THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

We ‘ought’ to develop cooperative institutions, even if we can’t know what we ‘ought’ to accomplish using them.

—“As Hume has made abundantly clear, there can be no basis in physical nature of any values or norms. The is-ought gap is unbridgeable.”—

Not quite sure how to say this, but the reason I disagree with Hume is that he means ‘universal theories (“is” statements) exist for physically transformational (physics – say of geology), genetically heuristic (plans and animals), and memory-heuristic (man or AI) entities.

However (a) the arbitrary precision for any system on that spectrum decreases from the physical-transformational to the memory-heuristic. Meaning that the precision of predictability of any instance decreases as we progress – gasses are hard to predict, and humans are harder to predict than gasses. We can make general statements (theories) about man, but we cannot make specific predictions about any given human. And (b) for sentient creatures, given what “is” both in the universe, and in our physical properties, we can choose from a variety of strategies, but we cannot know which we ‘ought’ to choose, because if we claim an ‘ought’ as a universal strategy for all of man, all choices are to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others, because we are sufficiently unequal to compete on equal terms. So any universal strategy ‘harms’ some body of people.

However (c), assuming we desire both the best competitive choices for every group AND the best overall strategy for man, we can construct institutions that allow cooperation between heterogeneous moral codes (reproductive and evolutionary strategies), such as the market, because in such institutions we can cooperate on means, if not ends, and that through diverse pursuit of ends we can still ‘advance’.

Yes it is not possible to select which theory might be right, or which human strategy might be right – those are synonyms. But we can choose what strategy might be wrong: chaos, violence and dysgenia that forbid the accumulation of capital sufficient for our long term prosperity.