Evolving Ought Beyond Is

The is-ought barrier is a regularly visited topic since its initial formulation by Hume. It certainly seems unassailable in that a syllogism designed to claim that what ought to be done is predicated on what is (observable and natural) must always fail. The reason for this is that the ought framework (call it ethics) can be formulated in any particular way to ascribe the good and the bad. A serial killer might believe that killing certain people eliminates demons from the world and is therefore good, regardless of a general prohibition that killing others is bad. In this case, we might argue that the killer is simply mistaken in her beliefs and that a lack of accurate information is guiding her. But even the claim that there is an “is” in this case (killing people results in a worse society/people are entitled to be free from murder/etc.) doesn’t really stay on the factual side of the barrier. The is evaporates into an ought at the very outset.

There are efforts to enliven some type of naturalistic underpinnings of moral reasoning, like Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape that postulates an adaptive topology where the consequences of individual and group actions result in improvements or harm to humanity as a whole. The end result is a kind of abstract consequentialism beneath local observables that is enervated by some brain science. Here’s an example: (1) Better knowledge of the biological origins of disease can result in behavior that reduces disease harm; (2) It is therefore moral to improve education about biology; (3) Disease harm is reduced resulting in reduced suffering. This doesn’t quite make it across the barrier, though, because it presupposes an ought for humans that reduces the imperatives of the disease itself (what about its thriving?), much less presupposing that reducing suffering is desirable. Some religious traditions have taken suffering as a necessary part of the shadow-world of this life that distracts from heavenly rewards.

So we have to confront that we are making a value judgment any time we are suggesting an ought. But insofar as Hume’s Guillotine may create a tension in how to view the application of reason or science to problems of moral decision-making, we do clearly use facts about the world as a component for making moral decisions. For example, the US Supreme Court, when confronted with the issue of how to interpret the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the case of the execution of a low-IQ person decided that the individual’s inability to communicate or understand their actions combined with an “evolving standard of decency” prohibited executing mentally deficient people. Here, though, we confront facts once again as the delineating line for what constitutes mentally deficient must be decided by expert opinion and is subject to continued evolution itself. As the famed psychological researcher James Flynn has demonstrated through his entire professional career, mental capacity and IQ is rapidly changing in the face of the necessities and drivers of our complex societies. In the case of Atkins v. Virginia, the very act of interacting with his attorneys raised Daryl Atkins’s IQ.

Thus we see not just evolving standards of decency—to repeat the SCOTUS phrase—but evolving concepts of what is in the world, what the facts are by which we can travel around our moral placement on the landscape, assuming we value the landscape as an ought. Other than an observation, however, are there any imperatives, any oughts, that can be derived from this meta-is? For instance, if standards of decency are evolving and we must rethink notions like what is cruel, do we need to reformulate how to view what is pornographic, what is necessary to deal with latent racism in modern societies, what is acceptable in terms of economic inequality, or what is the allowable amount of environmental harm in exchange for economic gain? The meta-is suggests merely that there is a creep towards understanding and action in the face of these conflicts combined with various experiments to judge the acceptability of solutions. In Eastern New Mexico and West Texas, for instance, the Permian Basin has been under massive development of oil and gas resources for the last several years, with the speed and tenacity of development resulting in massive road deaths and water system disruptions, though in a sparsely populated area of the US. Part of that development was supported by debt based on models of long-term oil prices that were upheld by OPEC management of the global oil supply (in other words, the free market was not at all free, providing profit opportunities to American producers). Now, under threat of both the OPEC price wars with Russia and the global pandemic reducing demand, the debt overhang threatens the US economy with potentially as significant a downturn as the Great Recession. Meanwhile, New York has largely banned fracking and new pipeline development. Some argue that the latter is stunting economic growth, though proponents want the state to focus on renewables and protect populated areas from the risks of pipeline failures.

Through a meta-is lens of an evolutionary view of ethics, these are two types of experiments that reflect the vitality of this evolving ethical process. The resolution of them partially hangs on scientific facts (Does fracking harm water supplies? Are human-based sources of CO₂ resulting in irreversible climate change?), partly on economic tradeoffs (Are the jobs and extended economic effects worth it?), and partly on ethical choices by groups and individuals combined with general resentment between groups.

I should contrast this a bit with Jürgen Habermas and ideas like communicative rationality, since I brought that up in the preceding post. Evolutionary solutions to complex problems are not solutions that are guaranteed any kind of global optimality or even rationality. The trajectories through the state space of conflicting human ideals might achieve a kind of local optimality, however, building a balance that is sufficient for continued thriving. A component of that may be rational decision-making arrived at by positive actors, but it can only be a component. If we take this meta-is a bit further, however, we know that thriving in evolved systems is exactly this flexible combination of local optima. Through variety in experimentation—through diversity—we achieve tentative optimality.