Lol, and that ‘i told you so’ is always a lucky guess. they claim to know in advance what will happen (when they don’t), and then take credit if and when it does happen.
A non-contingent ought, as I understand it, is an ought statement the truth value of which does not depend on the state of any part of the universe.
In other words, if we say that a statement such as “Mary ought to abort her baby” is a non-contigent ought, what we mean is that its truth value does not depend on the state of any part of the universe.
The problem: to say that the truth value of a statement does not depend on any part of the universe is a contradiction in terms.
To say that a statement is true is to say that it accurately describes some portion of reality. Conversely, to say that it is false is to say that it inaccurately describes some portion of reality. It thus makes no sense to say that a statement can be true or false without any regard to what goes on in any part of the universe.
Thus, if we accept that ought statements have truth value, it follows that every ought is a contingent ought.
The question then is: do ought statements have true value? And in order to answer that question, we must understand what ought statements are. (A relatively simple task.)
An ought statement such as “X ought to do Y” is short for “X ought to do Y in order to attain their goals”. That’s either true or false, right?
Thus, the truth value of any ought statement depends on two portions of the universe:
- what one wants (one’s goals, values, desires, etc)
- the portion of the universe that can obstruct one’s attempts to get what one wants
The statement “You ought to eat if you don’t want to die” does not say that one ought not want to die. It merely states what one ought to do if one does not want to die. As such, it is derived entirely from the observation that “People die when they don’t eat”.
In my view, the problem revolves instead around the actual existential gap between what you and I and Mary think we ought to do in regard to her unborn baby and all that can be/must be known about universe itself in order that any of our assessments here can be construed as more rather than less substantial in regard to any particular part of it.
In other words, how is whatever the whole truth might possibly be here not contingent on that?
And who or what would we turn to in order to confirm it?
Just imagine taking your assessment here to Mary. Imagine her reaction to it given the gap between this philosophical concoction and the actual turmoil her situation might possibly have precipitated.
No, down here on Earth, the beam is focused instead on those who insist that Mary’s unborn baby is in fact a human being and those who insist that no, in fact, it is just a clump of cells. And on those who insist that in fact bringing the unborn baby to term is only rational and moral outcome while others insist that forcing a woman to give birth is the only irrational and immoral outcome.
In this part of the universe anyway.
Then, from my point of view, you yank the exchange even further up into the stratosphere:
How can this sort of assessment not revolve entirely around others agreeing with how you define the meaning of these worlds put in this order?
Words that then define and defend still more words entirely removed from the existential anguish that Mary may or may not embody. Depending largely on the manner in which her own “I” here has been shaped and molded by the manner in which I construe human identity out in the is/ought world.
I wasn’t responding to you, iambiguous. You didn’t start this topic, remember 
Here we have the two statements:
- “You ought to eat if you don’t want to die”, and
- “People die when they don’t eat”.
Is it that the the “ought” in the former comes from the re-statement of the same sentence about what “is” in the latter?
Remove the subjective notion of “want” in the former and you can get the same statement: “You ought to eat to not die”. It’s equally true to say “You eat to not die”, so does the “ought” provide any function here other than to stand in for a statement about what “is”?
What then is the distinction between ought and is?
Is it the case that you can insert “oughts” into statements about what “is” even if it’s unnecessary to do so, when “ought” can also imply something other than “is”?
e.g.
- “One ought to put one leg in front of the other to walk” makes sense, but it says nothing more than “Putting one leg in front of the other is necessary for walking”.
- “One ought not to lie” however has no such direct necessity with regard to what “is”, so “ought” isn’t a non-functional substitute for “is”, and it does imply something about more than what “is”.
If the conclusion “You ought to eat if you don’t want to die” is not merely a conflation of the two premises “You ought to not want to die” and “Eating stalls dying”, as you reject, then it is either functioning as an “is” or not functioning at all.
So either:
- an ought comes from an ought,
- an ought is being used in place of an is, or
- an ought is redundant in a statement about what is.
Either way, an “ought” is still not coming from an “is”.
