Maverick Philosopher

After MacIntyre: On Deriving Ought from Is

Are there any (non-trivial*) valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions:  (i) The premises are all purely factual  in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative?  Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55):

1. This watch is inaccurate.

Therefore

2. This is a bad watch.

MacIntyre claims that the premise is factual, the conclusion evaluative, and the argument valid.  (The argument is an enthymeme the formal validity of which is ensured by the auxiliary premise, 'Every inaccurate watch is a bad watch.') The validity is supposed to hinge on the functional character of the concept watch.  A watch is an artifact created by an artificer for a specific purpose: to tell time accurately.  It therefore has a proper function, one assigned by the artificer.  (Serving as a paperweight being an example of an improper function.)  A good watch does its job, serves its purpose, fulfills its proper function. MacIntyre tells us that "the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch . . ." and that "the criterion of something's being a watch and something's being a good watch . . . are not independent of each other." (ibid.)  MacIntyre goes on to say that both criteria are factual and that for this reason arguments like the one above validly move from a factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

Speaking as someone who has been more influenced by the moderns than by the ancients, I don't see it.  It is not the case that "the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch . . . ."  A watch is "a portable timepiece designed to be worn (as on the wrist) or carried in the pocket." (Merriam-Webster)  This standard definition allows, as it should, for both good and bad watches.   Note that if chronometric goodness, i.e., accuracy, were built into the definition of 'watch,' then no watch would ever need repair.  Indeed, no watch could be repaired. For a watch needing repair would then not be a watch.

MacIntyre is playing the following game, to put it somewhat uncharitably.

He smuggles the evaluative attribute good into his definition of 'watch,' forgets that he has done so thereby generating the illusion that his definition is purely factual, and then pulls the evaluative rabbit out of the hat in his conclusion.  It is an illusion since the rabbit was already there in the premise.  In other words, both (1) and (2) are evaluative.  So, while the argument is valid, it is not a valid argument from a purely factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

So if the precise question is whether one can validly move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, then MacIntyre's example fails to show that this is possible.

What MacIntyre needs is the idea that some statements are both factual and evaluative.  If (1) is both, then (2) -- This is a bad watch -- follows and  MacIntyre gets what he wants.  But if (1) is both, then (1) is not purely factual. The question, however, was whether there is a valid immediate inference from the purely factual to the normative/evaluative.  The answer to that, pace MacIntyre, is in the negative.

Is Man a Functional Concept?

But now suppose that, with respect to functional concepts, the move from fact to value is logically kosher because functional concepts embed criteria of evaluation.  Then this discussion is relevant to ethics, the normative study of human action,  only if man is a functional concept.  Aristotle maintains as much:  man qua man has a proper function, a proper role, a proper 'work' (ergon).  This proper function is one he has essentially, by his very nature, regardless of whatever contingent roles a particular human may instantiate, wife, father, sea captain.  Thus, " 'man' stands to 'good man' as 'watch' stands to 'good watch' . . . ." (56)  Now if man qua man has a proper and essential function, then to say of a particular man that he is good or bad is to imply that he has a proper and essential function.  But then to call a man good is also to make a factual statement.  (57)

The idea is that being human is a role that includes certain norms, a role that each of us necessarily instantiates whether like it or not.  There is a sort of coalescence of factual individual and norm in the case of each human being just as, in Aristotle's ontology, there is a sort of coalescence of individual and nature in each primary substance. 

But does man qua man have a proper role or function?  The moderns fight shy of this notion.  They tend to  think of all roles, jobs, and functions of humans as freely adopted and contingent.  Modern man likes to think of himself as a free and autonomous individual who exists prior to and apart from all roles.  This is what Sartre means when he says that existence precedes essence:  Man qua man has no pre-assigned nature or essence or proper function: man as existing individual makes himself what ever he becomes.  Man is not God's artifact, hence has no function other than one he freely adopts.

Although Aristotle did not believe in a creator God, it is an important question whether an Aristotle-style healing of the fact-value rift requires classical theism as underpinning. MacIntyre seems to think so. (Cf. p. 57)  Philippa Foot demurs.

Interim Conclusion

If the precise question is whether one can validly (but non-trivially) move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, I have yet to see a clear example of this.  But one ought to question the strict bifurcation of fact and value.  The failure of entailment is perhaps no surprise given the bifurcation.  The Aristotelian view, despite its murkiness, remains a contender.  But to be a contender is not to be a winner.

The Aristotelian view is murky because it seems to imply that a bad man is not a man, just as a bad watch is not a watch.  If it is built into the concept watch that it tell time accurately, then a watch that is either slow or fast is not  watch, which is plainly false if not absurd, implying as it does that no watch could ever need repair.  Clearly, there is nothing in the concept watch to require that a watch be accurate.  There are good watches and bad watches. Similarly, there are good men and bad men. If to be a man is to exercise the proper function of a man, then there would be no need for correctional institutions.

___________________

*A trivial argument from 'is' to 'ought' exploits the explosion principle, i.e., ex contradictione quodlibet.  If anything follows from a contradiction, then from a contradictory premise set of factual claims any normative claim follows.

The Source of the Normativity of the Ought-to-Be

I was working on this four years ago. It might never get finished. So here it is.

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Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do?  If so, what is the source of their normativity?  I am led to pose this question by my current study of Philippa Foot's meta-ethical treatise, Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001).  If I understand her scheme, all normativity has its source in life, in living things, which would imply that in a lifeless world there are no states of affairs that ought to be or ought not to be.   

The Ought-to-Do and the Ought-to-Be

Let's begin by noting that if I ought to do X (pay my debts, feed my kids, honor my commitments, keep my hands off my neighbor's wife, etc.) then my doing X ought to be. For example, given that I ought to pay my debts, then my paying a certain debt on a certain date is a state of affairs that ought to be, ought to exist, ought to obtain. So it is not as if the ought-to-do and the ought-to-be form disjoint classes. For every act X that an agent A ought to do, there is a state of affairs, A's doing X, that ought to be, and a state of affairs, A's failing to do X, that ought not be. The ought-to-do, therefore, is a  special case of the  ought-to-be.

My question, however, is whether there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, are there non-agential oughts-to-be? 

It may not be possible to prove definitively that there are non-agential oughts, but their postulation is in line with ordinary ways of thinking and talking and there seem to be no decisive arguments against their postulation.

Consider a possible world W in which there are no moral agents, but there are sentient beings who are in a constant state of pain from which they cannot free themselves. It seems both meaningful and reasonable to say that W ought not exist, that its nonexistence is an axiological requirement. And this quite apart from the power of any agent to actualize or prevent such a world. One simply intuits the disvalue of such a world. One might express the intuition in the words, ‘Such a world ought not be.’ Non-agential oughts are axiologically required, while non-agential oughts-not are axiologically prohibited.

