David Hume vs. Sam Harris

[the PC apeman]

That value-laden sense of "better" is also a state in the brain, and one that is not processed any differently than what would be considered an "is".

So we can have group A with their ises, oughts, values etc. and we have group B with their ises, oughts, values etc. which are not necessarily the same. With the broad outline you gave there is no qualitative difference between them. But then we have this vague well-being thing as some sort of standard by which the oughts of each group can be measured. And Harris feels this well-being thing is an objective measurement? Is that a fair summary? The first part sounds like some variety of relativism (or possibly emotivism) and then that well-being thing is added on to disguise it as objective. (I'm still not sold that the rescue is successful.)

Are there objective criteria for health? If you say yes, then why the double-standard? If you say no, then you have nothing useful to say about health.

No and I disagree with your conclusion. There are widely-agreed intersubjective criteria for health which are quire useful. The idea of objective criteria for health actually strikes me as at odds with the idea of evolution.

We are smuggling in nothing more than what is already a set of states in the brain, subject to the same adjustments as any thought "is" or "ought".

Okay I see where you're going and that is putting all the work onto the idea of well-being. And there we'll probably just have to agree to disagree that that move is successful.

 

[memetherapy]

I read The Moral Landscape and it felt like he was addressing a conceptual problem in the way we think about morality rather than addressing any real world moral issues or inciting science to determine morality in any sort of way.

He doesn't just say that you can get an OUGHT from an IS. He says our ISs(beliefs) influence our OUGHTs in our own heads. That is reason enough to dismiss the argument that morality and empiricism are completely independent of each other. His book was a stab at moral relativism, not an attempt to decide what is moral.

 

[westprog]

All you can do (and all Harris has done) is covertly sneak in a moral value judgment in the First Mile, and then try to pretend in the later miles that he never did that and he is "solving the is/ought problem".

There appears to be the implication that if we check the operation of a healthy brain, we'll find that it produces moral decisions. I haven't seen any backing for the (implicit) claim that sociopathic actions are accompanied by neurological disorder. Undoubtedly some actions of damaged brains are considered morally dubious, but this is far from a universal rule. There seems to be either a leap of faith that neurological advances will be able to show the badness on the ECG, or perhaps that behaviours that we decide are immoral will be reverse engineered into sickness.

 

[westprog]

No and I disagree with your conclusion. There are widely-agreed intersubjective criteria for health which are quire useful. The idea of objective criteria for health actually strikes me as at odds with the idea of evolution.

There are many circumstances where there can be conflicting views about health - issues of quality of life versus longevity, for example. Trade-offs are routine in health-care, and different doctors will often come up with different answers - as with most areas of decision-making in real life.

 

[Wowbagger]

If he doesn't know the difference between the same general area being responsible for two different types of processing dealing with a similar input and the same area constituting two different types of processing there is absolutely no hope. I can't believe he published something with that sort of claim. Now I know I don't want to read this book.

It might be possible that my layman's summary missed something important. If you don't want to read the book, I urge you to consider reading the actual papers he cites. Don't judge the quality of this work solely on the simplified manner in which I described it.

 

[westprog]

It might be possible that my layman's summary missed something important. If you don't want to read the book, I urge you to consider reading the actual papers he cites. Don't judge the quality of this work solely on the simplified manner in which I described it.

No, we trust you.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I read The Moral Landscape and it felt like he was addressing a conceptual problem in the way we think about morality rather than addressing any real world moral issues or inciting science to determine morality in any sort of way.

He doesn't just say that you can get an OUGHT from an IS. He says our ISs(beliefs) influence our OUGHTs in our own heads.

This is scarcely a new or significant idea.

That is reason enough to dismiss the argument that morality and empiricism are completely independent of each other.

Dismissing a straw man is not a great victory.

"You cannot get from 'is' statements alone to a moral 'ought' statement" is not at all the same claim as "morality and empiricism are completely independent of each other", although Harris' acolytes seem to think it is and I imagine they are all getting it from Harris.

The more I discuss Harris' ideas with his followers the more annoyed I get by the damage Harris is doing to philosophy and rationality. He's actively spreading serious misconceptions about some of the fundamental ideas in secular moral philosophy, in order to make a fast buck.

