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2 years ago in Ethics Declaration By Mukesh

In meta-ethics, what is Hume’s "Is-Ought Problem," and does it present a fatal challenge to deriving moral principles from factual observations?

I'm writing a paper on the foundations of ethical naturalism. Hume famously pointed out that many moral arguments seem to jump from statements about what is the case (e.g., "Charity promotes happiness") to claims about what ought to be the case ("We ought to be charitable") without justification. Is this gap logically unbridgeable? How have modern philosophers (like Searle with institutional facts, or Foot with natural goodness) attempted to respond to or circumvent this problem? Does it render any project of grounding ethics in science impossible?

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By Yasak Answered 1 year ago

 Hume's Is-Ought Problem is a powerful logical challenge: you cannot deductively derive a prescriptive 'ought' from purely descriptive 'is' statements without a bridging normative premise. It isn't necessarily fatal but demands extreme care. Modern responses include: 1) John Searle's attempt to derive 'ought' from institutional facts (e.g., "I uttered the words of a promise" implies "I ought to fulfill it"). 2) Virtue ethicists like Philippa Foot argue that 'good' is a natural property related to the flourishing of a living thing. However, a tacit 'ought' (e.g., "one ought to flourish") often remains. In my view, the problem doesn't make ethical naturalism impossible, but it shows that any such project must explicitly argue for its foundational normative principle (e.g., "pain is bad") rather than pretend to discover it as a bare fact. 

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