Or consider our world, the actual world, with its nature red in tooth and claw, a world in which life lives at the expense of life. It is filled with vast quantities of natural and moral evil. Assume that naturalism is true, that there is no God or afterlife, and that the evils of this world will forever go unredeemed. If may be false, but it is meaningful to say that it would be better if this world did not exist, that it ought never to have existed. The metaphysical pessimist may be wrong, but he is not talking nonsense when he exclaims, "Better some other world or even nothing at all rather than this sorry state of things!" On the other hand, there are those who are struck by the sheer existence of things and are moved to exclaim, "It is good that there is something rather than nothing!" Such optimists are not talking nonsense when they say that things are as they ought to be even in the absence of any agent or agents who are responsible for things being as they are.

The sense of these exclamations does not seem to depend on the existence of moral agents with power sufficient to bring about or prevent the mentioned states of affairs. That something rather than nothing exists could be good even if it is no one's duty to bring it about and no one's responsibility if it obtains. That a world of uncompensated and unalleviated misery is bad does not depend on some free agent's moral failure. 

Does it make sense, and is it true, to say things like 'There ought to be no natural disasters' or 'There ought to be morally perfect people'?

Perhaps the following examples are clearer.  Imagine a pessimist who makes the following two-fold declaration: "In a possible world in which there are no sentient beings, things are as they ought to be, and in the actual world in which there are sentient beings, things are not as they ought to be."  He might also say, "A lifeless world is better than one containing living things."  The pessimist Schopenhauer declares that "Human life must be some sort of mistake."  That implies that a world without human beings is better than one with them.

On the optimist side, there are those who exclaim that it is good to be alive, that living as such is a good thing, or even that existence as such, whether living or nonliving, is good.  (For Thomas Aquinas, 'a being' and 'a good thing' are necessarily equivalent or 'convertible' terms: ens et bonum convertuntur.)

Suppose it it good that things exist. It would seem to follow  that the existence of thing is as it ought to be.  What makes this state of affairs good or such that it ought to be.  That things exist is a fact.  That things ought exist goes beyond the fact.

Two Assurances of Religion and the Case of the Philosophically Sophisticated Rapist

Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192:

Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power.

I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances.

The first assurance might be thought to be  not specifically religious, or at least not theistically-religious. There might be -- it is epistemically possible that there are -- objective and absolute moral distinctions without God.  I hope we can agree that the wanton slaughter of human beings for one's sexual gratification is absolutely wrong: wrong always and everywhere and in every possible circumstance in which there are human beings. Take that as an example of an objectively true moral proposition. Think of propositions in a Platonic or quasi-Platonic sort of way, as subsisting independently of minds, including God's mind if a divine mind there be, and thus as belonging to a realm unto themselves apart from the realm of space, time and matter. It might then be thought that the indicative proposition just stated suffices to ground the imperative, "Thou shalt not wantonly slaughter, etc."

Is there a Platonic realm of agential oughts and ought-nots that subsist independently of mind and matter and that suffice to make it morally impermissible to, say, rape and murder for pleasure and morally obligatory to, say, feed and care for one's children?  And all of this without a foundation in a divine intellect and will?

Perhaps; I can't prove the opposite.  My metaphysical hunch, however, is that such Platonic moral propositions, and not just moral propositions,  cannot 'hang in the air': they need support in a mind. That's my hunch, and I can articulate it rigorously in argumentative form. No argument in metaphysics in support of a substantive proposition, however, no matter how rigorously deployed, is rationally compelling. So none of my arguments will be rationally compelling. I can render my hunch reasonable, but I cannot force you to accept it on pain of your being taxed with irrationality should you not accept it.

Nevertheless,  I say we need God to ground the existence of moral absolutes. Britton says as much when he says that the absolute good has power.  For if the absolute good has power, then the absolute good is God.

Suppose you disagree.  Free-floating Platonica suffice, you say. It is enough that there subsist in Plato's topos ouranos an entire system of such propositions as Wanton slaughter of innocents for sexual gratification is wrong and Caring for one's offspring is morally obligatory.   The latter prescribes an ought-to-do, a moral must.  Who enforces it? If no one does, then it is an entirely impotent ought.  If we mortals sometimes enforce it, then the ought is not wholly impotent: we provide the power to enforce the moral imperatives that follow from moral declaratives.

Could a moral ought be wholly powerless?  Could it be true that one ought to X and oufht to refrain from Y even if there are no consequences in the realm of fact when the prescriptions and proscriptions are violated?  Could the Ideal and the Real, the Normative and the Factual subsist in such separation? Could Being be so bifurcated?

Would the moral law be the moral law were it never enforced? Enforcement is the bringing to bear of the Ideal upon the Real.

Consider the case of a philosophically sophisticated rapist. It is his pleasure to hunt women and have his way with them. He finds one in an isolated place where she cannot summon help. She pleads and protests: Rape is wrong! He admits that it is wrong.  He gives a little speech:

Yes, it is true, absolutely true, that rape is objectively morally wrong. It is wrong in Plato's heaven, but here we are on earth where there is nothing to prevent me from raping you. I am strong and you are weak.  I can and will satisfy my raging desire.  I have no reason not to. For my raping you will entail no negative consequences for me. I will make sure of that by strangling you while I rape you.  The dead tell no tales.  I will not offer the pseudo-justification that might makes right, that what I am about to do to you is morally permissible because I have the power to do it.   A right that might makes is no right at all. Might cannot make right. 'Might makes right' is eliminativism about right, not an identification of its essence. No such Thrasymachean sophistry for me. What I am about to do to you is not right, but wrong.  But the wrongness of the deeds I am about to do has no relevance  to what actually happens in this material world of fact where we find ourselves. It is a wrongness that subsists in Plato's heaven, but not here in the sublunary. The wrongness is neither here nor there. 

Why should I care that rape and murder are wrong? I am not saying that they are not wrong; I am admitting that they are. I am saying that it doesn't matter in the real world.  Why should I act morally in circumstances in which there are no negative consequences for me if I act immorally?  Will you tell me that I must act morally because it is the morally right thing to do?  That I ought to do right because it is right?  Why? There is no God and no post-mortem regard or punishment.  There is no enforcer of the right and there will be no one upon whom to enforce it.  I grant you your Platonic moral absolutes, but they hang in the air, and in a tw0-fold sense: no God supports them in their existence, and no God enforces them in the phenomenal order.  My final happiness does not depend on doing the morally right thing in those circumstances in which I can get away with doing the wrong thereby satisfying my lust for power, pleasure, and domination. Now take off your clothes!

My view is that something like God is necessary both to explain the existence of the Platonic moral absolutes and their relevance to our animal life here below.  We need God both as support and as enforcer.  Being is One. It is not so bifurcated that the Ideal and the Real are poles apart without communication. God bridges the gap and mediates the opposites.  He brings about the mutual adjustment of virtue and happiness, to borrow a Kantian formulation. But why do we need God to do this job?  Because we cannot do it all by ourselves. A truly just adjustment of virtue and happiness cannot occur for most in this life.

