The‘Ought’from the‘Is’

Some will dispute my last assertion. How can a Humean sceptic move from ‘is’ statements about the way things are, including the contingent but actual sentiments and feelings of people, to ‘ought’ statements about the way things should be, including what rights people should have? Is he not hoist with his own sceptical Humean petard by the vexing question of how the move from ‘is’ (the descriptive level of the way things happen to be) to ‘ought’ (the normative level of the way things should be) can be justified? It was Hume himself, after all, who drew attention to the shift in relations implicit in the move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’.

Hume’s Law, as it is often called,¹⁹ is Hume’s famous argument, at the end of Book III i 1 of the Treatise, pointing out that the prescriptive ‘ought’ and the descriptive ‘is’ are of logically different relations and denying the possibility of any logical derivation of the former from the latter. To move from one, say statements about the way the world is, to the other, normative statements, requires explanation. Such explanation, said Hume, is never given. Awareness of this difficulty, “wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.”²⁰ Strictly speaking that assertion, of the seemingly “inconceivable”²¹ nature of the move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, is all Hume ever argued. He was attacking rational, objective moral theories and beliefs (overwhelmingly predominant amongst the ‘vulgar’ in his day and still so today). It simply is not deductively valid to move from premisses about the way things are in the world to conclusions about the way the world ought to be.

On one level Hume’s observation is, to my mind and many others’,²² indisputable. (And even those who deny Hume’s Law would not deny that some Is-Ought inferences are invalid, indeed foolish. For example, because there are many jewellery store robberies, it does not follow that we should go on to allow and encourage such robberies. Those who deny Hume’s Law simply deny that all Is-Ought inferences are invalid.) Hume’s Law lays down that no set of non­moral premisses can entail a moral conclusion. Nor can an appeal to experience, to induction, be deductively valid.²³ Does this undermine my suggestion that non-legal, moral rights can be founded on convergent but contingent human sentiments? The answer, I would submit, is no.²⁴

I agree that a normative ‘ought’ relation cannot be logically derived from an empirical ‘is’ relation.²⁵ There is no deductive ground for the move from premisses which are empirical facts (or even logical truths) to a conclusion which is not empirical but rather a normative, unconditional imperative. But I did not suggest in the last section that one could logically derive the ‘ought’ from the ‘is’ in any way whatsoever. Indeed, it is exactly such attempts that are the objects of Hume’s Law. I merely noted that where, as a fact, the vast preponderance of people do hold certain feelings about acceptable conduct then, as a fact, that gives rise to expectations, standards and, of a sort, rights. It is not logically necessary that this be so. This move from is to ought cannot be derived nor is it rational.²⁶ But it is a fact, as it happens. Where the ‘is’ pertains to the feelings and sentiments of people, not merely to an observable state of affairs in the rest of the causal world, and where moral evaluations are seen to be, at core, caused by people’s sentiments projected on to the world, then the move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ is perfectly acceptable.

i)

i>)

therefore iii)

virtually everyone feels a particular way about something (say, that X be done);

morality itself is nothing more than a function of human feelings;

in this case, where there is a near consensus of feeling, X ought to be observed;

a gnawing contingency is introduced which cannot be passed over. The ‘ought’ in iii) rests on the contingent sentiments of people, not on some entailed or necessary conclusion. (So that if most people, as it happened, were in favour of robbing jewellery stores then they should be robbed.) But the sceptic, whose moral theory rests on the fact of contingent, subjectively evoked sentiments of approval and disapproval, openly and frankly admits the fundamental contingency of moral values; she concedes that the ‘should’ would disappear if people felt otherwise. She offers a causal chain from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, not a justificatory chain. It is only the moral realist who seeks to forswear contingency. In effect, the dilemma inherent in Hume’s Law dissolves with a recognition of the relative, feeling-based, non-rational nature of ethics. Consequently the sceptic’s move from an ‘is’ relation to an ‘ought’ relation avoids the fallacy of unjustifiably jumping between different logical relations because, for that sceptic, the ‘ought’ is a creature of prevailing human sentiments, of‘ises’.

On my interpretation then, Hume himself moved from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, although not in a way that infringed Hume’s Law. For Hume, the notion of ‘ought’ is only explicable in terms of the notions of limited self-interest, passions, expectations, desires, needs, widespread consensus of sentiments, and rules.

