Subject: 
        RE: [evol-psych] "ought" can be plausibly derived from an "is"?
   Date: 
        Wed, 20 Feb 2002 11:26:14 -0600
   From: 
        "Hill, David" 
     To: 
        'Pascal Bercker' ,
        [email protected]




From: "Hill, David" 
Date: Wed Feb 20, 2002 4:31pm
Subject: RE: [evol-psych] "ought" can be plausibly derived from an "is"?

Irwin Silverman wrote:

        I am not a professional philosopher so forgive me if this is
naive, but I see your example above as an apt demonstration of the
dichotomy between "is" and "ought"

        Your knife "is" dull - that is a fact.  But whether you "ought"
to sharpen it or not is a value judgement, depending potentially on many
things - e.g. how you plan to use it (are you a serial killer?) - whether
you have to forego more critical purchases to buy a knife sharpener, etc.

        I don't mean to offend, but these protracted discussions of the
obvious remind me of Alexander Pope - "A man of business may talk of
philosophy; a man who has none may practice it."

_______

Reply:  This simply ignores the concession plainly present in my posting.  That
the one statement does not entail the other as a logically valid consequence,
sans supporting premises, is obvious.  In any case, the relevant point is that
statements about better and worse behavior may follow from premises available
to us all, together with results that might possibly be obtained from EP.  By
the way, why do people typically say (without argument) that "ought" claims are
value judgments?  To say that X ought to do Y is not, prima facie, to make any
value judgment at all.  It is not, for example, to say that doing Y is better
than not doing Y, or that it would be good for X to do Y.  Indeed, it is
perfectly consistent -- though odd -- to say "Y is a very bad thing and I
rather hope you won't do it, but nonetheless you have an obligation  to do it
and ought to do it."  Between "ought" claims and ordinary value judgments there
is at least as much of a logical gap as any between is's and oughts.

David Hill

_______

From: John Cartwright [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 4:05 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [evol-psych] Ought, is and functions

Pascal Bercker in response to David Hill's knife analogy writes:

"IF an implicit premise is also the claim, for example, that one *ought*

to restore lost function to things (the knife having lost its function by

becoming dull) then you do simply have a derivation of an "ought"

from a more general "ought", which nobody contests is possible. What

is contestable, of course, is the alleged truth of the implicit prescriptive

premise, or presumably any general premise like it. "

____________


This crucial point is central to the whole process of deriving normative claims
from descriptive ones. Hills analogy relies on the normative assumption that
things should have their functions restored. If it were true then we would have
to outlaw abortion and contraception along the lines that these are not
permitting the proper function of wombs and ovaries. Why we don't of course is
that we also accept that humans have brains whose proper function (amongst
other things) is to make decisions. By not castigating contraception as morally
wrong we are privileging one set of functions ( choice making by a cogntive and
emotional system) over another ( making babies).

Nowhere do I say that things ought to have their functions restored.  A dull
knife still has the same function, typically, as when it was sharp.  My claim
is that a sharp knife is better than a dull knife.  Similarly, a man who looks
after his family is better than a man who doesn't.  Both of these claims have
exceptions, but both hold in the overwhelming majority of cases, and both
license plausible inferences, if not entailments.  Nothing in my argument
prevents cultural/social evaluations from trumping those derivable from genetic
function.  To say that Y follows from X is not to deny that other conclusions
follow from a richer set of premises.

David Hill

_______

-----Original Message-----
From: Pascal Bercker [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 2:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [evol-psych] "ought" can be plausibly derived from an "is"?


David Hill writes:

There is an interesting assumption that runs through this and similar arguments
for Hume's semantic dualism.  The assumption is that if we can't get
entailments from descriptions, what good is the evidence anyway?  To which one
ought to respond that descriptions are not typically more certain than
normative claims, and thus nothing is to be gained by restricting one's
evidence set to claims that are rigidly descriptive.  An outstanding moral
philosopher once put it this way. "If these lovers of tidy logical dichotomies
don't want to call the derivation "implication," then I give them the word.
Call it "shimplication."  Call it whatever you wish.  The question is whether
the sustaining argument is sound, not whether it fits neatly into Hume's
impoverished ontology."  If someone could derive significant moral conclusions
from factual descriptions, plus an appropriate functional analysis of a
Darwinian sort, plus a few unchallenged axioms, that would be worth doing,
however you characterize the several sorts of premises involved.