If the absolute good does not have (absolute) power, then the absolute good is 'neither here nor there' in both senses of this phrase.

On a Putative Counterexample to 'Ought Implies Can'

I have long subscribed to Kant's famous meta-ethical principle according to which our moral obligations cannot outrun our abilities. 'Ought' implies 'can.' If I am under a moral obligation to do X, then I must be able to do X. We are concerned here with moral not legal oughts, and we understand 'ought' in accordance with the principle that if one morally ought to do X, then one is morally obliged/obligated to do X. 

Roughly, if you ought to do something, then it must be possible for you to do it, not just logically, and not just nomologically; it must be possible for you to do it given your actual abilities at a particular time and in definite circumstances.  With a bit more precision:

OC. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C.

So if I ought to come to your aid, then I am able to do so.  By contraposition, if I am unable to come to your aid, then it is not the case that I ought to, and I am not subject to moral censure if I fail to. 

Note the logical difference between 'It is not the case that A ought to do X' and 'A ought not to do X.'  To confuse those two would be to commit an operator shift fallacy by importing the negation operator into the negatum.  So the contrapositive of 'ought' implies 'can' is not 'cannot' implies 'ought not,' but 'cannot' implies 'not ought.'  Better still: 'not can' implies 'not ought.'

Now suppose I promise to drive you to the airport at six in the morning. So promising, I morally obligate myself to so doing, i.e., I ought to drive you to the airport at six.  It follows by (OC) that I can drive you to the airport in a very concrete sense of 'can,': I know how to drive; I know how to get to the airport; I have access to a car, no one is preventing me from driving, etc.  Obviously, a carjacking would absolve me of my moral obligation.

My ability in this concrete and specific sense is a necessary condition of my being morally obligated to drive you to the airport.

Putative Counterexample 

Suppose that the night before the airport run I get drunk, sleep through the alarm, wake up late and hungover, and forget to fill up the gas tank in my vehicle.  As a result we run out of gas and you miss your flight.  I am unable to deliver on my promise, and do what the promise obligated me to do, but it seems that I am nonetheless morally responsible and indeed open to moral censure. In this case it seems that 'not can'' does not imply 'not ought.'  It seems that my inability to get you to the airport on time does not absolve me of my moral obligation to perform than very action. For I did something blameworthy by getting drunk the night before.

I am not impressed by counterexamples of this sort.  Touching only the letter, but not the spirit of Kant's great principle, they merely invite a reformulation thereof.  To wit,

OC*. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C subject to the proviso that around t and in C A has not done anything to impair his abilities or factors contributing to his abilities.

War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism

That the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine.  I am sensitive to its moral force. I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature as the types of actions they are, wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances.    But what would have been the likely upshot had  the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in World War II?  Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us.  But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens. 

If I understand the Catholic doctrine, it implies that if Harry Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age  for two centuries -- he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, if the deliberate targeting  of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done.  This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish."  Although I invoked an historical example, nothing hinges on it since a matter of principle is at stake.  

This extreme anti-consequentialism troubles me if it is thought to be relevant to how states ought to conduct themselves.  Suppose that there is no God and no soul and no post-mortem existence, and thus that this life is all there is.  Suppose the political authorities let the entire world be destroyed out of a refusal to target and kill innocent civilians of a rogue state.  This would amount to the sacrificing of humanity to an abstract absolutist moral principle.  This would be moral insanity.

On the other hand, extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true.    If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant.  If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant.   For the soul to be saved, it must be kept free from, or absolved of, every moral stain in which case it can never be right to do evil in pursuit of good.  Now the deliberate killing of innocent human beings is evil and so must never be done -- regardless of consequences.  On a Christian moral scheme, morality is not in the service of our animal life here below; we stand under an absolute moral demand that calls us from beyond this earthly life and speaks to our immortal souls, not to our mortal bodies.  Christianity is here consonant with the great Socratic thought that it is better to suffer evil, wrong, injustice than to to do them. (Plato, Gorgias, 469a)   

But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics.  No problem with that -- if the metaphysics is true.  For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know that the metaphysics is true?  Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism.  

I am not claiming that classical theism false.  I myself believe it to be true.  My point is that we know that this world is no illusion and is at least relatively real, together with its goods, but we merely believe that God and the soul are real.   

If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that in certain circumstances the deliberate targeting of the innocent is justified?

An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered.  But a leader of a nation  is in a much different position. Even if the leader qua private citizen holds to an absolutist position according to which some actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong regardless of consequences, he would not be justified in acting in his official capacity as head of state from this absolutist position.  The reason is that he cannot reasonably claim that the metaphysics on which his moral absolutism rests is correct.  God may or may not exist -- we don't know.  But that this world exists we do know.  And in this world no action is such that consequences are irrelevant to its moral evaluation.  By 'in this world' I mean: according to the prudential  wisdom of this world.  Is adultery, for example, intrinsically wrong such that no conceivable circumstances or consequences could justify it?  A worldly wise person who is in general opposed to adultery will say that there are conceivable situations in which a married woman seduces a man to discover military secrets that could save thousands of lives, and is justified in so doing.

Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me.  Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her moral rigorism remains tenable.

We confront a moral dilemma.  On the one hand, a head of state may sometimes justifiably act in the interests of the citizens of the state of which he is the head by commanding actions which are intrinsically wrong.  On the other hand, no one may ever justifiably do or command anything that is intrinsically wrong.

Of course the dilemma or aporetic dyad can be 'solved' by denying one of the limbs; but there is no solution which is a good solution. Or so say I.  On my metaphilosophy, the problems of philosophy are almost all of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but none of them soluble.  The above dilemma is an example of a problem that is genuine, important, and insoluble.  

Torture

Patrick Toner holds that waterboarding is torture.  I incline to say that it isn't.  But let's assume I am wrong.  Presumably, most who hold that waterboarding is torture will also hold that torture is intrinsically wrong.  But how could it be wrong for the political authorities to torture a jihadi who knows the locations and detonation times of suitcase nukes planted in Manhattan?  Here again is our moral dilemma.  I suspect Toner would not 'solve' it by adopting consequentialism.  I suspect he holds that torture is wrong always and everywhere and under any conceivable circumstances.  But then he is prepared to sacrifice thousands of human lives to an abstract moral principle, or else is invoking a theological metaphysics that is far less grounded than the prudence of worldly wisdom.  I would like to hear Toner's response to this.

Some have tried to solve the dilemma by invoking the Doctrine of Double Effect.  But I am pretty sure Patrick will not go that route.

