How to get an "ought" from an "is"

It has been a shibboleth of Western philosophy since Hume that you can't get an "ought" from an "is". That is to say that moral "commands" do not follow from objective situations, or, in the more radical form of the doctrine followed by logical positivists, that they are simply meaningless. Some of the better psychotherapies, such as Rational Emotive Therapy, also take this line, trying to educate patients out of their irrational and destructive "oughts", "shoulds" and "musts". But are these words totally meaningless, or inevitably irrational? Is there a way that you can in fact get an "ought" from an "is"?

Before examining "ought" I would like to take a look at a similar verb, "need" (all of these, incidentally, come into the same grammatical category of "modal operators"). Much time is wasted talking about "needs" and "wants", and the difference between them.

In practice, people say "I need X" as a stronger way to say "I want X", but this is psychologically dangerous as well as being semantically sloppy. "I want to be loved" is a perfectly rational statement that everyone save a few extreme misanthropists would agree with. "I need to be loved", on the other hand, implies that something awful will happen if I am not, though it is hard to say exactly what this awful thing is. While this is the kind of statement most people would only come out with in one of those "humanistic" psychotherapies which delight in making people snivel, perfectly unsentimental folk will still say "I need a new car." Is there a difference?

Both statements show what we could call a "floating need", since they do not say what the speaker needs it for, or what will happen if this this need is not fulfilled. The difference is that while the person who needs a new car could probably say why they need it and what would happen if they didn't get it, the other person would be pretty stumped for an answer. You don't need love in order to do something with it, and, as Albert Ellis and other rational psychotherapists have pointed out repeatedly, the result of not being loved is not as predictable as it might look - you might respond with anything from mild dissappointment to severe depression. Love is a want, not a need.

To make this clearer, let's take a trivial, everyday example. If I say "I need a screwdriver", it is pretty obvious that I want it to screw or unscrew something (or maybe lever something up or whatever). Unless I have very strange aesthetic tastes, I do not want a screwdriver for its own sake. A need is therefore a kind of secondary want, a precondition for doing something you want to do for its own sake, or for another need (e.g. I need to unscrew the back of the TV because I need to fix it because I want to watch TV). The logic of "need" is therefore:-

needX (Y) = IF NOT X, NOT Y

where Y is an explicit or implicit want for which X is a precondition (need).

Floating needs are perfectly OK so long as it is clear from context what they are preconditions for (i.e. what Y is). If not, floating needs can be pretty dangerous, since Y can be filled in with some vague default value like "happiness" or "doing the right thing".

So what about "ought"? We can analyse ought in the same way as follows:-

ought toX (Y) = IF NOT X, (probably NOT Y) OR (less Y).

(apologies to logicians - I realise I'm being a bit slap happy with my notation here!)

As with "need", if Y is implicit or unguessable, we have a floating "ought". Again, in many cases it is obvious what the "ought" is a precondition of. If, as a teacher of English, I say to one of my students "You ought to study irregular verbs," we can break this down into the following:-

You want to speak better English
You have a problem with irregular verbs
If you don't study irregular verbs you will probably not realise your aim of speaking better English so well.

It is the "if not" here which is important. In order to make a meaningful and rational statement, the speaker ought to be able to specify the comsequences of not fulfilling the "floating ought" (note that the first "ought" in this sentence does not float!). Thus if someone says something like "You ought to/should/must do that", you are perfectly entitled to ask "What will happen if I don't?" If they can't provide a ready answer, you may be justified in dismissing them as a moral charlatan, or at least as somewhat confused.

What this means for moral philosophy is that we are left halfway between objectivism and positivism. Moral statements can be meaningful, but need not be. The "is" of the equation needs to include a statement of desire or intention in order to give meaning to the "ought"; if one cannot be found, we can dismiss the statement as meaningless. If the intention is simply "to act morally", then further clarification is needed e.g. "to act according to the Samurai code", in which case we could imply either a basic want to act according to the Samurai code, or a secondary want based on a premise like "In order for a Samurai to fulfil his role (and be happy as a Samurai) he ought to act according to the Samurai code", which could then be subjected to further scrutiny.

To sum all this up, we can say:

is + want = ought

while remembering that "want" is a species of "is", since "Toshiro wants to act according to the Samurai code" is as much a fact as "Toshiro is a samurai."

Does this imply moral relativism? After all, if moral statements are simply statements of intention once removed (like a need is a secondary want), how can we say what people should want? Well, obviously if this theory is true we can't, except in the sense of saying "People should want X because I want them to want X". However, in practice, things are somewhat easier, since certain human wants are pretty universal. Most people, when it comes down to it, want to stay alive, want to be happy, and want the same for other people (with the possible exception of other people that they hate). We can therefore take such basic and nigh on universal wants as premises for any moral philosophy which is based on fulfilling peoples' "needs".

This still leaves the question of religious or spiritual morality, but again, there is no great problem, so long as the members of the moral community share the same primary want, which is to want to do whatever God (or their Higher Self, or whatever) would be happy with them doing. It would be impossible, however, to make such statements outside this moral community i.e. to someone who didn't believe in God, or who had different ideas about what God wanted, or even who accepted that God wanted this, but preferred not to do what God wanted (a Satanist, for example). If a Christian wants to talk morality with an atheist, they would be better off finding some common wants (like survival or happiness) and leaving God out of it. Overly pious moralists (including atheists!) often end up making about as much sense as if they were speaking Hittite. It is not that you shouldn't make such absolute moral statements, but that you cannot. What you can do, however, is point out the contradictions between what people do and what they want, between what their implicit wants and their explicit "oughts", or between two incompatible wants. This should still provide enough material to keep moral philosophers and psychotherapists in business for a long time.