A baby falls into the pond. The fall is a fact, but that does not
mean I ought to help. An is does not connect to an ought. Logically,
this is correct.
But our human nature—our psychology—does join the is to the ought.
Some say that is one of nature's "deceptions." There are loads of tricks it plays on us—e.g., how memory is not a video recording but gets polluted with errors.
In that case, psychology and logic are in conflict.
Not all accept the conflict notion; they argue that psychology is just doing things its way.
You can accept one or the other, or that, as we can have conflicted feelings and motives, each of us is somewhere in the middle.
We must remember that, despite the ought and moral is contradiction, nearly all people, most of the time, do treat a fact as giving rise to a moral mandate. Does their psychology lead to that? It can. But they can bypass that and do it out of laziness, making a shortcut of it.
G. E. Moore told us that we can only know good when we intuitively see it, but we have no way to define it. We intuit rather than define. We cannot define it in terms of something else: health, happiness, well-being, spirituality. None of these mean the same thing. Good and health, or happiness, or well-being, or spirituality, or whatever, do not mean the same thing. Good might result in those things, but that is what they are—results. Poison might be bad, but if I take it, I might kill off a disease and be better off. It still means the poison was bad. The good result is a separate matter.
If an ought could give rise to an is, logically and/or psychologically it is going to give rise to a fuzzy is. It is not useful enough to count as a morality that should be taken seriously.
Back to Moore. Seeing good is not the same thing as really seeing
good. What if your faculties are deceived by some spiritual goblin?
It is paradoxically good to see that your seeing good is imperfect
and uncertain.
To say, "I see good; therefore, I ought to be good," is as bad as, "A tile is red and square, so a tile ought to be square and red." This is the famous point that you cannot get a moral ought from an is. The fact that John needs help from you does not, in itself, show that you morally must help him.
That issue would imply that we are deceived by something—whether it is by a goblin or whatever!
In desperation then, and out of laziness, people try to ground good in God, for they sense that grounding good is an impossible task.
God is more than God to you. He also is connected to what you wish for. Your needs tell you something about how you see God. That means you wish for a God who would send you back in time, if it were possible, to kill Hitler in the cot to save millions of lives.
Some say that makes you evil, for Hitler was innocent then, and you cannot kill a person to save the lives of others when it is up to that person to do the right thing. You cannot murder to prevent murders. That is not the point. I am talking about if that were not a consideration. I am being hypothetical.
I am revealing that subconsciously and in principle, God is not
all sweetness, joy, and light to you—and that mirrors what you are
really like.
You cannot turn good into a mere feel-good thing. It's tough. It's
devastating. It's a major issue. To trivialize God or good shows
what kind of person you are.
Religion says the way God is implies a moral ought. For example, God did not make himself the loving, fair being he is. He just is these things—according to it. Morality either depends on God, or it is up to us to decide what is right and wrong. If God has to be consulted, then his voice can be no louder than yours or mine. Those who say God gives morality authority mean they give him the authority, so it's really their own authority after all.
Also, we cannot logically prove this ought being linked to an is—so we must be gluing them together psychologically. We have no business imposing our psychology on God.
The atheist is lucky to avoid all that nonsense.
Why do I feel I am good and need rewards if I treat others well? Why do I feel I am bad and need punishment if I don't treat others well? Why do I feel this is some kind of law that applies to all? People say objective morality is that which is binding on all, at all times and in all places—it is true and right no matter what anybody thinks of it. But wanting the morality to be that universally binding does not mean it is. If we act like it does mean that, then whatever we have is objective morality in name only.
And something being universal does not necessarily make it good or good enough.
People cherry-pick ought and is. For example, adultery is bad for you; therefore, it is wrong. Yet they say motorbike racing is bad for you, but it does not follow that that suggests or makes it wrong. It is evident that, even if morality could be real, nobody wants it to be and lies. It is really about control and hypocrisy.
The universe is vast and indifferent. It does not care how much good you do. For all you know, the good can set a process in motion that brings destruction. The web is unimaginable and unpredictable. If an is could give a moral ought, it is one weak ought indeed. The whole universe is, in a sense, against it—indifference is an enemy. The weight of the universe is against your ought.
Some strange conclusions come if you glue an is to an ought logically and/or psychologically.
Certain tests show that morality suffers from incoherence.
There is the thought experiment that if there is a large man, you might push him in front of a train to stop it from killing five or even a thousand little children. Is it right or wrong to do it? Should we just call it one of those things and say we do not know? If it is good to push or not to push, then good can be a terrible thing too.
Conventional morality sees that as a sin. That is because life cannot be weighed like that, so taking one life to save many lives is wrong.
We must realize here that if we were pulling a lever to kill him, we feel less murderers than if we pushed him. Our psychology is lying to us. Our religions and society surely have also helped it to lie. Evil is somehow devious and helped by devious people, and if lies are happening, you never know how they will help it.
The issue is that if you save one for many or many for one, you are still working with evil. Unavoidable evil is still evil. It will still lead to your corruption. God incarnate or his prophet being involved does not change that. If God or God-belief were a safeguard against evil, it would change it.
Kant famously said that you can tell if an action is bad by looking at what would happen if everybody did it. He said that universalizing certain actions makes them impossible to will consistently—you end up illogical.
But let me work something out from that. If you legitimize harming others, then that will eventually bring about the end of civilization, and the whole race will be at war. That is what you fear, so the universalizing leads to blackmail. That is bad if morality is meant to be a free response to having to do the right thing. That is not morality.
We have looked at all the evidence. Good is a term that appeals to us all, but we don't really know what it is. Moral systems, whether they are based on getting good results or on commandments, are rife with contradictions.
Conclusion
In the end, the sense that I “ought” to treat others well and that I am somehow bad if I do not rests on foundations that are far less secure than they first appear. We act as though moral facts exist — as though goodness were something objective and self-evident — yet every attempt to define or justify it collapses into contradiction. If we appeal to facts about the world, we fall into the trap of deriving an “ought” from an “is.” If we appeal to God, we simply shift the problem upward, giving a divine name to our own moral intuitions. And if we invent morality ourselves, we turn it into a system of preference and power, not truth.
Perhaps morality endures not because it is objectively real but because human beings cannot live without believing that it is. We are creatures who feel guilt, who seek justice, and who imagine goodness even when we cannot prove it. Whether or not there is a real “ought” behind those feelings, they shape our lives as though there were. The tragedy and the mystery of morality lie in that tension — between what we think must be true and what reason tells us we cannot know.