An Asymmetry in Is/Ought
This post describes a basic observation about the Is/Ought distinction, and why I think this observation comes in handy for understanding the normative parts of our language. The observation is as follows:
It’s often recognized that it seems impossible to use only ‘statements about what is the case’ to reasonably imply ‘statements about what ought to be the case’. But if we flip the terms around, we may see that the same is not true when we try to derive ‘is statements’ from ‘ought statements’.
That is, it seems that any ‘ought statement’ must come with some basic knowledge of ‘what is the case’ for the prescribed action/motivation to be meaningful. Let’s look at the ought statement: “People ought not kill people indiscriminately.” That ought statement requires me to have some understanding of what a person is, what it means to kill someone (and therefore also what it means to be alive, what it means to be dead, and causality/responsibility), and what it means to do so indiscriminately. If I did not have those sorts of factual understanding, then the ought statement would be meaningless because it would be impossible to tell what way of life it was prescribing. Therefore, meaningful ‘ought statements’ imply meaningful ‘is statements’.
If it isn’t obvious, an ‘ought statement’ which lacks any logically presumed ‘meaningful is statements’ would be a ‘meaningless ought statement’ because there would be no way of telling what it was meant to prescribe us to do. Otherwise, I would be able to say, “Borfaglorf bazaladong ought to quooz quaz,” and then claim that, “I’ve solved all of Ethics—you just need to figure out what I said!” And that seems absurd. Rather, as my ought statement lacks any references to ‘what is the case about the world’, I simply haven’t said anything really meaningful about ethics.
Okay... so what? Why do I think this is a helpful observation? What are potential conclusions we might draw from this observation?
I will describe my general answers to those questions here, and then hopefully get around to elaborating in another post.
Generally, I think it helps us understand how normative ‘ought statements’ are used in relation to the rest of our language—if the rest of our language is like a landscape, normative systems are like vast buildings or structures which we build atop the land. Without the foundation of conceptual and factual ‘is statements’, the normative statements will respectively be meaningless or inapplicable. However, the opposite is generally not true—statements about ‘what is the case’ are not generally rendered meaningless or inapplicable if they are not integrated into normative language. This is the is/ought asymmetry.
Now, some normative statements depend on other normative statements (or they may depend, in part, on each other). This may create a complex web of interdependent normative concepts and relations, but eventually, the whole normative structure must somehow make reference to underlying statements about what is the case about non-normative aspects of the world. The normative structure, however complex, must refer to some factual and/or conceptual underpinnings. If these references are meaningless, inaccurate, or ambiguous, then people will likely feel that the normative structure is correspondingly meaningless, inaccurate, or ambiguous.
Furthermore, one ethical system (a phrase I here use interchangeably with ‘normative structure’) may be built on the same landscape as another ethical system. We can have different ethical systems make reference to the same factual concepts and situations. These systems may differ on what they say we ought to do with regards to those concepts or within those situations; or they may agree about what we ought to do, but justify it differently. These different ethical systems can do this without disagreeing about the concepts they refer to, or the facts of the situations.
We might also imagine a barren landscape, on which one or more normative structure makes no references. Perhaps this is due to us previously not knowing that the area existed (for example, if scientific inquiry produced new concepts and observations). In these cases, we might choose not to stretch our normative structure to cover those situations. Or, we might see if the new conceptual/factual information is isomorphic or similar to other, previously interpreted conceptual and factual information; from there, we may stretch our ethical system to cover the new territory, taking inspiration for how we do so from the structure of the normative language atop the previously interpreted language.
It is further conceivable that we could have a language of ‘concepts and facts about what is the case’ without having any corresponding normative language. An important question may then be raised: “Why do we have normative language in addition to a descriptive language?”
Finally, there are some practical ways by which ethical language can shape the rest of our language. If normative language tells us what we ought to do, it might tell us what we ought to do with respect to using the rest of our language. It might say that we ought to avoid all talk of a certain subject. Or, our ethical system may presume certain facts/concepts that another ethical system denies, like in the situation of a theist and an atheist with respect to God. An ethical system may include epistemic norms which make us interpret the world differently from others, and therefore make us use a different language than others to describe what is the case. For example, a Young Earth Creationist talks about the facts of the world much differently than a scientist does about the facts of the world. Almost certainly, most ethical systems likely have some degree of disagreement among each other (although likely to lesser degrees than the creationist/scientist), and it is an open question as to how we ought respond to the observation that ethical systems are different from one another in the way in which they affect the descriptive/conceptual ground underneath them.
I should note that this is undoubtedly not an original observation, as this feels like a very natural line of thought to occur out after learning about the Is/Ought distinction. But I am forcing myself to get into the habit of writing regularly about topics I’m interested in, so here I am.