Related: The Problem of Dirty Hands 

Utilitarianism and Natural Normativity: Further Foot Notes

Philippa Foot argues (Natural Goodness, Oxford UP 2001, p. 48 ff.) that a naturalistic approach to normativity rules out utilitarianism. In this entry I try to understand the argument.  Foot writes,

. . . utilitarianism never gets off the ground in a schema such as we find in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Thompson. For utilitarianism, like any other form of consequentialism, has as its foundation a proposition linking goodness of action in one way or another to the goodness of states of affairs. And there is no room for such a foundational proposition in the theory of natural normativity. Where, after all, could good states of affairs be appealed to in judging the natural goodness or defect in characteristics and operations of plants and animals? In evaluating the hunting skills of a tiger do I start from the proposition that it is a better state of affairs if the tiger survives than if it does not? (Italics in original)

The argument in nuce is this:

A. Utilitarianism is founded on a proposition P linking goodness of action to goodness of states of affairs.
B. There is no room for P in the theory of natural normativity.
Ergo
C. Utilitarianism is inconsistent with the theory of natural normativity.

 

Ad (A).  Unfortunately, Foot does not deign to tell us what P is.  But I think the following is what she has in mind: What makes a good action good is its issuance in, or contribution to, a good state affairs where the state of affairs in question is a consequence of the action.  The action is good because the state of affairs it brings about or helps to bring about is good.  It is not the case that the state of affairs is good because the action is good.  On consequentialism, the goodness of the state of affairs is the metaphysical ground of the goodness of the action, and not vice versa.

Example.  For one sort of utilitarian, my behaving politely at a party  is good, not because behaving politely at parties is intrinsically good, good in itself, but because it contributes to a good state of affairs, the conviviality and social harmony of the party.  It is the goodness of the resultant state of affairs that is the source or ground of the goodness of the action.  Suppose my behavior at the party also involves false modesty, mild flattery, and perhaps even lying: Asked what I think of Trump's selection of James 'Mad Dog' Mattis as Secretary of Defense, I say: "I'm a metaphysician who spends his time thinking about the meaning of Being; I have no political opinions."  Now if the party were thick with liberals such a lie could be justified on utilitarian grounds inasmuch as it contributes to the greatest comity of the greatest number at the party in question.

Ad (B).   Foot must reject P because it is characteristic of her view that the source of the goodness or badness of an organism and its traits and operations is grounded in its intrinsic natural features.  An oak tree's roots are good roots because they are healthy roots: they go deep and wide in search of water and other nutrients.  The search is of course pre-conscious, but there is a sort of intentionality or teleological directedeness to it.  The same goes for the dispositions of the human will.  Good dispositions are good because of their intrinsic natural features.  They are not good because they are the objects of pro-attitudes by others or because they issue in good consequences. Foot assures us that "there is no change in the meaning of 'good' as the word appears in 'good roots' and as it appears in 'good dispositions of the human will.'" (39, italics in original.)

Note that Foot needn't deny that there are states of affairs or that they have normative properties.  Her claim is that such normative properties cannot be foundational.  The foundational normative properties are properties of living things, whether plants, animals, or humans, not properties of nonliving states of affairs.

Foot is right that her approach is inconsistent with utilitarianism.  But her approach continues to strike me as obscure.

Foot asks, rhetorically, "In evaluating the hunting skills of a tiger do I start from the proposition that it is a better state of affairs if the tiger survives than if it does not? "  It is not clear to me why  could not evaluate the skills of the tiger in this way. Why couldn't the evaluation proceed as follows:

For a living thing, to survive is better than to perish.  Tigers are living things. Therefore, it it better for a tiger to survive rather than perish.  To survive it must be fleet of foot and sharp of claw, etc.  Now this tiger specimen before me is lame and has been declawed.  So this tiger is not likely to survive.  Therefore this tiger is not a good tiger.

Note that the first four propositions are true whether or not any tigers exist. So why can't the normative properties be grounded in abstract states of affairs?  

We are back to the problem of the exact nature of the relation between the species and the specimen, or the life form of the species and the specimen.  There is something abstract about the species which removes it from the natural order.  As I said in an earlier entry in this series:

This naturalistic scheme strikes me as obscure because the status of species has not been sufficiently clarified.  Aristotelian categoricals are about species, but what exactly are species or the "life forms of species"?  The species peacockpresumably exists only in individual peacocks, but is not identical to any such individual or to the whole lot of them. (The species is not an extensional entity such as a mereological sum, or a set.) It looks to be an immanent universal, a one-in-many.   But then it is not natural in the very same sense in which an individual peacock is natural, i.e., in space and time at a definite spatiotemporal location, and only there.  (Universals are multiply located.) So Foot's natural norms are not natural in the same sense in which the organisms of which they are the norms are natural.

So there still is a fact-norm distinction in the form of the distinction between a member of a species and the species.  This whole scheme will remain murky until it is explained what a species is and how it is present in its members.  We are in the vicinity of the ancient problem of universals.  Foot's norms are not outside of things in a realm apart, not in the mind; they are 'in' things.  But what does this 'in' mean exactly?

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Natural Normativity: More Foot Notes

I am trying to come to grips with Philippa Foot's  Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001).

For Foot, norms are ingredient in nature herself; they are not projected by us or expressive of our psychological attitudes.  They are ingredient not in all of nature, but in all of living nature.  Living things bear within themselves norms that ground the correctness of our evaluations.  Evaluation occurs at "the intersection of two types of propositions: on the one hand, Aristotelian categoricals (life form descriptions relating to the species), and on the other, propositions about particular individuals that are the subject of evaluation." (33)

Foot bravely resists the fact-value dichotomy.  (You could say she will not stand for it.)  Values and norms are neither ideal or abstract objects in a Platonic realm apart, as Continental axiologists such as Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann maintained, nor are they psychological projections.  They are intrinsically ingredient in natural facts.  How does the resistance go?  We start with an Aristotelian categorical such as 'The deer is an animal whose form of defense is flight.'  The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29) The individual as a member of its species is intrinsically or naturally good if it is able to serve its species by maintaining itself in existence and reproducing.

I now note something not mentioned by Foot but which I think is true.  An individual organism does not reproduce itself; it produces (usually in conjunction with an opposite sexed partner) an organism distinct  from itself, the offspring  Thus an individual's 'reproduction' is quite unlike an individual's self-maintenance.  It is the species that reproduces itself, strictly speaking, not the individual. A biological individual needs ancestors but it doesn't need descendants.  The species needs descendants. Otherwise it becomes extinct.  

I mention this to underscore the fact that Foot evaluates individuals and their parts, traits and actions in the light of the species to which the individual belongs.  The goodness of a living thing "depends directly on the relation of an individual to the 'life form' of its species." (27) This is said to hold for all living things including human animals.  It would seem to follow that human individuals have no ultimate intrinsic value or goodness as individuals: their value and goodness is relative to the contribution they make to the health and preservation of the species.  Perhaps we could say that for Foot man is a species-being in that his existence and flourishing are necessarily tied to his being a specimen of a species.  (It would make an interesting post to explore how this relates, if it does, to the Marxian notion of Gattungswesen.)

