Another thought on those ontological arguments

[feotakahari]

Edit: okay, I’ve been schooled in the comments. Leaving this up for documentation.

I believe strongly in the is-ought gap. If you start solely with premises about what "is," you cannot reach a logical proof of what "ought to be." You need to have at least one premise about what "ought to be" and work from there. And I believe it works in reverse, too--statements about what "ought to be" cannot be used as your sole proof of what "is."

I propose that "if-then" statements face a similar gap. A simple statement that "X is true" is fundamentally different than a statement that "if X is true, then Y is true." If you start solely with "if X, then Y," then you will never be able to prove Y. Conversely, separately proving that X is true and Y is true does not prove "if X, then Y." The failure of so many ontological arguments is that they start entirely with "if X, then Y" premises while aiming for an "X is true" conclusion.

(Note that this isn't an exact parallel. If X is true, and Y is true, then the statement "if X, then not Y" can be proven false. I don't see a way to prove a falsehood from either side of the is-ought gap.

Comments

[discoursedrome]

One exception to this: if you have "either X or not-X", then you can prove Y by showing that "if X then Y" and "if not-X then Y", which is the binary form of the get-er-done proof method where you split stuff into a bunch of cases and prove each case individually.

[feotakahari]

Ugh. You've got me there.

[entanglingbriars]

One of the reasons I flirt with theism is that God seems to me to be the only way bridge the is-ought gap; God has the power to ontologically imbue the universe with morality and take morality out of the purely subjective.

[feotakahari]

I don't think subjectivity is necessarily an issue when talking about things humans do to humans. If rocks aren't imbued with the same morality humans hold, then maybe humans don't need to behave morally towards rocks, but humans have enough overlapping mental structures that we can take "I feel that it's wrong to do this to me" and establish "I feel that it's wrong to do this to other people." (Obviously, if we're not identical, then moral behavior towards each of us may not be identical, but we're not all alien, either.)

[sigmaleph]

if you're talking about the logical if, 'Y is true' implies 'if X then Y' for any X.

If you are not talking about logical propositions, I don't think there's a sharp distinction between 'X is true' statements and 'if A then B' statements. 'Gold is denser than water' is equivalent to 'a mass of gold has a smaller volume than the same mass of water', because that's just what the word 'denser' means. Maybe I am implicitly using the definition of density as an 'if-then' statement to go from one to the other, but then I can get 'if-then' statements for free just definining words, so the meaningfulness of the gap is kinda doubtful.