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

[zoltanspawn]

Really? Cause having read his essay...

What a charitable attitude you have to Sam's adjudication, and what a skeptical one I have. I think Sam's probably completely immovable, and it was done as a kind of tacky promotion. (Though I admit, I'm tacky enough myself to have enjoyed it.)

I would've enjoyed reading the runners-up, too.

 

[mightbe]

Did anyone think that Sam Harris was really serious about giving away $20,000? Of course not. It's a no-risk publicity stunt. He can simply say that he was not swayed whether he was or not (I doubt the essay had any effect). All he has to do to reply is dig out sections of the original book and rewrite them to fit.

I personally enjoyed both the essay and Sam's reply, probably because I don't care about morality at all. And the reply was very well-written. It probably read a lot easier than the lengthy book it was (most likely) sourced from.

 

[Kulindahr]

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.

The multiple answers to a quadratic equation are not contradictory -- many answers to "What is well-being?" are inherently so.

 

[Kulindahr]

Really? Cause having read his essay...

It destroyed Harris.

 

[Kulindahr]

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/clarifying-the-landscape

by the only conception of “better” that makes any sense

According to whom? This is subjective.

 

[bankside]

The multiple answers to a quadratic equation are not contradictory -- many answers to "What is well-being?" are inherently so.

No.

It destroyed Harris.

It didn't even touch Harris.

 

[Kulindahr]

I don’t believe that any sane person is concerned with abstract principles and virtues—such as justice and loyalty—independent of the ways they affect our lives.

There's his escape hole: anyone who doesn't agree with him isn't sane, and so doesn't count.

 

[Kulindahr]

Nice pronouncement, but it's subjective:

However, the well-being of the whole group is the only global standard by which we can judge specific outcomes to be good.

And this effectively concedes that it's all subjective:

In the end, however, we must work with intuitions that strike us as non-negotiable

 

[zoltanspawn]

It didn't even touch Harris.

Harris admits the criticism Born is making:

Again, I admit that there may be something confusing about my use of the term “science”: I want it to mean, in its broadest sense, our best effort to understand reality at every level...

I think most of us will not think of science in such spacious terms.

If Harris only intends his ML to be a part of the very long conversation that people have had for millenia about ethics, in its broadest sense, then Born is only repeating what Harris himself says: we may deliberate coherently about ethics.

However, if we take the more common, less spacious, meaning for science as something making justified truth claims through empiricism, then Born is identifying a real problem. Harris' ethics may or may not still work, but it isn't working by means of science.

 

[bankside]

I think Harris is making a sustainable empiricist claim.

It is possible to differentiate between plausible candidates for a moral course of action by their effects. The effects are subject to observation (or extrapolation), and the observations can reveal which courses of action are more morally effective. Effectiveness is not measured against an arbitrary standard assumed a priori, but against a standard constructed through empirical iteration.

 

[zoltanspawn]

Effectiveness is not measured against an arbitrary standard assumed a priori, but against a standard constructed through empirical iteration.

I'm not sure about this.

The moral standard which Harris is proposing is to determine whether the effects of an action result in 'well-being'. While those effects might be assessed empirically, I don't think the idea itself of well-being is arrived at empirically. He hasn't performed tests to conclude that well-being is a good moral standard, and other tests that show the falsity of moral imperatives or show that having a virtuous character is a bad moral standard.

Well-being is an idea which Harris arrives at through deliberation, not parsing evidence.

 

[Kulindahr]

I don't think Sam would contest to that at all. Here's what he's said:

"...I asked whether subjecting children to “pain, violence, and public humiliation” leads to “healthy emotional development and good behavior” (i.e. does it conduce to their general wellbeing and to the wellbeing of society). If it did, well then yes, I would admit that it was moral. In fact, it would appear moral to more or less everyone—just as slitting open a child’s belly to perform an emergency appendectomy seems obviously moral to anyone who understands the purpose of this procedure. The patent immorality of corporal punishment relates to the sense that it is clearly bad for children, both in the moment and in the long run (along with the fact that it is generally the product of anger, rather than benevolence, on the part of the brute holding the paddle)."​

Where is it established that "corporal punishment... is clearly bad for children"?

Understand that he is talking about (in my initial post) the worse possible misery for everyone not merely doing something even if it may result in pain or disaster. If you think the word "ought" allows you to say, "Maybe we ought to seek the worst possible misery for everyone," this expresses pure confusion. How is it even conceivable that we ought to seek the worst possible misery for everyone? What could "ought" mean in this case?

