Illusions of is-ought gaps

Hume's Guillotine proposes that there is a gap between what can be described in our world as "what is" and what can be prescribed as what "ought to be", the gap is meant to symbolize a causal disconnection. However, the three points below show a causal connection, making the gap an illusion.

1. It's impossible to have any notion of what ought to be without a description of what is. 

The prescription "people ought not steal" requires, for its own existence, a description of what it means to steal: to own something and for someone to take without consent and/or payment. This means that moral prescriptions don't exist in a moral realm separated by the is-ought gap; instead they exist as a consequence from descriptive reality where the is-ought gap is simply one of ignorance. Analogous to the fossil record gap that causes some skeptics to doubt the link between humans and apes.

2. The conclusion of how the world ought to be is simply a description of a preferred possible future state of the world.

Possible futures, because they haven't happened yet, don't exist and therefore cannot be descriptions of what is.  However, a possible future can be represented as accurate predictions existing in the present in human minds or in computers. Additionally, the preference exists in the world in the individual and collective states of human brains, which are built by our genes, selected for by evolution, all driven by the laws of nature. At each step an attainable description of what is.

3. The process of achieving a preferred future is baked into moral prescriptions as goals which can exist in the world descriptively. 

When we say "i took the wrong exit" while driving, or "i typed the wrong word" while making a typo, the word "wrong" is being used in a bigger context of goals and intentions. A goal to get to a destination with an intention to use the quickest or safest path. A goal to type a certain word with the intention to use the right letters. It's the same for the prescription "it's wrong to steal, so people ought not steal", stealing flaunts the goal to preserve and improve on the well-being and prosperity of conscious creatures. These goals exist in human brains and can be described as the neuronal firing patterns triggered by sensory information that trigger patterns of behavior that fulfills a function; goals can also be found in devices as the destination in a map/gps app on cellphones. More about goals here.

At each layer of the is-ought distinction, whether it is at the layer of the [1]prerequisites for oughts, or the [3]process of how an ought is made using goals, or the [2]desired ideal consequence the ought is aiming for, each can be described from how the world is. What this means, is that it must be possible to make an entirely descriptive analogue to the moral prescription "it's wrong to steal, so people ought not steal". Consider the following mouthful:

People were programmed by evolution to var1[preserve and improve on the well-being and prosperity] of the individual in service of var2[survival and reproduction]. When people started depending on larger groups for var2 and because the same genes that program people's brains with var1 also exist in other people, then applying var1 to others also services var2. Stealing goes against the goal of var1, so we can predict that by preventing stealing, we can achieve a future where goal of var1 and var2 is reached.

In this view, the is-ought analogy of a gap becomes an illusion. A better analogy is that of a steep moral mountain; the mountain exists in a reality grounded by our evolution, which is grounded by the laws of nature, specifically entropy. To successfully climb the mountain, we use the appropriate moral tools like the golden rule or the right guidelines like "people ought not steal". That oughts turn out to be convenient tools for climbing the mountain does not discard the fact that the mountain exists in reality, and can be described and measured as patterns of human behavior, an evolved drive to survive and reproduce, and the tendency for these patterns and these drives to align with low entropy in complex systems. More about this last idea here.

 

This is an evolved argument that hits on some of the same ideas from a previous blog Deconstructing Shoulds