On the Is/Ought Problem

1.

In a number of places, I have spoken about something I’ve referred to as the “is/ought problem”. This isn’t my term, but it’s one of several for the same thing. Most extensively, I have done so in a piece on postmodernism, objecting to a number of right-wing critiques of thinkers such as Foucault and Baudrillard, though also in a piece examining Animality and Snobbery, and it came up earlier in a piece on Mark Fisher’s “Vampire Castle” concept (AKA, yet more proof that the absolute worst essay by one of my favorite philosophers drives traffic. Don’t leave a comment about this, read my piece on Dis-Identity Politics.) It has recently come up in some of my classes, and I noticed it appear in a comment on a fairly old piece I did on the male hierarchy.

So, I wanted to put together a piece that clarifies things.

In short: with apologies to Murray Bookchin, there is no viable way to get an “is” from an “ought”, and the reverse is only slightly more coherent.

Themis, from pixabay free images, used under a CC0 license.

2.

This may seem like philosophical inside baseball, purely rearranging the rhetorical chairs on the deck of a slowly sinking Titanic but it is, in fact, a key issue. I might go so far as to say that it’s the first thing that one should learn in the course of developing the capacity for critical thinking.

The basic idea is that just because something should be a particular way doesn’t mean that it is that way. When you expect a particular outcome from a specific act, you should always be open to the possibility that you were working under specific conditions that no longer apply.

Let’s take a simple thought experiment: if two people are playing catch, you would expect to see a shadow falling on the grass next to them and expect to see the shadow of the ball move in a fashion that follows the ball. This expectation will not be the case in every situation, though — if there is no light, or if the ball itself were a source of light, or if the sole light source were angled to avoid the shadow falling upon the ground.

This much is obvious. However, should-ness, or perhaps ought-ness, is a deeper concept than this. Just as you can’t get an is from an ought in terms of something being expected, you can’t get an is from an ought in terms of justice. Consider the fact that it is thought that — according to a study written about in Science back in 2014, at least — more than 4% of death row inmates are thought to be innocent. Clearly the innocent should not be in jail, much less on death row. However, this is not the case. Neither in terms of being in prison nor in terms of being on death row.

We can, I want to stress, through a roundabout way relate ought and is here. This is happening, but it ought not happen, therefore we should take action. This is where complexity comes in. Because we use “ought” and “should” to refer to things that are both predicted to happen and to those which are socially preferable. In some situations, there is an alignment, and in others there is not. The fact that the English language doesn’t differentiate “ought by natural law” from “ought by human law” means that a certain amount of confusion occurs.

A simplified version of this appears in Neal Stephenson’s book Anathem as an adage that the inhabitants of that fictitious world know as “Diax’s Rake”, which goes “Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true.” In business, a similar idea is put forward more generally: “Past results are not indicative of future performance.” In our world, the postulate that you can’t get an is from an ought or vice versa is known by a different name: “Hume’s Guillotine.”

3.

I have complicated thoughts on David Hume. He was undoubtedly a deep thinker, though embedded in a social matrix that limited him quite a bit. I’ve got a certain amount of skepticism toward the enlightenment construction of rights, and we’ll leave it at that.

Hume, however, had a fascinating relationship to phenomenology and ontology. I’m not going to try to summarize it, though you’re welcome to take a turn through the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on his thoughts on the matter. I would say that, despite the fact that he first pointed it out, there are reasons to believe he and his history are merely ancillary to this whole business, however, I wanted to put forward this acknowledgement to cover all of my bases.

4.

Okay, you may say, if we can’t get an “is” from an “ought”, what about an “ought” from an “is”? This is fairly simple: in a roundabout way, as I mentioned before, you can. However, I would stress that this is somewhat different. The two are not confused in the example I gave, one is a response to the other. As such, I did not “get one” from the other, it is a separate but related postulate that comes from a factual statement (this is happening) and a value judgment (this ought not happen) that leads to a conclusion (something ought to be done about it).

In this case, the “ought” needs to do a lot of heavy lifting. Hence the example I picked: very few people would argue that the innocent should be imprisoned and executed. There are, however, people who might argue that it is acceptable for a small number of innocent people to be imprisoned and executed so long as more guilty people are. I would posit that this position comes about based on the feeling that such punishment will not come for the person taking that position — though this is drifting from the topic.

To get back on track, this is a response to a situation, not a value statement derived directly from an ongoing situation. If you derive an ought directly from an is (i.e., “it is this way, so it ought to be this way”) then what you are doing is not reasoning but making an ideological statement in favor of the status quo. This does not mean that one cannot arrive at a solution in line with the current situation — there is a vast chasm between “this bridge is up, so it should stay up” and “this bridge is up now and can be expected to cause death and disruption if it falls, so we need to maintain it.” One is an article of faith, and the other is a plan of action.

5.

