We have one ought: "value social relationships". Are we saying that we should classify one method of achieving that ought as an ought or is itself? To me that doesn't make sense but like I said, I haven't done the reading so maybe.
I'm interpreting your question assuming the "or is" is a typo, and omitting it, because I can't make sense of it as it is. In that case, my answer is yes. The general framing "If we ought to do X, then we ought to do Y" seems functional to me, where Y is
necessary to achieve X, which applies in our current example (it is
necessary to provide emotional bonding to babies
if we want them to be capable of rewarding relationships as adults). One might argue that this is merely an instrumental (cf. your "method") ought, but I think that given its
necessary relationship to the first, it actually inherits (at least some of) the moral weight of the first.
Right, I don't think there is any fallacious reasoning in 2 (noting of course that we're just setting out the argument simply, there are of course nuances that can come in.). As for whether that is an example that people raise in terms of is/ought I can't say.
I did some digging, and came across this article in PhilosophyNow:
Hume on Is and Ought. Whilst some of the article is opaque to me, I think it justifies my view of how this "fallacy" is defined:
Hume’s idea seems to be that you cannot deduce moral conclusions, featuring moral words such as ‘ought’, from non-moral premises, that is premises from which the moral words are absent.
i.e. the fallacy is about more than merely the "appeal to nature"'s identification of that which "ought to be" with that which "is", it is more generally about "getting to" (moral) "oughts" from (non-moral) "ises". My example seems to fit just fine.
Interestingly, from the point of view of Neil's first post, it seems that,
perhaps, Hume, the originator of the fallacy, would have accepted Neil's (and my) view that whilst you cannot derive an ought from a is via strictly deductive logic, it can be derived
somehow:
[T]he Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore (1874-1958) [...] thought it a fallacy, the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’, to define the word ‘good’ in terms of anything else.
This was not Hume’s opinion. He was not denying that the moral can be defined in terms of the non-moral. He was merely denying the existence of logically valid arguments from the non-moral to the moral. This becomes clear once we note that Hume does not think that he has to argue for the apparent inconceivability of is/ought deductions. It is something he thinks he can take for granted. This is what we would expect if he were making the logical point since it would have been obvious to his readers. For it was a commonplace of Eighteenth Century logical theory that in a logically valid argument the matter of the conclusion – that is the non-logical content – is contained within the premises, and thus that you cannot get out what you haven’t put in. Thus if an ‘ought’ appears in the conclusion of an argument but not in the premises, the inference cannot be logically valid. You can’t deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ by means of logic alone.
Then again, Hume's derivation seems different to that which Neil (and myself) propose: Hume's is based on "sentiment. It defines virtue to be
whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary", whereas Neil's (and mine) is based on "plausible reasoning" from the nature of sentient experience (emphasis in the original).
As I don't tend to frame the issue of morality in is/ought terms I'm not sure (I tend to be wary of absolutes though.)
I posted my general approach to morality in previous threads that so I think you've seen this but I take a much more pragmatic approach to morality. I posit three subjective - but I would posit almost universally shared - basic human goals: that we aim to survive, thrive and be happy. We combine these goals with the proposition that humans are social animals - that is, we cannot generally achieve these goals on our own, we need other people. Pragmatic reasoning (not sure if that is a technical term) then starts to apply. We can examine various ways of achieving these goals and weigh the pros and cons based on experience to figure out the best way to live our lives.
Sometimes we might be able to reach conclusions using pure logical reasoning, but often that's not going to be practical.
The pragmatic approach I think will avoid circularity problems (that's not to say that it doesn't come with its own set of problems, but I think it more closely resembles how we actually operate in practice when it comes to morality.)
That all seems to be very compatible with my own approach, Arouet,
with the addition that I think that what you describe as our being motivated by "basic human goals" can be objectively framed in terms of an "ought". It's really just another way of framing things, a different semantic "thrust" if you like. You say "we (simply) have these goals"; I say, "given what we know about sentient experience, we
ought to have these goals".