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Can you derive an "ought" from an "is"?

TX-Beau said:
I've always thought that ethics and morals are evolutionary survival behavior. We humans are communal creatures, we always have been. Our numbers and our cooperation make us strong. We survive through community, through group dynamic. We do not do so well as lone individuals explicitly thinking only about ourselves.
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Exactly. And evolution can also explain, albeit indirectly, altruism that lies beyond the explanation that you've given, like when we see a female dog adopt a litter of kittens who have no mother. Here, interspecies adoption doesn't assist in the survival of the species. However, that maternal instinct certainly does. The fact that a hog was taking care of tiger cubs is a side effect of her own instinct to take care of small creatures that nuzzle close to her. For 99.9% of the time, those small creatures would be her own offspring, and thus she would be perpetuating her genes. In this case, she isn't, but the genes that give her this instinct are shared with other hogs in her species, and contribute to the propagation of hogs as a population.

Of course there are many folks who dislike a description of morality as a side effect, let alone the byproduct of evolutionary biology. I never understood why that should diminish our perceptive value of it.
 
I finally got the video to play through without stopping.

I think he's playing to Western sensitivities to a fair degree. I'll concede him that ground, though; we tend to think of ourselves as the most advanced, and that's the audience he's addressing.

But it does make him subject to the question of why our view of what is best for people should have standing. He does a tidy job of showing that all sorts of things we condemn are wrong because they do result in human misery, and that's about as far as he gets -- or, I think, can get.


I'd rather go from is to ought by starting with an observable fact of human existence: each person owns himself.
 
Kulindahr said:
I'd rather go from is to ought by starting with an observable fact of human existence: each person owns himself.
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We might own ourselves in theory - but our individual continued survival is totally dependend on a highly complex organised society. Discussions of "ought" and "is" are a form of intelectual masturbation - meaningless against the fragility of our own existence.
 
AsianDream said:
We might own ourselves in theory - but our individual continued survival is totally dependend on a highly complex organised society. Discussions of "ought" and "is" are a form of intelectual masturbation - meaningless against the fragility of our own existence.
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Not at all.

Beginning with the fact of self-ownership, a system of ethics suitable for a complexly organized society can be derived. And as they are ethics that are defensible on an intellectual/rational basis, they are therefore useful.

For example, all individual rights derive from self-ownership, and it is honoring individual rights that distinguishes an advanced society. In contrast, just and fair systems of interpersonal interaction can also be derived, and it is those who sustain a society.


edit:

Further, a code of personal responsibility arises directly from self-ownership -- and the foundation for mental health, education, criminal corrections, and more.
 
Kulindahr said:
Beginning with the fact of self-ownership, a system of ethics suitable for a complexly organized society can be derived. And as they are ethics that are defensible on an intellectual/rational basis, they are therefore useful.
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Does an Ant own itself? - obviously yes? (if not who owns it) so what does that say about the organisation of thier hive society?

So in practical terms - self-ownership may be a totally meaningless concept
 
AsianDream said:
Does an Ant own itself? - obviously yes? (if not who owns it) so what does that say about the organisation of thier hive society?
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I doubt that an ant even has a self to own.

AsianDream said:
So in practical terms - self-ownership may be a totally meaningless concept
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In practical terms, the fact of self ownership provides ethics, political guidelines, even mental health principles.
 
Kulindahr said:
I doubt that an ant even has a self to own.

In practical terms, the fact of self ownership provides ethics, political guidelines, even mental health principles.
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The Buddhist concept is that even an ant has a “self” to own.

In fact Ants are very similar in physical complexity to human beings – with very much the same brains, eyes, ears, nervous systems and internal organs etc as we have. Just they don’t grow as big.

In fact the genetic “blueprint” to build an ant is similar in size to that for humans at around 3 billion DNA base pairs (or about 750MB of data).

I’d argue that there are no absolute “Oughts” – these are purely a construct of human perception and ideas – and certainly can’t be derived from any “Is”
 
I'm not sure ants have evolved to have any awareness of self.

