I have no particular antipathy toward Hume, but this. He's writing in 1740, a hundred years prior to Darwin. Human evolutionary history is the basis of my argument; such that it makes little sense to me to hark back to constructions of morality not informed by this knowledge. Hume's is/ought dichotomy is a valid question, but how can it conceivably have a valid answer?

"Our moral evaluations of persons and their character traits, on Hume’s positive view, arise from our sentiments. The virtues and vices are those traits the disinterested contemplation of which produces approval and disapproval, respectively, in whoever contemplates the trait, whether the trait’s possessor or another. These moral sentiments are emotions (in the present-day sense of that term) with a unique phenomenological quality, and also with a special set of causes. They are caused by contemplating the person or action to be evaluated without regard to our self-interest, and from a common or general perspective that compensates for certain likely distortions in the observer’s sympathies..."

"Sentiments" is as deep as he can get, because for him, the moral sense as behavioural intelligence ingrained into the organism by millions of years of evolution is an unknown. He cannot know that moral behaviours were an advantage to the individual within the tribe and to the tribe composed of moral individuals - less yet, consider that in relation to the hierarchical nature of the hunter gatherer tribe, and translate all that - via a not quite Nietzschean transvaluation of values, into an explicit form necessary to multi-tribal societies and civilisations. Moral sentiments are for writers of romance fiction.

A 'realist criterion' for truth, if I may say so, discerns what is (proximately) true by matching a truth-claim to a truth-maker (i.e. fact of the matter and/or valid inference) – like turning a key in a lock – and thereby mismatches indicate non-truths. I suggest that adaptivity (for FLOURISHING, not mere 'survival') is a heuristic criterion for deciding on 'criteria of truth'. — 180 Proof

I agree with ou, however I do not know if we 'decide' in a Kantian autonomy kind of way on the criteria of truth. We do that from a bedrock of cultural assumptions. Just as 'fliurishing' is based on cultural assumptions. I belong to a group of researchers investigating 'the anthropocene' for instance and that very word contains different connotations about flourishing than the biblical (go forth and multiply) or the positivistic (bring nature into culture) ideals of flourishing.

If "there are no criteria by which to judge criteria of truth", then we cannot decide whether or not it is true that "there are no criteria [ ... ]", no? This sort of arbitrariness (e.g. relativism, nihilism, anti-realism) isn't adaptive outside of very narrow, parochial, niches (e.g. academia). — 180 Proof

We cannot 'decide' whether there are criteria of truth or not in any definite once and for all way, no. That does not mean every criterion is arbitrary. We see, like your lock and key analogy, which work better than others and so provisionally we choose one over the other. The only thing that salvages us and perhaps the only criterion I would accept is that of the better argument. When you cease to abide by that rule you cease to pplay the game if 'triuth' altogether. However what constitutes a better argument is indeed dependent on the criteria of truth so the game is deeply circular. I do think it is meaningful because through it we get to know ourselves. Whether that is knowledge of the truth remains an open question, but those to me in the end coincide (in dogmatic idealist fashion :D ) .

Option (b) because prescription is basically description: you ought to do the thing, inasmuch as its true description is "right thing".

But option (c) because facts are true descriptions, and true is a value.

So it looks like out of the seven votes here so far, just over half of them say they fall into the same category as me, and just under half say otherwise (spread across the three other options).

But I'm wondering people haven't changed their votes after further clarification in this thread, or if people who didn't vote because of ambiguity did vote after those clarifications.

Maybe you only got 7 votes because the options offered are not exhaustive. They are, to be fair - the options offered by Western philosophy, but none of them - in my opinion, are correct.

"They are separate and starkly different" — Pfhorrest

"There is only the descriptive domain" — Pfhorrest

"There is only the prescriptive domain" — Pfhorrest

"They are separate but still similar" — Pfhorrest

Nope, no, niet, and non!

Life springs from the action of physical forces on inanimate matter, and the organism evolves in relation to a causal reality, and has to be correct to reality to survive. Surviving physiologies and behaviours are correct to reality because they survive. In the human organism, morality is a behaviourally intelligent sense fostered by evolution in a tribal context, prior to the capacity for intellectual intelligence that allowed, eventually, for an appreciation of fact. The descriptive "is" and the prescriptive "ought" are not separate, nor exclusive. They are interwoven in our evolutionary development and psychology; and we, human beings are by our evolved nature, situated between the is and the ought; our behaviours variations upon the ideal - of knowing what's true and doing what's right in terms of what's true!

Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I had in mind for option 2, as I said before, which is why I'm asking if anyone has changed/cast their votes after such clarifications.

Luckily, analysis of "right thing" and "evolutionarily advantageous" causes them to be distinguished clearly more often than confused.

Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I had in mind for option 2, as I said before, which is why I'm asking if anyone has changed/cast their votes after such clarifications. — Pfhorrest

I don't accept I'm suggesting that only the descriptive domain exists, because I assert that life stems from the action of physical forces on inanimate matter, and evolves in relation to causality - because, while the moral sense is rooted in behavioural intelligence, intellectual intelligence is qualitatively distinct - and illuminates an abstract realm of existence that does not exist for animals.

To illustrate - the bird doesn't plan ahead, even when it builds a nest before it lays eggs. Humans plan ahead because for humans the future exists by dint of intellectual apprehension. It's a matter of behavioural intelligence that chimpanzees share food - but intellectual intelligence has seen several thousand years of head scratching, seeking to define moral and ethical principles, then applied to religious, political and economic systems. Even if the prescriptive domain exists inter-subjectively, as a collective consciousness, it exists. And that it has a material, biological substrate - doesn't imply that moral questions can be reduced to matters of fact.

I do not claim that we should feed the poor because chimpanzees share food. That's the naturalistic fallacy - and is inherent to a descriptive explanation. Rather, there's a behaviourally intelligent, evolutionary advantageous moral sense - made explicit by intellectual intelligence, that exists between human beings. The descriptive and prescriptive are inseparable. And so, when we look at a list of facts, we see the moral implications. That's who we are! Both!

I don't think it fits into the middle options. Those options are two ways of collapsing the distinction to one pole, rather than undermining the theoretical apparatus that would make the distinction in the first place. eg pragmatist considerations regarding what it means for something to be a fact containing behavioural commitments for that fact, a reciprocal co-constitution thesis like you might find from a Heideggerian, or Anscombe's virtue-ethical attacks on the distinction. — fdrake

This would also constitute an option I would have voted for, had it been included in the poll. I like the idea of the co-constitution of the two "domains" (prescriptive and descriptive), which of course rather threatens their being meaningfully characterised as two distinct domains to begin with. I am not very well read in Heidegger, but his relevance to the issues of the relationship of (pragmatic) normativity to the constitution of "objective" empirical domains was made clearer to me by the work of John Haugeland (especially the last four essays included in his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind) where he also draws heavily on Sellars and Sellars' Kantianism.

The connection with Anscombe's virtue-ethics also is suggestive to me since it's closely related to Putnam's own attack on the fact/value dichotomy, his pragmatism, and David Wiggins' own conceptualism (mostly developed in his Sameness and Substance: Renewed as well as several essays on theories of truth, Humean and Aristotelian ethics, and on the subjective/objective distinction.

That's a lot a references and name dropping but maybe I can highlight the gist of this broad line of thinking about facts/values, descriptions/prescriptions, objectivity/subjectivity, etc., by means of an appeal to the Kantian/Aristotelian distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason. Aristotle suggested (this may have been either in On the Soul, in Nichomachean Ethics, or both) that theoretical reason, which aims at knowing what is true, and practical reason, which aims at deciding what to do, are different employment of the (unique) faculty of reason that are distinguished by the direction of their employment, as it were, from the specific to the general, in the case of theoretical reason, and from the general to the specific, in the case of practical reason. Hence, theoretical sciences could be viewed as aiming to generate principles that find application in the development of general statement suitable as to serve as major premises in theoretical syllogisms. Practical wisdom, as well as virtue, on the other hand, enabling an agent to select both a general premise (pertaining to ends) and a particular premise (some statement regarding means and/or opportunity) for concluding in some more specific practical requirement and, ultimately, in a particular (concrete) action.

This view yields a rather pragmatic conception of theoretical sciences (and of the descriptive domains that they are concerned with) since their aim become inseparably linked to the general goal of rationally guiding action.

