Elsewhere I tried to show that Nietzsche has a Human solution to “Is
vs. Ought” problem [1]. His notion of causality as free will is Human
causality, viz., habit; his picture of the mind is epiphenomenal, with
clear Human traces as he rejected noumenal self and “I” as a given; he
takes “Is” to be type-facts, facts about what character one is, and
“Ought” to be the second-nature of human beings as build upon the
type-facts. And the communal feeling of a natural being, viz. feeling of
responsibility given the causality of free will, links “Is” with
“Ought” just as Mounce claimed Hume meant them to do. At this point, it
seems to be the case that Nietzsche is of the firm conviction that the
problem can be traced back to a specific feeling of the moral subject,
viz. the feeling that s/he is the cause of his/her own actions. Moral
subjects achieve the causality in the second sense of the term Hume uses
via socialization and they become moral subjects along the way. And the
bridge between the I-sentences and the O-sentences are the
inter-subjective constraints that train them into the moral feeling of
responsibility. Indeed, this is the familiar process of moral education,
punishment and reward. As for causality, Nietzsche believes that “[w]e
has combined our feeling of will, out feeling of ‘freedom,’ our feeling
of responsibility and our intention to perform an act, into the concept
cause’…” [2]. It is just an explanatory schema human beings project on
the chaos of events to satisfy their need for an answer, facing the
unfamiliar and the unknown. The origin of the concept can be traced back
to our belief that we cause things, that we have free will. Freedom as
causa sui, however, is the power of things-in-themselves which,
Nietzsche avers, are not nonexistent. It is not a metaphysically
necessary relation, but a feeling that human beings are free in their
actions.
Accordingly, the problem Nietzsche and Hume deals with can be seen as a
question pertaining to account of free actions prescribed by the
O-sentences, rather than the shift between the copula “is” and the modal
operator “ought,” under the light of the belief that some facts,
connected by causal links in the I-sentences, must justify free actions
prescribed by the O-sentences. “Ought” as a performative, is to express
causa sui, freedom in moral action, but when the expression of moral
action prescribed by an O-sentence must express the moral freedom, the
expression of the action is
free from “Is” as well. Since, if utterance of the O-sentences can be
seen as a moral action, it is a free action too. Hence the problem of
“Is vs. Ought.” Nietzsche seems to provide the answer in the I-sentences
that express the type-facts, i.e., facts about the natural needs of
diverse human beings. In the next part, I will elaborate on this
suggestion.
The Rules of “Ought”
Hume, in the mainstream reading of the infamous passage in Treatise
[3], seems to express his disavowal of any metaphysically necessary link
between the two, i.e., the moral and the factual, sets of judgments. I
tried to show that Nietzsche follows his footsteps too. Their analysis
in fact remains worth of studying, since any argument that assumes a
necessary relation between the I-sentences and the O-sentences must find
a solution to the problem of freedom. The relation of causality may be
replaced by some other relation assumed to be metaphysically necessary
but if moral actions expressed by the O-sentences are subject to the
necessity among the facts expressed by the I-sentences, the problem
would persist. The unperceivable shift between the two set of judgments,
therefore, cannot be accounted by the metaphysically necessary
relations between the facts, since the actions then would lose the
crucial character which renders them moral. Since their time, however,
philosophers have come up with other alternative accounts of the
O-sentences. More crucially, they offered some brand-new ways of
conceiving the relation between the judgments and the facts, such as
speech-acts who not only describe but also constitute actions.
“
As Austin notes, what we have to study is not the sentence, but the
issuing of an utterance in a speech situation. Our question is not, what
does the sentence mean? but What happens? What does the speaker mean?
