A great danger of scientism is the appointment of elite “experts” who assume the powers to dictate freedoms. You write brilliantly about the limits of science in the human experience. But what we have seen and experienced is how the experts very quickly become authoritarians. Moreover, the experts rarely if ever employ genuine critique of their own understanding and policies and quickly stymie any real or perceived challenge to their positions.
I don't think that one's stance needs to be into clear-cut belief systems, like scientism or deism when dealing with the external world that one experiences in the here-and-now.
On an individual level we live in a sort of cosmological jungle and we simply lump around in it, trying to survive, and use every opportunity that presents itself to do so. To do less is to risk less that optimal survival.
It is only when we, as individuals, try to codify these personal survival systems that work for us individually, into dogmatic systems to be applied to all others universally. There's a sort of intermediate ground where the strategies are compatible and overlap, and these can by agreement become the basis for socially acceptable behaviors.
This is my own current position and I'm pretty sure that not a lot agree.
I perceive a that a functioning society, one that is relatively cooperative, has a legal system that is the full list of unacceptable public behaviors that all members can reasonably expect to not encounter in public, or only seldom and by unusual circumstance. This then implies that any behavior, or its detectable effects, on this list could reasonably be practiced in private. The moment it goes public, it is subject to legal and social sanction.
The problem with morality is that a) there is no objective source for moral certainty, and is therefore personal/cultural; and b) moral codes differ between individuals and cultures, but mainly in terms of priority of values and/or who is bound/protected by these morals.
In a multicultural, multi-ethnic polity, like the US, there has to be a general agreement on *which* of these moral values should bind all individuals. These then become laws, which are enforceable. All private behavior is not actively deterred unless it becomes public.
The basic problem is that “law” codifies what the general consensus of behavior should be—it does not “dictate” or produce it. Thus we might conclude that law is a necessary prerequisite to a well functioning society, but not necessarily sufficient “for” a well functioning society. This is the crux of the problem with a multi-cultural, multi-racial society and why it is doomed to failure here in the USA and perhaps most elsewhere in the Western world that promotes such. The generally agreed to behaviors are far fewer than the behaviors one or more cultures find abhorrent among themselves. Evolution—which produced such cultures and behaviors—is not changed over night. What took thousands of years to develop in far off lands with differing environments will not change in a matter of a generation or two. One culture must dominate and only those values prevail. The alternative is endless strife.
"Thus we might conclude that law is a necessary prerequisite to a well functioning society, but not necessarily sufficient “for” a well functioning society."
I think it's supported when we examine the patterns of immigration to the US. Earlier waves of voluntary immigration were basically from Europe, and because of this, had fairly similar cultural values. You had some level of religious friction, as Catholic/Protestant, and later Jewish/Christian, but in all such cases there had been considerable and prolonged mutual exposure in Europe from well before these groups immigrated to the US, so by the time of immigration the values and customs of these groups had had time to adapt and integrate, somewhat.
And as you say, there was an unashamed core culture of English Protestant traditions, and it was expected that the new immigrants would make an effort to adapt to the core, dominant culture. I know this first-hand, since I grew up in a fairly tight immigrant community as 2nd gen US birth citizen. Really, we had no troubles and in retrospect, I think that there were no members of the 1st/2nd community (my grandparents/parents) who did not expect and recognize that the duty to integrate was on the immigrant, if they expected to thrive. To them, it seemed like a fair deal in exchange for being allowed to immigrate and start a new life with loads of new opportunity.
As immigration broadened out after the 1960s changes to immigration laws, two things happened: the cultures from which the immigrants came had had no prolonged contact with western European cultures, which evolved to the dominant US core culture; and the implied requirement to integrate and adapt was reduced by well-intentioned but ill-advised social policy.
Diversity is fine, up to a point. And again, for all those cultural practices that the new immigrant has, and that he perceives are not widely acceptable to the core culture, he needs to keep these private, if he intends to retain them. You'll not find too much support for female circumcision, e.g., and yet we're told that diversity is good, without any apparent qualification, so the message is murky as hell and basically invites inter-cultural strife.
