The Is-Ought Problem, Part I: Moral Justifications
A first foray into the world of fallacies. We start today by looking at some ways in which people use morally motivated arguments, even in the face of scientific evidence.
There is a tendency to deem human beings as innately irrational; that at our core, we are driven by emotional and biological impulses, who, through our unique capacities for metacognition, want to be considered as rational actors.
It makes sense that we rest on our laurels a bit too much, at the best of times. At our core, we live out our days (and by extension, our lives) as a result of the actions we take. These actions are derived through probabilistic phenomena that you’re likely unaware of. How should we get to work? What do I want for breakfast? Should I wear trousers or jeans today? Whether you’re cognisant of this fact or not, you probably make thousands of these kinds of decisions a day. On a daily basis, we can see how our decision-making processes are predicated upon gut feelings and pre-curated heuristics. Say you’re walking home at night, and see a young person, dressed in a hoodie and casual attire. The first thought may (or may not - you’ll be a far better person than I) be to cross the road, or try to cut your walk home a little short. These heuristics can be mental minimaps, or ‘shortcuts’, designed to essentially make our cognitive processes a little less exhausting in the sea of stimuli we expose ourselves to on a regular basis. But as you can see from this example, they can also create biases. They’re the LLM of our decision making; capable of extracting swathes of information and training our brain, whilst risking larger, more blatant errors or ‘hallucinations’.
In short, if we live guided by heuristics (or as some may articulate, “vibes”), society would plummet into chaos. If we are indeed, in essence, irrational agents, then we have the schools of philosophy and science to thank for any semblance of societal structure. It’s heralded as a methodology so useful in understanding our present, limited reality, as it places our own biases and limitations in the centre of things, and emphasises a framework of externalising and testing these blindspots.
Scientific Method vs. Science
It’s important we differentiate between the term scientific method, and the holistic system derived from other branches of the term science. The latter consists of a body of individuals who participate in - and disseminate - the ‘system’ that is science, through journals, research facilities, industry, and universities. The scientific method is a distinct, a priori method which is considered separate from science. We can have the scientific method without science, but we cannot have science without the scientific method.
Something that is inherently core to this method is a concept called falsifiability. In other words, a theory must be testable, and consequently, open to rebuttal when opposing evidence comes into the fray. Philosopher Karl Popper concerned himself with this notion of falsifiability in a good number of ways. There’s a Popperian classic which continues to be applied in understanding the core values of the scientific method even today. Suppose one theory posits that all swans are white. How can we verify that this theory is valid? The obvious method would be to check that every swan is indeed white. Yet herein lies the problem. No matter how many white swans you count, you can never truly be 100% certain that there isn’t a black swan lurking around somewhere. Menacingly.
By this logic, you can never prove that the theory is true. Strikingly, the mere sight of one black swan tears this theory into tatters. Falsification is a brutal, honest beast: a single example can decimate a universal statement. Popper considered this as a well-developed branch of deductive logic.
Falsification is a useful tool in taming our basest decision-making. Offering facts and evidence to intuitive, knee-jerk assumptions can cull even the most crepuscular of biases, which is why they can be so informative in this present conversation landscape. As discussed before, reason and logic aren’t always what guides our decision-making - particularly when emotions are compromised. Instead, we behave in ways which reaffirm preconceptions, core beliefs, and even moral frameworks which have been ‘intuited’ (as opposed to argued). These moral assumptions can lead back to nearly all of the major political, social, and cultural discourse. Morality-justified reasoning, such as the just-world hypothesis (amongst other fallacies), can lead to people evaluating arguments in a biased approach to reach a conclusion that they prefer.
(This is possibly one of the reasons why I resent this notion of “building an online brand” using reels and Instagram fodder - you have to appear deathly certain of a position, or people consider you wishy-washy, as opposed to reasonable and measured).
We can see that this capacity to apply moralistic fallacies extends not only to what we believe ourselves, but towards what we think others ought to believe. A series of experiments conducted in the 2021 paper by Cusimano & Lombrozo exposed the participants to fictional scenarios and personas, within which contained one factually accurate write-up of the scenario, a belief-driven justification, and a moral justification for the belief-based account. The confederates of these experiments asked the participants which account that the fictional character should be more inclined to believe. The qualitative reports concluded that participants unconsciously applied non-evidential norms - essentially, more emotive arguments - as they proposed that the fictional protagonist ought to buy into the belief-driven account more than the factual report.