For example, suppose a deer is born with deformed limbs that prevent its engaging in swift flight from predators. This fact about it makes it an intrinsically or naturally bad deer.  For such a deer will not be able to serve its species by preserving itself in existence until it can reproduce.  The evaluation of an individual deer is conducted solely in the light of its relation to its species.  It is not evaluated as an individual in its own right.  Of course, I am not suggesting that deer be evaluated as individuals in their own right with an intrinsic moral worth that would make it wrong to treat them as means to our ends as opposed to treating them as ends in themselves.  What I am doing is preparing to resist Foot's claim that human being can be evaluated in the same way that plants and non-human animals are evaluated.

Or consider the roots of an oak tree. (46)  What makes them good roots?  In virtue of what do they have this evaluative/normative property?  They are good because they are robust, not stunted; they go deep and wide in search of water and nutrients; they do not remain near the surface or near the tree.  They are good because they are healthy.  They are healthy because they preserve the oak in existence so that it can contribute to the propagation of the species.  Bad roots, then, are defective roots.

So  evaluative properties are 'rooted in' -- pun intended! -- factual, empirically discernible,  characteristics of living things.  (The empirical detectability of normative properties makes Foot a cognitivist in meta-ethics.)  The vitality of the roots and their goodness are one in reality.  We can prise apart the factual from the evaluative mentally, but in reality there is no  distinction.  Foot does not say this in so many words, but surely this is what her position implies.  Somehow, the factual and the normative are one.  No dichotomy, split, dualism -- leastways, not in reality outside the mind.  The health of the roots and their goodness are somehow the same.  This sameness, like the notion of a species, is not entirely pellucid. 

Note, however, that this monism is purchased in the coin of an extramental dualism, namely, that between species and specimen. The normative properties are 'inscribed' in the species if you will.  A three-legged cat is a defective cat, but still a cat: it is is a defective specimen of its species.  The generic generalization 'Cats are four-legged' cannot be refuted by adducing a three-legged cat.  This is because 'cat' in the Aristotelian categorical, or generic generalization, is about the species, or, as Foot also writes,  the life form of the species, which is distinct from any and all of its specimens.  The species is normative for its specimens.

In sum, the sameness or 'monism' of normative and factual properties presupposes the dualism of species and specimen.  

A Tenable View?

One problem I mentioned earlier: the notion of a species is exceedingly murky.  But at the moment something else makes me nervous.  

For Foot life is the ultimate principle of evaluation, physical life, natural life, the life of material beings in space and time, mortal life, life that inevitably loses in the battle against death.  So the goodness of a human action or disposition is "simply a fact about a given feature of a certain kind of living thing." (5)  Badness, then, is natural defect and this goes for humans too: "moral defect is a form of natural defect." (27)  It follows that a moral defect in a person is never a spiritual defect, but in every case a natural defect.  The good man is the healthy man, the well-functioning man, where moral health is just a kind of natural health.  But the health of a healthy specimen derives from its exercise of its proper function which is dictated by its species.  A healthy specimen  is one that serves its species.  A good tiger is a good predator, and woe to you if you a member of a species that is prey to such a predator.  The tiger's job is to eat you and to be a good tiger he must do his job well.  And so it seems that a good Aryan man would then be a man who serves the Aryan race by developing all his faculties so that he can most effectively secure the Lebensraum and such that he needs, not just to survive, but to flourish, and above all to procreate and propagate, and woe to you if you are a member of weaker race, a Slavic race, say, fit to be slaves of a master race.  As a member of a race incapable of exercising to the full the virtues (powers) of a characteristic member of a master race, one is then, naturally, sub-human, an Untermensch.  A Mensch, to be sure, but a defective Mensch, and because naturally defective, or at least naturally inferior, then naturally bad.

This appears to be a consequence of taking life to the the ultimate principle of evaluation.  

At this point the fans of Foot are beginning to scream in protest.  But my point here is not to smear Foot, but to explore her kind of meta-ethical naturalism.  Actually, I am just trying to understand it.  But to understand a position you have to understand what it entails. There is philosophy-as-worldview and philosophy-as-inquiry.  This is the latter.  My intent is not polemical.

Foot's naturalism seems to imply a sort of anti-individualism and anti-personalism.  Foot views the individual human being as an organism in nature, objectivistically, biologically, from an external, third-person point of view.  She sees a man, not as a person, a subject, but as a specimen of a species, an instance of a type, whose value it tied necessarily to fulfilling the demands of the type. She also seems to be suggesting that one's fulfillment as a human being necessarily involves living in and through and for the species, like a good Gattungswesen.  

So even if a position like Foot's has the resources to prevent a slide into eugenics, or into the sort of racism that would justify slavery and the exploitation of the naturally inferior, there is still the troubling anti-personalism of it.  

How then could a monk's choice of celibacy for himself be a morally good choice?  Presumably only if it contributes to the flourishing of the human species.  But suppose our monk is not a scientist, or any other benefactor of humanity, but a hermit wholly devoted to seeking union with God.  Could Foot's framework accommodate the goodness of such a life choice?  It is not clear to me how.  It would seem that the choice to become a celibate monk or nun who lives solely for union with God would have to be evaluated on a Footian meta-ethics as morally bad, as a defective life choice.  The implication would seem to be that such a person has thrown his life away.

Now of course that would be the case if there is no God.  But suppose that God and the soul are real.  Could a Footian stance accommodate the moral choiceworthiness of the eremitic monk's choice on that assumption?  It is not clear to me how. 

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Aristotelian Categoricals and Natural Norms

 Here are some notes on Chapter Two, "Natural Norms,"  of Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, Oxford UP, 2001.  

As I mentioned previously, Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of Moore's original thought." (p. 5)  

"The main thesis of this book is that propositions about goodness and defect in a human being  -- even those that have to do with goodness of character and action -- are not to be understood in such psychological terms." (37)  Her point is that when we evaluate living things, whether plants, animals, or humans, our uses of 'good' do not need to be explained in terms of commendation or any other speech act, or in terms of any psychological attitude.  Goodness and defect in living things are intrinsic to them and not parasitic upon attitudes or stances we take up with respect to them.

On to the details.

Earlier we were discussing the peculiarities of generic statements.  A generic statement is one that is neither singular nor logically quantifiable.  'The cat is four-legged,' unlike 'The cat is sleeping,' is typically used to express a general not a singular proposition.   But 'The cat is four-legged,' typically used, is not equivalent to 'All cats are four-legged' or to any quantified statement.  One three-legged cat suffices to falsify the universal quantification, but it does not falsify the generic generalization.  The fact that many adult humans lack the full complement of 32 teeth does not falsify the generic 'Adult humans have 32 teeth.'  'Rabbits are herbivorous' is a further example.  It would seem to entail 'Some rabbits are herbivorous.'  Even so, one is saying much more with an utterance of the former than with the latter.

