There remain tremendous risks entailed in assuming facts and values can be separated cleanly, but these risks aren't really in the ground you're exploring here. Perhaps the clearest example of an 'ought' emerging from an 'is', which is in the institution of promising. The act of promising (is) provides the obligation of keeping a promise (ought). This can be extended further, and it can only be resisted by restraining the scope of 'is' in ways that are going to undermine the raw force of Hume's argument in the Treatise.
Yet I'd support your attack on 'Trust the Science' with the opposite argument: it is the act of pretending that facts are value-free that creates the illusionary idol of 'The Science'; we are supposed to pretend that we have to do this because of 'facts', which are really the ever-present knot of 'facts and values'. Hilary Putnam makes it clear that scientific process entails values such as like ‘coherence’, ‘simplicity’, ‘elegance’ and ‘rigor’. Values infuse all human endeavour, including the process of establishing facts. It is the attempt to deny this that cause the 'Trust the Science' disaster.
I discuss these issues at length in chapter 2 of my Chaos Ethics. There I note also that Hume's purpose of raising this idea in the Treatise was somewhat different to how we use this idea today, and I also note that he removed it from his later revision, the Enquiry, which says something about his own commitment to the idea. 😉
Finally, I love Hume, and I won't push back on supporting Hume - there's much to be gained from engaging with Hume today! On this particular issue, however, Hume's desire to bait the zealots (which he took impish glee in doing) was riding front and centre. In so much as you are enjoying doing the same, you are well within the spirit of Hume's project. 😁
Disclaimer: this is not an attempt to argue with you, but merely commentary.
I'm pretty sure I agree with all of this, CB, unless I've missed a subtlety. For example, I would never seek to assuming facts and values can be separated cleanly in terms of metaethics of metaepistemology, which is why I am so fond of Paul Feyerabend, as it would seem you are. I love Putnam, too. He's certainly right up there. I don't think these guys' associated "commentary" is at odd with Hume on this fundamental point. And even if Hume backed us into his critical distinction because he wanted to bait the zealots doesn't mean he was wrong, of course. Perhaps he just derived an is from an ought ;)
Your distinction between instrumental rationality and morality is perfect. Neither Harris nor Rand get this, although examples are countless.
The cited case of smokers illustrates that some of them place the enjoyment of smoking over the value of long-term health. Similarly, Crusaders in the Middle Ages clearly recognized that food gives strength, yet they routinely fasted before battle; Lincoln knew that medicine can cure diseases, yet he withheld it from Union prisoners in the South for fear it might also heal Confederate soldiers; members of Hamas rationally accept that evacuation from a war zone furthers life, and yet they block the exit of their own citizens in defiance of the humane restriction on war that only soldiers should engage in it. (Do NOT assume any attempt at “moral equivalence” here.)
In short, whatever the rationally accepted “is,” it can always be subordinated in the bewildering ordinality of “oughts” that humans are capable of.
A second distinction is equally important. It is the paradox that subjectivity is the foundation for any normative objectivity.
The Austrian school of economics rejected the crude, ostensibly “objective,” labor theory of value and explicitly referenced David Hume as the foundation of their subjective theory of value. As Austrian Ludwig von Mises demonstrated in his 1920 paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” the paradox is that countless subjective valuations form the only basis for objective market price determinations. This is what the “praxeology” of von Mises is all about.
I apply praxeology to solve the current problems of the state in my own book, The Constitution of Non-State Government (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947660853) – a book unread and unreviewed despite being submitted to dozens of economists, including Austrians. I simply use the subjective theory of value to update the symbiotic community of Johannes Althusius in the following way: Enlightenment claims of a single universal set of values – claims that founded the current “liberal” state in 1648 – are false, as demonstrated by Hume. The solution is that only a small community of those who share a set of values – completely subjectively, mind you – can approach a semblance of objectivity that can claim status as law.
I used to think you can't derive an "ought" from an "is." Then I read MacIntyre and saw why that was wrong.
Let me try to channel MacIntyre in my own way. What I'm channeling is chapter 5 of *After Virtue.*
Consider the following deduction:
(A) "I am a man"
THEREFORE
(B) "I ought to do what a man ought to do."
