An Explanation of the Normative-Descriptive Distinction (and the varieties of normativity)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 มี.ค. 2020
- This is a video lecture about the different between descriptive claims or laws, on the one hand, and normative claims or laws, on the other. I also explain three different varieties of normativity: the moral, the prudential, and the epistemic. This video was originally produced for use in an introductory level philosophy course, Introduction to Ethics. But it is a stand-alone explanation, so it can be used in any other context.
It might be because I listen to Jeffrey's videos at 1.75 x speed, but he makes philosophy quite exciting.
It's the two fold effect of his being a good communicator who is himself quite interested and excited about philosophy. His excitement becomes persuasively infectious.
IMHO Jeffrey makes philosophy quite exciting at any speed.
How are you writing it like that? Is this a camera trick? What sorcery is this?
I get asked this a lot. Here is how: th-cam.com/video/6_d44bla_GA/w-d-xo.html
The normative fact is this ought to be used as a massive trolling opportunity. The descriptive fact is that it sadly wasn't.
THANK YOU! BEST EXPLANATION I HAVE SEEN!
Wow !!!! Excellent illustrations and explanations.
Very clear and informative. Thank you.
One important thing is that if you want to truly say that anything should be a certain way, you must first accept another "should" statement to be true as an assumption.
Interested in this but I don’t quite understand, could you rephrase this? Or give an example?
@@JordanRSilva-um3di Let's say you should save someone's life. Why? Well, that could be because it's bad for them to die. Why? Well, this could be because they would no longer be able to experience happiness and that it would make their friends and family sad. Why should they be happy? Well, because happiness is good. Why is happiness good? ... Well, it just is. It seems to feel good to us, so those of us that are moral hedonists conclude that happiness IS what is good for us. There isn't really a proof for this. We just take it to be true as an axiom and see what other conclusions we can come to by assuming this one thing is true. You can't get to the conclusions without metaphysical axioms to base them on.
I agree with you here, and I like to think as a moral archaeologist. Where did these 'shoulds' come from? Say 20,000 years ago when we were hunter/gatherers, if a man saw a member of another tribe drowning, he would have no sense that he 'should' save him. So are we inventing 'shoulds', or discovering them? To discover something assumes it was there already, waiting to be found. Did moral laws exist before humans? Or are we inventing moral laws, like we invented the steam engine? when petrol and nuclear power came along we ditched steam without a second thought. Could we, in 200 years believe that if someone is preventing you doing what you want to do, the moral thing is just to kill him? No one would blame you then, because it's an obvious fact that he was stopping you doing your thing. Crazy, but food for thought.
awesome description thank you.
I love the implied verbiage that Beyonce is responsible for global moral conflicts HAHAAH
Descriptive is to Normative is proportional to "ought" is to "is" or "fact" is to "value"
Great clarity here. Thanks.
The underlying idea seems to be that self-preservation is prudentially, and not morally, justified. That I think is problematic. For example, ordinarily people should not kill themselves. Is it because it will be imprudent of them to do so, or there is a moral wrong we commit when we take our own lives (where such an act will be a wrong). Or, euthanasia is justified (or opposed) for practical reasons or because it affects the moral dimension?
Is this formulation correct?
"If the earth revolves around the sun, then the sun ought to rise in the morning."
Can you have a description as the antecedent and an epistemic norm as the consequent in a hypothetical conditional? I'm asking because I understand that Hume's is-ought distinction says that you can't have an ought proposition after an is proposition unless there is some kind of sentiment - but this is with morality. Does the same restriction apply to topics related to knowledge, that is would the antecedent be a rational justification to have such epistemic norms? Thanks
The way I understand it, it's a nonsensical statement. It barely works even in natural language.
Epistemic norm in the consequent would be something like "you ought to believe this fact about a sun, that a sun behaves such and such". Sun itself owes us nothing and ought to do nothing. The consequent is still just a descriptive claim (is proposition), just stated funnily.
The only counter-argument would be some kind of teleological view of nature. If there is a God, and the God commands the Sun, then the Sun ought to behave as God commands it. Something like that. Modern descriptions do not use teleology to explain the behaviors of dead nature. Famously, Aristotle used it in his Four Causes. We've killed God since then.
So you would need metaphysics that allows dead nature to follow epistemic commands. In that way it's nonsensical to me.
@@mikoajgutowski7747 Thank you that was a very good response. I agree that if such a statement were expressed by a speaker it would suggest s/he believes in some kind of teleology, but the statement itself is ambiguous as there is no significant reason to employ such things, at least in this context. So yes, the inclusion of "ought" in the consequent" is rather strange.
