'ought' (in the sense of 'you have a moral obligation to wear a ski mask while robbing a convenience store'). The difference is not that one is concerned with fulfilling the desires in question, and the other is not. The difference is that the 'desires in question' for each type of 'ought' is different.


The ought of paying for icecream

An equivocation beteen two different meanings of the word 'ought' is what appears in your case about the icecream. In one sense, the word 'ought' is the practical 'ought' associated with being the best way to get the ice-cream. This is similar to the 'ought' of wearing a ski mask while robing a convenience store. However, in proposition C, there is a shift in meaning to the moral sense of 'ought' which concerns more than what is practical for the agent.

Yes, it is true that payment being 'such as to fulfill the desire for ice cream' is inadequate to capture the moral 'ought' of the last statement, just as wearing the ski mask being 'such as to fulfill the desire for not being recognized while robbing a convenience store' is not the same as a moral obligation to wear a ski mask.

Yet, in all of these cases, the analysis of 'ought' in terms of 'is such as to fulfill the desires in question' offers a reasonable interpretation of the proposition.

This same equivocation exists in your next set of propositions concerning 'you ought to do X' and 'the only way to get what you want to is to do X'. Drawing this equivalency assumes that we are talking about practical 'ought', not moral 'ought'. The first 'ought', I think, is a moral 'ought'; whereas the second 'ought' is clearly a practical 'ought'. These are not equivalent, so noting that there is a lack of equivalence between them is not at all surprising.



Non-propositional statements

You also bring up statements (such as commands and interrogatories) which are not propositions. I believe that this is intended to cast some doubt on my argument that an 'ought' must refer to something in the real world of 'is' if it is to have an affect on the real world.

The significant difference between an evaluation on the one hand, and a command and an interogatory on the other, is that an evaluation is often offered as an explanation for an event. In other words, value propositions are offered as answers to the question "why" and can be sensibly preceeded by the word 'because'.

"Because it is wrong."

"Because it does not belong to me."

"Because I promised that I would."

You can't do anything like this with a command or an interrogatory, because these lack explanatory power. We can say something like, "Because he commanded me to do it," or "Because he asked me to do it." However, the clause to the right of 'because' is, itself, not a command or an interrogatory. It is an 'is' proposition about a command or an interrogatory. 'Ought' statements are genuine propositions that can and do serve as explanations for events. But to be an explanation for an event, the 'ought' must refer to something capable of influencing those events -- something that exists in the world of 'is'.


Summary

In the ways mentioned above, the bridge between descriptive 'is' and prescriptive 'ought' through the existence of desire is preserved. The statement 'you ought to do X' simply means 'doing X is such as to fulfill the desires in question.' There has to be some sort of bridge between 'is' and 'ought', else we must cease the practice of offing 'ought' statements as explanations of real-world events.

Understanding 'ought' as 'is such as to fulfill the desires in question' yields a strong relationship between evolution and ethics, since many of our 'desires in question' are heavily influenced by evolutionary forces.

Yet, there is nothing in here that contradicts my original proposition that, to the degree that a trait is hard-wired, to that degree moral concepts do not apply to them. This, as I have argued previously, is simply another way of stating that we are not going to waste our effort trying to apply the tools of priase, blame, reward, and punishment to dispositions that they cannot influence.

So, yes, a link between evolution and ethics exists. But those who postulate that ethics is 'hard wired' are fundamentally misunderstanding ethics. As a result, they are looking in the wrong place in their attempt to understand how evolution and ethics can be linked.

Jade

Yeah, sorry about that. I wasn't so much forming an argument as spilling my stream of thought onto the screen...

I am going to have to get to the rest of your comments tomorrow. I got work tomorr...uh this morning.

Adrian Selby

"Wearing a ski mask will disguise you" is either true or false, you are either disguised, at least facially, or you aren't.

However, saying you ought to wear a ski mask is not true or false. This is weird. How can it be true or false that I ought to wear a ski mask. It is advisable/inadvisable for sure, but it is not true or false.

When you make prescriptive statements you are not stating matters of fact, though the subjects in your statement may have matters of fact that obtain. The prescription itself is not a matter of fact. It is not true that you must wear something on your face to disguise it, for it is possible you can do a great many things to ensure your face is not remembered.