HINT: Star Trek's "Borg" were not the product of an original imagination.
 
AsianDream said:
The Buddhist concept is that even an ant has a “self” to own.
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And that is relevant... why?

AsianDream said:
In fact Ants are very similar in physical complexity to human beings – with very much the same brains, eyes, ears, nervous systems and internal organs etc as we have. Just they don’t grow as big.
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Only in a VERY broad sense! The brain isn't nearly as complex, the eyes are a lot different, their equipment for receiving sound hardly qualifies as ears.
The complexity is probably a couple of orders of magnitude less than humans'.

AsianDream said:
In fact the genetic “blueprint” to build an ant is similar in size to that for humans at around 3 billion DNA base pairs (or about 750MB of data).

I’d argue that there are no absolute “Oughts” – these are purely a construct of human perception and ideas – and certainly can’t be derived from any “Is”
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The oughts that can be derived from is tend to be in the form of "if... then" statements. From self-ownership, ethics arise from the expectations we have of how we want others to treat us, and the recognition that if we want them to treat us that way, then we should treat them the same way.

The sort of oughts that can be derived as Sam Harris proposes are similar, but tend to rely also on empathy to a certain extent. Still, it tends to boil down to "I wouldn't want to be treated that way, so I'd better not treat others that way." From there it becomes very much a cultural thing; he's already got a value established for judging things, namely that human well-being is of greater importance than other things. How can that be used to critique someone who says that human righteousness is more important than well-being? Or that honor is more important? The answer is that it can't, really: he's made a choice of values, and they've made a choice of values, and neither is anything more than a personal preference.
 
Kulindahr said:
Okay.

But it's hardly an "is" of the sort in the opening vid -- that's where I was hung up.
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The reaility is that all "Oughts" are just subjective - I'd definitely not defend Bhudist ideas as being rational or based on any evidence
 
Harris recently held a contest inviting critics to rebut his work in the form of an essay. The winning entry is here: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-moral-landscape-challenge

In short, the author distinguishes science and reason. He suggests that the conceptual axiom of 'well-being' can't be empirically supported (and that as a presupposition it doesn't find analogues in comparative fields).

Harris will reply sometime soon.
 
The author is quite correct --he spends more time saying what I said in the beginning: Harris has to define "well-being" subjectively, because there's no scientific way to do it, and then he has to find some way to derive "well-being" as the moral basis indicated by science.

It's more likely that fertility is a scientific value than a nebulous "well-being"...which is going to be defined differently by just about everyone.
 
zoltanspawn said:
Harris will reply sometime soon.
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http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/clarifying-the-landscape
I am, in essence, defending the unity of knowledge—the idea that the boundaries between disciplines are mere conventions and that we inhabit a single epistemic sphere in which to form true beliefs about the world. This remains a controversial thesis, and it is generally met with charges of “scientism.” Sometimes, the unity of knowledge is very easy to see: Is there really a boundary between the truths of physics and those of biology? No. And yet it is practical, even necessary, to treat these disciplines separately most of the time. In this sense, the boundaries between disciplines are analogous to political borders drawn on maps. Is there really a difference between California and Arizona at their shared border? No, but we divide this stretch of desert as a matter of convention. However, once we begin talking about non-contiguous disciplines—physics and sociology, say—people worry that a single, consilient idea of truth can’t span the distance. Suddenly, the different colors on the map look hugely significant. But I’m convinced that this is an illusion.
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Kulindahr said:
The author is quite correct --he spends more time saying what I said in the beginning: Harris has to define "well-being" subjectively, because there's no scientific way to do it, and then he has to find some way to derive "well-being" as the moral basis indicated by science.

It's more likely that fertility is a scientific value than a nebulous "well-being"...which is going to be defined differently by just about everyone.
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The multiple conceptions of well-being are explicitly embraced by Harris in his description of a field of infinite peaks of well-being. There is nothing subjective about well-being just because there are multiple versions of it. That would be like saying a quadratic equation has no answer - or that the answer is a matter of opinion or taste - because it does not resolve to just one answer.
 
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