His book was a stab at moral relativism, not an attempt to decide what is moral.

His position turns out to be indistinguishable from welfare utilitarianism plus a healthy helping of cult-like affirmations about how clever he and his acolytes are and how stupid everyone else is.

That's not moral relativism, because Harris would very definitely deny that other people's ideas about what constitutes moral behaviour (e.g. those of the Taliban) are as valid as his own.

 

[memetherapy]

"You cannot get from 'is' statements alone to a moral 'ought' statement" is not at all the same claim as "morality and empiricism are completely independent of each other", although Harris' acolytes seem to think it is and I imagine they are all getting it from Harris.

Harris doesn't confuse the two. He tries(maybe poorly) to distinguish the relationships between those two statements, because moral relativists are the ones who employ that faulty logic to defend clearly immoral acts.

I didn't mean he was being a moral relativist...I meant he was attacking moral relativism. I thought that was obvious, given his other books.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Harris doesn't confuse the two. He tries(maybe poorly) to distinguish the relationships between those two statements, because moral relativists are the ones who employ that faulty logic to defend clearly immoral acts.

I didn't mean he was being a moral relativist...I meant he was attacking moral relativism. I thought that was obvious, given his other books.

Oh, sorry about that. In Australia "a stab at X" usually means "an attempt at X", as in "I'll have a stab at answering that question". So I took it that way, although obviously your intention was to convey "an attack on X".

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

It might be possible that my layman's summary missed something important. If you don't want to read the book, I urge you to consider reading the actual papers he cites. Don't judge the quality of this work solely on the simplified manner in which I described it.

I doubt that you missed anything. He has to be saying something along those lines in order to overcome Hume's objection. But it's bad neuroscience and bad philosophy.

If I might offer an analogy........lot's of people cite mirror neurons as the answer to all sorts of different issues. In doing so they tend to imply that these neurons 'do' the exact same thing when performing an action and while the animal is looking at another perform the same sort of action. It is true that this set of neurons is active in both conditions, but that is not the whole story. Those neurons do not work in isolation and the rest of the brain was not accessed by these experiments. The actual activation pattern in the brain when one watches someone acting and when one acts must be different or the two states would be identical. They are not identical; they simply share some of the same pathways. The other overlooked issues is all the processing that occurs prior to activation of these neurons in an intact brain, but that's another story.

We haven't discovered that this is the case, but I would find it highly improbable that an 'is' and an 'ought' for a particular behavior do not share the same pathways, at least in part (the brain tends to be as conservative as possible). But the fact that they share some of the same pathways does not make them identical behaviors. There must be something that distinguishes the one from the other or we wouldn't have this conversation.

The distinction between the two is best summed, I think, in the distinction between directions of fit in language and thought. It will always be the case that emotion/motivation precedes decisions about what we ought to do regardless of what we learn.

I agree with you fully, and have made the argument previously in other threads, that science can inform the process and help us decide what we should do given a fundamental set of desires. But Hume was speaking about that fundamental set of desires, not second order issues like what the breakfast cereal should be (if we desire to live longer). Science can't tell us that we should desire to live longer; we simply decide that ourselves. Science can inform that decision, explain it, etc. But that is a different proposition.

 

[Wowbagger]

What we have here are two (or more?) opposing groups of intelligent people, believing the other group(s) are spouting nothing much more than inane nonsense. What I would like to do is break down some of the arguments opposing mine a bit more, just in (the unlikely) case that I am the one spouting inanity after all.

For ALL Those Who Still Think "Ought" Can Not Be Derived From An "Is":
A few questions I would like to ask you:

What is the value of keeping 'is' and 'ought' as separate concepts? What do we get out of keeping such a distinction in place? What would we be missing, if we melded the two together?
Your answer can appeal to anything you think is important: Philosophy, science, morality, etc.

What is the DANGER of trying to derive Oughts from Ises? (correction was made here) I would like this answer to be spelled out as clearly as possible, even if that risks pretending that I am in kindergarten or something. There could be something very fundamental I am missing, here.

Also, if possible, perhaps you can define the word "Is" and "Ought", and (optionally) perhaps even "derive"? What contexts or levels of morality forming would these words apply to?