or perhaps, how is the world altered by the occurrence of this
utterance?” [4]. The world alters when somebody utters an O-sentence,
since chances are there that one’s interlocutor may act as prescribed by
the O-sentence. The O-sentence can then be taken as analogous to a
command, then. “More frequently the point of an utterance is to evoke
some particular action as a response ... When someone obeys a command,
his action, of course,is a response to the command, not something caused
by it.” That is to
say, one appeals to the feeling of causa sui in uttering an O-sentence,
since one believes that one’s interlocutor has freedom and control
over his actions to change the course of the events as prescribed
by it. Given that “[t]here must exist an accepted conventional
procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to
include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain
circumstances” [5], the use of the O-sentences must have such a
conventional procedure as well. Supposing that utterance of an
O-sentence is an “act of uttering a sentence which is a performative
to perform an act (e.g. to give an order, or make a promise)”
(Holdcroft, 1974, p. 3) the factual preconditions of uttering an
O-sentence adumbrate the correct inferential procedure of a moral
argument: like in “Jones ought to pay back, because he promised to
do so.” In this vein, “the way in which in entailment one proposition
entails another is not unlike the way in which “I promise” entails “I
ought”: it is not the same, but it is parallel [6].”
It is parallel, since at the most basic level, there are factual
preconditions of uttering any sentence, whether it is performative
or not. If those preconditions are not satisfied, then the sentence is
not functional and the speech-act unhappy. Since the O-sentences
as performatives have a function, i.e., to indicate that the
interlocutor has control over his/her actions, the preconditions
for the fulfillment of the function may solve the way out of the “Is
vs. Ought” problem. I shall not go into the question if those are the
truth-conditions of the sentences, and the question about their truth
values is irrelevant in this context since in the sense I take them to
be as injunctions, they do not have truth values: “A moral judgment
of and centrally serves as a kind of injunction, spoken aloud or in
one’s heart, to others or to oneself, to behave or not to behave in
a certain way. As such, it has no truth value...” [7]. When they take
on other functions, i.e., not taken as injunctions, they may or may
not have truth values, but I shall not broach it in this discussion.
Nietzsche tried to show how “Ought” to enter into our language in
a quite complex history of a natural being. It was introduced, he
speculated, to satisfy the socio-political needs in language games
of responsibility, or more precisely to render a natural being moral.
Thus “Ought” to be not only used to express the moral behavior of a
life form, but it also constitutes the rules of moral behaviour, and it
is the moral action par excellence. In my reading, the socio-political
institutions induced the belief in the causality of free will, building
a language game, and then playing on the specific needs of them by
punishment (inducing pain) and reward (inducing pleasure). The
issue is that “Ought” to find its preconditions for its function –to
make interlocutors responsible from their actions–in the sociopolitical
context of natural needs. That is the context that provides
the constitutive rules of “Ought” as a speech-act which expresses
a new form of behaviour, viz. moral behaviour. Searle [7] defines
the notion of “constitutive rules” as describing new possibilities
of behaviour. A critique of Searle, Ransdell [8] he claims Searle’s
definition does not consider the instances where one is not
committed to the type of the behaviour. However, as I argued below,
there is no exit-option in the moral language game. In the next part,
I will put the conclusions I derived from the reading of Hume and
Nietzsche into modern terms and explain further.
“Ought” Based on Constitutive Rules
To present some of the schemas and insights unavailable at the
time of Nietzsche and Hume, I will present a review of the literature
on the passage by Hume that formulated the problem for the first
time. Dismissing some of the proposed accounts of the link in terms
of “normal psychical function,” [9], of “reductive definition of some
moral term” [10], and many others, I shall focus on only some, such
as that of Hannaford [11], of MacIntyre [12], and of Searle [13], and
the reason why is because those authors, engaging fruitful debates
and laying original analyses of the question, seem to be the best
representatives of the views they hold. Hannaford [11], adopts the
perspective of “human behavior and needs” as the standpoint from
which the “imperceptible” connection between I-sentences and
O-sentences can be perceived as generating norms for endorsement
of the conditions for free. Practices of a community. It is a vain move
on the side of philosophers such as Kant, to disparage hypothetical
judgments, he implies, for possibility conditions of moral discourse
are the necessary conditions for free action: that is to say, once the
value of free action is taken for granted, the moral judgments to
the effect that one ought to respect them set off automatically, and
other moral judgments are derivable from those. In other words,
“[f]rom the knowledge of what is necessary to human action in
general we can derive judgments of what we ought to do if we are
to continue to engage in that action”. Such conditions, he further
claims, are regulative functions of what it means to be a free member
of a community of persons and yield, recursively on this quasiaxiomatic
basis, particular O-sentences in particular situations that
can be descriptively grasped by I-sentences.