This seems like a pretty tight deduction. The logical entailment is rigorous. Membership of a class implies possession of the necessary traits of that class, including moral traits such as any moral purposes or moral obligations which are necessarily involved in being a member of that class.
Even a moral nihilist could accept the argument. They would see the deduction as analogous to:
(A) "I am a man"
THEREFORE
(B1) "I have whatever powers of flight it is characteristic of men to have."
There are no powers of flight that it is characteristic of men to have. So (B1) is a bit empty. But it's still true: I have whatever powers of flight are characteristic of men, namely, none. By the same token, by the moral nihilist's account, I have, as a man, whatever moral obligations and purposes are characteristic of men, namely, none. But (B) is still true.
Now, you might ask how we can know that there are any moral traits necessarily characteristic of men qua men, and if so, how we can know what they are. Good question, but it's part of the larger question of how we can know anything about any classes, and how we can make any sorts of generalizations whatsoever. Hume's radical skepticism touched upon that, too, and he went so far as to challenge the validity of inductive reasoning, creating a conundrum that has haunted philosophy ever since. Nelson Goodman's "grue" problem is a recent iteration of Hume's old doubt.
Just because the sun has risen 10,000 times does not logically imply that it will rise tomorrow. And to say that we trust in patterns because we have found extrapolation from patterns to be reliable is to make the case for inductive reasoning from inductive reasoning, which is circular. Hume's skepticism is as lethal to science as it is to ethics.
Now, of course, you can agree with Hume on one thing and to disagree with him on another. But there's something odd about insisting on the authority of one Humean doctrine while blithely ignoring another, and happily inhabiting the complacency that he exploded. Hume knocked both the Humpty Dumpty of science and the Humpty Dumpty of ethics off the wall. You have no right to trust science until you have refuted Hume. And if you do manage to refute Hume and put science back together, I think you'll find that you have also put ethics back together, or at least made a start.
I don't think it's possible to justify generalization without some sort of Platonic idealism. I can't perceive a cat without perceiving, however dimly or uncertainly, the idea of form of a cat. Only by means of that idea can I recognize another cat as the same kind of thing, and then make educated guesses about the traits of the second cat from the traits I have observed in the first. So science begins, but perceiving a class is not separable from perceiving the peculiar goodness or excellence or perfection or telos of that class, and so ethics begins also. It is a cat, therefore it ought, in some sense though not exactly a moral sense, to be, what a cat ought to be: healthy, beautiful, etc. But when it comes to men, the "ought" that comes with human nature is emphatically and thoroughly moral.
No one can have the concept of a man at all without having some knowledge that men ought to be brave, just, temperate and self-controlled, rational and wise and prudent. No one can REALLY, really and fully and thoroughly, understand what a man is without knowing that he ought to be hopeful and faithful and loving. People burdened with the impoverished metaphysics of scientific materialism can't integrate these truths with their larger worldview, so they have to rationalize them away as a mere subjective biases, and their subsequent struggles to give them the importance that they know they ought to have after they've pulled the rug out from under them are rather poignant. But Rand and Harris and Kuhn and the rest are right that science is indelibly value-laden in from the beginning. Our perception of the world's order and our perception of the world's goodness are inextricably bound together.
You have a fine mind, Nathan, but this strikes me as a whole lot of words in service of a whole lot of sophistry.
1. I like MacIntyre, but teleological arguments usually make me role my eyes. And this?
(A) "I am a man"
THEREFORE
(B) "I ought to do what a man ought to do."
Whatever the apparent logical rigor of the deduction, the proposition is unhelpful. I mean that B) claim manages to be both teleological and essentialist in ways that equivocate on the "ought." It might be circular--nevermind that it's not clear what normative framework the ought refers to--Virtue? Deontology?
So, yeah, I'm a metaethical skeptic all the way down. And so concerns about the very enterprise of science to me boil down to enlightened guesswork, Bayesian probabilities. I am certainly not committed to any Platonic Forms, which, to me, is even more nonsensical than Aristotelean teloi, which can at least be justified on pragmatic grounds.
