My apologies , natural rights are "nonsense on Stilts’.
On the contrary, good philosophy should be based on facts about what is good for people. Like every other intellectual endeavor.
You asked for citations of prominent philosophers who are sceptical that we need oughts in place of facts. Sam Harris, Phillipa Foot, John Searle, Hillary Putnam amongst others.
Scepticism about oughts seems thinly represented on the forum. Its important, don’t rely on me to represent it folks, I have a short attention span
I am sorry, but I disagree. Personal and relational rights are important when it comes to morality. In fact, I showed that they are the main axioms of ethics in another thread. We can easily derive what is morally right or wrong from these axioms.
I don’t understand you. We ought to do what is morally right. The goal of morality is to find out what is right or wrong in a moral situation.
Thank you for the references. I am wondering what they are saying. Do you mind explaining their position in a paragraph or two?
Well, the is-ought problem isn’t like that, not really. Because Hume says that in order to establish an ought, it requires deductive necessity. Which I can deliver, except in the counter factual case, but that is actually stronger than ought. It would make little sense to say that a triangle ought to have three sides, or a bachelor ought to be unmarried. That would imply that it were possible that a triangle not have three sides, or a bachelor be married, when it isn’t. Rather deductive conclusions are not “ought” but “has to” which is stronger. A triangle has to have three sides, a bachelor has to be unmarried. Though, I do rise to the occasion, and can deliver has to when it comes to identity entailments of necessary actions.
When it comes to ought though, ought means to “owe”. If I owe you money, there is no logical requirement that I pay it or honor it or the debt suddenly dissolves, or no longer exists or is rendered invalid. It is either a fact or it isn’t that I owe a debt, not a logical necessity, and the lack of a logical necessity to pay a debt doesn’t erase it.
Most philosophers have argued that facts alone cannot give you an answer to what is right and wrong.
Does the fact we eat meat make it right. Does the fact we love our children make it right
Maybe we need a rule in these cases - from the bible, from society, or from philososphy. They claim you cannot derive and ought from an is
But the question then is where do morals come from if not from facts about people
Phillipa Foot argues that people are natural things for which some things are naturally good. Like water is good for trees. Behaving well towards each other is one of those good things. When we see it we know its good. We don’t need the bible, law or rules to tell us. We just need the facts.
No doubt this analysis will not please anyone. They will say I explained it badly or that it is untrue at root. Its my best effort.
It is like that. All you need is to start from a descriptive statement and reach to prescriptive statement.
That is what I am doing. I derive what is right and wrong from personal and relational rights. I also establish why personal and relational rights matter.
I argue that we can deduce what is right or wrong from personal and relational rights. I also argue that personal and relational rights should be respected.
These are not good descriptive statements to start from, to the best of my understanding.
Some people just don’t agree on what is right or wrong because they see things differently. A sadist, for example, likes to deliver pain to others. We cannot convince him that causing pain is wrong because we see it as wrong.
Correct. Not all people are good. But good people also do lots of wrong things. We kill prisoners, keep criminals in non-human conditions, punish our kids, abort, etc.
That is certainly an evil character trait.
I would say that moral conclusions depend on facts about human life.
I have read very little Hume myself, so take the following with the grain of salt. I am mostly relying on Korsgaard’s treatment of Hume in “The Sources of Normativity”.
At first, it does seem (or it at least seems so to me) that Hume’s account is merely descriptive (i.e. “These sentiments and actions caused by these sentiments are what we refer to by “moral”, “virtuous”, etc.”) rather than prescriptive (i.e. “It is good that this is the case!”). The gap, it seems, has not yet been bridged.
Korsgaard argues that “reflective endorsement” allows Hume to bridge this gap. Vaguely put, by reflecting on our moral sentiments, we recognise a) their worth (or ‘good-ness’) and b) come to accept their ‘authority’ on us. I think that this can be categorised as a move from anthropological (!) facticity to normativity. By examination of our moral faculties (here understood as anthropological facts), we further arrive at our approval of these faculties (by f.ex. the recognition that our acting according to these sentiments will lead to a good life). Korsgaard further develops this argument to show that it doesn’t merely offer an extrinsically motivated account of morality, but I won’t go into that.
I think that this is very close to how you put it:
I’d nonetheless be interested to know if you share this reading of Hume, what you’d add or deny, etc.
A goal is part of the is-ought issue. If one has a goal then there arises some deeds that need doing. Reducing suffering is a moral goal and out pops acts of kindness. All morality is goal-driven. Coincidentally the FIFA world cup is underway in the US of A and perhaps drives home the point better than words can.
Morality is about what isn’t but could be, and successful additions to what is.
If you’re making a pot, good is an accurate result, an accurate pot, whereas evil is a purposely inaccurate result, not a pot, and a bad performance is accurately a semi-pot.
If you’re living on a planet, there is:
Good(a successful addition to what is), evil(a purposely unsuccessful addition to what is), or bad(an accidentally unsuccessful addition to what is).
Everything; good, evil or bad.
Morality is based around goodness, where any failure of goodness is bad.
Morality is interrupted and interfered with by evil, which propagates badness.
For ‘what is’, there ‘ought be’ a good performance/construction.
That means that all the good people do to support their families, the efforts that people make to support their community, the bravery of fire fighters are not moral because they are what people do. Thats what is. The only thing that would be moral would be pointless and random acts
I might me too much of a Kantian, but intuitively, this instrumentalist view of “morality” (i.e. of morality having a goal) does seem misguided to me. This is accompanied by the idea that moral oughts are categorical and that sentences of the form (1) “You ought to do x.” and (2) “If you want to be moral, you ought to do x.” are logically equivalent ( (1) ↔ (2) ). Instrumentality stops where morality begins; moral reasoning is non-instrumental reasoning. (2) is a frontier inside the area of practical reason where instrumentality and morality touch (“How to be moral?”). There is no goal to morality beyond morality itself.
Now, I do say that these are intuitions because I lack the clarity of thought to formulate an appropriate argument that is neither dogmatic nor circular. I do suspect that this is ultimately an issue of grounding. I tried to formulate what I’d take to be a Kantian argument for the non-instrumental character of morality, but I wasn’t yet able to do so clearly which is why I decided to delete that part.
Yes, few would disagree that instrumental rationality can serve good and bad ends.
Few would also disagree ( despite the misplaced comments that precede yours) that life does not produce a single overriding goal from which morality follows
That is why at the source lies something other than reason and rules.
Human pychology and human flourishing. They are subjective but not arbitrary. We can uncover facts about flourishing but they are plural and sometimes contingent