As for the obvious objection that what Hannaford suggests is
not a logical derivation in the strict sense of the term, he dismisses
it on the ground that as “a normal and natural kind of derivation”, it
does its job without having recourse to formal intricacies and being
neutral against them. His implicit assumption that human beings,
capable of moral action and consistent thought, can arrive at moral
judgments by other means than strictly logical operations, given
the conceptual relation between “Ought” as a prerequisite of moral
action and the social-communal context of the action. Only and all
moral agents capable of action can raise the question of what ought
to be done, thus he claims, and only in the context of preceding
moral dispute can agents make moral sense of an action, for, as in a
Kantian understanding, the shift between the two sets of sentences
are made possible by the universalized conditions of action in the
community of free equals.
However, two objections could be raised at this point:
a) What philosophers have been pursuing for ages does not
seem to be the Hannaford’s “natural derivation” of O-sentences
via hypothetical judgment: Indeed, most would argue against him
that judgments of this type, ones that establishes the means to do
X given that one wills X, presupposes the value of moral action
in a community. Hypothetical judgments may take off once it is
presupposed that human beings value taking part in the sociomoral
game but does not account for why they ought to take part.
Indeed, that seems to be what is called “technical,” rather than
purely moral, sense of ‘Ought’ that enables the natural derivation
[14].
b) It is quite ambiguous to re-frame the question in terms of
conditions of moral action that would emerge in communal debate,
without having settled first the conditions of idealized moral
debate: indeed, this may prove the foundationalist approach to the
question as regressive, as some still other moral premises may be
needed to do so, yet the I-sentences as they enter into Hannaford’s
theoretical picture, provide no defensive strategy against it.
The vices aside, Hannaford’s analysis has virtues:
a) The derivation of O-sentences from I-sentences, he thus
avers, may be achieved by extra-logical, yet semantical, operations
on contextual, rather than sentential, level. Therefore, most of the
philosophers perhaps looked for a strictly necessary relation on the
propositional level in vain since Hume and Nietzsche.
b) Therefore, the objection (i) may indeed lose its force,
provided that there is no exit-option in moral game: one may simply
remind the famous remark of Aristotle and insist that one who is
not in the game would be either a beast, or a god. Is it a water-proof
argument? Hardly so, for one may believe that free conditions of
actions are not realized in actual games of actual communities and
cannot be reached by moral debate of the agents, but to be sure,
burden of the proof lies not with the defender.
Interpreted as such, the riddle of Hume and Nietzsche has no
formal solution, but like the renowned Gordian knot, it can be cut
loose by recourse to the preconditions of free action which is the
basis of moral causality and responsibility as the function of “Ought”
implies. But as for the exact character of those conditions that
render human agents capable of moral action and responsibility,
Hannaford is silent, but MacIntyre [12] is not: such an approach to
moral judgments discover, or ought to discover, as its focal point,
he takes Hume to suggest, “a foundation in human needs, interests,
desires, and happiness”. Hudson [15], in criticizing MacIntyre’s
exegesis of the passage by Hume, claims: “it is undoubtedly the case
that moral judgments are made in situations where we want, need,
etc., and Hume is aware of this ; but it does not follow that he was, or
thought he was, deducing ought from is. To say that a game is played
in certain circumstances is not to say that the circumstances are
part of the game.” But it seems obvious that rules are responses to
the circumstances of a life form, a natural form of life that is subject
to the constraints of the circumstances in moral action.
Austin’s [5] introduction of “performatives” is the following:
a) They do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at
all, are not ‘true or false’; and
b) The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing
of an action, which again would not normally be described as
saying something.
