Getting from “Is” to “Ought” 1/ Let’s assume that there are no ought’s or should’s in this universe. There is only what *is*—the totality of actual (and possible) facts.
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I generally like this argument but have objections along a couple of lines which you might associate with FA Hayek and J Haidt. I don't think explicit, articulated understanding will ever be powerful enough (not even close), and morality is behavioural.
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Many failed and disastrous ideologies thought they were scientifically justified moralities
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That doesn’t necessarily make Sam incorrect, but speaks to the incompleteness of knowing the “is”... no?
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His argument rests on a premise assuming he can know 4/ "everything" about the "is". This is at odds with the claim 6/ he can be "mistaken". So, notwithstanding all the other problems, the logical form of the argument is invalid.
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No it rests on the premise that everything could be known. There’s no evidence that it can’t be, we are chipping away, however slowly.
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We cannot know everything because that implies a state of perfect knowledge. But because we are error prone (fallible), correcting errors is an infinite process. Knowing everything implies correcting all errors. But that's a contradiction.
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This seems like a logical disconnect. Most of us accept that we shouldn’t smoke (truth) although many of us do (fallable/behaviour). That doesn’t mean we haven’t found a truth, nor does it mean everyone will act perfectly.
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If we had perfect knowledge, the optimal number of smokers would not be zero. It would include all those who would not get diseases (we'd know which people that is!) and those for whom the benefits outweigh the later suffering.
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So what makes the reduction of suffering the OBJECTIVELY appropriate goal to pursue? You and I and others may agree that it is the right end, but it is only the right end because we say so. What is the objective (external of our own wishes) reason to minimize the suffering?
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Morality external to sentient beings is nonsensical. What matters to us is all that matters.
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Sure you can get from an “is” to an “ought” the way you describe but it required that you smuggled in a few assumptions that don’t logically follow from the “is.” 1/ What is morally important is the well-being of sentient beings. (Seems intuitive to most but doesn’t follow from >
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> the “is.”) 2/ What is moral is to grant standing (economics term from cost–benefit analysis) to ALL sentient beings. (Doesn’t follow from the “is” and is vastly counterintuitive to a lot of people. E.g., if a highly conscious alien race descended on Earth with the explicit >
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> goal to extinguish the human race because it would provide them so much well-being most people would want to fight back and try to kill the attackers even if their potential well-being outranks that of humans by orders of magnitude.) 3/ There are objectively ”worse” and >
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> better states in this infinite-dimensional space of well-being. (Even if we grant 1 this would only imply that we strive for Pareto improvements (economics term again) but it doesn’t tell us anything about what to do in cases where even one sentient being gets a worse deal >
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> than before. In fact even to navigate that landscape requires that we input a weighting of different sentient beings’ different kinds of well-being and that we input a discount rate on future well being based on uncertainty and other factors. In many of these considerations >
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> there will be vast differences in people’s moral intuition and the resulting model of this landscape would necessarily be highly subjective.) If you make the three assumptions above and specify everything in assumption 3 (there is already a breadth of theory about this in >
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> economics), then what’s left is to employ the branch of mathematics called optimization theory. Finally, I don’t see how your position is different than the old utilitarian position. Perhaps with the exception that you claim to be able to derive your position from an “is.”
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To put it succinctly, you can get from “is” to “ought” *if* you have universally agreed upon values. But even universal values are subjective. Nothing about the universe says that human suffering is “bad”. That is a value we ascribe, even if we all agree on it. /1
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I think a better way to say it is “You can’t get from an is to an ought, but if we all agree that the suffering of conscious beings is *bad* then this doesn’t matter because we _can_ derive oughts from that single shared value”
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You can not show an age or people that enjoyed smashing baby heads. At best you can show a group that killed babies out of fear to a god but they didn’t derive joy from it. Point is there are universal truths.
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A value that is universally agreed upon ("killing babies is bad") is still a value. We cannot derive this value from facts about the universe. And we don't need to, because we all agree.
@SamHarrisOrg claims the is/ought dichotomy doesn't exist, I say it exists but doesn't matter -
Are you familiar with the ideas that something like “Love” could be a force in the universe measurable like any other force? That it is this existence that allows our brain sets to interact with it the way we do? The way we use it to create societies etc...
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do you mean to say it is a force like gravity or electromagnetism? maybe in a very abstract way one could consider something like love a force, but I’m not sure in what sense you mean this
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1/ Using my scenario about let’s say punching a baby in the face. Now assume a force exists in the universe that plays a part in how we feel about such events. We may do it out of ignorance or appease a leader but never actually happy about it. Consider it a check/balance force.
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