Hume does not actually say that one cannot pass from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’ but only that it ‘seems altogether inconceivable’ how this can be done.... When Hume asks how what seems altogether inconceivable may be brought about, he may be taken to be suggesting either that it simply cannot be brought about or that it cannot be brought about in the way in which 'every system of morality which I have hitherto met with’ has brought it about.²⁸

It is not a derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’, then, so much as a transition from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. And the implicit basis of the transition is a rejection of moral realism of all sorts and an acceptance of an areasonable, sentimentalist, sceptical characterisation of morality.

Hume’s Law, on my interpretation, is a subversion of “vulgar”,²⁹ eighteenth century religious³⁰ morality, of claims that morality is demonstrable, of “all systems — and they are still to be found today, as they were in Hume’s time — which smuggle in a suggestion of objectively authoritative prescriptions without making it clear where they come from.”³¹ It does not subvert moralities which make no such suggestion.

Two matters remain to be discussed under the rubric of the is/ought dilemma. Firstly, can an attempt to extract objective prescriptivity from the ‘logic’ of human qualities or action, to derive logically an ‘ought’ from a particular type of ‘is’, succeed? In other words, is there some logical connection between the facts of human attributes and the moral evaluations by and about humans? If not, then secondly, is there sufficient uniformity of sentiments, feelings and responses to establish criteria of goodness and of ‘oughts’? That is, can a factual unanimity be discerned in the world? My answers to these two questions will affect my view of natural law in section e).

Accordingly I turn next to my first posed question, the possibility that an ‘ought’ relation might indeed (contrary to Hume’s Law and to what I have been indicating) be demonstrated to follow logically from some particular set of empirical facts. One contemporary and praised³² version of just such an attempted argument is made by Alan Gewirth who purports to prove, logically and deductively, that a “supreme moral principle”,³³ and hence certain

197 basic human rights, follows from the fact of beings being purposive agents (i.e. from the necessary conditions of human action). This principle and these rights, if Gewirth be persuasive, make some conduct unconditionally wrong regardless of prevailing human sentiments or particular cultural norms.³⁴ Clearly then, the Gewirthian attempt does not mimic my sceptical approach of jettisoning any objectivist foundations for the normative ‘ought’ and, instead, of asserting it to be a creature of contingent, observed human sentiments such that ‘ought’, in fact, is the very same relation as ‘is’. Rather, Gewirth wishes to retain the moral objectivism of his ‘ought’ so that regardless of prevailing human sentiments some conduct just is unconditionally wrong.

Gewirth’s basic strategy is to move from claims about the imputedly intrinsic nature of human action to necessary prudential goods and rights and from there on to moral rights. The strategy is reminiscent of the approach of Nagel (who starts from the nature of personal identity and attempts to move to a type of reason that can alone motivate action) which I discussed and rejected in chapter one. One main difference, though, is that Gewirth makes an even stronger claim that his conclusion can be empirically established.³⁵ Indeed he goes further and professes to have “... shown how the claiming of rights with their correlative ‘oughts’ logically follows from being a purposive agent”.³⁶ Such a breathtaking claim deserves careful examination.

The gist of the Gewirthian argument is that denying (certain moral or non-legal) rights is rationally self-defeating and logically contradictory. The necessary conditions of purposive (and thus human) action, he claims, provide the foundation from which (certain moral or non-legal) rights can be logically deduced or derived. In other words, the ‘is’ of the necessary goods or conditions of purposive action^2,1 supplies all that is required to deduce or derive, logically, the ‘ought’ of an objective, non-contingent “normative moral principle”³⁸ and this principle, in turn, entails (certain moral or non­legal) rights. Obviously much depends on just what is or is not ‘necessary’ about the conditions and structure of purposive action. But before pursuing this issue let me first set out, in his own words, the crucial steps in Gewirth’s argument:³⁹

(1) I do X for end or purpose E.

(2) E is good.

(3) My freedom and well-being are necessary goods.

(4) I must have freedom and well-being.

(5) I have rights to freedom and well-being.

(10) I have rights to freedom and well-being because I am a prospective purposive agent.

(13) All prospective purposive agents have rights to freedom and well-being.