Finally, "No one can have the concept of a man at all without having some knowledge that men ought to be brave, just, temperate and self-controlled, rational and wise and prudent." Huh? Like Rand and Harris, you seem to conflate epistemology and metaepistemology with ethics and metaethics (a branch of metaphysics), or put another way. Just because language, knowledge, and ontology get all muddled for humans doesn't mean the world bends to that muddle. Just because science is value-laden doesn't mean it's possible to derive an ought from an is.
Well, OK, then. What's your answer to the "grue" problem? How can we justify inductive reasoning? It seems off topic, but my hypothesis is that you won't be able to answer that without making metaphysical commitments along the way that will pull the rug out from under your metaethical skepticism.
I know time is scarce and I won't hold it against you, of course, if you can't compose an answer to that. But I think that's where one has to begin.
You're trying to switch to chess from checkers. I have made my case for the is/ought distinction and you would like to change the subject from Is/Ought to the Induction Problem so you can evade the deep problems of your view on the former. Otherwise, I have never denied that we make metaphysical commitments. We do it all the time. You might even say we "ought" to do it, where ought is instrumentally rational. As Quine once quipped "The Humean predicament is the human predicament." I pretty much trend in the direction of the pragmatists on the philosophy of science, somewhere between Quine and Rorty. We do our best with what we have.
The metaphysical commitments and the metaethical commitments are all rolled up together. When I say "I am a man," the statement has moral content baked in from the beginning. A totally amoral value-blind human being is borderline inconceivable and certainly not what we ever reason about practically. My ability to generalize about people depends on my understanding of human nature, which is moralistic to its roots, as is everyone else's. I'm trying to make you articulate a way out of induction skepticism because I think you'll realize, along the way, that you've lost all your reasons for being a metaethical skeptic.
Good stuff! Back in the day I tried to convince activist libertarians that we fight for liberty -- because we like it. No need to cross the is-ought barrier.
See page 35 of the December 2009 issue of Liberty.
There remain tremendous risks entailed in assuming facts and values can be separated cleanly, but these risks aren't really in the ground you're exploring here. Perhaps the clearest example of an 'ought' emerging from an 'is', which is in the institution of promising. The act of promising (is) provides the obligation of keeping a promise (ought). This can be extended further, and it can only be resisted by restraining the scope of 'is' in ways that are going to undermine the raw force of Hume's argument in the Treatise.
Yet I'd support your attack on 'Trust the Science' with the opposite argument: it is the act of pretending that facts are value-free that creates the illusionary idol of 'The Science'; we are supposed to pretend that we have to do this because of 'facts', which are really the ever-present knot of 'facts and values'. Hilary Putnam makes it clear that scientific process entails values such as like ‘coherence’, ‘simplicity’, ‘elegance’ and ‘rigor’. Values infuse all human endeavour, including the process of establishing facts. It is the attempt to deny this that cause the 'Trust the Science' disaster.
I discuss these issues at length in chapter 2 of my Chaos Ethics. There I note also that Hume's purpose of raising this idea in the Treatise was somewhat different to how we use this idea today, and I also note that he removed it from his later revision, the Enquiry, which says something about his own commitment to the idea. 😉
Finally, I love Hume, and I won't push back on supporting Hume - there's much to be gained from engaging with Hume today! On this particular issue, however, Hume's desire to bait the zealots (which he took impish glee in doing) was riding front and centre. In so much as you are enjoying doing the same, you are well within the spirit of Hume's project. 😁
Disclaimer: this is not an attempt to argue with you, but merely commentary.
I'm pretty sure I agree with all of this, CB, unless I've missed a subtlety. For example, I would never seek to assuming facts and values can be separated cleanly in terms of metaethics of metaepistemology, which is why I am so fond of Paul Feyerabend, as it would seem you are. I love Putnam, too. He's certainly right up there. I don't think these guys' associated "commentary" is at odd with Hume on this fundamental point. And even if Hume backed us into his critical distinction because he wanted to bait the zealots doesn't mean he was wrong, of course. Perhaps he just derived an is from an ought ;)
Your distinction between instrumental rationality and morality is perfect. Neither Harris nor Rand get this, although examples are countless.