I guess reformulating this can be clearer if it were framed as a case concerning justification and propositional attitudes. We remove "ought" for "will":
S believes that "the sun will rise in the morning" if and only if the earth revolves around the sun.
other than the stuff the other guy brought up my only issue is that the sun rises because of earths spin not it’s orbit lol
@@tritto-bk3ug lol that's true too, and you can count in that factor. I was just worried about normative thinking.
It seems to me that the epistemic examples of Normative Claims are also “Descriptive “ claims. Take the given example that the sun rises in the East. Obviously that is something we ought to believe from observed data, but isn’t it just simply a ‘descriptive’ claim?
No because it’s the difference between what is true and what you should believe. The very fact that the sun rises in the east is descriptive and has nothing to do with belief or people or evidence or whatever it’s just fact. The choice for us as human beings to look at the evidence gathered by those before us and believe that it rises in the east is the normative. A better way to put it that I have only just arrived at is that you are mistaking one claim as both descriptive and normative rather than two seperate claims that would represent either one. By this I mean you are combing the descriptive claim that the sun rises in the east with the normative claim that you should believe that it does. These two are not the same. The sun rises in the east is a shaky example anyway because East is an arbitrary direction devised by humans. I wouldn’t say it’s true that the Sun rises in the east per say it really only rises in what we deemed the east to be. Really only semantics but with something like that being more specific is easier for arguments sake. But you could make the same argument with any way you phrase it I guess.
Could you give me examples of statements based on descriptive and epistomic normative statements , about the sun
I do get the idea behind it,but find myself , confused between descriptive and epistomic statements
Well explained !
Question. Are there different types of descriptive laws as well?
Hadn't really thought about it. The person to ask would be someone who specializes in philosophy of science, I believe. But, off the top of my head, maybe: physical laws, biological laws, economic laws, psychological laws, etc.
@@profjeffreykaplan Thanks, I will check that out. But there was another question I had in mind that led to this question. But before addressing that question let me coin a term here, mathematical theology. And by that term one can contrast mathematical theology versus normal theology. For in normal theology (as I understand it) includes divine revelation in addition to human reason, where philosophy may consider the divine but does so strictly on the basis of human reason.
So mathematical theology is sort of an halfway point between these two were one applies human reason to divine revelation but does not use that divine revelation as a proof (e.g. to be taken on faith) but rather as the subject of human reason. Or to say it another way does the supposed divine revelation makes sense if just examined based on human reason. That is not to judge that divine revelation as being either true or false or good or bad (which would be presumptuous to do if indeed that revelation is indeed divine) but rather to better understand it and see if it makes sense from just the stand point of human reason alone, even if that understanding may fall shy of constituting proofs, maybe it can provide insights.
So if one looks at say a passage from say the Bible (or any other source that claims to be divine relation) one can examine it not to say is it true or is it false or even if it is a divine revelation or not but merely does that make sense and if it is indeed true what might that imply about other things. So whether this type of approach to divine revelation falls under theology or philosophy I am not sure, but it does not require faith but only reason other than the faith to think such considerations are worth the time and effort to consider (albeit that if one does believe that it is indeed divine revelation they may be more likely to be so inclined to think that but even so one can lay that belief aside and just examine the passage in the light of human reason alone, even if that may not always be an easy thing to do, one can at least attempt to do so.)
And so sorry about the long segue into my other question but it seems if not necessary it might at least be helpful to make that before proceeding to that question as to where I am coming from in considering this question.
So here is my other question that came to mind:
Now there is a passage in Isaiah that says.
Isa 11:2
The Spirit H7307 of the LORD H3068 will rest H5117 on Him,
The spirit H7307 of wisdom H2451 and understanding, H998
The spirit H7307 of counsel H6098 and strength, H1369
The spirit H7307 of knowledge H1847 and the fear H3374 of the LORD. H3068
As such we have three groups of twos. In one group (say call it the left group) one has wisdom, counsel, and knowledge. in the other group (say call it the right group) one has understanding, strength, and fear of the LORD.
So when I watched you presentation I couldn't help from noting that it seems these tree normative cases seems to match up well with those on the right with moral seems to go well with the fear of The LORD, the spirit of strength matching well the the prudential, and the epistemic matching quite well with spirit of understanding .
