We COULD do for ethics something completely parallel to what we do for physical sciences: see what repeatably feels good rather than bad, take that as our repeatable “observations”, and then strategize plans that might satisfy all those feelings, just like we theorize explanations that might satisfy all observations, and then test them against the same kinds of things we based them on, repeat as necessary. — Pfhorrest
Aren’t our feelings/emotional states also “is’s?” Aren’t they facts about the world like any other? — Pinprick
It doesn't include our impressions/feelings of/about the facts of nature and only refers to the facts of nature minus our impressions/feelings with respect to them. — TheMadFool
The is/ought problem arises out of the absence of an inferential link betwixt descriptive statements (is) and normative claims (ought) but our feelings/impressions about/of deeds/actions provide the missing link, bridges this gap. — TheMadFool
What strikes me as odd is that moral theories are precisely the systems of values that bridge the is/ought gap and Hume, for some reason, seems to have ignored/overlooked/dismissed that as inadequate. — TheMadFool
Aren’t they inadequate because they aren’t capable of bridging the gap? It’s funny, because I always felt like it was the moral theories that ignored/overlooked/dismissed the is/ought gap. — Pinprick
What is an ought really? — TheMadFool
Doesn't it express a desire/wish/hope that things could be, well, different but different from what exactly? Well, different from what is of course. It appears from what I've just said that the is-ought relationship is not in any sense a logical deduction and therefore Hume's objection is N/A. The ought isn't deduced from an is, rather an ought is desired from an is. — TheMadFool
What you are talking about is just psychology, and it is only akin to science in it's statistical dimension, and unlike other sciences it is always going to be reliant upon individual reports if it is not merely concerning behavior of people en masse. — Janus
I also don't think such investigations are necessary because we already know that being murdered, raped, robbed, beaten up, exploited, ridiculed and so on makes people feel bad — Janus
the problem with a hedonistic approach is that much that makes people feel good is not ethical because it is damaging to their health and people may then become burdens on others — Janus
Then what does justify an ought? — Pinprick
We replicate their experiences (observations) for ourselves when there's any doubt or disagreement about what's true: we go stand in the same contexts and see if we experience (observe) the same things ourselves, and then try to come up with some theory that explains how all of those experiences (observations) can be consistent with the same reality. — Pfhorrest
We'd have to replicate their experiences (of things feeling good or bad) for ourselves when there's any doubt or disagreement about what's good: go stand in the same contexts and see if we experience the same things (good or bad feelings) ourselves, and then try to come up with some strategy to get to a state of affairs where all the good experiences are had and none of the bad ones are, and call that state of affairs the moral one. — Pfhorrest
What is "damage to health" but some bodily condition of suffering? And what is "being a burden on others" but seeing to your comfort costing someone else their comfort? Those are still hedonistic concerns. Hedonism doesn't mean short-sightedness or selfishness. — Pfhorrest
We don't, and can't, do that at all for most of what counts as scientific knowledge; we simply accept or do not accept science on the basis that we trust or do not trust the experts. — Janus
What feels good to me is not necessarily what feels good to others. — Janus
people can turn suffering to good account — Janus
You seem to be using 'hedonism' in a tendentious way that is not in keeping with ordinary parlance — Janus
The justification of oughts can be found in the system of values one chooses. — TheMadFool
Oughts do nothing but express our desire for things to be different, that's all there is to it. — TheMadFool
So something like “You ought to be compassionate” is justified by something like “I value compassion?” If so, the issue is that you’re extending, or projecting, your values on to me. What is the justification for that? Why should I, or you for that matter, choose to value compassion? In order for values to be able to justify oughts, they must be justified first, or else they are baseless. Any appeal to some internal state seems incapable of justifying anything. — Pinprick
This is where we’re disagreeing. Oughts are much more than expressions of our desires in my view. Besides this, to say you want things to be different than they are, is to say that because things are a certain way we ought to do X. So it still seems to be derived from what is. “The current state of affairs is unsatisfactory, therefore we should do X.” The only thing you seem to be doing is adding an additional premise, while trying to eliminate the first. “The current state of affairs is unsatisfactory. I desire to change the current state of affairs. Therefore I (we?) should do X.” — Pinprick
That’s why I said, in the bit you cut out, that that’s the process said experts use, which makes the consensus of said experts trustworthy for the general public to rely on. — Pfhorrest
How things look or sound etc are not the same between every observer either. There are different kinds of colorblindness, actual blindness in different degrees, tetrachromaticity, different degrees of hearing sensitivity or deafness to different pitches of sound, people who can or can’t smell or taste various things or to whom they smell or taste different, etc. — Pfhorrest