Agreed. I too came from an immigrant family. My father born in Europe and migrated after WWII. He was so gung-ho to become an American, that the “old language” was not spoken in the home. He came here conversant in English, albeit accented. However he was not going to inflict bilingualism in the house. I distinctly remember one day his admonition to visitors the “speak English”, and “if I wanted to speak Dutch I’d have stayed over there”. Obviously, we adapted quite rapidly to “Americanism”. ;-)
Historically, philosophers of science have used the term “scientism” as a pejorative to describe the misapplication of science. For example, in 1942, F.A. Hayek defined scientism as the “slaving imitation of the method and language of Science. Hayek, F. A. v. (1942). "Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I". Economica. 9 (35): 267–291. In “The Counter-Revolution of Science” (1952) Hayek discussed that is it impossible to apply natural science to the social sciences because natural science seeks to eliminate the human factor while the social sciences explore human behavior.
I had the good fortune to study Philosophy of Science under Paul Feyerabend at UC Berkeley in the 1980's. Feyerabend was a physicist and philosopher. In class he railed against the growing power of the priesthood of "scientists" who used the illusion of certainty they called "science" to exercise unquestionable power over the population. In his book, "Science in a Free Society" he posed the key question -
What's so great about science?
He summarized the flawed concept that "science" is a pure endeavor free from bias, error and agendas –
"There is therefore hardly any difference between the members of a ‘primitive’ tribe who defend their laws because they are the laws of their gods, or of their ancestors and who spread these laws in the name of the tribe and a rationalist who appeals to ‘objective ‘standards, except that the former know what they are doing while the latter does not." p. 82
To the consternation of the world of “science”, Feyerabend cautioned -
"[T]here is no ‘scientific method’; there is no single procedure, or set of rules that underlies every piece of research and guarantees that it is ‘scientific’ and, therefore, trustworthy. Every project, every theory, every procedure has to be judged on its own merits and by standards adapted to the processes with which it deals. The idea of a universal and stable method that is an unchanging measure of adequacy and even the idea of a universal and stable rationality is as unrealistic as the idea of a universal and stable measuring instrument that measures any magnitude, no matter what the circumstances. Scientists revise their standards, their procedures, their criteria of rationality as they move along and enter new domains of research just as they revise and perhaps entirely replace their theories and their instruments as they move along and enter new domains of research." p. 98
Great piece, but who exactly is advocating a scientific approach to poetry, literature and art, as the superior method?
Any adherents of a scientism promoting "an imperial ideology that subjugates other disciplines while denigrating distinct ways of knowing and interacting with the world," are nowhere to be seen in the humanities/arts faculties across Western universities.
In fact, these faculties have been victim to a different brand of 'imperial ideology' in recent decades - identity politics.
The Epicurean pleasure principle got it right: the key to life is to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. A simple living, cultivating friendships, and limiting desires.
Commendable article Bo, thank you. But surely pluralism isn't the best remedy for the encroachment of scientism into artistic territory. As another commenter mentioned, how can we endorse it while also rejecting relativism?
David Deutsch argues in the Beginning of Infinity--which you've likely read--that beauty is a form of objective truth. That is to say that Beethoven's own drafts of the Diabelli Variations that ended up in the waste bin surely were less objectively beautiful than what he published. And perhaps further, also less beautiful were the variations on the same waltz theme by others such as Hummel and an eleven-year-old Liszt. These conclusions are no less true because they presently must be supported by musical arguments and listening rather than by numbers and graphs.
Here's a link to Deutsch's lecture called "Why are flowers beautiful?" He says flowers must've arrived at objective, universal beauty as the communicative solution to attract insects because a more parochial design would have failed to bridge the vast gulf between these two highly distinct forms of life. Moreover, because flowers are objectively beautiful, eons later when humans arrived with the gift of universalist reason, we too were necessarily attracted.
> Pluralism must prevail. Poetry, literature, art, and music bring us into contact with the profound mystery of existence. They do not merely provide fleeting experiences; they offer transformative encounters with reality, yielding wisdom and insights inaccessible through science alone.
Does this mean that "indigenous ways of knowing" provide knowledge on par with knowledge obtained through the employment of the scientific method?