That made me wonder if perhaps there might be three types of descriptive as well that might match with understanding, counsel, and knowledge. hence my question. But before leaving the question unanswered for the moment one might speculate that perhaps there are (reverse engineering them from this passage as an merely an exercise to see where that might lead). So knowledge would be declarations of facts. Counsel would be some authority that more knowledgeable about those facts, say expertise. And wisdom comes from that epistemic understanding of why one should believe something and thus to be wise if to believe those things tat are true and to reject what is not true and to say open minded about those things that the jury may still be out.
as such I was wondering if philosophers have come up with somewhat equivalent types or categories in regard to descriptive statements. Also, this serves as an example of what I am calling mathematical technology (for the lack of a better name) in that whether one believes that these words in Isaiah are from God or not one can still examine them in the light of reason alone to see if they might make sense and doing so that may or may not cause one to alter their belief as to whether they are divine revelations or not but regardless one can perhaps have a better understanding of what the passage has to say in its own right aside from its origin and maybe in doing so that can be food for thought that might shed light on other things as well, all the more so if indeed the source is from God.
@@RonLWilson I think there's a term for that! As I understand it, using reason to conclude things about God without scripture is called, "natural theology." When you introduce scripture, and you use reason to conclude other things not explicitly stated, that's "scholasticism"
I feel like by definition there can’t be. At most you could categorise but I don’t see how the concept of truth or fact can have different types that are different in essence, like there is with normative claims.
Thanks mate.
Well explained
Wait wait, is this man writing all of his notes BACKWARDS for the camera?
He is also writing with left hand.
No. th-cam.com/video/6_d44bla_GA/w-d-xo.html
As per his adjoining video to this one, maybe you "should" apply Occam's Razor to this belief that he's writing backwards. What would a simpler explanation be? An example of an "Epistemic" law!
@@Nyghl0 Only really applies if you can think of a simpler hypothesis.
my brother in christ he is obviously writing normal and then flipping it in editing.
are descriptive statements and positive statements the same? If so, what about prescriptive statements and normative statements?
Fact-value distinction(Wikipedia)
Fact-positive or descriptive
Value-normative or prescriptive
@@kredit787 So they are just different names having the same meaning?
@@nothingchanges014 Two categories, one category is when we describe/explain(descriptive) how things are objectively and second category is when we evaluate/assign our own meaning(normative) to things subjectively. If this isn't clear I give up.
At a certain point, it seems the distinction between moral and prudential normative statements falls apart. Really, all normative statements are essentially "moral." What is prudential is ultimately moral. Prudence or frugality are actually moral statements saying that you should strive to maximize profits, or something to that effect.
Can you please give us lecture on David Hume's justice?
I thought you were going to say "aesthetic" under the normative category: things we ought to like.
Aesthetic is subjective, there’s no objective reason why we ought to like something. There might be qualities that a piece of art possesses for example, that some might say you ought to like, like an emotional response it evokes or maybe it has a rich history or something but that would be all stuff that some might say is of personal benefit to you which is just prudential. Honestly I’d say anything aesthetic would fall under prudential because it’s really just a matter of personal benefit.
Normative is grouped into moral, prudential n epistemic.....
I don't believe in prudential normative facts; I think they can and should be reformulated as something of the form: "The best way to serve your interests, and yours alone, would be to do X".
You could also try to get rid of epistemic normative facts by doing something like this: replace "given the evidence you ought to believe X" with "given the evidence X is (implied by) the best explanation".
You can make tha a descriptive statement, but it incorporates an assumption about what your interests are, which are subjective. Similarly, moral normative statements could be reformulated as a statement of what is subjectively moral, and a descriptive statement of what action achieves the most moral outcomes.
@@artmarkham3205What "your interests" are is certainly not immediately clear (your happiness? preferences? moral status?). But seeing as these "prudential facts" are distinct from morality on Kaplan's view, it seems to me there isn't actually a right answer; it's just a matter of definition. Which means prudential facts should be reformulated descriptively, with the intended definition of "your interests" explicitly or implicitly specified.
instead
As for trying to evaluate moral statements descriptively, you cannot ever remove the normative language. Take "you shouldn't murder". We can reformulate this as "murdering is bad" or "murdering is wrong", but we still have "bad" and "wrong" which are normative properties.
Sir which course btw?
11:24 'do do'
Very clear and informative video, but also essentially wrong: There is no such thing as a normative fact. That is a contradictio in adiecto. Only opinions can be normative. Facts cant be by definition. Facts are independent of opinions. Facts are objectively true, independent of the observers judgement. Facts dont even need an observer. Normative statements/opinions, on the other hand, cant exist without anyone judging.
If I saw this 20 years ago….
Isnt the earth is a sphere a fact and therefore a descriptive statement?
The statement he is referring to isn't that "the earth is a sphere" but rather a level above that, that "the earth is a sphere and so therefore you should believe that the earth is a sphere. Because it is."
You ought to believe what people in authority tell you to believe, not what your eyes and senses tell you. Good people believe in authority and obey it. I know because I learned it in mandatory indoctrination camps as a child.