We can thus correct the quote to say, "If you don't want to be recognised, you ought to ensure you are not recognised." But I don't see how this sense of ought reflects the moral sense, such as 'If you want to abort, you ought to abort'. It is not clear that if you want to abort you really ought to abort, because it is possible that what you ought to do is different.

I'm sure you'd reply with, well, whether you ought to abort depends on whether the desire to abort fulfils more desires than it thwarts. Given the problems we both acknowledge appertain, and given my conclusion that we can't confirm what we really ought to do in DU terms, it appears to me that we cannot determine what we ought to do in this sense.

Furthermore, that we 'ought to fulfil more desires than we thwart' is subject to the is/ought gap. It is not clear that it is a fact that we ought to fulfil more desires than we thwart, or indeed that we ought to have desires that do this.

Jade

I am currently working with the hypothesis (one of many) that when people say 'Ought' they often mean something along the lines of Aristotle's 'Final Cause'. In other words, that among all the possible 'ends' or futures that a thing can have, one of them is priveleged as the "proper end", and the object seeks that proper end as a matter of it's deepest nature. That is to say, when a thing does not do what is 'Ought', that it is being perverted from it's 'proper end' and going against its nature.

This sense can explain the 'spyware' scenario: When I say "the computer ought to be working", I mean that I think its inherent nature is to work in a certain way, that the spyware corrupted it from working as was 'proper' for it, and that now with the spyware removed that it will return again to what it is 'supposed to be doing' (should do). Similarly, in the 'logic' scenario, it is proper and 'natural' (in accordance with the nature of a logical being) to accept the conclusion of a strong argument.

I think this is also what is sometimes meant when people speak of what people 'Ought' to do (in a moral sense) -- that we have a deepest nature or priveleged future that is natural and proper. For instance, when Aristotle spoke of the proper or good life as "living in accordance with reason", he meant that reasoning was the defining characteristic of humanity (what separates us from the animals, or something), and thus the proper object of our existence.

In short, 'Ought' = of all the possible "will do's", there is one that is the proper action, as defined by the deepest nature of the object in question.

Now, I don't actually necessarily believe that this is true, though it has a certain intuitive appeal....

Jade

Actually, I was not equivocating (or at least not intentionally). I actually did mean (and do mean) to say that the 'practical Ought' seems to contain or evoke a cognitive force that 'equivalent' fact statements do not (and thus is not quite equivalent). I was not really concerned with moral Oughts in my examples.

"You Ought to wear a hat and scarf to keep your head warm" does not feel the same as "Wearing a hat is such as to fulfill the desire to keep your head warm". The 'Ought' has a force behind it --or conjures a force by its presence-- which the plain fact statement does not. This remains the case even when you put them both in arguments:

a) It is cold outside.
b) You do not want your head to be cold.
c) Wearing a scarf and hat will prevent your head from being cold.
d) Therefore you Ought to wear a scarf and hat.

versus...

i) It is cold outside.
ii) You do not want your head to be cold.
iii) Wearing a scarf and hat will prevent your head from being cold.
iv) Therefore wearing a scarf and hat is such as to fulfill the desire to keep your head from being cold.

...(d) and (iv) just don't evoke the same feeling in me when I read them. (iv) evokes the same level of feeling (i.e. none) as any other Fact statement, such as "The grass is green" or "The only way to win chess is to capture the enemy king". However, I am having a hard time expressing exactly how they are different, and what this 'feel' is.

In my last post I spoke about how desires feel like physical forces, and that Ought statements seem to be an expression of a similar force. I am not sure how to expand on this, except to say that when I feel that I ought to do something (A), I experience it as a desire or attraction towards A. However, when I percieve the fact that X will enable me to acheive a given desire or purpose, that knowledge doesn't have the same compelling force attached to it.

Does this make any sense to you? Does anyone else feel similarly?

Jade

While this is a good explanation, I remain unconvinced. Let me see if I can explain why...

1) Because I ought to.

2) Because I think I ought to.