That concept of "the worst possible misery" is a fallacious argument since no one would aim for such a thing. And regardless of the content of a particular statement, the meaning of "ought" remains the same.

Sam has responded to critics who have raised the question of ambiguities:

"Of course, goals and conceptual definitions matter. But this holds for all phenomena and for every method we use to study them. My father, for instance, has been dead for 25 years. What do I mean by "dead"? Do I mean "dead" with reference to specific goals? Well, if you must, yes -- goals like respiration, energy metabolism, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. The definition of "life" remains, to this day, difficult to pin down. Does this mean we can't study life scientifically? No. The science of biology thrives despite such ambiguities. The concept of "health" is looser still: it, too, must be defined with reference to specific goals -- not suffering chronic pain, not always vomiting, etc. -- and these goals are continually changing. Our notion of "health" may one day be defined by goals that we cannot currently entertain with a straight face (like the goal of spontaneously regenerating a lost limb). Does this mean we can't study health scientifically? "
​

"Health" is not "defined with reference to specific goals"; he's not giving goals but prescriptions. The definition of "health" won't change, either, only what we can do to achieve it. From his approach, I would have to answer, "Yes -- by your definition, indeed we cannot study health scientifically, because we don't know what it is".

I wonder if there is anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like: "What about all the people who don't share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is 'healthy'? What makes you think that you could convince a person suffering from fatal gangrene that he is not as healthy you are?" And yet, these are precisely the kinds of objections I face when I speak about morality in terms of human and animal well-being. Is it possible to voice such doubts in human speech? Yes. But that doesn't mean we should take them seriously."

His definition of health is sloppy as all heck -- and it's really fairly easy to define. But this "well-being" is even slipperier, so there's no way at all to study it scientifically.

 

[Kulindahr]

If he's only doing that to a certain extent, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what he is doing beyond that extent.

Dodging and weaving to avoid facing that given his approach, there's no way to achieve what he wants.

 

[Kulindahr]

Here's a really good excerpt from Sam to get the debating juices going:

"So, while it is possible to say that one can't move from "is" to "ought," we should be honest about how we get to "is" in the first place. Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down. When I say, "Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs."​

He's making a very basic philosophical error on the matter of empiricism and logic: they're not "values" to be held or not, they're systems that correspond to the real world.

 

[Kulindahr]

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.

Which is ironic considering that one of the two pro-business parties in the US seems to believe in social Darwinism, and clearly believes that we all are in fact lone individuals thinking only about ourselves -- and that these are virtues.

 

[Kulindahr]

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.

Evolutionary theory is a better foundation for morality than this "well-being" notion. It sets out species survival as the prime value, and everything bends to that.

 

[Kulindahr]

Boy - aren't you USA Christians arrogant!
It is relevant because it is part of the Buddhist belief system – in which all life is sacred.

What does being a Christian have to do with it?

The Buddhist belief system is no more relevant than the Hindu, Christian, Satanist, pagan, or any other.

 

[Kulindahr]

I'm not sure about this.

The moral standard which Harris is proposing is to determine whether the effects of an action result in 'well-being'. While those effects might be assessed empirically, I don't think the idea itself of well-being is arrived at empirically. He hasn't performed tests to conclude that well-being is a good moral standard, and other tests that show the falsity of moral imperatives or show that having a virtuous character is a bad moral standard.

Well-being is an idea which Harris arrives at through deliberation, not parsing evidence.

This, especially the last.

 

[FirmaFan]

Evolutionary theory is a better foundation for morality than this "well-being" notion. It sets out species survival as the prime value, and everything bends to that.

I would argue that survival is a far less optimal standard for morality than well-being is. If you are to curb the notions of morality to only survival, an extreme amount of well-being could easily be sacrificed as long as it doesn't compromise survival. I usually hate pointing towards science-fiction movies to make a point, but they do tend to serve as a kind of oculus into our culture, and your comment about curbing morality to survival reminded me of the film "I, Robot" where the robots, to ensure humanity's survival, decides to imprison every human being, thus protecting them from any potential for harm. Would such a system as that be considered moral, as it all but guarantees the survival of a species? A system of well-being would, by necessity, include a consideration of survival. Survival does not necessarily include consideration of well-being.

 

[zoltanspawn]

Ryan's reply to Sam's reply.