Re: Hume's "No Ought From Is" is Limited!
Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2022 10:31 am
There is no issue in this case.Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 9:49 amSo you are solving nothing whatsoever.Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 9:47 am Yes there is a continuum of oughts in terms of different criticalness & urgency in different timings and different conditions.
There are a wide range of oughts, e.g. ought not to fart in the elevator is a matter of courtesy and not being offensive is not a moral ought like shoving icepicks into peoples' eyeballs in a violent manner or killing people by whatever means.
Ultimately whatever is to be identified as moral oughts proper, they must be verifiable and justifiable empirically thus as objective moral facts. In addition these objective moral facts are not to be enforced on anyone.
Not only are you sub-categorising oughts into moral and non-moral.
You are also sub-categorising moral oughts into critical and urgent.
You are also saying oughts are subject to context and conditions.
So what happens when you have competing oughts from different sub-categories in different contexts and different conditions at the exact same time?
Do you let lapse your duty to an urgent ought; or a critical ought?
Do you let lapse your moral duty to your family; or your moral duty to your species?
Do you let lapse your moral duty to your wife; or to your parents?
Choices, choices, choices, choices... How do you optimise your limited time?
In the future, one will have the opportunity to have the competence to be able to optimize to the best of one's well being.
Note the central theme of our discussion is whether there are objective moral facts or not.
Hume claimed there are none but that is only because due to his time [1700s] he did not have access to the latest advance knowledge we have.
Note this scenario,
'The ought-not-ness to kill another human' is an objective moral fact as conditioned to the moral FSK.
Note this scenario,
Suppose one is caught is a no escape situation where one is given a the choice either to stop another from breathing or else one will be stopped from breathing.
Rationally and to optimize one's well being, one will have to stop the other from breathing to save one's life despite the moral fact 'The ought-not-ness to kill another human' which is only an ideal and guide.
But despite the non-compliance to that guide, one need to be mindful of one's non-compliance to the need for optimization of one's well being.
What is critical is one must strive to find solutions to prevent similar scenario from happening again. How can we do that? It is complex but possible in the future.
To topic, there are a wide range of oughts. The type of oughts that Hume rejected are not objective moral oughts. Hume was ignorant of the existence of real objective moral oughts that are inherent within all humans.