I suggested in my previous post through the analogy of politics that “oughts” can be broken down into what “is” to eliminate the need for “oughts” at all. This is not the same as saying that an “ought” can be derived from an “is”, it’s saying that “oughts” are a mistake of ignorance compared to knowing what “is”.
As above, “One ought not to lie” can be reduced to “If you lie, you will either lose trust if you are found out, or achieve an outcome that is not honest to reality and will either detrimentally fail or be detrimentally suboptimal”. There’s no ought here, but substituting an ought in serves like a recommendation contingent upon the consequences of what “is”. This either falls into the category of “an ought is being used in place of an is” or “an ought is redundant in a statement about what is”.
Again, either way, an “ought” is not coming from an “is”.
“Oughts” are an error, which is why morality is a description of what works, and not a prescription of what should work. Reverse Causation here is the fallacy I pointed out, just as much as deriving an “ought” from an “is”.
This should solve your issue with:
“The problem: to say that the truth value of a statement does not depend on any part of the universe is a contradiction in terms.”
and
“it follows that every ought is a contingent ought.”
Not sure what your point is.
Every “ought” statement has an equivalent “is” statement. “You ought to eat if you don’t want to die” is equivalent to “Eating is necessary for the continuation of life”
Every “ought” is derived from an “is” in the sense that for every “ought” statement O there is an “is” statement I not equivalent to it the truth value of which influences the truth value of O.
Isn’t this literally a process where an ought is derived from is(es)?
I suppose another way of putting this is morality isn’t in a vaccuum and we aren’t in vaccuums. We are particular social mammals. Raping babies isn’t good for us.
And I haven’t quite figured out where this takes me, but morality is. (and our desires are and our needs are)
Lizards on the other hand have quite different ises and hence oughts, these latter being ises also.
I agree with the above in a way but would extend it as follows;
If a human do not eat, he will die.
If all humans don’t eat, the whole human specie will be extinct.
DNA wise all humans are programmed to survive at all costs till the inevitable to ensure the human species is not extinct. [exception exists only when the program is defective].
Thus all humans ought to eat.
This ought is derived from “is”.
This ‘ought’ is reasoned out from facts, i.e. “is”
To reconcile the ‘is’ with ‘ought’ we can verify it with a scientific experiment [i.e. empirical is].
We can do this experiment by taking a sampling from the full range of humans on Earth, e.g. in terms of gender, age, race, countries, states, and all other demographic sectors.
Then we ask each the following question,
“Will you volunteer to kill yourself to death?”
Common sense will inform us no ordinary human will answer ‘Yes’.
Those who answer ‘yes’ would likely be the mentally ill due to defects in their DNA, e.g. the certified heavily depressed suicidal person, and other mentally ill. The % of these people are like to be very minimal.
The above experiment and question can be extended to every ordinary human on Earth.
Common sense again will inform us, all will answer ‘No!’ [note exceptions as explained above]
From the above and imputing the Golden Rule, we can derive the primary ‘ought,’
“No human ought to kill another human”
From there we will be able to derive a hierarchy of ‘ought’ with different weightages and values.
The origin of Morality is driven by the survival instinct [till the inevitable] and an inherent Faculty and Function of Morality within the human brain/mind that is slowly evolving just like how the human faculty of the reasoning and planning executive function had evolved from eons ago as distinct from the primates and other animals.
One of the parts of the brain that support this faculty of Morality are the presence of Mirror Neurons working with other parts of the brain.
The point here is while it is possible to reason out an ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ that “ought” as an ideal should never be enforced upon anybody but merely to be used as a GUIDE only to facilitate continuous improvement of narrowing the moral-ethics GAP.
The above are in accordance with Kantian Morality and Ethics
That would be WTL (short for Will to Longevity) which can be contrasted with WTP and WTMIJOT.
I am not exactly sure there is a single human being out there striving to live for as long as possible let alone that all human beings do so. How would you go about demonstrating such a thing?
Not that it’s relevant to the thread, just curious.
Well, to the best of my knowledge, once a thread is begun ILP, members are permitted to respond either to the points raised in the OP or to the points raised by others in responding to them. It happens all the time. I merely suspect the is/ought distinctions that I make here between what someone concludes the origin of morality is and how those conclusions might factor into a description/assessment of a particular context are important to raise.
