Subject:
RE: [evol-psych] ought and is in relation to function
Date:
Wed, 20 Feb 2002 11:02:16 -0600
From:
"Hill, David"
To:
'Jeremy Bowman' , "Hill, David"
CC:
Evolutionary Psychology
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Bowman [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 6:16 PM
To: Hill, David
Cc: Evolutionary Psychology
Subject: Re: [evol-psych] ought and is in relation to function
I agree with much of this, but the disagreements are important. I will try to be brief in sorting
them out.
Perhaps the clearest way of explaining what is meant by an "ought" is by reference to
simple activities that have goals or ends (as David Hill observed), and perhaps the
simplest activities of this sort are games.
Most games have an "object" -- such as "getting the highest score" or "cornering the other
player’s king". The players’ behaviour can be described (explained,
predicted etc. -- to some extent anyway) by reference to the "object" of the game.
Crucially, this "teleological" sort of description (explanation, prediction, etc.) involves
"oughts", for the simple reason that it involves ends. A player ought to make this or that
move because it helps to achieve the object of the game. If he fails to make the move in
question, then he might be enjoined to make it -- even if he doesn’t in fact make
it. "Oughts" enter the picture because they express these injunctions (or prescriptions, or
obligations, or duties, or recommendations, or pleadings, or askings, or desires, whatever
we choose to call them).
There is an intuitively obvious logical "gap" between a simple description of an actual
move and an injunction to make a potential (and possibly non-actual) move with an eye
to the object of the game. This is the logical "gap" that Hume was complaining about.
Descriptions have true values, injunctions don't. It is an interesting question whether "you
ought to go home now" has a truth value. "It would be best if you went home now" is
different. It is expressly evaluative and (in my view) typically has a truth value. Jeremy (and
most latter day Humeans) prejudice the issue by focussing on explicit ought statements
rather than on ordinary moral evaluations. I now see that it would have been better if I had
not described my enterprise as deriving an ought from an is. I should have said that I was
indicating how one might derive morally significant evaluations from factual claims, functional
descriptions, and notions so basic that they may taken as axioms. What to do with
"oughts" is a further puzzle.
It is clear -- isn’t it? -- that much more is going on "behind the scenes" with the
latter than the former. At the very least, an injunction to make a move is relative to the
object of the game, whereas a description of the current "state of play" isn’t.
So David Hill is quite right to insist that there is an intimate connection between design
and "oughts". Wherever there is design, things are designed for a purpose, and so there
are ends, and therefore inevitably "oughts" as well.
But David Hill’s "derivation of ought from is" is no such thing. It is (at best) the
derivation of an explicit "ought" from an implicit "ought". Anyone can do that, because
"oughts" are often disguised as "is’s". Even I can do it: "X is murder, therefore one
ought not to do X". Here, the word ‘murder’ applies only to morally
reprehensible acts of killing, i.e. to acts one ought to avoid.
This I believe to be false. There are, I think, morally defensible murders (though not many). I
believe that Jeremy's inference is a plausible inductive inference. He is right, of course, that
one can promote it to an entailment by adding "one ought never to commit murder." But this
is, in my judgment, a false premise and the inference is more plausible if interpreted
inductively.
It seems to me that the "is/ought" question really has two separate parts: (1) Does nature
exhibit design (and therefore ends, and therefore "oughts")? and (2) If it does, are the
"oughts" that inevitably follow anything like moral "oughts"?
I would say that the answer to both questions is No.
1. Does nature exhibit design? -- We routinely talk as if many of the things found in
nature were designed or had a specific purpose. But the great breakthrough of
evolutionary theory was to make it possible to avoid all talk of design, purposes, ends,
goals, etc. All references to design (purpose, etc.) in evolutionary theory are merely
apparent -- and all can be replaced with a purely causal story of how things came to be
as they are. A wholly design-free account is bound to be longer and more detailed,
because references to "purpose" or design in evolutionary explanations are in fact a
superficial, shorthand way of capturing the relevant details of the purely causal story.
For example, we might ask about the "purpose" of eyebrows. What are they "for"?
Answer: the eyebrows are "for" keeping liquid (rain, sweat) from flowing down the
forehead into the eyes. At first, it may look as if we have given a teleological rather than a
causal account of eyebrows. But we haven’t. The fuller evolutionary explanation is
that we inherited thicker eyebrows from our ancestors -- the ones with the thinner
eyebrows tended to die out before reproducing because sweat or rain got into their eyes.
"Because" -- i.e. as a historical result of sweat/rain getting in their eyes, not with the
purpose of keeping sweat/rain out of our eyes.
One might say that the "function" of eyebrows is to keep rain/sweat out of the eyes. But
the word ‘function’ equivocates between "purpose" and what I have just
described in wholly causal terms. Let no one confuse them!
I agree that these concepts are often confused, but not by anyone well versed in the history
of thought. Aristotle clearly distinguishes between them. For him, nature was full of tele
(ends), but there is no hint of a design hypothesis in his natural philosophy. If nature
embodies no design it may still be chock full of functions generated by Darwinian
mechanisms. From those functions (sans cosmic purposes of any kind), morally relevant
conclusions may follow by plausible inferences. Given that I am a human father, it may very
well follow that I act better if I take care of my children and support my mate than if I do not.
We need not regard these as having no better basis than moral intuition. We can look for
real grounds in our natures, interpreted as functions that emerged in evolution. No
elementary semantic argument can possibly show that this is hopeless. Philosophy ain't
that potent.
2. Are the "oughts" of merely apparent design in nature anything like moral "oughts"? --
"Social Darwinists" might answer Yes, but anyone who disapproves of cruelty or
needless suffering, or who thinks "might is not always right" (such as Darwin) would
surely answer No. In other words, even if we allowed ourselves to be duped by
everyday idioms into thinking that nature gives us a set of "oughts", they would not be the
"oughts" of a defensible morality.
This simply acknowledges that EP cannot hope to generate a complete morality. Cultural
and social assumptions will be needed to articulate and flesh out a moral point of view. In a
similar way, physics cannot generate by valid inference a satisfactory biology. It does not
follow that no biologically important conclusions follow from physics.
It is possible to watch a game of chess and infer (in a way that Hume would not have
disapproved of) what the object of the game is and hence what players ought to do,
given that they are players of that game. And similarly, it is also possible to watch nature
and infer (in a way that Hume would not have disapproved of) what the object of
"nature’s game" might be. (Dawkins would probably say something like, "to get
one’s genes into future generations in large numbers"). This may involve kindness
to related non-strangers, but it involves disregard for unrelated strangers, and cruelty to
other animals.
Jeremy Bowman