The following wrinkles now occur to me.  If 'some' imports present existence, then the generic 'Velociraptors are carnivorous' does not entail 'Some velociraptors are carnivorous.'  But let's not get hung up on this, or on the entailments of the presumably generic 'Unicorns are four-legged.'    But we should  note, en passant, the presumably different phenomenon of plural predication.  'Velociraptors are extinct' is not about individual velociraptors; it is not equivalent to 'Each velociraptor is extinct.'  Presumably, it is the species that is extinct, whatever exactly species are. A species goes extinct when its last specimen expires; but one cannot say that the specimen goes extinct.  Assuming that Obama is not a species unto himself, his death will not be his extinction.  Compare 'Horses fill the field' with 'Horses are four-legged.'  The first is a plural predication; the second is not.  It is false that each horse fills the field, but true that each normal horse is four-legged.   But both sentences have in common that they are not about each horse.  

But I digress.  Back to Foot.

Foot, following Michael Thompson, speaks of Aristotelian categoricals.  "The deer is an animal whose form of defence is flight" is an example. (34)  The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29)  Foot is not assuming the immutability of species.  But species must have a "relative stability" if true Aristotelian categoricals are to be possible at all. (29)  "They tell us how a kind of plant or animal , considered at a particular time, and in its natural habitat, develops, sustains itself, defends itself, and reproduces." (29)

Foot, stepping beyond Thompson,  stresses the teleological aspect of Aristotelian categoricals.  "There is an Aristotelian categorical about the species peacock to the effect that the male peacock displays his brilliant tail in order to attract a female during the mating season." (31)  Not that the male strutting his stuff has any such telos in mind.  The thought here is that there is a teleology in nature that works itself out below the level of conscious mind.  The heliotropism in plants is a kind of teleology in nature below the level of conscious mind. Plants 'strive' to get into the light, but not consciously. Migrating birds are not trying to get somewhere warmer with better eats; they do not have this end in view.  And yet the migratory operation is teleologically directed.  Why do the birds head south?  In order to survive the winter, find food, and reproduce.

Can we say of an individual plant or animal that it is intrinsically good or bad independently of our interests or desires?  This is the crucial question that Foot answers in the affirmative.  Norms are ingredient in nature herself; they are not projected by us or expressive of our psychological attitudes.  Ingredient not in all of nature, but in all of living nature.  Living things bear within them norms that ground the correctness of our evaluations.  Evaluation occurs at "the intersection of two types of propositions: on the one hand, Aristotelian categoricals (life form descriptions relating to the species), and on the other, propositions about particular individuals that are the subject of evaluation." (33)

Foot is bravely resisting the fact-value dichotomy.  Values and norms are neither ideal objects in a Platonic realm apart, nor are they psychological projections.  They are intrinsically ingredient in natural facts.  How does the resistance go?  We start with an Aristotelian categorical such as 'The deer is an animal whose form of defence is flight.'  The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29) The individual as a member of its species is intrinsically or naturally good if it is able to serve its species by maintaining itself in existence and reproducing. Note that an individual organism does not reproduce itself; it reproduces (usually in conjunction with an opposite sexed partner) an organism distinct  from itself, the offspring  Thus an individual's reproduction is quite unlike an individual's self-maintenance.  An individual needs ancestors but it doesn't need descendants.  The species needs descendants. Now suppose a deer is born with deformed limbs that prevent its engaging in swift flight from predators. This fact about it makes it an intrinsically or naturally bad deer.  For such a deer will not be able to serve its species by preserving itself in existence until it can reproduce.  That's my gloss, anyway.

The idea, then, is that the species to which the individual organism belongs encapsulates norms of goodness/badness for its members which the individual either meets or fails to meet.

Interim Critical Remarks

A. This naturalistic scheme strikes me as obscure because the status of species has not been sufficiently clarified.  Aristotelian categoricals are about species, but what exactly are species or the "life forms of species"?  The species peacock presumably exists only in individual peacocks, but is not identical to any such individual or to the whole lot of them. (The species is not an extensional entity such as a mereological sum, or a set.) It looks to be an immanent universal, a one-in-many.   But then it is not natural in the very same sense in which an individual peacock is natural, i.e., in space and time at a definite spatiotemporal location, and only there.  (Universals are multiply located.) So Foot's natural norms are not natural in the same sense in which the organisms of which they are the norms are natural.

So there still is a fact-norm distinction in the form of the distinction between a member of a species and the species.  This whole scheme will remain murky until it is explained what a species is and how it is present in its members.  We are in the vicinity of the ancient problem of universals.  Foot's norms are not outside of things in a realm apart, not in the mind; they are 'in' things.  But what does this 'in' mean exactly?

B. My second remark concerns an individual organism that cannot  serve its species such as an infertile human male, or a human female who cannot have children and is therefore biologically defective in this respect.  Does her biological defect make her a bad human being?  Foot would seem to have to say yes: the defective woman does not come up to the norm for her species.  She is abnormal in a normative sense and not merely in a statistical sense.  She is not a good woman!  How is this any different from the case of the lame deer?  A lame deer is a defective deer, hence not a good deer.  It is not a good deer because it cannot flee from predators thereby maintaining its life so that it can go on to procreate and serve its species by so doing.

Foot wants to bring normativity down to earth from Plato's heaven; at the same time she wants to extrude it from the mind and install it in natural things outside the mind.  This makes plenty of sense with respect to plants and non-human animals.  But of course she want to extend her scheme to humans as well.  This is where trouble starts.

Foot sees the individual organism in the light of the species: as a specimen of the species and not as an individual in its own right. This is not a problem for plants and non-human animals, with the possible exception of our pets.  But Foot wants to extend her natural normativity scheme to humans as well.  But how can what I ought to do, and what I ought not to do, and what I should be and how I should be be dictated by my species membership?  Am I just an animal, a bit of the world's fauna?  I am an animal, but I am also a person: not just a material object in a material world, but a conscious and self-conscious subject for whom there is a world.  

After MacIntyre: Can a Normative Conclusion be Derived from Purely Factual Premises?

Are there any valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions:  (i) The premises are all factual  in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative?  Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55):

1. This watch is inaccurate.

Therefore

2. This is a bad watch.

MacIntyre claims that the premise is factual, the conclusion evaluative, and the argument valid.  The validity is supposed to hinge on the functional character of the concept watch.  A watch is an artifact created by an artificer for a specific purpose: to tell time accurately.  It therefore has a proper function, one assigned by the artificer.  (Serving as a paperweight being an example of an improper function.)  A good watch does its job, serves its purpose, fulfills its proper function. MacIntyre tells us that "the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch . . ." and that "the criterion of something's being a watch and something's being a good watch . . . are not independent of each other." (Ibid.)  MacIntyre goes on to say that both sets of criteria are factual and that for this reason arguments like the one above validly move from a factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

Speaking as someone who has been more influenced by the moderns than by the ancients, I don't quite see it.  It is not the case that both sets of criteria are factual. The criteria for something's being a good watch already contain evaluative criteria.  For if a good watch is one that tells time accurately, then that criterion of chronometric goodness involves a standard of evaluation.  If I say of a watch that it is inaccurate, I am not merely describing it, but also evaluating it.  MacIntyre is playing the following game, to put it somewhat uncharitably.

