Tangentially, FWIW: Among the ought/is counterarguments that I’ve heard (I first encountered it in Alasdair MacIntyre’s stuff) is that some “is”s have “ought”s wrapped up in them from the get-go. The way we divide reality up into its various “is” packages may or may not include function, purpose, etc. in any particular package, but that’s in part a linguistic, cultural, fashionable, etc. decision.
For example: that is a clock, it ought to tell the correct time, because that is what clocks are all about. That it is a clock implies what it ought to do.
MacIntyre’s position, more-or-less, is that the modern philosophical position that you can’t get oughts from izzes in the human moral realm is the result of a catastrophe in which we lost sight of what people are for, in the same way that if we forgot what clocks did and just saw them as bizarre artifacts, we’d think they were just as suitable as objet’s d’art, paperweights, or items for bludgeoning fish with, as anything else, and it wouldn’t matter which ways the hands were pointing.
Now you might say that adding an ought to an is by definition like this (as with the clock) is a sort of artificial, additional, undeclared axiom. But you might consider what removing all the oughts from things like clocks would do to your language and conceptual arsenal. Removing the “ought” from people was a decision, not a conclusion. Philosophers performed a painstaking oughtectomy on the concept of a person and then acted surprised when the ought refused to just regrow itself like a planarian head.
From a language perspective, I agree that’s it’s great to not worry about the is/ought distinction when discussing anything other than meta-ethics. It’s kind of like how we talk about evolved adaptations as being “meant” to solve a particular problem, even though there was really no intention involved in the process. It’s just such a convenient way of speaking, so everyone does it.
I’d guess I’d say that the despite this, the is/ought distinction remains useful in some contexts. Like if someone says “we get morality from X, so you have to believe X or you won’t be moral”, it gives you a shortcut to realizing “nah, even if I think X is false, I can continue to not do bad things”.
Tangentially, FWIW: Among the ought/is counterarguments that I’ve heard (I first encountered it in Alasdair MacIntyre’s stuff) is that some “is”s have “ought”s wrapped up in them from the get-go. The way we divide reality up into its various “is” packages may or may not include function, purpose, etc. in any particular package, but that’s in part a linguistic, cultural, fashionable, etc. decision.
For example: that is a clock, it ought to tell the correct time, because that is what clocks are all about. That it is a clock implies what it ought to do.
MacIntyre’s position, more-or-less, is that the modern philosophical position that you can’t get oughts from izzes in the human moral realm is the result of a catastrophe in which we lost sight of what people are for, in the same way that if we forgot what clocks did and just saw them as bizarre artifacts, we’d think they were just as suitable as objet’s d’art, paperweights, or items for bludgeoning fish with, as anything else, and it wouldn’t matter which ways the hands were pointing.
Now you might say that adding an ought to an is by definition like this (as with the clock) is a sort of artificial, additional, undeclared axiom. But you might consider what removing all the oughts from things like clocks would do to your language and conceptual arsenal. Removing the “ought” from people was a decision, not a conclusion. Philosophers performed a painstaking oughtectomy on the concept of a person and then acted surprised when the ought refused to just regrow itself like a planarian head.
From a language perspective, I agree that’s it’s great to not worry about the is/ought distinction when discussing anything other than meta-ethics. It’s kind of like how we talk about evolved adaptations as being “meant” to solve a particular problem, even though there was really no intention involved in the process. It’s just such a convenient way of speaking, so everyone does it.
I’d guess I’d say that the despite this, the is/ought distinction remains useful in some contexts. Like if someone says “we get morality from X, so you have to believe X or you won’t be moral”, it gives you a shortcut to realizing “nah, even if I think X is false, I can continue to not do bad things”.