The cited case of smokers illustrates that some of them place the enjoyment of smoking over the value of long-term health. Similarly, Crusaders in the Middle Ages clearly recognized that food gives strength, yet they routinely fasted before battle; Lincoln knew that medicine can cure diseases, yet he withheld it from Union prisoners in the South for fear it might also heal Confederate soldiers; members of Hamas rationally accept that evacuation from a war zone furthers life, and yet they block the exit of their own citizens in defiance of the humane restriction on war that only soldiers should engage in it. (Do NOT assume any attempt at “moral equivalence” here.)
In short, whatever the rationally accepted “is,” it can always be subordinated in the bewildering ordinality of “oughts” that humans are capable of.
A second distinction is equally important. It is the paradox that subjectivity is the foundation for any normative objectivity.
The Austrian school of economics rejected the crude, ostensibly “objective,” labor theory of value and explicitly referenced David Hume as the foundation of their subjective theory of value. As Austrian Ludwig von Mises demonstrated in his 1920 paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” the paradox is that countless subjective valuations form the only basis for objective market price determinations. This is what the “praxeology” of von Mises is all about.
I apply praxeology to solve the current problems of the state in my own book, The Constitution of Non-State Government (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947660853) – a book unread and unreviewed despite being submitted to dozens of economists, including Austrians. I simply use the subjective theory of value to update the symbiotic community of Johannes Althusius in the following way: Enlightenment claims of a single universal set of values – claims that founded the current “liberal” state in 1648 – are false, as demonstrated by Hume. The solution is that only a small community of those who share a set of values – completely subjectively, mind you – can approach a semblance of objectivity that can claim status as law.
I used to think you can't derive an "ought" from an "is." Then I read MacIntyre and saw why that was wrong.
Let me try to channel MacIntyre in my own way. What I'm channeling is chapter 5 of *After Virtue.*
Consider the following deduction:
(A) "I am a man"
THEREFORE
(B) "I ought to do what a man ought to do."
This seems like a pretty tight deduction. The logical entailment is rigorous. Membership of a class implies possession of the necessary traits of that class, including moral traits such as any moral purposes or moral obligations which are necessarily involved in being a member of that class.
Even a moral nihilist could accept the argument. They would see the deduction as analogous to:
(A) "I am a man"
THEREFORE
(B1) "I have whatever powers of flight it is characteristic of men to have."
There are no powers of flight that it is characteristic of men to have. So (B1) is a bit empty. But it's still true: I have whatever powers of flight are characteristic of men, namely, none. By the same token, by the moral nihilist's account, I have, as a man, whatever moral obligations and purposes are characteristic of men, namely, none. But (B) is still true.
Now, you might ask how we can know that there are any moral traits necessarily characteristic of men qua men, and if so, how we can know what they are. Good question, but it's part of the larger question of how we can know anything about any classes, and how we can make any sorts of generalizations whatsoever. Hume's radical skepticism touched upon that, too, and he went so far as to challenge the validity of inductive reasoning, creating a conundrum that has haunted philosophy ever since. Nelson Goodman's "grue" problem is a recent iteration of Hume's old doubt.
Just because the sun has risen 10,000 times does not logically imply that it will rise tomorrow. And to say that we trust in patterns because we have found extrapolation from patterns to be reliable is to make the case for inductive reasoning from inductive reasoning, which is circular. Hume's skepticism is as lethal to science as it is to ethics.
Now, of course, you can agree with Hume on one thing and to disagree with him on another. But there's something odd about insisting on the authority of one Humean doctrine while blithely ignoring another, and happily inhabiting the complacency that he exploded. Hume knocked both the Humpty Dumpty of science and the Humpty Dumpty of ethics off the wall. You have no right to trust science until you have refuted Hume. And if you do manage to refute Hume and put science back together, I think you'll find that you have also put ethics back together, or at least made a start.