> Those who reduce the mind to nerve cells and describe humans as machines frequently argue, for instance, that free will is an illusion [...] drain the blood from the universe, leaving behind a conceptual corpse
I warmly recommend Valentino Braitenberg's *Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology* (MIT Press 1984). I firmly believe that while he does the former in the delightful thought experiment which is the content of the (first half of the) book, he does nothing of the sort of the latter -- I found his prose more beautiful, insightful & enlightening than any poem.
'Does this mean that "indigenous ways of knowing" provide knowledge on par with knowledge obtained through the employment of the scientific method?'
Probably not in the physical sciences; more likely in the 'human sciences', where untrammelled ability to perceive phenomena as emergent is more revealing than the reductivism of the scientific method.
> untrammelled ability to perceive phenomena as emergent is more revealing than the reductivism of the scientific method
This is why I referred to Braitenberg's book; he has no problem of perceiving the emergent as something arising from the 'reductivist' lower layers.
From the *Introduction* of that book:
"This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.
I have been dealing for many years with certain structures within animal brains that seemed to be interpretable as pieces of computing machinery because of their simplicity and/or regularity. Much of this work is only interesting if you are yourself involved in it. At times, though, in the back of my mind, while I was counting fibers in the visual ganglia of the fly or synapses in the cerebral cortex of the mouse, I felt knots untie, distinctions dissolve, difficulties disappear, difficulties I had experienced much earlier when I still held my first naive philosophical approach to the problem of the mind. This process of purification has been, over the years, a delightful experience. The text I want you to read is designed to convey some of this to you, if you are prepared to follow me not through a world of real brains but through a toy world that we will create together."
Yeah Michael Polanyi had a similar insight. I agree that things emerge from their component parts (and from elsewhere--observer perception etc). How else could it happen? I'm asking the question genuinely.
I don't think so. A generic reference to the philosophy of language doesn't support the claim that "the 'human sciences', where untrammelled ability to perceive phenomena as emergent is more revealing than the reductivism of the scientific method".
I've given an example where the reductivism of the scientific method *enhances* the ability to perceive phenomena as emergent; your task is to show how such ability can be *more revealing* in case of the 'human sciences', with their putative untrammelled ability of perception.
I want to agree, but you lost me when you mischaracterized what Harris meant, deleting the parts of his claim that indicate it clearly:
"Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, *fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever those turn out to be).* Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science."
He is saying that morality arises from the laws of nature because minds are a part and function of the natural world. I think this is indisputable, and it's indisputable even if morality is 'given' to us by a deity (whose mechanism of delivery can simply be the fact of our belonging to the natural world), and even if we feel we are capable of transcendence. This is so because human beings exist within and as a part of nature. We are not outside of it; by definition, literally nothing we do or think or become is or can be outside of the natural world. But we can certainly transcend mental states and understandings, and are capable of as yet unimaginable feats.
Note also that Harris has not specified here what the laws of nature are, nor has he said that answers to questions of morality and values *must* fall within the purview of science. The qualifier he used was "potentially."
“ literally nothing we do or think or become is or can be outside of the natural world.”
“Once out of nature I shall take
My bodily form….”
I think you need to read a good deal more literature. Begin with Yeats’ “Byzantium”.. from there to Blake… the Romantics… Dante…Shakespeare… GM Hopkins… Eliot….usw….
A great danger of scientism is the appointment of elite “experts” who assume the powers to dictate freedoms. You write brilliantly about the limits of science in the human experience. But what we have seen and experienced is how the experts very quickly become authoritarians. Moreover, the experts rarely if ever employ genuine critique of their own understanding and policies and quickly stymie any real or perceived challenge to their positions.
I don't think that one's stance needs to be into clear-cut belief systems, like scientism or deism when dealing with the external world that one experiences in the here-and-now.
On an individual level we live in a sort of cosmological jungle and we simply lump around in it, trying to survive, and use every opportunity that presents itself to do so. To do less is to risk less that optimal survival.
It is only when we, as individuals, try to codify these personal survival systems that work for us individually, into dogmatic systems to be applied to all others universally. There's a sort of intermediate ground where the strategies are compatible and overlap, and these can by agreement become the basis for socially acceptable behaviors.
