The source of ought

Reading | Ethics

Darren Allen | 2023-03-26

David Hume, one of the earliest critics of rationality, pointed out that you cannot derive an ought from an is, meaning that it is impossible to reach any moral conclusion—about what is right and wrong, or good and bad—from the facts alone. To put this another way: it is impossible to find quality in quantity.

Hume’s ‘is-ought’ problem has remained unsolved since he first presented it, for the simple and transparent reason that it cannot be solved. There are no qualities in isolated facts that are not brought to those facts in the experience of them. The only way to argue that there is, is to argue away the experience.

Take, for example, chocolate: Is it good? There is no rational answer to the question. No ‘goodness’ can be found in a bar of chocolate, or cocoa bean, or theobromine molecule that isn’t brought to them by the person experiencing (e.g. eating) the chocolate.

Even if we say that chocolate is ‘good’ in a purely mechanical sense—it  contains chemicals the body needs (flavanols, anthocyanins and phenolic acids) or finds pleasurable (phenylethylamine, tryptophan, caffeine)—there is no way to determine, from the facts alone, whether we ought to eat it, or at what point we ought to stop.

This applies to everything, even life itself. Is life good? Meaningful? Whatever answer we give to that question hasn’t been discovered in the isolated facts, which is why people with lives that are ‘good’ in a purely factual sense—the rich, for example, the comfortable people, the clever people—so often declare life is meaningless or appear to us as meaningless people.

It’s also why it is impossible to reason people out of their values. Have you ever tried to argue with someone that the life they hate is actually good? Or that the chocolate they don’t like really tastes good? Have you ever tried to rationally explain to someone that they’ve done something wrong? You may have shown them something they did not know by using a rational argument, but you can’t show them that this new information is good or bad.

All of this might seem terribly theoretical, but it is at the heart of so many of our problems, from personal misunderstandings right up to social catastrophes. It’s the reason why the cleverness that the world values so highly can never clear up the mess it has created. It’s at the very heart of the lies we are surrounded by.

Let’s consider a few more examples. Have you noticed the way that every authority in the world—from governments to corporations to schools to councils—appeals to ‘the science’? We have to do such and such a thing, or you have to buy such and such a thing, ‘because of the science’ or something is dangerous or someone is wrong because they are ‘against the science.’

What does this mean? What is ‘the science’? And why is it so wrong to be ‘against’ it? Actually, ‘the science’ just means the literal facts, and it means the logical relationship between the facts. Certainly very useful—only an idiot doesn’t learn to grasp facts and rationally think about them—but there is no quality there. None at all.

Should you eat less meat? Should you send your children to school? Should you stop using your car? Should we lockdown society? Should you eat this manuca honey? Should we impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine? It is true that to make an informed decision about these things—and an infinite number of other such questions—we do need information. We need the ‘scientific’ facts, which is why people who do not want us to make an informed decision work so hard to deprive us of the facts.

But even if we had all the facts (if that were possible; and it’s not), there is no way that they can tell us what to do; because there is no ‘ought’ that can be found in an ‘is.’ Even if we knew, for sure, ‘the science’ of everything, we wouldn’t be one step closer to knowing whether something was good or bad.

And that’s exactly why ‘the science’ is so important: because the people who constantly harp on about it either don’t know what is good or bad, or they don’t want you to know. They want you to believe that the literal facts contain the quality they are telling you they have. In this, rational scientists are no different to religious priests, who do exactly the same thing.

Religion is also all about facts, and people who promote religions are all about making others believe those facts contain quality.

Some modern religions aim to be literally, or rationally true. These include modern Western Buddhism, Stoicism and Shamanism, all of which are shorn of their more fanciful elements—the miraculous floating Buddha, Zeus at the heart of Stoicism and the various madcap exploits of Shamanic gods—and reduced to various rational systems.

But there is no quality in any of these ponderous literalist systems, which is why they are impotent before moral crises and unproductive of quality; or, to put it another way, why their adherents—academics and writers of the modern professional class—are bland, moral cowards and unable to produce anything original, concealing their mediocrity behind clever theorising, trivial, self-regarding confessions and a ceaseless torrent of empty ideas and quotations.

Other religions are less interested in rationality and accept facts which are, to rational analysis, clearly, absurdly false; but here rational falsehood is not the point. Followers of non-rational religions take the incredible facts offered in their Bibles, Torahs and Korans as literally true by crossing over to them on a bridge called ‘belief.’ They believe that God really (factually) exists, or that there really is life after death, or that we really have ten chakras, or that Jesus really died for our sins.