If you haven’t read my piece on postmodernism, this is what I identified as the principle issue with critiques of that philosophical school: people were upset that the problem was being described, taking description of the issue for advocacy that it continue. It is not Foucault’s fault he identified that the school, the factory, the barracks, and the hospital all begin to resemble a prison after a time: he didn’t think that was good. He was laying out the similarities and tracing it all back to Jeremy Bentham, who could be said to be arguing for it.

This is also the problem with a lot of discourse about fiction on the internet, where readers confuse the portrayal of distasteful things (a kind of fictitious “is”) with approval (a non-fictitious “ought”). This often masquerades as an intellectual activity, largely because it’s couched in therapeutic language, referencing issues of consent among others.

Now, I realize that I bring almost everything back to teaching, but you’ll have to forgive me, it’s what I spend most of my time doing. This issue cropped up in a rather funny way in one of my classes: I tend to present the 1984 Reagan Campaign’s “Prouder, Stronger, Better” (AKA “Morning in America”) advertisement as an object of rhetorical analysis. As a result of this, about half of one of my classes believes that I’m a big fan of Ronald Regan, and whenever this comes up I simply hear the Killer Mike song “Reagan” in my head.

It’s not positive. In no way are my feelings on this man positive.

This is why, as I’m reminding myself, it’s important to stress in my classes that I’m not expecting my students to agree with the texts I put in front of them: I’m expecting them to think about them. The gap here is important to remember, because otherwise they won’t develop the habits of thinking about the information presented to them.

Well-developed critical thinking skills require that “is” and “ought” be kept separate until after information has been weighed.

This is also why, when I teach research writing, in the course of a fourteen week research project, I forbid students from writing their thesis statement or coming to a conclusion before week eight. They need to look at what the information is before they make their decision about what to say about it. If they chase, instead, what they feel should be their answer, they end up going down blind alleys and getting stuck trying to defend an unsupportable position.

6.

I have a friend who works in the tech industry who says that the way to be a great engineer is to become the best at following instructions. To be clear, he isn’t saying this is a good thing: this is a critique that he is making of the industry that he works in. I very much like this friend, but a person whose only scientific background is the fact that I minored in psychology, this sounds like an insane statement to me — it’s not that I think it’s wrong, it’s that I can’t imagine this field actually functioning like this.

Yeah, yeah, we’ve all seen the Torment Nexus.

The overemphasis on STEM in American education contributes to this confusion. There is a ruthlessness to these “hard” fields, a tendency to look at where you are and at your destination and then find a bright shining line that leads from A to B, then to carve a straight path along that line through all obstacles. It leaves out, of course, the question of why B is the goal. It has room only for what is. There is not any consideration for what ought be.

By necessity, this blind spot leads to distorted thinking. We can see this from the case of Curtis Yarvin — AKA Mencius Moldbug — who was a computer programmer who decided to think through the problems of American Politics and came up with an absolutely garbage solution to the problems he saw. The exact nature of this problem is better treated in Neoreaction a Basilisk than I will be able to discuss it here. I recommend reading Edgar’s treatment of that book and then diving into it.

7.

Composite image of a male Chimpanzee (left, from Rennett Stowe) and a male bonobo (right, from Marie van Dieren), used under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Now I get to what prompted all of this, a particular comment on my piece “Exiting the Manosphere: The Male Hierarchy Is Not a Thing” — which I will not repeat in whole here (having worked in publishing, my inclination would be to edit it, and I do not wish to be accused of putting words into someone’s mouth; in addition, they use a slur that I, frankly, do not wish to repeat here.) Regardless, I am leaving the comment in place so that you may read it for yourself.

The poster attempted to refute my assertion based on evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary Psychology is an approach to psychology that attempts to use what is “known” about the environment and behaviors of early hominids to explain human behaviors. To a certain extent, this is something that can be treated seriously. As biological entities, we have a complex and still-unfolding evolutionary history.

Let’s get the basic critique out of the way.

Our two closest simian relatives are the chimpanzee and the bonobo — and, when it comes to behavior, the two couldn’t be more different. Chimpanzees live in troupes centered around a dominant male and often go to war with neighboring bands. In contrast, bonobos live in tight-knit matriarchal communities, spend most of their time copulating, and rarely engage in violence. Technically, we’re closer genetic relatives to bonobos, but it doesn’t really matter: we’re different creatures altogether.

So, you might say, let’s limit ourselves to an examination of only unarguably human entities.

However, it is important to understand that — as David Graeber and David Wengrow postulate in The Dawn of Everything, among others, have said — we don’t actually know anything about how prehistoric humans lived. We have a certain amount of fossil records, we have artifacts and observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples, though that latter source is highly questionable: why should we assume that contemporary hunter-gatherers map 1:1 on to prehistoric hunter-gatherers 1:1 when they don’t even map onto one another that well? A more scholarly approach to this can be found in “Genes and Cultures: What Creates Our Behavioral Phenome?” by Paul Ehrlich and Marcus Feldman.