“…and these can by agreement become the basis for socially acceptable behaviors.“
Very vague. Can you expand - ??
This is my own current position and I'm pretty sure that not a lot agree.
I perceive a that a functioning society, one that is relatively cooperative, has a legal system that is the full list of unacceptable public behaviors that all members can reasonably expect to not encounter in public, or only seldom and by unusual circumstance. This then implies that any behavior, or its detectable effects, on this list could reasonably be practiced in private. The moment it goes public, it is subject to legal and social sanction.
The problem with morality is that a) there is no objective source for moral certainty, and is therefore personal/cultural; and b) moral codes differ between individuals and cultures, but mainly in terms of priority of values and/or who is bound/protected by these morals.
In a multicultural, multi-ethnic polity, like the US, there has to be a general agreement on *which* of these moral values should bind all individuals. These then become laws, which are enforceable. All private behavior is not actively deterred unless it becomes public.
Anyway, that's how I see it...
The basic problem is that “law” codifies what the general consensus of behavior should be—it does not “dictate” or produce it. Thus we might conclude that law is a necessary prerequisite to a well functioning society, but not necessarily sufficient “for” a well functioning society. This is the crux of the problem with a multi-cultural, multi-racial society and why it is doomed to failure here in the USA and perhaps most elsewhere in the Western world that promotes such. The generally agreed to behaviors are far fewer than the behaviors one or more cultures find abhorrent among themselves. Evolution—which produced such cultures and behaviors—is not changed over night. What took thousands of years to develop in far off lands with differing environments will not change in a matter of a generation or two. One culture must dominate and only those values prevail. The alternative is endless strife.
"Thus we might conclude that law is a necessary prerequisite to a well functioning society, but not necessarily sufficient “for” a well functioning society."
Excellent point.
I agree with this and it's very well-stated.
I think it's supported when we examine the patterns of immigration to the US. Earlier waves of voluntary immigration were basically from Europe, and because of this, had fairly similar cultural values. You had some level of religious friction, as Catholic/Protestant, and later Jewish/Christian, but in all such cases there had been considerable and prolonged mutual exposure in Europe from well before these groups immigrated to the US, so by the time of immigration the values and customs of these groups had had time to adapt and integrate, somewhat.
And as you say, there was an unashamed core culture of English Protestant traditions, and it was expected that the new immigrants would make an effort to adapt to the core, dominant culture. I know this first-hand, since I grew up in a fairly tight immigrant community as 2nd gen US birth citizen. Really, we had no troubles and in retrospect, I think that there were no members of the 1st/2nd community (my grandparents/parents) who did not expect and recognize that the duty to integrate was on the immigrant, if they expected to thrive. To them, it seemed like a fair deal in exchange for being allowed to immigrate and start a new life with loads of new opportunity.
As immigration broadened out after the 1960s changes to immigration laws, two things happened: the cultures from which the immigrants came had had no prolonged contact with western European cultures, which evolved to the dominant US core culture; and the implied requirement to integrate and adapt was reduced by well-intentioned but ill-advised social policy.
Diversity is fine, up to a point. And again, for all those cultural practices that the new immigrant has, and that he perceives are not widely acceptable to the core culture, he needs to keep these private, if he intends to retain them. You'll not find too much support for female circumcision, e.g., and yet we're told that diversity is good, without any apparent qualification, so the message is murky as hell and basically invites inter-cultural strife.
Agreed. I too came from an immigrant family. My father born in Europe and migrated after WWII. He was so gung-ho to become an American, that the “old language” was not spoken in the home. He came here conversant in English, albeit accented. However he was not going to inflict bilingualism in the house. I distinctly remember one day his admonition to visitors the “speak English”, and “if I wanted to speak Dutch I’d have stayed over there”. Obviously, we adapted quite rapidly to “Americanism”. ;-)
Historically, philosophers of science have used the term “scientism” as a pejorative to describe the misapplication of science. For example, in 1942, F.A. Hayek defined scientism as the “slaving imitation of the method and language of Science. Hayek, F. A. v. (1942). "Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I". Economica. 9 (35): 267–291. In “The Counter-Revolution of Science” (1952) Hayek discussed that is it impossible to apply natural science to the social sciences because natural science seeks to eliminate the human factor while the social sciences explore human behavior.