But none of these imaginary ‘facts’ can tell us what good and bad are, or how to behave, even if they are true. The discovery of meditative alpha-waves or the lost city of Atlantis or the spear that pierced Christ’s side are no different to discovering that vitamin D can enhance your immune system.

We may or may not accurately conclude such discoveries are factually true and useful to know, but we can never conclude that they therefore mean that something or other is good or bad, or that it is good or bad to act in a certain way.

This, by the way, is why the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that “the primary question about life after death is not whether it is a fact, but even if it is, what problems that really solves.” What problem does it really solve to know that God exists, or that souls resurrect? None. They just add more facts to our knowledge.

Of course that is precisely why people love miracles so much, the amazing exploits of the mythic Jesus, the mythic Mohammed and the mythic Buddha, and in our secular age, the mythic James Bond, the mythic Spiderman and the mythic Gandalf. These mere ideas entertain them and distract them.

So how are we to know what good and bad are? Or right and wrong? Where are we to find quality, if not in the facts? It certainly cannot be found in emotions, or in so-called ‘intuitions’ based on those emotions, which may be pleasent or unpleasant, but are, finally, also kinds of facts, and just as unreliable. Who can trust an emotional person?

Activity is also a kind of fact, as is physical sensation. They might lead to all kinds of pleasure, or away from all kind of pain, but there is no way, ever, that they can reveal moral truth, or beauty, or any other kind of quality. Nobody who tries to arrive at quality by basing their decisions on what feels nice—physically or emotionally—or by simply running around like a chicken with its head cut off, ever finds it.

Take a look around you. Are the most rational people (including the new Stoics, Buddhists and Shamen), the most joyous, the most moral, the most lovely? What about very religious people? Or extremely emotional people? What about those who don’t stop working? Or those who are only interested in physical pleasure? Do any of these people genuinely inspire you? Do you feel good in their company? Do they strike you as any kind of moral authority?

No. There is no moral truth, no quality, no good or bad, in the mind, the will, the emotions or the body; which is to say, in the self. The self is just a collection of things.

Anyone who asserts that the self is the source of quality, or that it is the final judge of right and wrong, is selfish. They will probably go to great lengths to conceal their selfishness, but if the quality of their lives is based on their thoughts, emotions, actions and sensations, it is based on no quality at all; it is an illusion.

The only place quality can be found, the only ‘thing’ in my actual, real experience that is good, that can tell me what good is, that is neither a fact, nor an emotion, nor an activity, nor physical sensation, is attention. Attention is the only experience within my self which is not, ultimately, self.

But here we encounter a tremendous difficulty, because there are two kinds (or ‘modes’) of attention: one is thing-like and the other is quality-like. What I mean is that your attention can be tightly focused on a factual thing, or it can be softly focused on an experience of quality.

The reason I say ‘tight’ (or ‘hard’) and ‘soft’ (or ‘loose’) is because the more you concentrate, the more you enter the ‘factual mode’ of attention. If you stare at something in the room, hard, it becomes more and more ‘thing like,’ separated from all the other things in the room and only related to them through thing-like relations.

If, however, you loosely regard something, relaxing your attention and taking everything else in with it—the rest of the room—the individual quality of the object starts to become more apparent.

This is what less civilized people do (the Navajo have two ways of looking, a hard look for hunting and a soft look for taking in the beauty of a scene) and what our greatest artists do, and what they try to express with their work. To the hard-focusing mind van Gogh’s chair is just a strangely drawn thing, kind of pretty, ‘distinctive’ perhaps, or ‘original,’ or ‘creative’—certainly valuable—but the strangeness remains a work of imagination, just a different kind of fact. To the soft-focusing mind, however, the chair expresses a quality which is actually there.

The reason people fundamentally disagree about such things, about the quality of things—paintings, say, or songs, or faces, or even ideas—is that one or both of them are not actually experiencing its quality. Their attention is focused on the thing, and whatever emotions and thoughts they associate with the thing.

Because their attention is thing-focused, quality is not just absent from their consideration, but they have no way of knowing it is absent. They think they understand, they have an emotion of understanding, it looks like they understand; but they do not understand.