I don't think it's possible to justify generalization without some sort of Platonic idealism. I can't perceive a cat without perceiving, however dimly or uncertainly, the idea of form of a cat. Only by means of that idea can I recognize another cat as the same kind of thing, and then make educated guesses about the traits of the second cat from the traits I have observed in the first. So science begins, but perceiving a class is not separable from perceiving the peculiar goodness or excellence or perfection or telos of that class, and so ethics begins also. It is a cat, therefore it ought, in some sense though not exactly a moral sense, to be, what a cat ought to be: healthy, beautiful, etc. But when it comes to men, the "ought" that comes with human nature is emphatically and thoroughly moral.
No one can have the concept of a man at all without having some knowledge that men ought to be brave, just, temperate and self-controlled, rational and wise and prudent. No one can REALLY, really and fully and thoroughly, understand what a man is without knowing that he ought to be hopeful and faithful and loving. People burdened with the impoverished metaphysics of scientific materialism can't integrate these truths with their larger worldview, so they have to rationalize them away as a mere subjective biases, and their subsequent struggles to give them the importance that they know they ought to have after they've pulled the rug out from under them are rather poignant. But Rand and Harris and Kuhn and the rest are right that science is indelibly value-laden in from the beginning. Our perception of the world's order and our perception of the world's goodness are inextricably bound together.
You have a fine mind, Nathan, but this strikes me as a whole lot of words in service of a whole lot of sophistry.
1. I like MacIntyre, but teleological arguments usually make me role my eyes. And this?
(A) "I am a man"
THEREFORE
(B) "I ought to do what a man ought to do."
Whatever the apparent logical rigor of the deduction, the proposition is unhelpful. I mean that B) claim manages to be both teleological and essentialist in ways that equivocate on the "ought." It might be circular--nevermind that it's not clear what normative framework the ought refers to--Virtue? Deontology?
So, yeah, I'm a metaethical skeptic all the way down. And so concerns about the very enterprise of science to me boil down to enlightened guesswork, Bayesian probabilities. I am certainly not committed to any Platonic Forms, which, to me, is even more nonsensical than Aristotelean teloi, which can at least be justified on pragmatic grounds.
Finally, "No one can have the concept of a man at all without having some knowledge that men ought to be brave, just, temperate and self-controlled, rational and wise and prudent." Huh? Like Rand and Harris, you seem to conflate epistemology and metaepistemology with ethics and metaethics (a branch of metaphysics), or put another way. Just because language, knowledge, and ontology get all muddled for humans doesn't mean the world bends to that muddle. Just because science is value-laden doesn't mean it's possible to derive an ought from an is.
Well, OK, then. What's your answer to the "grue" problem? How can we justify inductive reasoning? It seems off topic, but my hypothesis is that you won't be able to answer that without making metaphysical commitments along the way that will pull the rug out from under your metaethical skepticism.
I know time is scarce and I won't hold it against you, of course, if you can't compose an answer to that. But I think that's where one has to begin.
You're trying to switch to chess from checkers. I have made my case for the is/ought distinction and you would like to change the subject from Is/Ought to the Induction Problem so you can evade the deep problems of your view on the former. Otherwise, I have never denied that we make metaphysical commitments. We do it all the time. You might even say we "ought" to do it, where ought is instrumentally rational. As Quine once quipped "The Humean predicament is the human predicament." I pretty much trend in the direction of the pragmatists on the philosophy of science, somewhere between Quine and Rorty. We do our best with what we have.
I also love Goodman, but you're right that I can't do 'grue' today.
The metaphysical commitments and the metaethical commitments are all rolled up together. When I say "I am a man," the statement has moral content baked in from the beginning. A totally amoral value-blind human being is borderline inconceivable and certainly not what we ever reason about practically. My ability to generalize about people depends on my understanding of human nature, which is moralistic to its roots, as is everyone else's. I'm trying to make you articulate a way out of induction skepticism because I think you'll realize, along the way, that you've lost all your reasons for being a metaethical skeptic.
But yes, that's kind of a long project!
Good stuff! Back in the day I tried to convince activist libertarians that we fight for liberty -- because we like it. No need to cross the is-ought barrier.
See page 35 of the December 2009 issue of Liberty.
https://libertyunbound.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Liberty_Magazine_December_2009.pdf
The "ZAP" -- Oh you've got me howling over here!