I had the good fortune to study Philosophy of Science under Paul Feyerabend at UC Berkeley in the 1980's. Feyerabend was a physicist and philosopher. In class he railed against the growing power of the priesthood of "scientists" who used the illusion of certainty they called "science" to exercise unquestionable power over the population. In his book, "Science in a Free Society" he posed the key question -
What's so great about science?
He summarized the flawed concept that "science" is a pure endeavor free from bias, error and agendas –
"There is therefore hardly any difference between the members of a ‘primitive’ tribe who defend their laws because they are the laws of their gods, or of their ancestors and who spread these laws in the name of the tribe and a rationalist who appeals to ‘objective ‘standards, except that the former know what they are doing while the latter does not." p. 82
To the consternation of the world of “science”, Feyerabend cautioned -
"[T]here is no ‘scientific method’; there is no single procedure, or set of rules that underlies every piece of research and guarantees that it is ‘scientific’ and, therefore, trustworthy. Every project, every theory, every procedure has to be judged on its own merits and by standards adapted to the processes with which it deals. The idea of a universal and stable method that is an unchanging measure of adequacy and even the idea of a universal and stable rationality is as unrealistic as the idea of a universal and stable measuring instrument that measures any magnitude, no matter what the circumstances. Scientists revise their standards, their procedures, their criteria of rationality as they move along and enter new domains of research just as they revise and perhaps entirely replace their theories and their instruments as they move along and enter new domains of research." p. 98
Great piece, but who exactly is advocating a scientific approach to poetry, literature and art, as the superior method?
Any adherents of a scientism promoting "an imperial ideology that subjugates other disciplines while denigrating distinct ways of knowing and interacting with the world," are nowhere to be seen in the humanities/arts faculties across Western universities.
In fact, these faculties have been victim to a different brand of 'imperial ideology' in recent decades - identity politics.
Science is subject to Goodhart's law.
Attempting to govern by the "science" doesn't get you scientific governance, it leads to politicized science.
There is no such thing as "the" science.
The Epicurean pleasure principle got it right: the key to life is to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. A simple living, cultivating friendships, and limiting desires.
Koheleth.
Pain is not objectively wrong. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2024/07/sam-harriss-argument-for-objective.html
I don't think it's possible to create a scientifically grounded morality either. https://zerocontradictions.net/pdfs/case-against-moral-realism.pdf
"Science is great at many things, but it is not the only path to enlightenment."
It depends on what you want enlightenment about. Enlightenment of the material world requires science.
Of course, science for the material world. Morality is a whole other matter.
Yes, but morality is largely influenced by genetics.
Commendable article Bo, thank you. But surely pluralism isn't the best remedy for the encroachment of scientism into artistic territory. As another commenter mentioned, how can we endorse it while also rejecting relativism?
David Deutsch argues in the Beginning of Infinity--which you've likely read--that beauty is a form of objective truth. That is to say that Beethoven's own drafts of the Diabelli Variations that ended up in the waste bin surely were less objectively beautiful than what he published. And perhaps further, also less beautiful were the variations on the same waltz theme by others such as Hummel and an eleven-year-old Liszt. These conclusions are no less true because they presently must be supported by musical arguments and listening rather than by numbers and graphs.
Here's a link to Deutsch's lecture called "Why are flowers beautiful?" He says flowers must've arrived at objective, universal beauty as the communicative solution to attract insects because a more parochial design would have failed to bridge the vast gulf between these two highly distinct forms of life. Moreover, because flowers are objectively beautiful, eons later when humans arrived with the gift of universalist reason, we too were necessarily attracted.
Am curious to hear any responses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT7DFCF1Fn8
Compliments on a really elegantly written and logically rigorous article
> Pluralism must prevail. Poetry, literature, art, and music bring us into contact with the profound mystery of existence. They do not merely provide fleeting experiences; they offer transformative encounters with reality, yielding wisdom and insights inaccessible through science alone.