Hard-attention doesn’t really understand anything. It does not know what good and bad are, it doesn’t know what beauty is, or truth, and it doesn’t ever really know what to do. All it can do is ‘work out’ what to do, or try to, and this never really works. It just creates more problems, which the concentrated self then tries to deal with in the same way.

Over time, hard-attention tends to get harder and harder, which makes the self harder and harder. This is why we call such people ‘up-tight’ and ‘stiff.’ They might be sloppy and slovenly, or have a feeble, watery will, but there is something about them which is horribly inflexible, heavy, humourless, dull, which expresses itself in the tone of their voices, the way their faces and bodies move. To put it another way; you are what you notice.

Attention doesn’t just manifest in appearance, but in action. The stiff self produces nothing of originality—it says nothing really new, it does nothing really new, it thinks nothing really new—because it is forever focused on things, and the ideas they give rise to, which can never be new.

When I focus, hard, on a tree for example, separating it from its context, giving it a name, it becomes knowable—and manageable—because it is acquiring a form I have learnt. I recognise the tree-as-thing because I have learnt to do so. This recognition is, of course, useful, but it can never really be original, because it’s not mine.

The tree itself, however, the mysterious being of it, blended with the whole moment, comes to me direct. To the extent it does come to me direct, it inspires absolutely new ideas. These will also have something of the known about them, but at their heart there is something genuinely new.

Stiffs, naturally, are unable to see this. This is why they often tell us that ‘there is no such thing as originality,’ that all of culture is really just a clever rehash. They focus entirely on those aspects of culture which are rehashed—such as the various ideas and expressions which Shakespeare took from others—and conclude that, really, the creativity of the genius is really a refined form of plagiarism.

Which is exactly what the creativity of stiffs is. All they can do is move things around, rephrase them, give them a shiny new gloss, but never, ever bring any fresh quality to the heart of what they do. It might be terribly clever, even unusual, but with the tight, selfish, thing-human, there is always a sense that nothing original, nothing actually new, is really being offered here. There are no shockingly original revelations, there is no bright laughter as we recognize quality. There is nothing but stuff.

Soft consciousness is quite different, but not for the reason that stiffs believe. Hard consciousness, reducing soft-consciousness to a thing, takes it to be a thing, which can be possessed, by buying it, or by learning about it, or arrived at, through some kind of technique or practice.

This is how modern Buddhists and Shamen view ‘enlightement,’ as something which can be studied, by reading books, or  achieved by spending a few months in Tibet or ingesting sufficient quantities of Psilocybe mexicana.

Not that such things are without truth-value, but consciousness is not a thing; it is not an event in time, but experience itself. The truth, or depth, of my experience is not a moment-thing, which a witnessing-thing can access through certain kind of knowledge-things or action-things.

So what is it? And if it’s not a literal thing which can be communicated, why speak of it at all?

There are two ways to present the truth. One is to indirectly express what it is; this is the purpose of art, or fiction, or myth. The other is to break down the lies tight consciousness clings to, and let the truth speak for itself.

It is impossible for a short account like this to break down a hard self, to break the heart of the reader, to cause them real pain, but life will do that. Here we need only note, by way of conclusion, that once the tight self has been broken down enough, moral decisions, like all ‘good ideas’ happen by themselves.

This is why it is so useless to try and be inspired, to go looking for the right thing to do, or the right way to live. All wisdom, all genius, all right action comes of itself, naturally, without having to think, or try, or even decide.

Good people are not those who make decisions the world universally agrees are moral, but those for whom there are no decisions. There may be, in the most intense moments of our life (dramatised in the most intense stories), epic moral decisions to make, but the good life is characterised by an absence of choice, because the self—which turns possible outcomes into things and facts about which paths to take to reach them—is no longer in charge.

Think of it this way. You are walking along the top of a cliff when you see someone fall into a cranny, beyond reach. This person is unhurt, but the tide is coming in, they cannot swim and in an hour they will drown. It will take you thirty minutes to run, along one thin rocky path, back to town, and thirty minutes for the emergency services to arrive.

What decisions do you make? Anyone who chose anything other than ‘run as fast as you can along the path,’ anyone who dawdled, or who indulged themselves in decision-making, would be considered immoral.

All of life is like this. We can persuade ourselves that it is not, because we cannot see humankind is drowning and because we are trained to persuade ourselves that we don’t care whether it does or not.

 

This piece appears in Darren’s collection of radical pieces, Ad Radicem.