After I feel enough people have provided answers (OR, if a lot of time passes, with hardly any answers), I will write further responses to this thread. But, I am willing to give you folks some fairly good amount of time to formulate your answers if you need it.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

What we have here are two (or more?) opposing groups of intelligent people, believing the other group(s) are spouting nothing much more than inane nonsense. What I would like to do is break down some of the arguments opposing mine a bit more, just in (the unlikely) case that I am the one spouting inanity after all.

For ALL Those Who Still Think "Ought" Can Not Be Derived From An "Is":
A few questions I would like to ask you:

What is the value of keeping 'is' and 'ought' as separate concepts? What do we get out of keeping such a distinction in place? What would we be missing, if we melded the two together?
Your answer can appeal to anything you think is important: Philosophy, science, morality, etc.

What is the DANGER of trying to derive Ises from Oughts? I would like this answer to be spelled out as clearly as possible, even if that risks pretending that I am in kindergarten or something. There could be something very fundamental I am missing, here.

Also, if possible, perhaps you can define the word "Is" and "Ought", and (optionally) perhaps even "derive"? What contexts or levels of morality forming would these words apply to?

After I feel enough people have provided answers (OR, if a lot of time passes, with hardly any answers), I will write further responses to this thread. But, I am willing to give you folks some fairly good amount of time to formulate your answers if you need it.

You are not spouting inane nonsense.

We can always derive an ought from an is; it is just that in doing so we add something to it. The issue is that an 'is' does not necessarily become an 'ought' unless we want to make it so. 'Oughts' depend on desires/motivations/emotions. Nothing can tell us what desires we are supposed to have; we simply have them. As a group we can decide, based on a certain type of desire, which desires we want to suppress in a certain group as well. We can study how those desires arise and we can see which generally held desires work best in large groups. But nothing in scientific investigation creates the desires in the first place.

Now, with that said, 'oughts' actually are 'ises' from one way of looking at things. They can be studied.


ETA:

Maybe this will help?

An 'is' is a description of something, at least in our minds. An 'ought' is an action. Descriptions do not immediately become actions when we speak of complex processing. The only time when a sensation immediately becomes an action is with simple reflexes. For everything else, sensations and descriptions need other input to be translated into actions. That input when it comes to morality, as Hume reminded, is desire/emotion/motivation.

 

[the PC apeman]

What is the value of keeping 'is' and 'ought' as separate concepts? What do we get out of keeping such a distinction in place? What would we be missing, if we melded the two together?
Your answer can appeal to anything you think is important: Philosophy, science, morality, etc.

The danger of deriving an ought from an is arises from observing an is, such as some people take property from others, and concluding that that is how things ought to be.

What is the DANGER of trying to derive Ises from Oughts?

I've never seen anyone try to do this. Do you have an example?

Also, if possible, perhaps you can define the word "Is" and "Ought", and (optionally) perhaps even "derive"? What contexts or levels of morality forming would these words apply to?

Ises are facts about the world. My own conclusion on oughts is that they express truth-inapt emotions rather than as Hume, and most other people, use them as propositions having a truth value. (ie. One ought to do X is either true or false.) This gets around Hume by redefining what an ought, ahem, is.

I take derive, in this context, to refer to a deductive process of reasoning. So upon observing the fact (the is) that people give to charity, it would be fallacious to conclude that people ought to give to charity. It is not a valid deduction. (Note that if moral utterances can be true or false, an argument for a proposition can be fallacious even if the conclusion is true.)

It seems that Harris starts out very close to my position. His oughts, as described in this thread, are basically just emotions. Then he slides back into a more palatable view of oughts by saying some oughts have more objective value than others (via this vague well-being standard). He's essentially recursively saying what oughts ought to be and I see no support for the idea there is objective value.

Generally I go along with the more popular conception of oughts, amused at the hilarity that often ensues. It is especially amusing from atheists who will go through all manner of theistic aplogetics-like contortions to support the idea that a realist morality exists.

 

[Humes fork]

What is the value of keeping 'is' and 'ought' as separate concepts? What do we get out of keeping such a distinction in place? What would we be missing, if we melded the two together?
Your answer can appeal to anything you think is important: Philosophy, science, morality, etc.

