In last week's article, I described a conundrum the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein faced about morality: he saw that there’s no way to “observe” moral facts in the world. Think about describing a heinous murder: he argued you could tell someone every fact about the perpetrator, the victim, and the crime itself, all without learning whether it was right or wrong. Morality seems to be something above this—or something arbitrarily added on.
Wittgenstein was far from the fist to recognize this. It’s a problem known as the is/ought gap: how could any fact about the world—that is, the way the world is—tell us something about how we ought to act? If I describe what stealing is, how could that tell you that it’s wrong to steal?
This idea became popular in the 18th century, particularly from the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume, a famous skeptic, introduced the concept of the is/ought gap to philosophy. Being a skeptic, he was concerned about just how we as humans form ethical values and decide what is right. Ultimately, he saw no rational foundation for ethics. In his view, there is something arbitrary and emotional to all ethics. (He also saw no rational basis for just about any human action—see our video on Hume below.)
Hume’s challenge forces us to ask a real question: what makes anything “good” or “true?” What could possibly make something “the right thing to do?”
Think about values. Let’s say you consider a value of yours to be that it’s good to be generous with your money and donate to those in need. You might hold this value, but do you consider it to be true? Is there any way in which we could look at a similar statement—maybe, “it’s bad to lie to people”—and say that it is true in the same way that a statement like “the sky is blue” is true?
Today, most people would probably agree with something to this effect. Although moral principles might be good or valuable, they are not themselves truths of the world. There’s no uniform way to evaluate these kinds of statements. While we could test the theory that the sky is blue by simply looking up and checking, there is no apparent way to “test” whether murder is wrong. It's simply something entirely different from other kinds of truth.
This is perhaps the single biggest obstacle to accepting any sort of objective morality. Most often, we consider these statements not just to be subjective but to be more or less impossible to analyze objectively. We’re left with nothing better to say but some manner of “agree to disagree.”
How can we escape this problem? How can we look at facts like the human mind and soul and conclude with a true moral statement? What lets us reason between experiences and observations to recommendations and obligations?
For much of history, this problem wasn’t so troubling. To thinkers before Hume, the notion of moral truth was obvious.
Let’s consider where ancient and modern moral philosophy might differ. Most modern ethical philosophy is rooted in trying to decide whether certain actions are wrong. A common question for modern ethics might be whether it’s right to eat meat raised in an industrial farm with very low quality of life for its animals. A utilitarian might look at this question and consider the consequences: Though animal welfare might be valuable, perhaps it’s better to make food production more efficient and thus improve human quality of life.
In this case, we are considering in the abstract whether a certain action is wrong. It’s a question of whether that thing ought to be done. Here, it’s hard to connect it to any sort of objective fact about the world. Is animal welfare somehow good? Is cheaper food for humans good? We might be inclined to say yes to both, but why and how?
Perhaps it’s this approach of considering ethics as the study of particular actions that’s leading us astray. Earlier concepts of ethics were certainly concerned with right action, but that was not the foundation nor the essence of the discipline. Ethics was not rooted in finding the right thing to do—instead, it was rooted in finding the right way to be.
What does this mean? For most of the history of ethics, the essential ‘fact’ that all ethics was rooted in was human teleology. The facts of who you are and what you should be start with the soul. In this understanding of ethics, the ‘facts’ of ethics were the facts of human nature. These thinkers (Aristotle being perhaps the most famous) thought that our first responsibility was to identify what human nature is, then to identify what human nature could and ought to be.
In this sense, ethical standards weren’t some sort of arbitrary way of evaluating human actions—the discipline wasn’t reducible to, “We think this is bad,” or, “We think this is not useful.” Instead, ethical behavior was synonymous with human excellence. To become the ideal human being meant to become someone in a habit of ethical behavior—in the habit of virtue.
In the same way that an acorn develops into a sapling and the sapling into a tree, a human is naturally meant to develop into someone who is moral and virtuous. The study of ethics means asking what an ideal human life is like. Aristotle, one of history’s first great ethicists, argued that the happy life and the virtuous life were one in the same: the highest form of happiness and the highest form of virtue should exist alongside one another.
When we move away from human action and to human nature, we can start to see these values and facts matching up. Happiness is good for a human: it’s a sign of living well. Virtue is good for a human. The moral language that seemed like nonsense to Wittgenstein or Hume seems obvious in this context.
Aristotle’s teleology isn’t free from criticism, of course. He saw this as a sort of biological fact of human life—this claim is much harder to defend in light of today’s science. Yet we see her the potential to talk about ethics not in terms of like, dislike, or usefulness, but in terms of real truth.