He smuggles the evaluative attribute good into his definition of 'watch,' forgets that he has done so thereby generating the illusion that his definition is purely factual, and then pulls the evaluative rabbit out of the hat in his conclusion.  It is an illusion since the rabbit was already there in the premise.  In other words, both (1) and (2) are evaluative.  So, while the argument is valid, it is not a valid argument from a purely factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

So if the precise question is whether one can validly move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, then MacIntyre's example fails to show that this is possible.

I think what MacIntyre needs is the idea that some statements are both factual and evaluative.  If (1) is both, then the argument is valid, but then it is not an argument from a purely factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

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Oughtness, Obligation, Duty

If I ought to do something, am I obliged to do it?  And if I am obliged to do something, is it my duty to do it? I tend to assume the following principle, where A is an agent and X an act or rather act-type such as feed one's children.

P. Necessarily, A morally ought to X iff A is morally obligated to X iff A has a moral duty to X.

The necessity at stake is conceptual; so by my lights (P) is a conceptual truth. But, as if to illustrate that philosophers disagree about every bloody thing under the sun, a correspondent writes:

(show)

I don't see that "x is something I ought to do iff x is something I'm morally obligated to do" is a conceptual truth, or even true. [. . .] Non-consequentialist moralities allow room for good deeds that are not obligatory. If helping a stranger is a good deed and you are fully able to perform it without endangering others, then I am quite comfortable recommending to you that you ought to do it. But I am not suggesting you have any duty or an obligation to do so. [. . .] So, you ought to help does not imply you have a duty to help.

I will now try to show that you ought to help does indeed imply that you have a duty to help, assuming that one is not equivocating on 'ought' and is using 'ought' as it is used in (P).

I agree that there are good deeds that are not obligatory. Suppose my neighbor is away when an important-looking package is delivered to his door. I take it into my house for safekeeping until he returns. Surely I am under no obligation, moral or legal, to do such a thing. Yet it is a good deed.

But it does not follow that it is a deed that I ought to do, or that I have a duty to do; it is precisely a supererogatory action, one above and beyond the call of duty. (A supererogatory action can be something as trifling as this, and need not be grand or heroic, but more on this in a separate post on supererogation.) If I ought to X, and I omit to X, then I do something wrong. Therefore, if I ought to pick up my neighbor's package, but omit to do this, then I do something wrong. But obviously I do nothing wrong in leaving my neighbor's package where it lies. Hence it is not the case that I ought to pick up my neighbor's package. Nor do I have any duty to pick up my neighbor's package.

I suspect my correspondent is simply playing fast and loose with 'ought,' a word with several meanings in English. Some examples:

a. 'The car ought to start; I installed a new battery.' This looks to be a non-normative use of 'ought,' one with no relevance to moral theory.

b. 'If you want to get to Tucson from Phoenix by interstate highway, you ought to take I-10 East.' This sentence is a hypothetical imperative, and the subject-matter is morally indifferent.

c. 'If you want to be a successful hit man, then you ought to learn how to kill with a .22 caliber gun.' A second hypothetical imperative. Here the subject-matter is not morally indifferent, but the 'ought' has noting to do with a duty.

d. 'If helping a stranger is a good deed, and one wants to be helpful, then one ought to help.' Another hypothetical imperative, and close to what my correspondent said above. But this use of 'ought' is not the use in principle (P) above.

e. 'You ought to pay your debts.' A categorical imperative, and a morally relevant use of 'ought.' This is the use of 'ought' that is featured in (P) above.

In sum, (P) seems rock-solid and I will continue to adhere to it until someone can instruct me otherwise.  But then I ask myself: Am I merely making precise how I shall use the relevant moral words?  Is (P) above a merely precisifying, and thus partially stipulative, definition? If so, then ordinary language considerations won't tell against it.

The Obligatory, the Supererogatory, and Two Moral Senses of 'Ought'

This is an old post from the Powerblogs site, written a few years ago.  The points made still seem correct.

.....................

Peter Lupu's version of the logical argument from evil (LAFE) is committed to a principle that I formulate as follows:

P. Necessarily, agent A ought to X iff A is morally obligated to X.

This principle initially appealed to me, but then I came to the conclusion (with the help of the enigmatic Phil Philologos or was it Seldom Seen Slim?) that the biconditional (P) is correct only in the right-to-left direction. That is, I came to the view that there are moral uses of 'ought' that do not impute moral obligations. But so far I have not convinced Peter. So now I will try a new argument, one that explores the connection between the obligatory-supererogatory distinction and the thesis that there are two moral senses of 'ought.' Here is the gist of the argument:

(show)

1. There are supererogatory actions
2. Whatever is good to do ought to be done
---
3. There are two moral senses of 'ought,' one prescriptive the other commendatory.

Ad (1). I am using 'supererogatory' in a wide sense. Accordingly, an action can be supererogatory (roughly: above and beyond the call of duty) even if it is not heroic or particularly costly (financially or otherwise) to the agent. It can be something as trifling as leaving a 50% tip in a restaurant. (Not that hard to do given dives I frequent.) If an action is obligatory, then it is good to do, and bad to leave undone. If an action is supererogatory, then it is good to do, but NOT bad to leave undone. Suppose I have lunch in a restaurant in which the food is good and the service adequate. Then

a. I am legally and morally obligated to pay the bill.
b. I am morally but not legally obligated to leave a 15% tip. (Or so I would argue.)
c. I am neither legally nor morally obligated to leave a 50% tip.

Nevertheless it is a good thing to leave a large tip (other things being equal), but not bad if I fail to leave a large tip. So the action is supererogatory in the wide sense here in play.

Ad (2). The principle that whatever is good to do ought to be done is theoretically attractive. It is attractive because it forges a partial link between the axiological and the deontic which are two aspects of the normative. Axiological terms include 'good,' 'evil',' 'value,' 'disvalue,' 'ideal.' Deontic terms include 'obligation,' 'prohibition,' 'permission,' 'right,' 'duty.'

Note the difference between (2) and

4. Whatever is good ought to be done.

(2) is about the good-to-do; (4) is about the good-to-be, which is a wider category. (4) says that everything which would be good were it to exist ought to be brought about by someone. It suffices to refute (4) to adduce a state of affairs that would be good if realized, but is not in the power of any finite agent to realize. Well, it would be good if none of us had to to die; but the immortality of human beings is not a state of affairs that can be brought about by any finite agent or agents.

Much more needs to be said about the principle (2) but let's assume that one accepts it.

Now under what conditions can it be true both that (1) there are supererogatory actions, and (2) whatever is good to do ought to be done? On the face of it, these seem contradictory. The supererogatory is that which it is good to do but not obligatory. But if what is good to do ought to be done, then it seems to follow that what is good to do is obligatory — which contradicts (1).

