HUME is ought Flashcards
cannot infer an ought from an is
iticises naturalism. Hume said philosophers talk about the way things are and then jump with no apparent justification to a claim about the way things ought to be.
There are various ways of phrasing Hume’s argument:
You can’t get an ought from an is.
You cannot infer values from fact.
Just because something is a certain way, that doesn’t tell us anything about how it ought to be.
Is-statements do not entail ought-statements.
The consequence of Hume’s argument is that, for any moral proposition, you cannot give a factual justification for believing it. Take the example of “it is wrong to kill people” and try to figure out what the factual justification is for it. Why is it factually wrong to kill people?
You could certainly point out various factual consequences of killing people that we often take to be wrong, such as that it harms people or violates their preferences. It is indeed a fact killing people can involve such things. However, why is it a fact that it’s wrong to harm people? Why is it a fact that it’s wrong to violate people’s preferences?
Whatever answer someone presents as a fact (is-statement) from which they have inferred their values (ought-statements), it seems you can always question what their reason is for that inference. It looks like we cannot infer values from facts.
Hume argues that you could be aware of all the facts about a situation, yet if you then pass a moral judgement, that cannot have come from ‘the understanding’ nor be ‘the work of judgement’ but instead comes from ‘the heart’ and is ‘not a speculative proposition’ but is an ‘active feeling or sentiment’. This looks like an argument against realism but also against cognitivism and for non-cognitivism, specifically emotivism.