You will either address them or not. 
I’ll admit that my own “technical” understanding of “is” and “ought” here may not be up to snuff.
But to argue that humans ought to eat or they will die seems less a moral obligation than a biological imperative. Similarly, to argue that the human species itself ought to survive is an assumption that is not able to be demonstrated in and of itself as a moral imperative. That too seems more a manifestation of biological laws embedded in the evolution of life on Earth.
It may turn out that everything we do here is entirely programed by nature. But to the extent that we do have a say in all of this how can it be determined that it is immoral/unethical to refuse to either eat or to survive? Going back to what one construes the origin of that to be.
How is that not instead largely embedded in particular contexts understood in particular ways by particular individuals?
The part that ever and always fascinates me the most here.
It is extremely unlikely. I mean, I see a lot of contented smokers for example. Then there are all people who love high-risk sports. There are men and even now women who re-up for military service - to be with the troops they know, to serve their country and so on. This is after being in wars where they see their comrades get killed. Sometimes precisely because they saw them get killed and want to prevent others they know from dying.
There are criminals who even when offered a way out of a dangerous criminal life do not take.
People who abuse all sorts of substances.
Most people trade off potential negative healthy effects for pleasure, powerful experiences, their passions.
People travel to dangerous places. Heck, so many people in the US decide to drive when they could just as easily take public transport - not all have this option, but many do. That decision right their radically increases their chance of death.
In many societies men especially put themselves at risk - hunting a lion alone, counting coup, exploring new areas - out of a sense of honor, to demonstrate courage, for the good of the tribe, to compete for status with other men and more.
It is not remotely just damaged individuals who will risk their lives, risk shortening their lives, for all sorts of reasons
because humans have many values - some can be categorized as WTP, some in other ways.
Does the underlined bit not look like what my point is?
I then went on to suggest that oughts (e.g. about lying) emerge either from ignorance of more complex objective processes that can be explained purely in terms of “is” (useful for kids and the unintelligent/uneducated), or as a simplifying shortcut to bypass the need to fully understand these objective processes (to blackbox the need to put thought into social decisions for the sake of efficiency at the cost of being fully appropriate). Moral statements function as though certain rules simply “come into existence”, as if commanded by a deity, or placed into your heart from divine origin, when really there’s a reason that exists to explain why e.g. lying is a bad idea that can be explained completely in terms of “is”. This exposes “oughts” as invalid in the first place - meaning they aren’t merely “not derived from an is” like they try to be, but they don’t validly exist in the first place.
That’s not to say you can’t use them in place of an “is”, or redundantly, and still seem to make sense. This is what you’re doing here:
My point is that this is either a mistake, or unnecessary - serving only to obfuscate.
The reason for correcting your counter point is that it allows us to correctly answer the OP:
Oughts are presented as though “1) Morality is a handed down by a divine creator, who commands us to behave a certain way on threat of damnation.”
But in fact “2) Morality is an evolved trait in social animals, which has helped our ancestors survive.” means there’s an objective reason why morality emerged that can be explained purely in terms of “is”, without requiring the conjuration of a mysterious source like a divine creator, who supernaturally bestows “oughts” to us. “Is” comes from “is”, and “oughts” aren’t derived from them, they’re simply inserted unnecessarily.
To address the OP, as I already covered: “morality” is a description of “what works”, rather than a prescription of “what should work”, meaning it does change over time in line with the rate of change in environments, it’s just that environments change slowly. Realising this makes sense of the barbarism permitted in older religious texts, and why some of it still applies. It also makes sense of why conservatives are useful to keep liberals in check but only in as much as environments are changing slowly - when environments are changing more rapidly, keeping the change and adaptation of morality in check does more harm than good.
You mean drugs? I agree. However, it’s important to note that just because people take drugs does not mean they do not strive to live the longest life possible. It could simply be the case that they are foolish i.e. that they falsely think (not necessarily consciously) that by taking drugs they are extending their lives. Note that I am not saying this is the case. I am simply saying that one must be aware of the distinction between irrationality (poor attempts at attaining certain goal) and different values/goals.