1 and 2 are not equivalent. Specifically, 2 is certainly an "Is" statement, and can be true or false. However 1 is not so clear. When you speak above of Ought statements as being legitimately usable in explanatory sentences, it seems to me that you can take such explanatory sentences as shorthand for something more like 2 above. Thus, if someone says "I killed Mrs Thatcher because I ought to kill powerful women", this statement has no explanatory power unless it is taken as shorthand for "I killed Mrs Thatcher because I think that I ought to kill powerful women".

In short, Ought statements are raw expressions of preferences, and no more true or false than "Ow!" or "Mmm!". Only statements which talk about such preferences -- "I like this" or "I think that I ought to do this" -- can have truth values.

(Not that I am particularly committed to this position, but it would be interesting to see how you address it)

Jade

Unless of course it is useful to speak of Ought statements as mental constructs: "Johnny thought he ought to do this, which is why he did it". Nonetheless, you are correct to say that if Ought statements are never true or false then it is rather absurd to go around thinking and acting like they are. However, if they do lack truth-value, then neither is it true to say that we 'should' stop thinking of them as true -- though such a comment might hold cognitive force within our minds.
I sort of thought these 'hardwired' comments were talking more about certain perceptual categories in the mind -- such as our ability to percieve harm or pain or unfairness. Such things do seem to be hardwired to a large extent (as much as our capability to percieve causality and teleomatic behaviour). Without them we could have no 'moral sense' or ability to understand and detect good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust.

That said, I entirely agree with you that morality does not (as humans seem to understand it) apply to things that we cannot change -- that truly hardwired behaviours are not immoral. I would just point out that this perceptual rule ("nothing that is unchangeable is immoral") is itself likely to be hardwired into us by evolution.

Hooboy !!

Ok, I agree that morality or ethics are not hardwired into us. Perhaps we should change the question to:

Has evolution given us an inescapable motivation to develop a sense of morality and ethics as a group survival strategy?

If there is no hardwired morality that tells us "Murder is wrong", then is there a predisposition to live in groups? If so, then is the development of morals to facilitate these groups present? If so, is it unreasonable to expect that these morals be consistent from group to group?

Alonzo Fyfe

Keeping in mind that the issue under discussion is the hardwiredness of ethics and the influence of evolution....


Adrian Selby

You asked, "How can it be true or false that I ought to wear a ski mask?"

The first thing to note is that 'ought' is a relational term. Removing 'ought' from the context of a relationship makes the term meaningless, in which case the statement cannot be true or false.

Allow me to illustrate this point with another relational term: taller (than). We can ask, "How can it be true or false that Jim is taller than?" In fact, we cannot. The statement is meaningless. However, it is meaningless precisely because "taller than" is a relational term, and the statement is missing any sort of relatant. You have to have a relatant for a relational term to make sense.

The same is true of 'ought' or 'should'. I have suggested that it is 'such as to fulfill the desires in question.' If you use the term in the complete absense of any desires in question, then the ought statement becomes just as meaningless as a stand-alone 'taller than' statement.

Once we add the relevant desires, then the statement about whether X is 'such as to fulfill the desires in question' becomes more meaningful.

Allow me to refer back to the original example, "If you want to get to the movie before it starts, you ought to (should) leave by 3:00." This states that if one acts to make the proposition, "We leave at 3;00" true, then the proposition "We will be at the movie before it starts" will be true.

[NOte: Many of our 'ought' statements deal in probabilities, so the possibility that one can leave at 3:00 and still not get to the movie before it starts does not add any significant problem. A more complex, though more precise, analysis would be something like, "If you want an 90% or greater chance of making it to the movie on time, then you should leave by 3:00."]

So, that is how an ought statement can be true or false. It can be true or false that, if the proposition that follows the 'ought' statement is made true, than the proposition identifying the desired state will be made true.


Jade

On proper ends.

Ultimately, when it comes to moral ought, I agree with the Aristotelian approach, yet it has one significant shortcoming.


What does it take for an end to be a 'proper end'?

We could answer this question by saying that it is an end 'favored by God', or we could say that it has 'intrinsic meric'. However, none of these entities exist. Therefore, there is no 'proper end' that can fill this role in your formulae. We end up with a state whereby the set of items that ought to be done is a null set.

