The Ought from the Is

Posted on | January 24, 2007 | 2 Comments

I have been glancing occasionally at some of the articles and essays in Samuel Brittan’s book ‘Against the Flow’ over recent weeks. It is a collection of pieces written mostly between 1999 and 2005 for various publications. I bought the book just before Christmas and have enjoyed dipping into it, each time reading all or most of a piece and then leaving it alone for a couple of days before going back to it. Brittan is a curious character – virulently anti-socialism (note the ‘ism’ rather than ‘ist’ – it is the credo he dislikes, not necessarily its adherents – otherwise I might have found him harder to read), trenchantly iconoclastic, and excoriatingly logical (by his own logic, of course – but that is merely to state the obvious).

His unsentimental method brings him up against myriad writers and thinkers, politicians and hacks – he ranges through British foreign policy to the European economy to public services to government economic policy to religion and ethics to academe to some key twentieth century luminaries, such as Keynes, Hayek and Bertrand Russell, and much more. Even when I disagree with him, which is quite often, I cannot but respect the means by which he comes to his conclusions. I would certainly not like to meet him in a head-to-head debate – on any subject!

One sentence jumped out at me as I read one piece last night, on Steven Pinker’s book ‘The Blank Slate’, a book I own but have only read in bits. Brittan writes something I have always agreed with on a purely instinctive level – what interested me particularly, though, was the link he made to David Hume. He wrote, in a piece called Humanitarianism Without Illusions:

“Throughout …[Pinker's]… book, he reminds people of the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s demonstration that no ‘ought’ proposition follows from any factual or logical assertion.”

I found an online copy of Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature so that I could search the text, and came up with this – in Book III, Part 1, Section 1:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprized 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. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

That, I think, is why I can never be anything other than a relativist when it comes to ethics, morality or belief – I have never really been able to understand how anyone can simply ‘know’ they are right in ethical or moral terms. That absolute knowledge that ‘I am right’ is a strange phenomenon, indeed.

And, boy, does this old world of ours suffer from its effects!

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Category: belief, enlightenment, ethics, personal, philosophy, religion, society

Comments

2 Responses to “The Ought from the Is”

Hilery
January 26th, 2007 @ 12:29 pm

John, I share your aversion to certainties and proscriptions. But I also fear that relativism, taken to its (all right – my)logical conclusion may result in us swaying in whatever wind happens to be blowing at the time.

I feel there are universal axioms such as peace, justice, simplicity, truth, adherence to principles not policies, making common cause and respecting honest differences of opinion.
May these not be held as ethical and moral aspirations by which to live without ‘oughts’ attached?
John Connell
January 26th, 2007 @ 1:01 pm

I agree completely, Hilery, although we might all offer slightly (or even hugely) differing definitions of those principles you mention. I’m just interested in how we get to such principles, however we might define them, when, if Hume is right, there is no ‘is’ that leads logically to such ‘oughts’.

Of course, Hume could be wrong.