It is totally deficient as far as philosophical arguments go. OTOH, if all you are doing is communicating your moral intuitions, fine.
Too bad there are people who have the wrong moral intuitions eh ? Do you think you have anything meaningful to tell them ?
I see how well your non-argument works when you tell the amoralist “if somebody is trying to kill a girl in a black alley, blah blah” - what sort of answer do you usually get ?
Obviously people who believe that the state is good…are informed by their immoral sense that the state is good. You can’t really argue against that can you ?
No I don’t. But that won’t stop me and other other people with similar senses of right and wrong from taking action against them if they commit aggression.
The same denial you get when you tell the amoralist “prove to me natural authority exists, blah, blah, blah”.
Most people are informed by the false idea that state aggression is a necessary evil.
I would say there’s no divide for the simple fact that a person primarily uses an ought in terms of what is happened before (Gee, I ought’ve bought X instead of Y.), where as the ‘is’ is used to imply an action that has occured or is occuring without considerations to alternatives (being weighted by personal valuations). The ought implies in itself an alternative that may or may not be attractive to a human being. The real problem raised by the so-called is-ought divide is the fact that not everyone sees the same conclusion for each possible ought condition.
I think one possible solution is the fact that morality is something learned over time, not merely builtin or held as absolute. Thus, the ought in all moral statements become a mechanism to signal a point by which an individual can seek to judge one’s values, finding that which fits best with their own epistemology. Some ought conditions can lead to death, but that by itself doesn’t mean the ought swings to is or that is can conversely swing to ought. As zefreak has been suggesting is that oughts are not evaluations onto themselves. They merely signal a means by which a human being can evaluate the choices that can be taken (regardless of perfect knowledge).
Ladyattis, I must say this whole line of thinking is a wrong turn in moral theory. In plain language, morality has never been about general optimization in action. People don’t say it is immoral to go skydiving without a helmet or to have an un-diversified stock portfolio. What sets moral choices apart from other choices is that the former involves possible choices which might be selected with full knowledge that it is likely to be to the detriment of the moral actor’s material well-being: risking one’s life to save another, abstaining from a tempting crime which would likely go unpunished, etc. Those choices are a distinctive part of human action. That part ought to have a name. It’s traditional name is morality. It makes no sense to extend that name to all human action.
As per the rest of the topic, I fear this thread is getting sidelined. It should deal with the possibility of deriving ought statements from is statements. I have been wanting to have this discussion for a long time, as I feel it is important and largely misunderstood.
Lilburne, I agree with much of your position but how do you distinguish “right” moral urges from wrong ones? Do you simply mean moral urges that you have and those that you don’t?
There are no cosmically/objectively “right” or “wrong” moral urges. Moral urges are the kind that impel us toward action that is most certain to be to our own material detriment relative to other actions and is usually for the sake of others. Some moral urges concern what is traditionally known as property rights: the urge not to aggress against others and to retaliate against aggression. Of course there are the great many non-moral urges which are not selfless in this way: the basic urges of personal survival and personal promotion. When a basic urge overwhelms a property-relative urge and we thus aggress against someone, our property-relative urges will often engender feelings of guilt. In hindsight a repentant person will feel that the basic urge that impelled him to aggress was “wrong” in that it was excessive. This kind of thing can happen in foresight too. We’ve all been at a point where we’re about to do something that we feel is wrong, but we go ahead and set out to do it anyway. In those cases, our self-promotion urges are overwhelming our moral urges, but the latter are still there engendering feelings of “pre-guilt” and causing us to reflect upon the self-promotion urges as “bad”, even though the latter continues to impel us on anyway. If such guilty feelings become strong enough, they will tip the scale and we will act morally.
Yes, words like “right,” “wrong,” “immoral,” “should,” “ought,” “rights,” etc. are all the language of persuasion. Sometimes they are backed by logical consequentialist arguments (implicitly or explicitly), sometimes they are backed by sophistry, sometimes by appeals to emotion, to verified scientific results, to the “greater good,” to the well-being of the speaker or listener, to religion, to metaphysics, or to the sense of empathy, justice, or guilt. But let that not detract from the fact that they are fundamentally words of persuasion toward one’s fellows, and unless consequentialistically expounded, they are no more the purview of academics than campaign slogans like “America for Americans!” and “GoBama!”
I personally am done humoring those who bandy about such vague words of persuasion unbacked by logic and call them academic discourse. Even if that turns out to include Rothbard, who I respect tremendously. A fundamental of clear thinking is being able to call fallacies fallacies and truths truths, no matter the source, and to demand clear and unambiguous explanations and definitions. Otherwise, why are we here?
Great post. I personally take this further by avoiding the words such as ‘legitimate’, ‘freedom’, and ‘liberty’.
In addition, I avoid ideologically-loaded words such as ‘murder’, ‘theft’, and ‘slavery’. For example, anti-abortionists use the word ‘murder’ for the killing of fetuses; anti-gun organizations use the word ‘murder’ for shooting a trespasser; and anti-war protestors use the word ‘murder’ in statements like “Bush has ‘murdered’ over one million Iraqis.” The word ‘theft’ is used by copyright and patent owners to refer to those who ‘steal’ their copyrights and patents. Communists use the word ‘slavery’ for employees working under the free market. I would replace the words ‘murder’, ‘theft’, and ‘slavery’ with non-ideological words such as ‘killing’, ‘seizing’, ‘capturing’, ‘hunting’, etc.
So, if somebody is murdered you don’t call it murder. When people are enslaved you don’t call them slaves. Rape is not rape. And so on and so forth. Pretty clever, interesting and useful. I do admire philosophers so much.
By the way, the forum seems to be full of philosophers who belong to the Jacob Bloom school…
Presumably, because he has a high agent-dependent valuation of freedom, and he would like to converse with others who do too: perhaps in order to make the world a more free place, pursuant to his agent-dependent valuation of freedom.
I would definitely use the word ‘murder’, ‘theft’, and ‘slavery’ rhetorically as slogans, to persuade others. I will definitely say “Bush has murdered over one million Iraqis.”
However, the usage of such terms in intellectual debates can create problems. For example, most of the population define ‘murder’ as the unnecessary killing of innocents. They will say warfare as a ‘necessary evil’, so they will deny that Bush has murdered over one million Iraqis, even though they knew that Bush has killed over one million Iraqis. So the use of ‘murder’ has create confusion for the opponents.
Indeed, general semantics has emphasized that terms such as ‘murder’, ‘theft’, etc. have caused problems in society.
I think maybe you’ve gotten the wrong impression of the direction of this line of thought (at least if I understand AJ correctly).
As a moral agent, I proclaim that Bush DID murder over one million Iraqis, because the killing is disgusting to my sense of right and wrong. I think if most Americans were disabused of the notion that it was necessary for their personal safety, they would feel the same way about it too.