In a recent post I discussed a proposed attempt by John Searle to bridge the is/ought gap. While his attempt failed in the end, his argument did provide some interesting points to consider. Consider the sentence “It is the case that Cartman ought to share.” Is this an ought statement or an is statement? Searle’s argument, we saw, exploits a similar ambiguity in order to derive a full-blown ought statement from a pseudo is statement.
This, however, raises an interesting question: Are values facts? Are values reducible to facts? Modern Synthetic Ethical Naturalists would say “yes” while Ethical Non-Cognitivists would say “no.” In this post I will explore some of the arguments put forth first by the NC’s. We will then see that the uncertainty as to the answer of these questions above complicate matters quite a bit.
In his book, “Fact and Values” C. L. Stevenson argues that ethical disagreement have a dualistic nature to them; they consist in both disagreements in belief (about facts) as well as disagreements in attitude (about values). In such discussions, disagreements in belief play a secondary role to that of disagreements in attitude, for it is an agreement in attitude which is ultimately sought, not an agreement in belief. As Plato put it in the Euthyphro, it is disagreements as to value, not facts which lead to “hatred and wrath.”
In the course of ethical debate, according to Stevenson, appeals are made to facts in order to influence the other person’s values. This is NOT meant to imply that such “debates” actually involve rational reasoning. The appeal to facts is meant not to compel or logically entail certain consequences, but rather to motivate a change in attitude in one’s interlocutor.
This is accomplished due to linguistic meaning having two aspects to it: descriptive meaning, that part which can basically be labeled cognitive such as beliefs, doubts, etc., and emotive meaning, that part which is basically non-cognitive in nature such as feelings, attitudes and emotions. In ethical debate, according to Stevenson, the facts get tied to values by way of certain words and expressions having both descriptive as well as emotive meaning. It is by way of this that facts come to influence values, though no logical relationship of any kind is ever established between the two.
Thus, we see that no amount of facts ever actually entails any particular set of values. One can know all the circumstances surrounding capital punishment and still have an attitude either for or against it. One can know all facts and never be absolutely sure which facts are more important or more valuable. One can know exactly how one’s life would have turned out if they had done certain things differently and still not know WHICH path was the one that should have been taken. And so on.
In response to such a position, Peter Railton in his paper “Facts and Values” (yes, it is the same title of Stevenson’s book) suggests that the fact/value distinction has been greatly exaggerated. In order to demonstrate this, he defines moral value in terms of what he calls “non-moral” value. Non-moral value, according to Railton, is that which is good for a person, rather than being simply ‘good’. What is non-morally good for a person is that which that person, were she fully informed and rational, would want for herself to want in her current, uninformed situation. Moral value is simply that which maximally promotes non-moral value from a social point of view.
And yet here a rather obvious problem seems to arise. What is ‘good’ is here defined in terms of what is ‘good for the person’, but good for the person to what end? To increase evolutionary fitness? To produce pleasure? To be happy? To flourish (eudaimonia)? To do what God wants? The distance between fact and value still seems rather distant.
It is relatively easy to see how values could have originally arisen from mere facts in the evolutionary scheme of things. In order to encourage certain behaviors, evolution created essentially all conscious animals with certain urges which typically involved, or at least facilitated nutritive or sexual gratification. Whatever it is that a particular animal has such instinctive urges for is thus valued by that animal.
However there is no reason to suspect that all value can now be reduced to evolutionary fitness, the gratification of instinctual urges or even pleasure. Indeed, the thought of human values being universally reducible to any of these is actually quite repulsive to most people. Human values have come to be far more robust and complex than they must have originally been for our ancestors.
Furthermore, even if we can tell a just-so story for how values originally emerged from facts, we have no reason to suspect that we are thus able to justify particular values which we now have with an appeal to value-free facts. Perhaps the most promising route would be to justify values in terms of factual statements regarding the evolutionary history of the value system which we inherit, both biologically speaking, but more importantly culturally speaking.
Bibliography
C. L. Stevenson: Facts and Values
Peter Railton: “Facts and Values”
