Morality without God

[The Grand Nudger]

It's possible. But then you have all your work ahead of you to explain where the oughts come from. You have to contend with Hume's skepticism.

I think Hume makes a good point. A simple study of the facts doesn't produce an ought.

So I think the discussion is more properly basic. "My tire is low on air. Therefore, I OUGHT to go fill it at the gas station." This isn't a scientific statement. But it is nonetheless reasonable. You don't get the ought from the "is." You get it from understanding the ideal state of your tires, and comparing it to its current state.

How do you know the ideal state of your tires, or it's current state?  You see where this is headed. Both of those statements are at well at-home in natural sciences. Talking about psi and materials and load after all. Those sentences are missing, but would provide clarity - ofc they're only missing in the sentences above (and also in how we communicate our oughts, fwiw) - but that shouldn't be taken to mean that they aren't there. We love silent premises.

Appropriate to the thread, Hume was considering those moral systems of his day and began his problem thusly -

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.

He may not have been so skeptical of the moral systems discussed today, particularly in that it's been resolved multiple times for different moral systems, though no particular way of resolving the issue means that we can't pose the question still and again (the silent premise in that being that those resolutions are inaccurate).

I think that if a person begins with the notion that moral x's are or must be something other than natural or analytic x's - it's not going to be surprising that they fail to find their moral x' in those places - even if those moral x's were there, and obviously so, staring them right back in the face. We may desire more from morality than it is. The "deeper" explanation that we sometimes reach for. Maybe there is such a thing, and maybe there are oughts and moral questions that must refer to such a thing. I don't personally think that there is, but assuming that there were, there are probably still at least some oughts that resolve to synonymous claims in the natural sciences.

The go-to example being pleasure-ought. A pleasure-ought is almost trivially accommodating to scientific (or empirical..if we prefer) inquiry. It's hard to maintain that there's no way to bridge the two. More an issue in that silent premise up above that we believe that's an inaccurate response, not an impossible response.