Alien Abduction, or the philosophy of space soccer
New episode coming soon...
A thought: if an alien landed in a theatre, would it know how to behave?
I don't think so. There's nothing about the mere fact of red curtains, a raised stage or velvet chairs that tells us about the norms regulating the theatre experience. In fact, unless the alien already came to the theatre armed with some basic assumptions about how humans use chairs and stages, it wouldn't even know what a theatre is for.
So the general idea is: brute facts tell us very little about what matters in a given context.
Philosophers have long discussed the gap between facts and values, or as David Hume famously put it,* the "is / ought" gap.
The fancy way of putting it is "should" statements about values cannot logically be derived from "is" statements about facts. Just like a factual description of chocolate and beetroot can't tell you which is better, without there being underlying value judgments about what constitutes "better" (obviously not beetroot).
The less fancy way of putting it is - the magnificent Wise Hypocrite podcast is moving from descriptive questions (Who Am I?, What Is Real?, How Do I Know?) to prescriptive questions (What Should I Do? How Do We Live Together? etc.). But that's a bit of a leap. Because we can't go from descriptive questions to prescriptive questions, without first dealing with evaluative questions.
So in the next episode, we're taking a little pit stop along the way from "is" to "should" - join me for a little think about "What Matters?"
*(NB - Hume never actually said this but that's another story)