What is “good account” if not someone kind of enjoyable experience? e.g. getting hurt then recovering makes you stronger, being stronger makes you less likely to get hurt... the avoidance of pain is still the benefit there. — Pfhorrest
I’m using it in the ordinary philosophical way going back for thousands of years. — Pfhorrest
I think it's reasonable to think there is far more agreement in regards to what is perceived via the senses than there is in regard to all but the most extreme moral questions (i.e. rape, murder, child abuse etc). — Janus
I think ethical questions (how best to live) are far more subtle, and not at all simply based on considerations of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. I can see you're trying hard to recast the usual account into a form that will pass through your lens, but I don't find it convincing at all. — Janus
There is no "ordinary philosophical way going back thousands of years". This is naive, have you never heard of hermeneutics or anachronism? It's all a matter of interpretation. We read translated texts that inevitable reflect, to greater or lesser degrees, the biases of modern translators. It is naive to think we can get inside the heads of the ancients. — Janus
The degree of agreement isn’t important if you’re not taking a majoritarian vote (which I’m not advocating) but rather taking every individual into equal account. — Pfhorrest
And also you don’t seem to be differentiating between moral opinions (“this state of affairs is morally good”) and the experiences I’m advocating we take as the grounds for forming moral opinions (“this experience feels good”); it’s the latter we’re talking about here. — Pfhorrest
I'm basically advocating that we take as the criterion for a state of affairs to be moral without qualification that in said state of affairs everyone feels good rather than bad, like science takes reality to be that which is consistent with all observations. — Pfhorrest
Well, the first thing that I want to point out is that there actually seem to be some ought statements that cannot be called prescriptive statements.
Brushing your teeth is the best available decision option at this time for you to take' seems to be a descriptive statement and it also happens to be an is statement.
So, the creators of the English language created the word “ought” that could pretty much be substituted most of the time for these long winded evaluative propositions.
To take every individual into account is impossible, even if possible in principle. — Janus
Strange that you should say that, since it seems to be you who is equating the two. — Janus
Add to this limitation the fact that you would be relying on the notoriously unreliable medium of self-reporting, and your project appears completely impractical. — Janus
So is taking into account every observation in the physical sciences. Nobody thinks we're going to actually finish doing that. — Pfhorrest
The point of relying on replicable first-person experiences is precisely so that you don't have to rely on self-reporting. — Pfhorrest
The difference is that the behavior and responses of physical substances, biological organisms such as trees, bacteria, fungi and even animals is invariant or much closer to invariant than the behavior of humans. The assumption of this invariance is taken for granted when we claim to have knowledge of the natural world. — Janus
This accounts only for your own experiences. I thought you wanted to take everyone's experiences into account, so now I'm puzzled as you seem to be contradicting yourself. — Janus
The world being studied is the same in both cases, the people doing the experiencing are the same in both cases, it's only the type of experience that differs: an experience of vision, hearing, etc ("senses"), vs an experience of pain, hunger, etc ("appetites"). — Pfhorrest
But we still need to be able to confirm that IF someone IS in such-and-such circumstance they DO experience such-and-such, by undergoing such-and-such circumstances ourselves, — Pfhorrest
This is, of course, trivially true and tangential to any point that I have made. The is—ought divide expresses skepticism that an inference can be made between a descriptive "is" statement and a normative/evaluative "ought" statement. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
The statement that "the road ought to be visible now because the fog has cleared" is not the kind of ought statement we care about here. We don't care about inferences deriving an "is" from a descriptive "ought", but rather we are concerned with inferences deriving an "is" from a prescriptive "ought". — Cartesian trigger-puppets
It is, in fact, not a descriptive statement because the term "best" here is evaluative and prescriptive which makes the statement loaded. Try forming an is—ought inference with your examples and see the issue reveal itself. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
P1. If you have options, then you ought to choose the option that is best; — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Just because we have options doesn't mean we should choose any of them. For example, if I had the options to burn my hand, cut my hand, or freeze my hand—I would choose none of these options. This makes the premise false. It is not necessarily entailed that we must choose any option at all. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Why should we brush our teeth? — Cartesian trigger-puppets
How is it morally obligatory? — Cartesian trigger-puppets
P1. Brushing your teeth makes them clean
Therefore, C. You ought to brush your teeth.