Searle [13], following him, elaborates upon the rules of the
performatives. He takes the so-called pejorative sense of ‘Ought’
as tautological with that of ‘obligation’ under the institutional
facts therein, and therefore establishing a connection between
the I-sentences and the O-sentences as the sup-species of the
former. Therefore, he claims, if one acceded to play in the game
of “obligation,” one has to play by the rules of the game, which is
constitutive of it. In other words, a moral game like “obligation”
is none other than its rules that constitutes it, i.e., institutional/
constitutional facts. Some believed all of this is irreparably wrong,
as “Searle’s confusion, then, arises from his having conflated a
question of entailment with a question of entitlement,” in the sense
that the obdurate gap retains between the I-sentences and the
O-sentences. Indeed, the objection would have a point to the effect
that the institutional facts would always be divorced from the facts
simpliciter, had the divorce could be rendered intelligible without
recourse to the institutional facts of other speech-acts. “I suppose
this amount to saying that judging, acknowledging, classifying
someone else’s act as an ‘institutional act’ comprise themselves
a distinct group of institutional acts [16].” Yet individuation of
such facts must again resort to other language games or presume
the preconditions of free action in order to account for the moral
character of the action at stake-freedom. And the preconditions of
free action for a form of life, viz., human form of life are quite wellestablished
in terms of needs and interests. “That is not agreement
in opinions but in form of life [17].”
“Is” in “Ought”
As I attempted to show above, Hannaford following the Kantian
tradition finds the solution to the problem in preconditions of
free action human beings feel that they are capable of. McIntyre
elaborated and specified these conditions as needs, interests,
desires and happiness as facts to be expressed by I-sentences. On
the other hand, Austin and Searle held the mirror to the judgment
side of the problem and gave some hints that moral judgments as
expressed by O-sentences can be seen as speech-acts. That is to say,
the O-sentences not only express those facts, but building upon
them as the ineluctable preconditions of what they aim at, viz., free
action, they constitute the moral facts. In fact, that is what my Human
reading of Nietzsche implied as well. Conditions of free action, to
be sure, relates to free will and causality of will as an inexplicable
feeling that enters into the moral picture. If morality be intelligible
and moral actions be possible after all, one may presume freedom
of action in metaphysical terms as a necessary relation, too. Yet
that is not to say that freedom will is to be taken as a tangible and
observable causal relation that makes itself manifest in the action
as Hume and Nietzsche put it. And if that relation is not possibly
observable, it cannot be expressed by the I-sentences. If it cannot
be expressed by them, then the formal gap between them and the
O-sentences opens up. At this point, following Searle, I argue that
the O-sentences comprise a sub-set of speech-acts. They do not
only express moral facts, but also constitute them as moral. I believe
Hume’s second definition of causality must come into the picture to
account for freedom of action that enables the use of speech-acts as
capable of articulating moral facts. Human beings feel that they are
the cause of their actions. Indeed, as compatibilists argue, causality
of free will and physical causality may be co-operating on human
actions, though the former is not demonstrable by any means, since
it is not observable, ostensible and determinable. In fact, to put it
brashly, it makes no difference to the argument from free will at
all that causa sui is indemonstrable. The gist of the matter is that
unless one is willing to give up the whole edifice of morality and
related institutions, which is Nietzsche’s point and aim, one is
compelled to presume causality in the second sense.
Moreover, given the naturalistic fallacy, one cannot demonstrate
moral properties and actions by the I-sentences. Thus, human
beings need a second set of judgments, viz., the O-sentences, to
express them. But then the problem is that, given that causality of
will is indemonstrable as well, the odds are against the attempts
to establish the necessary semantic connection between the
I-sentences and the O-sentences, as the rules of the speech-game
are centered on freedom, i.e., freedom from the factual constraints.
It is in fact not a paradoxical situation where one is supposed to
establish the necessity imposed by factual restraints when the game
is designed to illustrate that one can get rid of them in free action.
That a necessary connection is indemonstrable does not boil down
to the conclusion that there is no such connection. The semantic
necessity in question seems to be established by fixing the referent
of the moral terms, though we may not demonstrate their semantic
content. The notion of “fixing the referent” goes back to Kripke
[18], who distinguished between the two functions of Sinn, viz. that
of determining the semantic content and that of determining the
referent. People in the past referred to the same natural object as
we do to as a piece gold but did not know the factual restrictions on
the speech-act at stake before they discovered physical properties
of the element described by the semantic content of the term “gold.”
Even then the necessary relation between the factual restrictions
and the speech-act did hold. Analogously, we may never point to
the necessary relation between the semantic content of the moral
terms and operators and that of amoral ones, but that is no reason
to deny that there may be necessary relations between the moral
speech-acts and the amoral facts [19-25].
