(April 4, 2021 at 10:17 pm)polymath257 Wrote: [...]
The is/ought distinction seems to me to ultimately be a question of goals. The 'is' side has no goals: it says what various courses of action will lead to. The 'ought' chooses between the possibilities so as to meet certain desirable consequences.
Yes, this makes sense to me. I usually phrase it as an "if / then" statement, where the "if" part states what the goal is. If we want X result, then we should take Y steps to get there. The X part, the goal, is not provable in the way that scientific things are provable. (Even though it may be a goal which every reasonable person agrees on.) The Y part, the method, may be debated as to how well it aims toward the agreed-on goal. That the Y part may be proved by science doesn't mean that ethics is something decided scientifically -- the goal is still a judgment call.
Some goals or "ifs" would be so obvious that it would be silly to disagree. (Though I suspect some argumentative people on this forum might try.) So for example we could argue that it's better not to have cancer than to have it. If not having cancer is good, then it's good to keep carcinogenic stuff out of the environment. From there you can debate what kind of legislation is most effective for that end.
But as Aristotle warns right at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, we can't ask for more precision in a field than the subject will bear. Ethics isn't math. So even obvious statements like "carcinogens are bad" might involve a certain fuzziness in practice. Too much sunlight causes skin cancer, but not enough is also bad.
Anyway, I think that ethical arguments work best if we find some deep basic goal which every reasonable person will agree on, and work out the methods from there.
Quote:What makes a consequence desirable is the next issue, of course.
I still like "human flourishing."