This is deductively invalid. The conclusion is not entailed by the premise. It is possible for the premise to be true and the conclusion be false. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Yes, but the difference is that in the first case you have commonly precisely identifiable phenomena to study and in the latter you don't. — Janus
I don't see how confirming that all people experience some feeling in a certain circumstance is possible, least of all by merely confirming that we experience said feeling in said circumstance. People and circumstances are highly variable. — Janus
On the other hand is we place someone right in front of a tree and ask them what they see right in front of them, we can be highly confident that they will answer that they see a tree. — Janus
This makes me think you must still not understand what I'm saying, because it's the exact same phenomena I'm talking about in either case — Pfhorrest
Are the leaves of trees green or red? People will give you different answers depending on the tree, even for the same tree depending on the time of year... some people will even give you different answers for the same tree at the same time, because their color vision differs between them. Yet somehow that hasn't destroyed the possibility of dendrology. — Pfhorrest
I think it's more a case of you not understanding, or not wanting to accept, the critique. This seems to be the stock response you have for all critiques of your ideas. — Janus
It's not the same phenomena: Individual feelings and responses are available publicly only insofar as they can be communicated. The environment is perceptually available publicly tout suite. — Janus
Anyway it looks like we are going to have to be satisfied to agree to disagree; which seems to be the usual outcome of our conversations. — Janus
The is/ought divide is not the same thing as the fact/value distinction. — TheHedoMinimalist
I don’t see how it does provide any argument for the existence of a fact/value distinction and Hume himself never said that it does. — TheHedoMinimalist
Yes, but a statement like “you ought to brush your teeth” is not a prescriptive ought statement either. It is an evaluative ought and I’m claiming that value realists can argue that evaluative claims are factual and that the fact/value distinction is an illegitimate distinction. — TheHedoMinimalist
Well, who exactly gets the authority to define what a descriptive statement is? It could be argued that evaluative statements are descriptive statements because they describe things related to value. — TheHedoMinimalist
After all, doesn’t it make more sense to say that descriptive statements are statements that describe stuff even stuff related to value? — TheHedoMinimalist
Because [not] brushing your teeth causes cavities and the sensations caused by these cavities produce experiences that have a felt quality that you are psychologically compelled to regard as being worse than the felt qualities of most normal experiences that you have in life. — TheHedoMinimalist
Yes, that’s the is/ought divide but I don’t see how it implies the fact/value distinction. — TheHedoMinimalist
Why think that value statements are not factual statements and why think that they have to be derived from non-evaluative statements? — TheHedoMinimalist
Are you making a case against the general consensus amongst analytic philosophers who differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive statements based on the reasons I have thus far offered? — Cartesian trigger-puppets
The premise is simple; if something can be empirically verified, then it is factual and thus descriptive. For example, if I make the statement that "My right hand has 4 fingers with 1 thumb," it provides a description for the way things are. A statement such as this can be checked and verified through empirical observation. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Prescriptive statements are a subset of evaluative statements, which is the only distinction between the two that I am aware of. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Are you making a case against the general consensus amongst analytic philosophers who differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive statements based on the reasons I have thus far offered? Most people understand that there is a very different kind of thing being described when it comes to value judgements. Something that extends beyond merely describing that which corresponds with empirical observation. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Even so, you seem to be aware that there is a distinction between statements that describe stuff and ones that describe stuff and stuff related to value. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
First, that it is not entailed that every agent will classify the experience within the same category. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Second, the category itself is based on an arbitrary measurement that is phenomenally dependent. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
Because they do not report something that is observable or falsifiable, and that is what facts are supposed to do. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
I don’t think that facts are necessarily supposed to report something that is observable or falsifiable and you will find plenty of academic analytical philosophers who also don’t think about facts in those terms. This way of thinking about facts has largely fallen out of style since the decline of the logical positivist movement in the mid 20th century. — TheHedoMinimalist
he problem with having evaluative facts is that there is no method to substantiate them or evidence to support and confirm them. They necessarily depend upon the agent to express them, either directly or indirectly, for substantiation and the only evidence there is that suggests they are true is contained within the privacy of the agents subjective mental states. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
The court would appreciate the statements regarding a fingerprint, eyewitness, and footprint because these statements correspond with how we experience reality. If what is stated has the semantic content that most members of a language associate with a concept which corresponds to the way we experience the world, even with varying degrees of accuracy, arbitrarily defined by human standards such as limited sense perception and inconsistent cognitive processing, it is what we call a fact. The type of fact that is most compelling and that most pressure us to adopt a new belief. — Cartesian trigger-puppets
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