Keeping with the subject of relating evolution to ethics, we could say that the 'proper end' is the continuation of the species. However, what makes that a [i]proper[/b] end? Why not identify 'facilitating the release of stored energy' as our 'proper end', for which survival of the species is merely a means to this end?

I would argue that we can cut these accounts of 'proper end' out of our ontology and be none the poorer because of it. Yet, we would still have a need for the use of the words 'should' and 'ought'.


on the feel of a word

This brings us to the objection that, to you, "therefore you ought to wear a scarf and hat" does not have the same feel as "therefore wearing a scarf and hat is such as to fulfill the desires in question."

Actually, this fallacy has a name -- it is called the fallacy of opacity.

The recognized test for a thesis concerning logical identity is not whether or not the two propositions 'feel' a particular way to a person. Feeling is not a part of a term's meaning.

The official test is whether all propositions using one expression keep their truth value when the second expression is substituted.

My objection to your 'proper end' theory illustrates this point. There is no such thing as a 'proper end'. Which means that all statements of the form 'X is such as to fulfill a 'proper end'" are false. No X is ever related to a 'proper end'" if no 'proper end' exists. Yet, some 'ought' statements remain true.



on the test for logical identity

If you wish to object to the thesis of logical equivalence that I offer, the way to do it would be to provide a counter-example, whereby an 'ought' statement has one truth value, while the substitute 'is such as to fulfill the desires in question' statement has a different truth value.

I will warn you in advance that I will answer the bulk of these counter-examples in one of two ways.

(1) Equivocation.

The counter-example equivocates by changing the reference for the desires in question in the middle of the argument. To illustrate this mistake, assume that I were to say that "A is taller than B" means "The value of A's height in meters is greater than the value of B's height in meters."

You, then, bring forth a counter-example whereby "Jim is taller than Joan" is true, yet "the value of Jim's height in meters is less than the value of Joan's height in meters."

I discover that the 'joan' you are referring to in the first statement is Joan Smith, and the 'joan' you are referring to in the second statement is Joan Joans. I can then answer that this example does not disprove my thesis of logical equivalency due to the fact that you equovicated on the meaning of the term 'joan'.

(2) Explanatory failure.

The 'ought' statement in the offered counter-example makes reference to entities that do not exist. That is to say, you cannot provide any type of alternative account of how "A ought to do X" can be true in the real world. Since people assert that ought statements are (or, at least, can be) true in the real world, an analysis that does not allow for the possibility of such statements being true, is a poor analysis compared to one that allows ought statements to have a truth value.


on on mental constructs

You propose an alternative to the thesis that 'ought' terms must refer to things that exist in order to influence events in the real world by saying, unless...it is useful to speak of Ought statements as mental constructs: "Johnny thought he ought to do this...."

Actually, this does not escape the problem, because we are concerned with what it is that Johnny thought when he thought he ought to do this. We could, for example, explain the fact that Johnny drank from the cup because Johnny believed that the cup was full of water. However, this does not allow us to escape the question of what "the cup was full of water" means, and whether or not its meaning has a truth value. Similarly, even though we can explain the fact that Johnny returned the money because he thought it was the right thing to do, this does not allow us to step outside of the question of what 'it was the right thing to do' means and whether or not it has a truth value.

Adrian Selby

vetThis isn't a fact.

Truths describe facts. What is the case is the desire to see the start of the movie. What is the case is the arrival in the cinema before the movie starts. The exhortation to do so, the prescription that for B you need to do a certain set of things A as opposed to another set of things is not a fact, it is a prescription. One can agree that one needs to do a certain set of things to do a certain other set of things, but it does not necessarily follow that one ought.

It necessarily follows that my saying it is raining is true if and only if it is raining. The statement is a truth candidate, it pertains to a matter of fact.

Nothing necessarily follows from my saying that person X ought to do something. The statement is not a truth candidate, as it pertains to a matter of fact and one of many possible matters of fact that are causally antecedent, with the implicit assumption that where there is a matter of fact that there is a desire, it is a matter of fact that people ought to act on such desires, or that the exhortation should be obeyed.

I cannot test for the truth of your prescription, only the desires it relates to. The prescription is not a fact, though it contains referents that are truth candidates, namely real desires.