A second and related idea that I also owe to Wiggins consists in his employment of a distinction between two traditional distinction that are often being conflated: (1) the general/specific distinction and (2) the universal/particular distinction. Wiggins borrows this 'distinction between distinctions' from R. M. Hare who had first deployed it in the context of the philosophy of law. This distinction may help dissolve some puzzles that would stem from too crudely contrasting the employments or theoretical and practical reason in the way I have rather hastily sketched above. So, the main insight here is that although employments of practical reason that begin with some set of general requirements, ends, or desires, in order to arrive at (with the consideration of more local or specific means and opportunities) particular courses of action, the reasoning proceeds, dialectically, both from the general to the specific and from the particular to the universal. That is, in order to be successful, practical reasoning must not only aim at seizing (specific) opportunities suitable as to achieve pre-selected ends but must also contribute to select among the various ends and needs of the agent those that are rendered salient by the practical and moral demands of the current situation. This entails that the principles making a particular action rational (at some particular time and place) become universally applicable (by the light of practical reason) merely to the extend and on the condition that the ends being pursued have been selected in a manner that is sensitive to the specific requirement of the situation of the agent (and hence the role of practical wisdom, and of virtue, in sustaining rationality by making salient to the agent ends suitable as to being pursued in the right circumstances).

That's a lot a references and name dropping but maybe I can highlight the gist of this broad line of thinking about facts/values, descriptions/prescriptions, objectivity/subjectivity, etc., by means of an appeal to the Kantian/Aristotelian distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason. Aristotle suggested (this may have been either in On the Soul, in Nichomachean Ethics, or both) that theoretical reason, which aims at knowing what is true, and practical reason, which aims at deciding what to do, are different employment of the (unique) faculty of reason that are distinguished by the direction of their employment, as it were, from the specific to the general, in the case of theoretical reason, and from the general to the specific, in the case of practical reason. Hence, theoretical sciences could be viewed as aiming to generate principles that find application in the development of general statement suitable as to serve as major premises in theoretical syllogisms. Practical wisdom, as well as virtue, on the other hand, enabling an agent to select both a general premise (pertaining to ends) and a particular premise (some statement of need and/or opportunity) for concluding in some more specific practical requirement and, ultimately, in a particular action. — Pierre-Normand

That sounds to me like either the first of fourth options, depending on whether you think the application of theoretical reason and practical reason are starkly different from each other or very similar. (It sounds like you think they're pretty different, but I'm not completely clear).


Maybe a better way of summarizing the four options would be this flowchart:

Do questions about "what is" and "what ought to be" have to be addressed separately (options 1 or 4), or does an answer to one automatically give you an answer to the other (options 2 or 3)?

- If they have to be addressed separately:

- - do the methods of answering the two questions differ greatly (option 1), or

- - are they generally similar / parallel / analogous (option 4)?

- Else, if an answer to one automatically gives you an answer to the other, is that:

- - because "ought" questions are just a subset of "is" questions (option 2), or

- - because every claim that something "is" inherently implies some "ought" as well (option 3)?

That sounds to me like either the first of fourth options, depending on whether you think the application of theoretical reason and practical reason are starkly different from each other or very similar. (It sounds like you think they're pretty different, but I'm not completely clear). — Pfhorrest

On the present view, they're different applications of a deeply integrated set of rational skills -- involving both 'knowledge that' and 'knowing how'. Knowing what is (knowledge of the descriptive domain, so called) involves knowing what can be done with elements of this domain and knowing how (knowledge of the prescriptive domain, so called) involves knowing how to make use of what is in order to sensibly conform to contextually relevant prescriptions.

- Else, if an answer to one automatically gives you an answer to the other, is that:

- - because "ought" questions are just a subset of "is" questions (option 2), or

- - because every claim that something "is" inherently implies some "ought" as well (option 3)?

Answering questions to one rely on our also answering questions to the other. But that's neither because of simple relations of inclusion or implication. It's rather because of a relation of co-constitution. Objects in an empirical domain are constituted by us in the way that they are because of the pragmatic point of our constituting them in that way, and our practical concerns are what they are in the light or our historically and materially situated sets of opportunities and capabilities (what is). What is (empirically, for us) and what ought to be (according to our ethical/political/technical practices and standards) arise together, historically, but they're not the same thing since they correspond to movements of thought in opposite directions along the specific/general and particular/universal continua.

knowing how (knowledge of the prescriptive domain, so called) involves knowing how to make use of what is in order to sensibly conform to contextually relevant prescriptions. — Pierre-Normand

That leaves entirely open the question of how to decide what the prescriptions to try to conform to are, which makes it sound like option 2 to me.

That leaves entirely open the question of how to decide what the prescriptions to try to conform to are, which makes it sound like option 2 to me. — Pfhorrest

Option 2, that there exists only a descriptive domain? If there were only a descriptive domain, then this domain would be self-sufficient. What there is to be known would be quite independent from our pragmatic concerns. But the present approach denies that; although what it claims the descriptive domain to be dependent on for its constitution isn't a separate domain, or the existence of queer normative facts, but rather co-constituted rational practices and rational concerns.