Is/ought/must/society

It is very easy to transcend the is/ought barrier.

A: “I want to eat pie.”

B: “Then you ought to earn some money so you can buy pie!”

C: “I promise to find you a cheap pie.”

A: “Then you should do that!”

One might contend that this is entirely a matter of non-moral ought, and not what Hume argued. Well, promises sure seem moral to me, but that is not the main problem I’d have with that. The main problem is simply that this is false. We use “should” et al in a very specific family of ways, and they can well be sufficiently described by the words satisfying a goal – moral ones as second-degree wants. As in, wanting something about a wanting, or about another person’s acting (and thus sufficient wanting for such an act) – when we say “to steal is wrong”, we mean that we do not want to want to steal, nor do we want other people to steal. This may or may not be all that there is to it, I do not think that is all, realists may be inclined to disagree.

While morality does seem to me impossible to ground in universal objective truth, it is likewise impossible not to have a moral system. We cannot escape that. What we ought to question ourselves here – look, another ought, they are quite usable in rational inquiry too, eh? – is what moral system we then should have. Look, there’s an ought again! They’re fornicating all over the article. (I could say that we must have morals, too.)

The first obvious answer is “none”. But that one is obviously wrong, for it is necessary to have one. Even not to act is to have a moral system. So the second would be, “the one we want”. This seems vaguely satisfying, but which grounds to desire them from? “Whichever”, some may ask. That may be so. But can we truly wish for others to follow our moral system if we do not wish for our system to be universalised? It seems contradictory to do so.

So John has an idea. He formulates his beautiful moral system. “You should all obey John.” No problem here, as John just has to obey himself. However. No one would ever agree to it. Not even John’s creepy stalker ex-wife. It’s thus a rather useless morality, he can stick to it, but it seems equally weird to have a moral system not geared towards convincing people to want it. So what morality seems to grow up to here, is a matter of society. What kind of society do we want? Not one where John calls the shots. A moral system must thus, to a degree, serve what people desire.

Wait wait wait. Here roams monsters illogical. Whence this jump from a very specific example to a very broad statement? The matter at hand is merely the universalised parts of morality. What one limits oneself to, by all means, cannot be required to be universalised. The Sufi mystic who lives poor may think it good for people to be so, but he would not require anyone. He only requires of himself to be poor. This is not problematic in the same manner. Can we, then, create a moral system entirely requiring things of oneself, and saying nothing of what others should and should not? It seems hard, and irrelevant to this matter at hand – that universalised morality is politics.

There cannot be a final moral system. There will likely never be one everyone agree upon. So how about this:

Everyone shall be free to do whatever they want, as long as this does not impede someone else to exercise her own free will equally.

It won’t work alone, but it is a good ground for a society.

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Published:
December 16, 2009 / 22:37
Category:
English, Philosophy
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