Does this mean that "indigenous ways of knowing" provide knowledge on par with knowledge obtained through the employment of the scientific method?
> Those who reduce the mind to nerve cells and describe humans as machines frequently argue, for instance, that free will is an illusion [...] drain the blood from the universe, leaving behind a conceptual corpse
I warmly recommend Valentino Braitenberg's *Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology* (MIT Press 1984). I firmly believe that while he does the former in the delightful thought experiment which is the content of the (first half of the) book, he does nothing of the sort of the latter -- I found his prose more beautiful, insightful & enlightening than any poem.
'Does this mean that "indigenous ways of knowing" provide knowledge on par with knowledge obtained through the employment of the scientific method?'
Probably not in the physical sciences; more likely in the 'human sciences', where untrammelled ability to perceive phenomena as emergent is more revealing than the reductivism of the scientific method.
> untrammelled ability to perceive phenomena as emergent is more revealing than the reductivism of the scientific method
This is why I referred to Braitenberg's book; he has no problem of perceiving the emergent as something arising from the 'reductivist' lower layers.
From the *Introduction* of that book:
"This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.
I have been dealing for many years with certain structures within animal brains that seemed to be interpretable as pieces of computing machinery because of their simplicity and/or regularity. Much of this work is only interesting if you are yourself involved in it. At times, though, in the back of my mind, while I was counting fibers in the visual ganglia of the fly or synapses in the cerebral cortex of the mouse, I felt knots untie, distinctions dissolve, difficulties disappear, difficulties I had experienced much earlier when I still held my first naive philosophical approach to the problem of the mind. This process of purification has been, over the years, a delightful experience. The text I want you to read is designed to convey some of this to you, if you are prepared to follow me not through a world of real brains but through a toy world that we will create together."
Yeah Michael Polanyi had a similar insight. I agree that things emerge from their component parts (and from elsewhere--observer perception etc). How else could it happen? I'm asking the question genuinely.
Then the "more revealing" claim requires some other support.
Think a little on the way language works and you will understand
I don't think so. A generic reference to the philosophy of language doesn't support the claim that "the 'human sciences', where untrammelled ability to perceive phenomena as emergent is more revealing than the reductivism of the scientific method".
I've given an example where the reductivism of the scientific method *enhances* the ability to perceive phenomena as emergent; your task is to show how such ability can be *more revealing* in case of the 'human sciences', with their putative untrammelled ability of perception.
"Does this mean that "indigenous ways of knowing" provide knowledge on par with knowledge obtained through the employment of the scientific method?"
Excellent question. I am interested in Bo's answer
I want to agree, but you lost me when you mischaracterized what Harris meant, deleting the parts of his claim that indicate it clearly:
"Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, *fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever those turn out to be).* Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science."
He is saying that morality arises from the laws of nature because minds are a part and function of the natural world. I think this is indisputable, and it's indisputable even if morality is 'given' to us by a deity (whose mechanism of delivery can simply be the fact of our belonging to the natural world), and even if we feel we are capable of transcendence. This is so because human beings exist within and as a part of nature. We are not outside of it; by definition, literally nothing we do or think or become is or can be outside of the natural world. But we can certainly transcend mental states and understandings, and are capable of as yet unimaginable feats.
Note also that Harris has not specified here what the laws of nature are, nor has he said that answers to questions of morality and values *must* fall within the purview of science. The qualifier he used was "potentially."
Morality is an illusion https://zerocontradictions.net/pdfs/case-against-moral-realism.pdf
“ literally nothing we do or think or become is or can be outside of the natural world.”
“Once out of nature I shall take
My bodily form….”
I think you need to read a good deal more literature. Begin with Yeats’ “Byzantium”.. from there to Blake… the Romantics… Dante…Shakespeare… GM Hopkins… Eliot….usw….
I've read and love them, but they aren't relevant to the matter at hand.
Scientism is Technocracy.
https://principlesvstribes.substack.com/p/on-technocracy
“Ought” is a subset of “is”, but that does not mean the non-ought ises alter the subjective ises that are oughts.
Moral realism is fallacious. https://zerocontradictions.net/pdfs/case-against-moral-realism.pdf