The contradiction is avoided if we distinguish between two moral senses of 'ought.' In the prescriptive sense, what one ought to do is what one is obligated to do. In the commendatory sense, what one ought to do is good to do but not obligatory.

But are there any sentences that feature moral uses of 'ought' that do not impute obligations? Suppose my wife says to me, 'We ought to give more of our income to charity.' Suppose further that there is an obligatory percentage and that we are already giving that percentage. In saying what she says, my wife is not imputing an obligation to us; she is recommending that we do more than we are obligated to do. Since the context is moral, this seems to be a moral use of 'ought' that does not impute an obligation. This seems to be a clear counterexample to (P) above.

Suppose instead she had said to me, 'We ought to check out the Roy Orbison exhibit at the Tempe Center for the Arts before it is too late.' Visiting such an exhibit is a morally indifferent action: neither prohibited, nor obligatory, nor supererogatory. The use of 'ought' in this example is nonmoral. It like the 'ought' in 'If you want to get to Tempe from Gold Canyon by freeway, then you ought to head east on the Superstition Freeway.'

Robert Merrihew Adams (Finite and Infinite Goods, Oxford 1999, p. 235) offers this example: "The religious leaders of the world ought to launch an appeal to protect the physical environment in which humanity must live." Someone who says this is not saying that the leaders are under an obligation; he is saying that it would be a good idea were they to act as recommended.

To sum up. There are nonmoral and moral uses of 'ought,' but not every moral use is an obligation-imputing use. So the biconditional (P) is false. What is true is the conditional,

P*. If agent A is morally obligated to X, then A ought to X.

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How to 'Derive' Ought from Is

I demanded an argument valid in point of logical form all of whose premises are purely factual but whose conclusion is categorically (as opposed to hypothetically or conditionally) normative.  Recall that a factual proposition is one which, whether true or false, purports to record a fact,  and that a purely factual proposition is a factual proposition containing no admixture of normativity. 

My demand is easily, if trivially, satisfied.

Ex contradictione quodlibet.  From a contradiction anything, any proposition, follows.  This is rigorously provable within the precincts of the PC (the propositional calculus).  As follows:

1. p & ~p 
2. p  (from 1 by Simplification)
3. p v q (from 2 by Addition)
4. ~p & p (from 1 by Commutation)
5. ~p (from 4 by Simplification)
6. q (from 3, 5 by Disjunctive Syllogism)

Now plug in 'Obama is a liar' for p and 'One ought to be kind to all sentient beings' for q.  The result is:

Obama is a liar 
Obama is not a liar
Ergo
One ought to be kind to all sentient beings.

My demands have been satisifed.  The above is an argument valid in point of logical form whose premises are all purely factual and whose conclusion is categorically normative.

I am demanding too little!

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After MacIntyre: Is and Ought

This follows up on yesterday's discussion.  Thanks to Hodges for getting me started on this, to Milos for reminding me of MacIntyre, and to Peter for agreeing with me so far.

Are there any valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions:  (i) The premises are all factual  in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative?  Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55):

1. This watch is inaccurate.

Therefore

2. This is a bad watch.

MacIntyre claims that the premise is factual, the conclusion evaluative, and the argument valid.  The validity is supposed to hinge on the functional character of the concept watch.  A watch is an artifact created by an artificer for a specific purpose: to tell time accurately.  It therefore has a proper function, one assigned by the artificer.  (Serving as a paperweight being an example of an improper function.)  A good watch does its job, serves its purpose, fulfills its proper function. MacIntyre tells us that "the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch . . ." and that "the criterion of something's being a watch and something's being a good watch . . . are not independent of each other." (Ibid.)  MacIntyre goes on to say that both sets of criteria are factual and that for this reason arguments like the one above validly move from a factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

Speaking as someone who has been more influenced by the moderns than by the ancients, I don't see it.  It is not the case that both sets of criteria are factual in the sense defined above. The criteria of something's being a good watch already contains evaluative criteria.  For if a good watch is one that tells time accurately, then that criterion of chronometric goodness involves a standard of evaluation.  If I say of a watch that it is inaccurate, I am not merely describing it, but also evaluating it.  MacIntyre is playing the following game, to put it somewhat uncharitably.

He smuggles the evaluative attribute good into his definition of 'watch,' forgets that he has done so thereby generating the illusion that his definition is purely factual, and then pulls the evaluative rabbit out of the hat in his conclusion.  It is an illusion since the rabbit was already there in the premise.  In other words, both (1) and (2) are evaluative.  So, while the argument is valid, it is not a valid argument from a purely factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

So if the precise question is whether one can validly move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, then MacIntyre's example fails to show that this is possible.

But I am being tendentious on purpose for didactic reasons.  I grant that it is not perfectly evident that values and facts are mutually exclusive.  I think what MacIntyre needs is the idea that some statements are both factual and evaluative.  If (1) is both, the MacIntyre gets what he wants.

Is Man a Functional Concept?

But suppose one would be wrong to reject the (1)-(2) counterexample and that, with respect to functional concepts, the move from fact to value is logically kosher.  Then this discussion is relevant to ethics, the normative study of human action,  only if man is a functional concept.  Aristotle maintains as much:  man qua man has a proper function, a proper role, a proper 'work' (ergon).  This is a proper function he has essentially, by his very nature, regardless of whatever contingent roles a particular human may instantiate, wife, father, sea captain.  Thus, " 'man' stands to 'good man' as 'watch' stands to 'good watch' . . . ." (56)  Now if man qua man has a proper and essential function, then to say of a particular man that he is good or bad is to imply that he has a proper and essential function.  But then to call a man good is also to make a factual statement.  (57)

The idea is that being human is a role that includes certain norms, a role that each of us necessarily instantiates whether like it or not.  There is a sort of coalescence of factual individual and norm in the case of each human being just as, in Aristotle's ontoloogy, there is a sort of coalescence of individual and nature in each primary substance. 

But does man qua man have a proper role or function?  The moderns fight shy of this notion.  They tend to  think of all roles, jobs, and functions as freely adopted and contingent.  Modern man likes to think of himself as a free and autonomous individual who exists prior to and apart from all roles.  This is what Sartre means when he says that existence precedes essence:  Man qua man has no pre-assigned nature or essence or proper function: man as existing individual makes himself what ever he becomes.  Man is not God's artifact, hence has no function other than one he freely adopts.

Although Aristotle did not believe in a creator God, it is an important question whether an Aristotle-style healing of the fact-value rift requires classical theism as underpinning. MacIntyre seems to think so. (Cf. p. 57)

Interim Conclusion

If the precise question is whether one can validly move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, I have yet to see a clear example of this.  But one ought to question the strict bifurcation of fact and value.  The failure of entailment is perhaps no surprise given the bifurcation.  The Aristotelian view, despite its murkiness, remains a contender.

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