[5] Bridging the Is/Ought Divide
If a human being is just a collection of atoms and molecules bumping into each other via only material and efficient causes, then Hume is right; you cannot derive a moral duty from any interactions of them. No matter how many bricks we stack in a circle, they will not magically become a sphere. However, the A-T tradition rejects this mechanistic view in favor of teleology—the idea that things have inherent ends, goals, or purposes (final causality). Telos is the end that a given action drives towards. It is important to understand that teleology in an Aristotelian sense has nothing to do with intelligent design or Paley’s watchmaker argument. We must put this out of our head immediately. This is not an attempt to prove God exists via gaps in scientific knowledge or to show that evolution could not have occurred or that there is inexplicable irreducible complexity in nature. Thomists are often quite critical of such arguments that depend on scraps on the floor as opposed to a main entrée that sits in front of them getting cold. Aristotle put forward the notion that any object can be described by four causes:
Material (matter): what something is made of, its physical composition.
Formal Cause (form): structure, pattern or essence that defines what something is.
Efficient (Agent): source of change be it a force or agent.
Final Cause (purpose): the goal or end purpose for which a thing exists.
In order to better understand these four causes, let us see how they would apply to a statue of David Hume. The material cause would be what the statue is made of (bronze metal or bronze atoms). The formal cause is the shape or design of the statue (resembling his human body as opposed to a pile of metal). Guven the statue is an artifact, its form is accidental, or imposed on it from the outside. The efficient cause is how the statue came to be (an artist sculpted and molded it). The final cause is the purpose of the statue (to honor David Hume and his contributions to philosophy).
Since around the 17th century, science has largely moved towards efficient, and material causation at the methodological exclusion of the other two. It has done well for itself, and is generally interested in what things are made of and how they came to be. But these two causes alone do not provide a comprehensive description of something. For example, we can look at what a car is made of and how it was made in a factory, but this does not tell us the purpose of a car: a machine that can safely and efficiently provide transportation of people and goods from A to B. We can examine the underlying matter that makes up a watch and we can even witness it being made step by step. None of this tells us its end, purpose or telos: to tell time.
In a world without telos, the Humean gulf between “is” and “ought” is infinite in extent. But if the world has telos and we can know the ends or purpose of something, we can move from is to ought because value is intrinsic to what a thing is. Look at the following argument:
- The watch is missing a hand.
- This watch has a warped spring.
Therefore, this is a bad watch.
We have moved from two objective descriptions of a thing to its value. It may appear that we have uncritically moved from is to ought, but this is not the case. The purpose or end of a watch is to tell time. A watch that doesn’t work is objectively broken. A watch that tells time poorly is objectively inferior to one that tells time accurately. Once we know the function of purpose of a thing, “good” and “bad” become objective descriptions of how well something is at achieving its ends or fulfilling the purpose intrinsic to its nature. We can break it down as follows:
- · Fact : The watch has no hands.
- · Value : It is a bad watch.
- · Why? Because we know the function of a watch.
Other examples abound. One purpose of a heart is to pump blood. One end of the human eye is to see. We can know when something is good or bad once we know it function or purpose. I find buying a car a good example because it consists of a mixture of subjective preferences and objective facts that more closely resembles the messy nature of reality.
You can have a subjective preference over the type of vehicle you buy. Maybe you want something big or maybe you want something small that is good on gas. Maybe you want black, but the wife wants red. Maybe you want a minivan, but she wants a pickup truck. You might want something that goes egregiously fast and prefer something more sporty than safe (our wants and desires do not have to correspond to what is best for us) . We could want things that harm us or are not good for us or others (they thwart our ends). Maybe you want a leather interior, but the wife wants cloth. There are a number of subjective features or preferences that go into the car buying process. These will be different from person to person.
So what is the primary purpose of a car? For someone it could be a status symbol or even a way to compensate for some perceived “deficiency” in their physical anatomy. An object can have multiple ends. I am confident that we can all agree that one primary end of a vehicle is to provide safe transportation of people and goods from A to B. Vehicles that are safer and more reliable are thus objectively better given this purpose. A vehicle without anti-lock brakes is objectively less safe than one with anti-lock brakes. This is not a matter of subjective preference. This is a physical fact based on empirical tests of static and kinetic friction. A vehicle without anti- lock brakes, headlights, brake lights, seat belts and airbags is objectively bad compared to one that has all of these things—all other things being equal.
Ed Feser is fond of using a triangle to explain this point and his analogy can also serve double duty in that triangularity as a concept is a powerful argument for the immateriality of the intellect. What is the essence of a triangle? A triangle a closed plane figure with three sides (made of line segments) and three interior angles (which add up to 180 degrees). We can draw good and bad triangles. A good triangle is one that is as close to this description as possible. If each of our line-segments were in the shape of a parabola, this would be an objectively bad triangle. This demonstrates that something can be a triangle (a certain type of thing) even if it fails to perfectly instantiates the essence of triangularity (the nature of a thing). What constitutes a well-drawn triangle is fairly obvious most of the time. A good or bad triangle is based on the definition or nature of what a triangle is. That makes it entirely objective. If you said red triangles are the best or you liked small triangles better than big triangles, those would personal preferences. A modern artist might intentionally draw a skewed triangle, and it can inevitably be a good drawing to them insofar as it expresses some meaning they wish to convey about reality. But it would not be good in the sense of accurately instantiating the essence of what a triangle is and this is not an issue because we only know the triangle is skewed because we understand the objective nature of essence of a triangularity to begin with. Drawing triangles is, of course, not a moral issue. Ed Feser has articulated this position on his blog:
Human beings, like every other natural substance, have a nature or substantial form, and what is good for them – what constitutes their flourishing – is determined by the ends or final causes that follow upon having that sort of nature or substantial form.
A “good” heart is one that pumps blood efficiently. A “bad” root canal is one that fails to remove the infection. These are objective facts, not matters of opinion. Now there is a chief difference here. Only rational beings with intellect and will can engage in morally good or bad decisions. These other examples have been analogies primarily intending to demonstrate that once you know something’s nature, you can decide on whether it is good or bad at fulfilling that function. An eye that cannot see is not morally bad and neither is a heart that pumps blood poorly. Neither can behave otherwise. Even animals cannot engage in moral behaviors. Feser writes:
“If a squirrel were rational, it would be natural and good for it to will to escape predators and to gather nuts for the winter, and unnatural and bad for it to will to offer itself up to predators and to eat only toothpaste or stones. And the latter would be unnatural and bad for it whatever the reason it willed these things—brain damage, genetic anomalies giving rise to odd desires, bad squirrel upbringing, squirrel peer pressure, the influence of squirrel pop culture, arguments from squirrel philosophers who were hostile to natural law, or whatever.”
Human beings on the other hand can choose to pursue the ends our nature intends for us or to go against them. Determining what is morally good or morally bad for humans then, is not a matter of inventing arbitrary rules, but of discovering what facilitates our flourishing given our nature and what thwarts it. Establishing a natural moral law is an objective enterprise insofar as we humans share an essence and we can understand the ends or telos of our nature.
Vinnie