This paragraph from the middle of the literature review functions as a much better response to the substance of evolutionary psychology than most of what I was planning to say, so I quote it here:

Those critics are correct. There is a general tendency for evolutionary psychologists vastly to overestimate how much of human behavior is primarily traceable to biological universals that are reflected in our genes. One reason for this overestimation is the ease with which a little evolutionary story can be invented to explain al- most any observed pattern of behavior. For example, it seems logical that natural selection would result in the coding of a fear of snakes and spiders into our DNA, as the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker thinks (1997: 386–89). But while Pinker may have genes that make him fear snakes, as the evolutionist Jared Diamond points out, such genes are clearly lacking in New Guinea natives. As Diamond says, “If there is any single place in the world where we might expect an innate fear of snakes among native peoples, it would be in New Guinea, where one-third or more of the snake species are poisonous, and certain non-poisonous constrictor snakes are sufficiently big to be dangerous.” Yet there is no sign of innate fear of snakes or spiders among the indigenous people, and children regularly “capture large spiders, singe off the legs and hairs, and eat the bodies. The people there laugh at the idea of an inborn phobia about snakes, and account for the fear in Europeans as a result of their stupidity in being unable to distinguish which snakes might be dangerous” (1993: 265). Further- more, there is reason to believe that fear of snakes in other primates is largely learned as well (Mineka, Keir, and Price 1981, Mineka and Cook 1993)

For additional critique, I might recommend Robert Lickliter’s “Developmental Dynamics: Toward a Biologically Plausible Evolutionary Psychology”, which includes the following as part of its thesis: “ several of the fundamental assumptions underlying the conceptual framework promoted by current advocates of an evolutionary approach to psychological issues are seriously flawed in light of the knowledge provided by contemporary biology.”

In short, neither psychology nor biology want evolutionary psychology under their umbrella. Perhaps the best reasoning for this can be found in “The Darwinian cage: Evolutionary psychology as moral science” by Richard Hamilton, who writes that

its biological rhetoric notwithstanding, evolutionary psychology is a positivist social science in the grand tradition which seeks to mechanize morality in order to facilitate social engineering. It does so on the basis of the assumption that a causal chain exists between our evolved modules and certain undesirable behaviours. We must undermine this assumption if we are to challenge evolutionary psychology’s claims to social explanation. In what follows I will argue three things. First, that to replace our everyday moral vocabulary in the way that evolutionary psychology proposes is neither desirable nor possible. Second, that evolutionary psychology consequently operates with an impoverished view of actions. Finally, that evolutionary psychology’s causal ambitions condemn it to either reductionism or vacuity.

In short: it doesn’t hold together as a scientific theory, because it’s based on faulty data and uses faulty reasoning to reach distasteful ends. If it used sound data and sound means to reach distasteful ends, that would make it a bitter pill. Given that it doesn’t, that bitter pill has become as appetizing as a long drink of water found in a roadside puddle: just as bitter, but more likely to make you ill than cure what ails you.

The commenter whose words kicked the writing of this piece off argued that it is improper to throw out a theory that is not 100% accurate about everything all of the time. Which, to an extent, is true. However: if a different theoretical framework has better grounding, then you cannot claim that holding on to the weaker theory is a reasonable position. What you have there is an “ought” not an “is”. You are saying “this is not true, but it ought to be true.” This is not logic, it is desire. Perhaps it can be thought of as an ethical statement, but it is not a logical statement founded in the cold equations of reason.

Now that we are treating this on the level of desire and ethics, let’s bring up the one thinker that the commenter mentioned: Theodore Robert Beale, alias Vox Day, is a racist and a misogynist. This is unarguable: he referred to black author N.K. Jemisin as “half-savage” (using archive.org, because like hell am I giving that man traffic.) Now, this may not seem terribly material: however, if one is predisposed to see the world as hierarchized in terms of race and sex, which are not supported by any reputable science (and I know because I wrote a piece on Garret Hardin a while back. Prejudicial thinkers are always trying to colonize the sciences and justify their positions after the fact), then would it not make sense to call bullshit on this other hierarchy he’s championing?

I might suggest — and I am attempting to leave my teacher hat on here and engage with this in good faith, though I will admit that is somewhat difficult — that someone who believes this has been taken in by a malicious scam. They have been convinced of something that is actively leading them away from happiness by men who don’t care about them in the least.

We are drifting away from the central issue of this piece — the incompatibility between “is” and “ought” — and into different territory, but I might suggest that someone who has fallen down this particular rabbit hole might get some mileage out of another thinker that I have issues with, though far fewer than Beale (or Hume, for that matter), David Foster Wallace, who delivered a commencement address to the 2005 class of Kenyon College, in which he said:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

(Emphasis added.)

I have issues with him, but there are certain things here that ring true to me. You have to learn to think critically about the ideas that you accept — we all have to do that, I’m far from perfect on that front — and it seems to me that seeking to be at the top of some imagined hierarchy that you insist ought to exist will blind you to the reality that there is no hill to be king of.

What I am trying to do here is not score points or win an argument. There is no winning or losing here.

What I am trying to do is throw you a life preserver. Take it or don’t.