The idea that people have different, algthough generally similar, values is much more convincing to me than the idea that every single human being (let alone every living being, not to mention every being, living or not) has the same exact values.
What is either a mistake or unnecessary? The statement that the truth value of the statement “You ought to eat if you don’t want to die” is derived from the truth value of the statement “People die when they don’t eat”? How is that either a mistake or unnecessary?
Inserting the “ought” into “You ought to eat if you don’t want to die” is at least unnecessary to the truth value of “People die when they don’t eat”, if not a mistake - that’s not to say there’s anything mistaken in the true statement “People die when they don’t eat”, just that rephrasing it with an “ought” added in to mean the exact same thing as an “is”, is unnecessary.
This is because “ought” can potentially carry with it implications that extend beyond “is”, so using “ought” in place of “is” only looks like an “ought” derived from an “is”, when really it’s just an “is” derived from an “is” worded misleadingly.
At best you could say that an “ought” can be derived from an “is” if the “ought” is an “is”, but this still only tells us anything about deriving an “is” from an “is” and how to mistake an “is” with an “ought”, which is more than an “is” even if it can also be used as the same as an “is”. But even accepting this example of trying to derive an “ought” from an “is” would not prove the general case, because “ought” can also imply more than an “is” in different examples. For example, if something is natural, it doesn’t follow that it ought to be.
Yes, and they also simply could be compartmentalizing. They follow their desire for the drug, while at the same time not facing the damage this may be doing, while during the same days, cutting down on bad fats, exercising or in whatever way trying to extend their lives, never wanting to notice the contraditions in their lifestyle. IOW yes, they very likely do not say, heck, I will live a shorter life since I value the drug experience higher. On the other hand many others will consciously value quality of life, as evaluated in many different ways, higher than the quantity of months of a life.
As I had stated DNA wise all human beings will strive to survival at all costs at least till the inevitable fact of mortality.
DNA wise, all human beings are also programmed to let go of the above clinging to live as they get older when all the aggressive will to life are eroded due to the atrophy of the relevant neurons.
This is where suicides happen to younger people when the above program is initiated too early in life.
As mentioned [in theory] we can confirm the above by asking a sample of humans from every demographic or ask everyone on Earth the question ‘Will you kill yourself to death’? It is feasible for such an experiment to be done when all people are connected to the internet in the future.
I stated;
DNA wise all humans are programmed to survive at all costs till the inevitable to ensure the human species is not extinct. [exception exists only when the program is defective].
It is true many humans as observed take risks the average person would not dare to venture.
But the point is these people think they will not die in the belief they have done the necessary calculated-risk they will not die and they don’t want to die. Otherwise if they want to die voluntarily, they might as well jump off the cliff like the suicidal ones which I mentioned are exception due to a mental illness.
Recently I saw the film ‘Free Solo’ where Alex Honnold climb Al Capitan a 3000 foot wall [90% vertical] in Yosemite Park without ropes, only by himself. In this climb his life is hanging merely by his finger tips and one slip he will fall and die. 90% of free-soloists had died.
But Alex Honnold has stated he has fear of death and do not want to die in any of his climbs.
Why he is able to do it was due to the calculated risks he had taken. He climbed the wall many times and each time studied every hold carefully thus to reduce the risk but any thing can still happen. He did that over 8 years.
It is also naturally there are mutations in a small % [say 10%] of humans so that they are risk-seekers which will also facilitate the survival of species where they helped to open new frontiers [dangerous] to seek new resources for an expanding population which is also another feature to ensure the survival of the species.
Those who go to war believe they may die but many believed they will be lucky and they don’t want to die like the suicidals.
As for the drug addicts who keep going despite knowing the probability they will die, they do not want to die voluntarily. Their problem is they are trapped by the addiction in which case is a mental problem thus the exception like the suicidal.
There are those who died from carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, irrational acts in their actions, but it is inherently in them they do not want to die and had not planned to die voluntarily like the suicidal.
My point is a valid one;
DNA wise ALL humans [generic] are programmed to survive at all costs till the inevitable to ensure the human species is not extinct. [a small % of exceptions exist only when the program is defective].