What if we just got rid of epistemic norms as being objective truths and just say that they are useful tools for limiting the number of potential explanations to those that seem most rational and that ultimately the reason we have them is because they have worked for us in the past. One could, for example, multiply unnecessary entities ad infinitum (such as the case with Meinong's jungle) but that ultimately you'll just end up with an infinite option of explanations and infinite amounts of entities to account for. So epistemic norms arent objective, they are just preferable to their alternatives by most people because they tend to, on average, lead to explanations that are usually right.
My own view is that if you are going to deny that there are objective moral and prudential norms, then, as you say, you have to also deny that there are objective epistemic norms. That is the best route for the moral skeptic to go. But this is really, truly and incredibly radial, wild view, when you think about it. No objective epistemic norms? That means that believing that the earth is flat is not truly irrational. I believe it is round, someone else belives it is flat, neither of us is doing the right thing, and neither of is us making a mistake. There are no mistaken beliefs. There is no rationality. That is just what is means to get rid of objective epistemic norms. There are no non-relative standards by which to evaluate any beliefs are correct and others is as incorrect. And, actually, when you think about it this view seems to be quite nearly self-refuting. The view that there do not exist objective epistemic norms, is that view put forward as *correct*? As the view that one *ought* to adopt? Surely it is. Surely that is the point of rational discourse. But if the view is correct, then it is not correct, because no view is correct according to the view itself. If there are no epistemic norms, then it cannot be said that one ought to believe that there are no epistemic norms.
@@profjeffreykaplan when you say "correct" do you mean "true?" One can say that no view is irrational, but some views are more likely to be true than others. So if we know which views are more likely to be true than others (such as justified beliefs), we can say that the most effective way of ensuring that your beliefs are more likely to be true is to justify them. In which case it would just be a descriptive claim about how knowledge is acquired, not a prescriptive claim. We could even adopt Joyce's fictionalism for epistemic norms. We could make believe these norms in academia since most of the people going there do actually want to generate knowledge. I dont see why that couldn't work for both the domains of morality and epistomology
@@philip8802 Something like that could work, I suppose. But I think it is worth emphasizing how much has been abandoned by giving up objective epistemic norms. Let's assume, as you suggest, that we understand 'truth' as entirely descriptive. We can then say which views are more likely that others to be true. But, of course, there is nothing better, on this view, about truth. Suppose that someone prefers false beliefs. We can't say that they are doing anything wrong, because we have abandoned an objective notion of epistemic wrongness. This seems to me to suggest the following, perhaps: we have revealed that the notion of truth that we are working with is very much normatively loaded--I feel like saying that if truth is not in any agent-independent sense better than falsehood, then we aren't talking about truth and falsehood; part of what makes true things true is that they are the beliefs that one ought to strive for.
@@profjeffreykaplan
I have no presumption that you are going to respond to this 3 years out (or even, indeed, that you still hold this view 3 years later), but I'll compose a response for whoever stumbles on this thread next.
It seems to me that epistemic normative claims are purely descriptive claims made from the perspective of someone who believes that pursuit of truth is an intrinsic moral good.
Which is to say, that epistemic normative claims are just morally normative claims with extra steps.
In this way, you can demonstrate that all of the "types" of normative claims are, in fact, the same type of normative claim, just routed through a different commonly-held normative belief.
Prudentially normative claims are just descriptive claims that _assume_ that you "should" want to live a long and healthy life in comfort and happiness. Most people do, but all of the normative quality of this claim comes from this morally normative presumption.
And likewise, epistemologically normative claims are just descriptive statements made under the presumption that the morally normative statement "you should believe what is true" is true.
These are widely held beliefs, but they aren't some sort of unique class of normative statement. They're just morally normative claims with extra steps.
@@fieldrequired283 I agree with you on one point but disagree with another. I agree that there can’t exist objective epistemic norms. At most they achieve a sort of localised objectivity, that is to say that something subjectively underpinned becomes objective in and only in the context of where the subjective underpinnings exist. For example it would be objectively wrong to murder someone in terms of morality and prudence but is the act objectively wrong at its conceptual core, no. Right and wrong aren’t naturally existing phenomena. The thing that I disagree with, and i’m not sure if this was even your intention, is your reduction of the types of normative claims to gift wrapped moral norms. There isn’t a normative claim that exists that you can’t find a moral foundation for but prudential, epistemic and other normative claims are conceptually far removed enough from just morality to still be worth using. I imagine it’s kind of counter productive to take a normative claim, dig to it’s core moral principle and then discuss or classify or whatever. At that point it’s not even the same thing anymore.
Thia guy knows destiny's child .
i/e
Plz come to main point to long and to much example sample take 1 example and come to main point
Well explained