Sense of Hume-r
Interestingly, these participants fell into the assumption that a moral justification of the events outweighed the importance of a factual account. They decided what these fictional characters ought to believe in a given paradigm, even when a moral justification contradicted the historical accuracy of events.
According to David Hume’s famed aphorism, you cannot derive an ought from an is. In essence, projecting a specific value system from an “ought” towards another, purportedly reality-based “is” creates a problem in our discourse. We can apply morality-driven “oughts” across an array of societal discussion; gun laws, AI, technological advancements, political conflict, just to name a few, and make arguments which can impede evidence-driven cases. At face value, this is a sound idea: elucidating belief-centric arguments would help dilute the lack of scientific rigour when making bold claims, especially in the school of psychology and human behaviour.
There are a couple of ways in which we can challenge Hume’s claim, however. For one, some philosophers contend that the is-ought issue goes beyond a falsification issue, and more to do with language and semantics.
The is-ought problem, as articulated by Hume, is when a philosophical treatise moves from making "is" claims to making "ought" claims, without explaining how the shift is made. Claiming that same-sex marriage is “bad” because of theological reasons, for example, doesn’t sufficiently (or necessarily) explain the shift which warrants an “ought” which we need to abide by, for example. But what if we do explain the shift? Do our moral “oughts” become automatically valid?
Attempts to refute Hume's law take issue with this specific, linguistic articulation of the problem. For example, in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Distinction, Hillary Putnam writes:
One clue that the claim presupposes a substantial metaphysics (as opposed to being a simple logical point) is that no one, including Hume himself, ever takes it as merely a claim about the validity of certain forms of inference, analogous to the claim “you cannot infer ‘p8Cq' from ‘p or q.’” Indeed, if the claim were simply one about the form of certain inferences, it would prohibit one from ever inferring “you ought to do x in such-and-such circumstances” from “for you to do x in such-and-such circumstances is good, and for you to refrain from doing x in those circumstances is bad.
Of course, many philosophers would reply to this example by saying that it does not run afoul of Hume’s dictum because it is a case of inferring an “ought” from an “ought.” But that is my point. Their ability to recognize statements such as “for you to do x in such-and such circumstances is good, and for you to refrain from doing x in those circumstances is bad” as a case of an “ought” turns not on any feature of the form of the statement but rather on an understanding of its content.”
“Nor did Hume himself (or any of his readers) understand the claim as one about the canons of formal inference. Rather, Hume assumed a metaphysical dichotomy between “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas” (the dichotomy that constituted his early anticipation of “the analytic-synthetic distinction”). What Hume meant was that when an “is” judgment describes a “matter of fact,” then no “ought” judgment can be derived from it. Hume’s metaphysics of "matters of fact” constitutes the whole ground of the alleged underivability of “oughts” from “ises.”
Another important theoretical development since Hume’s argument can be found in the work of logician Arthur Prior. Prior demonstrates that, by starting with a set of “is” claims as well as a set of “ought” statements, we can then create a logically coherent claim which actually allows us to derive an ought from an is.
Consider the following, which I’ll label SC: “either it’s sunny or cats are cute.”
Whether we consider SC an is or ought claim, we’re still going to be able to derive an “is” from an “ought.” We can see this in this example if SC is an “ought” claim. It’s predicated by “it’s sunny”. And even if people consider it an “is” claim, we can still derive an “ought”. We can derive “cats are cute” from SC plus “it’s not sunny”. Therefore, whether SC is an “is” or whether it’s an “ought”, we are still able to derive this “ought” from a given “is”.
This is just one logical example of challenging Hume’s concerns towards ought-is statements. With this, we can start to see some of the potential flaws within deductive reasoning. If a premise is flawed or flimsy, it doesn’t matter how well you present your arguments; the foundations are shaky. For another article, I’ll be delving into more arguments countering the purely empiricist and sceptical account held by some fine thinkers such as David Hume.
The reason is this: we cannot only address the passioned, illogical claims by poor deductive reasoning across debates without acknowledging the gap in moral reasoning. “Subjective morality” is a fragile, ill-conceived concept; we’ll be exploring this in more detail in future articles.