In this section I have room only to accentuate what I see as central flaws in Gewirth’s argument that an ‘ought’ can be logically derived from an ‘is’. Here are three major criticisms.⁴⁰ Firstly, the sense in which the conditions and structure of purposive action are said to be ‘necessary’ shifts and varies. What is necessary about the general features of such action unaccountably changes to suit Gewirth’s argument. Secondly, Gewirth’s two stated features of action, namely voluntariness and purposiveness,⁴¹ pre-judge without argument the highly contentious philosophical issues of the possibility of free­will and of reason-based motivation respectively. That is, Gewirth tacitly assumes that human action is undetermined and unforced⁴² and he tacitly assumes as well, albeit subtly, that reason can move action.⁴³ In essence he takes Nagel’s side over Hume’s. Thirdly, most crucially, and related to my first criticism, one of Gewirth’s necessary conditions of human action — that the agent be purposive — is hugely broadened in the move from step (2) to step (3) to become the new condition that agents have what is “required for success in achieving [their] purposes.”⁴⁴ This expanded condition that agents have all that is needed to act “with [a] general chance of success in achieving the purposes for which [they] act”⁴⁵ Gewirth calls well-being. But Gewirthian well-being seems hardly to be a necessary (z.e. logically necessary) pre-requisite or condition of human action. While it may be⁴⁶ that the very concept of action includes as well some notion of purpose (such that the latter is necessary even to understand the former in some sort of Kantian, synthetic a priori way), it is manifestly untrue to assert that the probability or even the possibility of success is a condition of the very possibility of action. We humans simply do not live in a world where action is logically restricted to, indeed only conceivable in, instances in which there is ‘a general chance of successfully achieving our purposes’. Not only is this not necessitated, it is empirically false. Thus, whatever Gewirth himself might say, the move from step (2) to step (3) is not logically entailed.

These three criticisms taken together subvert the foundations of Gewirth’s argument and that is sufficient to undermine his attempted derivation.⁴⁷ Let us therefore consider them in somewhat greater depth. They are all linked to the first three steps of Gewirth’s argument and his claims about the necessary conditions of an agent’s acting for any purpose at all. Take my most damning objection first. “Self-esteem and education”⁴⁸ may be desirable conditions in a purposive agent but they are not always required to achieve one’s goals. That is, they are not required as a matter of past observable experience (z.e. not empirically necessary) nor, a fortiori, are they required by entailment (i.e. not logically necessary).⁴⁹ To go further then and say with Gewirth that such conditions are generally needed to succeed is merely an empirical proposition; there is nothing logically necessary about it. Conditions needed generally to succeed in intended action, Gewirth’s well-being and the vast majority of conditions and standards typically vouchsafed as non-legal, ‘human’ rights such as free-speech, freedom of religion and sexual equality, are not therefore a necessary part of purposive action.

What of conditions needed to act at all? Perhaps a much reduced Gewirthian argument might be salvaged. “Life and physical integrity”⁵⁰ seem to offer more promise as conditions necessary to action — one can, after all, hardly act purposively if dead or a heap of broken limbs. But the need to be alive in order to act (which is a logically necessary relation because what is meant by action in this sense entails a living actor) is insufficient on its own to help Gewirth. It would apply to all forms of life on the planet. Are they all to have a right to life? Of course this is not what Gewirth argues on a careful reading.⁵¹ His argument is restricted to purposive actors who all, we are told, must see their own purposes as good. Perhaps then at least freedom⁵² is a necessary good? Again, I am afraid, even this does not follow logically.

