Moral Prescriptions

Rules: sets of instructions, that when followed, will guarantee a specific correct result. Often Idealized to facilitate understanding.

Idealization: generalization and simplification of concepts into forms that are easier to understand, transmit, explain, remember.

Abstractivity: an interpretation of reality that involves arranging information into concepts and idealizing on them. 

We often hear that we cannot derive an ought from an is, this is Hume's Guillotine and it is the philosophical principle that we cannot derive prescriptions solely from factual descriptions. A description of the world is necessary because without them prescriptions would not have any content to target nor any context to be relevant. In addition to descriptions, a second missing piece is also needed to form prescriptions: information processing into idealized rules. However, information processing is something a bit more complex, some groundwork needs to be set first in our origins.

Origins 

Humans evolved to have senses that allow us to interpret and maneuver the world. These senses exist so as to maximize survivability leading to maximizing reproduction; successful reproduction has a chance to improve the senses in the next generation. Rationality is a type of sense, meaning that after combining information we can feel when a new concept is useful after connecting correlation with causality. These animal's footprint shapes correlate with the animal's movement, these sets of footprints will lead to an animal with nutrients in them, food leads to survival leads to reproduction leading to ability to process information being passed to the next generation, sometimes with improvements.

Humans combine a lot of different things to create useful tools; we combine sticks and stones to make hammers and spears, silicon and rare earth metals to make computers. Like bird nests for birds, tools are an extended phenotype of our genome; our genes evolve instructions for building a brain that can not just sense the world but also interact with the world. Humans also combine information into concepts that can be as useful as any tool we make; we combine repeating and logical patterns in the world to create mathematics, we combine patterns in human behavior to create moral prescriptions. All of these patterns in service of survival and reproduction, for they're the initial guiding variables; however like in mathematics and tech devices, tools can be used for other means too.

Once humans became proficient enough at surviving and reproducing and with the introduction of plant and animal domestication, we were able to provide enough resources for populations to explode. Soon enough humans needed to worry not just about surviving the environment with eachother's help but also surviving eachother's treachery, giving way to the evolution of reciprocal altruism.  

Abstractivity of Moral Prescriptions 

Measurements exist in the objective domain, our experiences exist in the subjective domain, so which domain of interpretation do "should" statements reside in? The statement "people should not murder" does not have any truth values in it because it's not structured to have them, instead it is structured like advice, warnings, promises, threats, recommendations, commands. It is a shortcut created to facilitate the influencing of people for common goals; should statements hide within themselves implications about the consequences of people's behaviors, about intuitive calculations regarding reputation, allegiances, safety and fairness. Should statements resembles a concept that has been idealized, and idealization of concepts is the domain of abstractivity. Moral prescriptions can be very useful tools for stabilizing societies as they provide rules and guidelines for reaching mutually beneficial results and the processing can be done intuitively with emotions as the driving factors to win games of reciprocity. These intuitions is what makes morality subjective, however a subjective interpretation doesn't exclue the possibility of an objective interpretation.

Objectivity's & Subjectivity's Role in the Creation of Moral Prescriptions

Objectivity provides accuracy for long chains of inference regarding what a person should do. Subjectivity provides expediency in time sensitive situtaions where doing nothing has clear bad results.

Peter Singer's thought experiment of a drowning childing provides useful grounds for testing accuracy vs expediency. A child is drowning on a shallow pond, you have the opportunity to save the kid at the cost of ruining your expensive suit. Different moral prescriptions will be processed and created depending whether you need to act now and if you have ample time.

If you need to act now, then your moral instincts will engage your emotions and intuitions and arrive at "I should wade into the water and save the kid". Now that urgency is out of the way, you can measure the frequency of kids that play in the area, the effectiveness a fence could have at keeping curious kids out of the water, the amount of lifesavers required to make sure someone can see it and use it to help someone else, leading to "I should advocate with lawmakers to implement better safety around the water". Essentially, objectivity can be very useful to lawmakers for creating infrastructure and regulations that are morally positive.