New Stone Age hunters 

            (credit: American Museum of Natural History, via Wikimedia Commons) 

      

                                                          Neanderthal Woman 

                                   (credit: Bacon Cph, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Deriving “Ought” from “Is”

Most modern philosophers and scientists say that you can't derive "ought" from "is". They mean that you can't get any definitions of what "good" or "bad" are from any of the facts in the real world. The following argument shows otherwise.

1. First, understand Cultural Anthropology. A society’s whole system of beliefs, habits, customs, etc. for programming its citizens to act, survive, and multiply is called its culture. A tribe’s culture is its set of memories of past experiences plus the programs that people of the tribe have found useful for sifting through those memories when they meet up with a challenge and need to devise a way to respond to it. A tribe's memories of past events, along with its familiar methods for handling daily life and occasional challenges enables it to survive and flourish over the long haul. Useful strategies for healing illness, getting food, picking mates, raising kids, etc. are all in there.                                          

2. The most important long-term programs that the members of a tribe work out over generations are the most general ones. These allow us, once we've learned them, to react effectively to situations which may not be exactly like the situations our ancestors had to deal with, but which have general patterns in them that are like the patterns in the problems that our ancestors faced. For example, we may never have had to deal with a tsunami, but if our children do, and they have been told what our grandparents told us, i.e. “When the animals head for the high ground, you follow.”, we and our culture will go on. I may never have seen a sea leopard before, but if I know where every mammal’s heart has to lie, I know where to shoot to kill it.  Even more generally, I know “danger” when I see it. In short, general principles that work in the real world are valuable. We teach them to our kids because they get reliably good results.

3. The largest, deepest, most general, and most profound principles we have are what we call our values. They tell us how to design the program of actions and interactions that we engage in, day in, day out, with other members of our society and with plants, animals, and objects in our environment. Our values help us to prioritize – decide what matters, what doesn’t, and what to do about it – every minute of every day.    

4. We live by our values; if they work, they guide us well as we design all our other routines for living. If the values are well-matched to the principles of reality, then they will guide us to survive and flourish, generation to generation. Smart values make the evolving of our culture happen in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way. Manageable change. Over centuries, wise values steer a society past pain. That is all they were ever meant to do. Values control how we pick and modify our behavior patterns, and our behavior patterns enable us to dodge hazards and seize opportunities in the real world, so that we survive, generation after generation. Therefore, our values must be in tune with the deep operating principles of the real, physical universe. So that we survive over the long haul of millions of people and thousands of years. 

5. Now, second, understand the deepest principles of the physical universe: entropy and quantum uncertainty. In essence, they tell us that life is always both hard and uncertain. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) says that life will always be uphill. Metals corrode, fabrics rot, animals and people die. Suns burn out, galaxies scatter, and planets crumble to dust. The universe is burning out. Always. Life swims against that current. Thus, life is hard and always will be. Then, quantum theory tells us life is not only hard, but also unpredictable. It sometimes “goes sideways”. And there is no way to devise a system which will give us the foresight we’d need to keep us from running into all the possible jolting surprises. The future is always uncertain. Our values guide us to better odds of surviving uncertainty, but never to total security.    

6. Now, third, put Physics together with Anthropology. In tribes that have worked out effective systems of values and behaviors, the people keep expanding and thriving in spite of the hardness and scariness of life because their values are designed to handle adversity (entropy) and uncertainty. The values that guide us to handle entropy are courage and wisdom. If a society teaches young people courage – to seek challenge, take in new territory, work out new ways of handling challenges so that courage and “grit” are simply habits they live by – then that society is more likely to survive, flourish, reproduce, and pass its way of life on to its children. If it does not handle reality well, it dies out. Maybe because of a surprise in the environment (a drought, a plague, etc.), but more probably because another society that is more vigorous overwhelms and absorbs it and its out-of-date way of life, i.e. it loses a war. 

7. The other value that has proved to be important to use along with courage for dealing with life’s adversity (entropy) is wisdom. If we only programmed our kids to seek challenge, many of them would end up dying young because they would be constantly engaging in risky behaviors that would cause them to die young. Therefore, we must also teach them to assess the potential risks and benefits of every venture they may be contemplating, and to take only those risks for which the probabilities of success look high and the probabilities of disaster, low. “Take risks, kid, but make them calculated risks.” Cost-benefit analysis. The behavior patterns that arise in tribes that value both courage and wisdom have proven effective in the survival struggle. Teach the kids: venture, but venture with a smart plan. Even in myths, ancient people's life guides, Jason (courage) needs Chiron (wisdom), Arthur needs Merlin, Luke needs Yoda, and Katniss needs Haymitch, etc.

8. As the balance of courage plus wisdom enables societies to deal with adversity, so the value we call "freedom" enables us to respond to uncertainty. Teaching kids to value freedom encourages every citizen to develop her/his talents (e.g. carpentry, math, athletics, art, cooking, healing, etc.). This gives a society a wide range of choices ready to use as it faces the challenges that the future will throw at it. Note, however, that no one versatile individual will ever come close to mastering all the skills that his society may need to call on in some future crisis. Our best bet as a community is to include a variety of people with many different skills and lifestyles so that no matter what the future throws at us, odds are that someone in town will be able to handle the crisis and guide us through it. Therefore, valuing freedom means encouraging the maximum variety of people and lifestyles that we can. Freedom, as a value taught in our society, is just a way of increasing our tribe’s versatility and survival odds over the long haul.  

9. As wisdom is the value that we teach each new generation in order to balance their courage and keep it from leading them into taking foolhardy chances and dying young, so the value that we teach to counterbalance and stabilize the effects of freedom is love. Courage alone would destroy the young persons who lived only by it; freedom alone would tear the community apart as many different kinds of people with different lifestyles would slip into cliques and grow uncaring about their neighbors. Prejudice, riots, then society breaking up would inevitably come. Like Wisdom trains and focuses courage, Love trains and focuses freedom. Therefore, love your neighbor, not in spite of the ways in which s/he is different from you, but because of those same weird ways. Someday in the uncertain, dangerous future, those ways, weird as they seem to you now, may save your community or nation – plus you, and everyone that you care about.

10. The values of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are not just sweet-sounding. They provide guidelines for designing ways of life that work. Many varied jobs, done well, make a team, a community. In the long run, for our whole species, if we want to survive, these values simply make sense. Therefore, being kind isn’t just nice. Over the long haul, it’s our best bet. And being good means being brave, wise, creative, and loving, or at least respectful – in balance – all at once. These traits are seen as virtues in every culture on Earth because only cultures that have them have made it this far. Together, these virtues form the values-base that guides all successful human societies as they act, talk, and think. These virtues ultimately aim at one simple goal: to survive. Using these virtues, each culture works out its own way of life, by trial and error, over generations of hard experience – to suit its territory. Many cultures are possible in any given environment, but all of them will share these large values because the values work.

 

Entropy/hardship + Quantum uncertainty/hazard + Cultural evolution 

 

                               ==►  Morality (courage, wisdom, freedom, and love)                

         

In short, these values in all present cultures are just general life principles tailored to the local demands of the physical universe itself.

 

("Ought" has now been derived from "Is".) 

QED        

                                                            Modern bow hunter 

                                            (credit: BelleDeesse, via WallpaperUP) 

                                  Actors portraying cavepeople in movie 10,000 B.C. 

                                                       (credit: the Guardian)