It's not so much the value of it as the truth of it. They are two different concepts, as can easily be demonstrated. Watch:

Premise 1: Bob has a lot of money.
Premise 2: Jim is broke and starving.
Conclusion: Bob ought to give some money to Jim.

Can you spot the missing premise? The conclusion doesn't follow from the given premises. You need another one: The value premise.

It is a logical fallacy to derive ought from is, and this is good to know whenever you watch or participate in a debate or a discussion.

What is the DANGER of trying to derive Ises from Oughts? I would like this answer to be spelled out as clearly as possible, even if that risks pretending that I am in kindergarten or something. There could be something very fundamental I am missing, here.

Consider Social Darwinism. The Social Darwinists tried to go from "is" (natural selection in nature) to "ought" (therefore, society should operate around this principle).

And again, going straight from "is" to "ought" is a logical fallacy.

Also, if possible, perhaps you can define the word "Is" and "Ought", and (optionally) perhaps even "derive"? What contexts or levels of morality forming would these words apply to?

"Is" in this case expresses statements of facts, like that evolution happened, or that the Earth is round. "Ought" expresses value statements, such as valuing happiness, freedom, equality, democracy etc. These are crucially different things! Equality between the genders is not a scientific theory, it's a value-concept. Likewise, global warming is not a value, it's a scientific theory.

Science tells you how to part the atom. It doesn't tell you if you should use that ability for nuclear ower or nuclear bombs.

 

[Dani]

Ises are facts about the world. My own conclusion on oughts is that they express truth-inapt emotions rather than as Hume, and most other people, use them as propositions having a truth value. (ie. One ought to do X is either true or false.) This gets around Hume by redefining what an ought, ahem, is.

I'm not sure Hume treated ought statements as propositions, but I agree with you that they lack truth-value.

 

[Dani]

What is the DANGER of trying to derive Ises Oughts from Oughts Ises?

The controversy is the other way around.

 

[the PC apeman]

I'm not sure Hume treated ought statements as propositions, but I agree with you that they lack truth-value.

Yeah, I don't think he personally felt that way but rather argues about them that way in the is-ought problem. I think this stems from a decision one must make when trying to attack an entrenched idea & its term. One can either introduce a new term: oughts do not exist, you're really talking about personal values. Or, one can attempt to redefine the term: oughts do exist, but they are not what you think they are. (We see a similar dilemma in free will debates. Free will doesn't exist versus free will exists but it isn't what you think it is.) I find it hard to stick with one approach or the other and I end up confusing my correspondent.

 

[Wowbagger]

The controversy is the other way around.

I hate it when I do that. I corrected my post. Thanks!

 

[Earthborn]

In fMRI studies, we found that the same areas of the brain act on ideas we might consider as "is" or "ought" identically.

That seems like a good explanation for why certain people tend to confuse the two, and why they don't notice the huge conceptual leap they make when they derive one from the other.

 

[Kaosium]

On a whim I decided to re-read the opening post of this thread:

Today, we know they are matters of fact. To pretend otherwise is to ignore centuries of discoveries about what makes civilizations thrive or fail.

What makes civilizations thrive or fail? Who agrees on this?

There is the little matter of how accurate they are perceiving the world.

It would be insane to claim murder is justified, as long as the murderer is viewing his victim in a completely unrealistic manner.

I think perhaps you misunderstand, let me put it this way. What is 'willful murder?' It is a person killing another. What makes it 'willful murder?' That it ought not be! It comes not from the action itself, but the feelings that action provokes inside of you. There are probably scenarios where you (or others) can imagine killing being justified, or even right, but it doesn't matter even if under no circumstances would you think it so, as that comes from the feeling of condemnation that arises from you in regard to the action, which just is.

Those who view this without any feeling in all (or virtually all) circumstances are called 'sociopaths' and we lock them up or fry them because they frighten us! A feeling of revulsion arises within!

You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but it is the object of feeling, not of reason.

There are other ways to find it, other than introspection and feelings, other things like that.

The counterintuitive findings of the Peak-End Rule demonstrate this.

What would those be, and how does the Peak-end heuristic apply?

Sometimes it DOES take external facts, besides your own feelings, to determine what constitutes correct moral action.

You mean other people telling you how they feel about it? Perhaps they will frighten you?