To conclude, my reading of Nietzsche via Hume put in sharp
relief three points: the subjective feeling of human causality gives
a sense of the necessary connection between the O-sentences
and I-sentences. Human beings feel, after a long history of moral
education, that they are the cause of their own actions and they
act, on the beliefs expressed by the I-sentences and as prescribed
by the O-sentences [26-32]. It is necessary for them to assume
causality of will as natural and social beings in order to satisfy their
needs, pursue their interests, and aim at happiness in the context
of socio-political institutions. That in turn assumes they can cause
the facts to change accordingly if these preconditions of free action
are satisfied. The I-sentences in a moral argument thus can be seen
as expressing the facts about their interest, needs, and happiness
as the preconditions of free action[33-42]. However, causality of
free will also implies freedom from factual constraints, whether in
causal relations, or in any other metaphysically necessary relation,
and that is why constitution of a distinct speech-act in the form
of the O-sentences is inevitable, since the action of uttering an
O-sentence is a moral one too [43-55]. Given that causality of free
will is not demonstrable on the factual level, the factual speechacts,
i.e., the I-sentences cannot convey the autonomy presumed in
moral actions. The O-sentences on the other hand, given the shift
of the logical operator from the copula “is” to “ought,” give a sense
that moral action is divorced from the factual constraints. However,
all that they demonstrate is the feeling that human beings cause
their own actions. It is not a formal epistemological ground from
which the O-sentences can be derived from the I-sentences. Yet,
they act on the belief that they ought to cause the action prescribed
by an O-sentence when it contributes to their interest, needs, and
happiness [56-60].
Thus, in the feeling of causa sui, there is no gap to be bridged. It
seems obvious that there are only amoral facts to form beliefs and
act upon. The shift from the I-sentences to the O-sentences, however,
is based on a selective interpretation of some facts. Minimally, those
facts must, in principle, relate to the rules of the moral speech-act,
viz., necessary conditions of free action. Once expressed by a moral
speech-act, those facts are constituted as moral. Thus, the feeling
of causa sui, which divorces the O-sentences from the I-sentences,
re-connects them since some of the I-sentences express the factual
preconditions of this feeling. It seems obvious that human beings
must satisfy some of their needs and pursue their interests to enjoy
freedom of action. Therefore, the I-sentences that express those
needs and interests which are the prerequisites of enjoyment of
freedom of action can be seen as expressing the facts which are
evaluative in themselves. Some of the facts Nietzsche calls typefacts
seem to be promising in this context. The facts relating to
biological-physiological and psychological needs are no doubt
cut out for the job of the inferential shift between the I-sentences
and the O-sentences as such needs must be met so freedom of
action must be enjoyed. To clarify the conclusion, the rules of the
moral speech-act in the O-sentences serve to express the feeling of
causality in the second sense of the term Hume uses. Moral action
must be caused freely, and the feeling of moral freedom finds its
expression in the modal shift from “Is” to “Ought.” As it is the case,
some of the I-sentences express the preconditions of the enjoyment
of freedom in the action prescribed by an O-sentence, and as such,
they can be used to close the gap opened up by the feeling of moral
freedom. Even if free will is not indemonstrable, then, provided that
free will is to be possible at all, if morality is to be possible at all, one
should be able to demonstrate what makes its factual enjoyment
possible. All human beings need food, sleep, shelter, recognition,
education, social interaction and context, among many other
things, so they can enjoy their moral freedom implied in the moral
speech-act [61,62]. The previous sentence above can be taken as an
instance of the conjunction of the basic I-sentences that makes use
of the O-sentences possible. That is to say, in order for the gap to be
possible, in order for the problem of “Is vs. Ought” to be intelligible,
the factual preconditions and implications of the problem must
be possible and finally in order to close up the gap and solve the
problem, one should inquire into what makes its expression
possible. Moral freedom expressed on the linguistic level, thus,
must be traced back to the preconditions of its enjoyment on the
factual level [63,64]. Further study is required to dig deeper into
the litany of the basic needs and preconditions that would make
freedom of action possible. I believe it would be wise to pursue the
naturalist strand of thought in Hume and Nietzsche to pursue the
question at stake [65].
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