Ought and Is

[Hiroshi Satow]

1, ought can come from is.

I think we can say that what we should do can derive from what nature is. Norms can be found in facts.
Let's think this way.

Jim is a young man and came to like drinking recently. He hasn’t mastered moderation yet. Sometimes he’s got too drunk to walk straight and so has to ask his friends for help; sometimes he doesn’t have a bit so as not to disgrace himself, only to find himself sober and out of place among his pleasantly drunken friends.

On the other hand, Jim’s father is a moderate drinker. He loves drinking but never goes too far. He enjoys it but never drinks himself sick. He can do without if circumstances don’t permit. Some say moderate drinking is good for health, which is why he always looks fine.

Jim’s mother says, “You should behave as your father does.” In this case, morality derives from a fact; what Jim should do is shown in what his father does; ought can come from is.

Hope you understand my poor English

[Hiroshi Satow]

2, Is comes from ought.

When we have too much, we should stop having; when not enough, we should go on getting. After having too much bread for breakfast we should eat less at lunch; having slept too little due to, say, preparation for the exam, we should go to bed earlier. This “ought” can also derive from facts in nature. Imagine what our body does. When the temperature of our body gets too high, sweat runs and cools us down while it evaporates, which prevents dangerous conditions like overheating and heatstroke. But if we get too cold, the blood flow to our skin decreases, which makes us start shivering so that muscles generate heat. So when we have too much heat, we stop having it; when there is not enough heat, we try to get more of it. This is our physiology like the law of physics. And this cyclic process we should imitate and master for the purpose of our survival.

[Hiroshi Satow]

3, Is entails Ought.

We may think that even when we fall short of the norms, there is no need to come up to the standards, is there? After all, we are what we are and we need not be what we should be in order to be.

However, there can be found a paradox in here. That we are what we are means that we exist by virtue of what philosophers call Conatus, “will to live.” Every animal does its best to survive, making the best use of Conatus, and I should say that no animal can exist unless it puts forth every effort to live, suggesting that a living thing can keep on living only after it eagerly does what it should. Is is ought and ought is is; or rather, is results from ought. Rats run away from cats as fast as possible, and cats chase rats as rapidly as they can. Otherwise, either of the animals cannot survive or reproduce. They do what they should as much as they can, and it is only after they managed to do so that they can exist.

By the way, Japan has been enjoying... those burning hot days these days. And I hear the same thing is happening all over the Europe. Hope you guys are safe and well in your country.

[Hiroshi Satow]

4, Live in accordance with nature.

Concerning the Stoic thesis, “Live in accordance with nature,” there can be a number of interpretations, but as far as I understand, both the base verb “Live” and the prepositional phrase “in accordance with nature” mean is, whereas this whole sentence is imperative, which shows ought. The proposition can be paraphrased as the following, that we should do what things in nature are in order to be. Life is no free lunch. We all have to pay for it, and in order to pay we’ve got to work hard!

[Impenitent]

I think there may be some difficulty with language here...

1. Behaving as your mother requests/suggests is not a moral imperative but a practical one

2. Behaving in accordance to those circumstances is not a moral imperative

3. anthropomorphic error- the attribution of human traits to a non-human entity is an error

...it gets hot during the summer- you ought to stay cool

4. should and ought are not the same

-Imp

[Hiroshi Satow]

It’s anthropomorphism if we have a belief that plants and animals think and behave like human beings, an attribution of human nature to non-human beings; it’s not anthropomorphism to suppose the other way around, that we human beings, in some respects, behave just as non-human beings do.

Suppose there are a man, a dog and a stone on a plane flying high. What will happen if they should be thrown out of the plane? They will all fall down, no doubt. If we imagine that just as the man feels fear, so do the dog and the stone, then this is anthropomorphic. However, to picture the man falling down and accelerating like the dog and the stone do according to the law of the motion of uniform acceleration, then it’s no anthropomorphism; it’s just the universal law of physics that moves them all in the same way, no room for any attribution of any human nature to anything.

I’m not familiar with it, but Auguste Comte seems to have thought that a variety of laws can and should be integrated into one. He took what he called the law of persistence as an example. Which is that everything has a tendency to sustain itself as long as possible. We can find the law anywhere in nature if only we attempt to. The law manifests itself in physics as the law of inertia; in biology, it’s habit; in sociology and politics, it’s that fixed tendency which every political organization shows in trying to maintain itself. Let’s go farther and say that, in human psychology, it is what Freudians call defense mechanism, in which we make every effort to protect ourselves from internal anxiety and conflict. Since the law is related to human psychology, it is natural to suppose that it has something to do with human morality and even to suppose that other scientific laws can also be related to ethics in a way we haven't yet found.

I’m not at home in natural sciences, which is why what I wrote here may be hard to understand. After all it is just a dream or a nightmare of a dreamer in a hot summer midnight