Facts about Morality – How Small can We Make the Is-Ought Gap?

Some time ago, we talked about the is-ought gap, the idea that there will always be an unbridgeable logical gap between facts and moral duties. This is true, but that doesn’t stop us from turning the lens of fact onto morality, and seeing how close we can get.

To begin with, let’s step back to get a look at what morality is from an impersonal, objective point of view. Out of all the different views of morality there are, they have one thing in common: the idea that some things are better than others, that there are potential ways things should be and actions people should take, and there are potential ways things should not be and actions people should not take.

What determines what is judged to be good and what is judged to be bad? It starts with stimulus reaction and anticipation. Some things cause pain, and some things cause pleasure. We naturally recoil from pain and seek out pleasure. This is the beginnings of morality.

It is not the whole story, of course. We often abstain from pleasure or allow ourselves to suffer pain in the service of higher values. We might value order, justice, honor, or a clean mind, and make sacrifices in the realm of pleasure and pain to serve these values. The weight we give to each of our values determines our morality. In fact, we can think of the instincts surrounding pleasure and pain as values, and describe morality as the process of making choices and choosing rules for life based on our values. Values can be fluid; we might occasionally be able to choose our values, but most of the time they are influenced unconsciously, either by nature or by socialization.

It is not just our own circumstances that influence our values, but our capacity for empathy and compassion, to imagine what it is like to be in others’ shoes, and to want good things for them as well as for ourselves. There is a part of us that wants to do what is good for everyone, to make the world better, not just our own lives and actions. This is a double-edged sword, because although it can motivate us to help others, it can also make us think we know what is good for them better than they do, and to try to control their values and the choices they make.

On top of our values, we craft narratives. These can come in the forms of myths and stories, ideologies, philosophies, and religions. Narratives shape our values and help us remember them when the pleasure and pain stimuli become strong enough to make it hard to think. Compelling narratives for values different from ours can influence us to adjust our values in their direction.

The space of moralities is vast and varied. But despite all the variety of this moral landscape, the goal of all moral systems can be summed up in one statement: to make things good.

This is intentionally vague, because “good” means a lot of different things. Some say it’s happiness, others fulfillment, wellbeing, absence of misery, eudaimonia, or any number of similar concepts. In fact, as the philosopher G. E. Moore pointed out over a hundred years ago, it is impossible to define “good” as any specific thing. But in this context, we observe that any time a person looks at themself and the way things are and the way things will be, and says, “this is good,” they all share the same core idea: to be satisfied with one’s life and the world.

Despite “good” meaning different things to different people, it is the goal of all morality. Thus, we can take all conceptions of goodness and all measures according to all people, and indeed all conscious creatures, and add them together to make a “total goodness.” For any event, action, circumstance, etc., there is an objective level of total goodness, determined by the aggregate of its subjective, individual goodness to every person and conscious creature. This is messy and complex and always changing, but it does, in fact, exist.

And here lies the question. Can we say it is an objective, factual moral imperative that we ought to aim to increase total goodness? Well . . . No. Because we run into the is-ought gap. Even though the total goodness of something is an objective fact, that does not mean it is a fact that we ought to work toward increasing the total goodness. There is still an unbridgeable gap in the logic.

Any passage between is and ought requires a leap of faith. But the more descriptive facts about morality we take into consideration, the smaller the leap required. To me, the leap from the fact that there is such a thing as total good to the opinion that we ought to work toward increasing the total good, is small. Not even a leap, really, just a step. I am willing to take that step, and I invite you to take it with me. Let’s make this world a better place.

The Is-Ought Gap

Some time ago, I wrote a series on morality. My approach was to go through a bunch of different views people have on morality, and give my opinions on each one, pointing out contradictions where I saw them, and picking out my favorites. Now, we’ll revisit the topic from a perspective outside the narratives, which in philosophical terms is called meta-ethics. We’ll be less concerned with which ideas are better than which, and focus on descriptions of moral behavior and ideas, and objective frameworks from which to think about it. To kick things off, we’ll talk about the is-ought gap.

The is-ought gap came from an observation by the philosopher David Hume, who noticed that every time a moral philosopher tried argue for a moral system, they would make a bunch of is-statements about the world, and somewhere along the line take a magical leap to ought-statements. For instance, “The result of evolution by natural selection is to pass on genetic information to the next generation. Therefore, we ought to live in the way that maximizes the chance of our genetic information surviving into the future.” Most of us are not satisfied with this conclusion. What about being kind to strangers? What about lifting people on the other side of the world out of poverty? That’s not the point, though. The problem is that the argument sets up an is-statement, which seems to be leading somewhere, but then jumps to an ought-statement, which does not automatically follow from it.

Another example is the nature of conscious experience. “It is the case that we all have some conscious experiences we would rather have than others. For example, most of us want to avoid pain if there’s no reward from it. Therefore, we ought to take actions that reduce pain in ourselves and others, and to help each other reach the high points of the human experience.” Although this resonates more strongly with most of us than the previous example, it is still a non-sequitur; the premises are not sufficient to prove the conclusion.

You may wonder if maybe we just haven’t found the answer, that someone will come along with a solution and bridge the gap. In fact, many, including myself, have tried. But it is impossible, because it commits a category error. Is-statements are descriptive, whereas ought-statements are normative. Given a number of descriptive statements, you can derive more descriptive statements. Given a number of normative statements, you can derive more normative statements. However, it is impossible, using statements from just one category, to make conclusions that lie within the other. If you ever hear anyone claim to have solved the “is-ought problem,” all they have done is show they don’t understand it.

If we look at what is, we see all kinds of moral systems arising, competing, dying out, thriving above, or beneath, or to the side of others. From rule of the strongest to compassion for all to following the words of the hero or prophet or god or priesthood. It’s clear that moral systems exist, and people follow them passionately, and clearly have a way of determining what they should and should not do within their moral framework. It is also clear that what is true, or what they believe is true, plays a factor in it.

This shows us a sort-of exception to the is-ought gap; if we take some ought-statements as a given, then we have a goal. Once we have a goal, is-statements can show us how we ought to act in order to move toward that goal. This is true for goals that are finished once they are accomplished, as well as for the goals of acting in certain ways over periods of time. In this way, we can use is-statements together with ought-statements to derive more ought-statements. For instance, if we don’t want to be inside a burning building, then we ought to light a fire in the fireplace only if it is safe; and if the fire alarm goes off or the room starts to fill with smoke, we ought to leave the building. If we want to avoid the pain and consequences of a car crash, then if the training programs are good, we ought to receive driver training; if the rules of the road are safe, we ought to adhere to them; if insurance is worth more than the risk of a crash, we ought to have insurance; and all kinds of stuff like that. Given goals, facts about the world can help us know what we ought to do to move toward those goals.

We haven’t bridged the is-ought gap—there is still the implication that we want to be safe and avoid unnecessary suffering—but we have figured out how to use is-statements together with ought-statements to help us reach toward the things we value. There may be no way to prove with absolute certainty what we ought to do, and even if we could, it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to be experts on moral philosophy, but we can get by well enough if we inject a little common sense into the discussion and choose to work toward what we believe to be right. We’ll go more into that in the next entry of the Meta-Ethics series.