1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Problems with the is/ought fallacy?
I think one way we can *get around* the problem is to accept that it only applies to *deductive* moral arguments. Hume says in *A Treatise of Human Nature*:
For as this *ought*, or *ought not*, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.
As u/narwhaladventure says, it's really just a matter of how arguments work and how we define validity. As a result, even though we cannot *derive* an ought from an is, there doesn't seem to be anything obviously problematic with trying to infer an an ought from an is inductively or abductively. This is exactly the sort of move that many Moral Naturalists have made.
Comment by DieFreien at 12/09/2019 at 11:22 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I agree. My primary concern was to do with Moral Nihilism. I think a lot of people read Hume's Guillotine, misconstrue the takeaway, and run around screaming "it's all a fairytale".