Leaving aside the merits of the debate over whether humans have free-will,⁵³ the move from step (1) to step (2) — from any purpose E being unforcedly chosen by agent X to E always being seen to be good by X — conflates a) the objects of preferences, desires, proclivities and passions and b) that which the agent thinks⁵⁴ will lead to her good or happiness or well-being. But such a conflation pre­supposes a narrow theory of action where reason vets purposes and permits action only towards those that pass.⁵⁵ This leads to two very different potential objections. For one thing, one might be prepared to admit that an agent X must desire or want whatever E she seeks (even if there be other conflicting desires and wants) but that she need not see E as good for herself. Perhaps X wants to smoke a cigarette for example. Even the moral objectivist could concede that a) and b), in fact, do not always align.⁵⁶ Gewirth might then respond that he is limiting his argument to so-called ‘rational’ agents (a narrower category than purposive agents), those whose desires were seen to further their own good from some ‘objective’ or ‘ideal’ vantage. Actions like smoking when one knows it is not good for her, on this mooted Gewirthian response, are simply to be dismissed as ‘irrational’. Reason, it is being pre-supposed, would be there to mediate the desires and could, by itself, move action. However, I have attacked this view of reason as unsound in Part A of this book, in particular in the first chapter. And if I be correct, a reason that is motivationally impotent could not check desires. On my view of reason that would mean that all objects of desire either were classified as ‘good’ (i.e. ‘good’ is taken in a sense such that a) and b) do always align) or Gewirth’s argument would fail from the start at step (2) for not encompassing the self­condemning smoker. So to try to make anything of Gewirth’s argument on the sceptic’s view of an inert reason we have to assume that any desire is for something that qualifies as good. Freedom (in step (3)) must then mean the freedom to do anything at all (with all the eventually derived non-legal rights being equally unlimited). However Gewirth’s is implicitly a positive not negative⁵⁷ conception of freedom with all sorts of tacit limitations. He does not argue that people have (moral or non-legal) rights to do whatever they want to do. His argument cannot allow a) to be substituted for b) or the result would be that we have the non-legal right to do anything we desire. Gewirth must rather limit the permissible E’s in a) not just to those falling within b) but further still to ‘rational’ or ‘socially acceptable’ E’s within b) and that limitation, again, implicitly requires a reason­based theory of action and some form of moral objectivism. The non-Gewirthian moral sceptic, though, not only has an areasonable theory of motivation, but would not know how to understand ‘good’ in b) anyway. Is it to be an evaluation from the disembodied or ideal observer’s or utilitarian or unbiased perspective, or something else?

When a) is conflated with b) Gewirth’s step (1) does entail step (2). But the conflation requires a latent and inescapable moral objectivism which is the very matter Gewirth seeks to show he can derive.⁵⁸ Unfortunately the Gewirthian ‘ought’ only follows logically when it has been assumed from the start. Consequently Gewirth’s argument fails. He is arguing in a circle.

My conclusion, therefore, is that Gewirth fails in his attempt to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Moreover, this failure is indicative of all similar attempts. Hume’s Law, as a statement of the impossibility of any such logical derivation, remains unchallenged. There is no way to move deductively from the copula ‘is’ to the separate copula ‘ought’ unless the ‘ought’ has been pre-supposed from the start. One ramification of this failure is that claims for non-legal rights, that so- and-so should be the case even though the relevant legal system provides otherwise, cannot be justified by some deduction from human nature. Whatever be the facts of human nature, these facts have no logically necessary relation to the way things should be for human beings. The language of ‘human rights’ discourse often — perhaps typically — glosses over and obfuscates this fundamental objection. Human qualities, characteristics or features, as they happen to be, provide no deductively solid basis for any moral claims whatsoever, for any shift from ‘is’ to ‘ought’.

It is possible, however, to dissolve the whole ‘ought’ relation away into a naturalistic ‘is’ explained in psychological and sociological terms. That is the approach I adopted earlier in this section. And once the ‘ought’ is reconstructed or translated into a series of types of ‘is’ then Hume’s Law has no jurisdiction. The only cost of such a transition is the open, avowed contingency that must go along with all such dissolved ‘oughts’.

Put metaphorically, the ‘ought’ (of how humans should be treated), when seen through the sceptic’s spectacles, appears as an ‘is’ (of shifting combinations of individuals’ sentiments and feelings). In this light, the attempt to tie human rights (i.e. non-legal rights claims) to certain features or attributes of human nature involves finding some sort of observed uniformity about people that might, for instance, make it true to say that ‘everyone, or nearly everyone, agrees there should be free speech in China and a job for the willing in France’. She who attempts to find uniformities like this will not be blind to the fact that any discovered are fundamentally contingent — contingent because they are based on experience only, which might have been otherwise and which might yet change in the future. The sceptic accepts this. She perceives that morality, and thus non-legal rights, rests on nothing more than contingent and variable human feelings and sentiments. The very Humean question to ask, in that event, is just how uniform these contingent human sentiments happen to be.

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