Hume’s is-ought problem
So, anyway, the topic of Hume’s is-ought problem came up on this blog several months ago.
In short, the is-ought problem is a challenge to any attempted transition from any set of descriptive claims to any prescriptive claim. Most criticism of the is-ought problem concentrates on attempting to show that an “ought” can (in fact) be derived from an “is”, the premise of the is-ought problem being that ought can not be derived from “is”.
What’s been bugging me about the matter, though, is that I’ve not been able to discover why my initial neophyte’s take on it is flawed — namely, that the is-ought problem could be regarded as what I’ll call a “null statement” because it’s recursive. As I put it then:
“…it seems rather silly/self-contradictory to assert that since it supposedly IS impossible to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’, that we OUGHT not make reference to ‘ought’.”
In other words, the is-ought problem is itself an example of the is-ought problem. One doesn’t have to falsify the is-ought problem in order to disregard it because the recursiveness of the is-ought problem means that proponents of the is-ought problem have themselves provided all of the rationale necessary to disregard the is-ought problem — both as an objection to Rothbard’s natural law theory and generally.
I have, no doubt, just embarassed myself. Show me why I’m wrong.
UPDATE: Charles H. writes…
I wanted to weigh in on your (mis)interpretation of the is/ought problem. (There’s some dispute as to
whether the problem as it is most commonly phrased today can actually be traced to Hume.)You seem to think that the is/ought problem is a sort of moral proclamation: that its point is to tell us what we *ought* to do vis-a-vis making moral proclamations. As I understand the problem, however, it’s a straightforward logical problem: there’s no way to get a conclusion of the form “one ought to do X” unless there is a premise that also contains an “ought.” In other words, there is no way logically to move from factual statements about the world alone to moral proclamations. It’s not that one *ought not* make moral proclamations, it’s that if one does, they don’t follow logically from non-moral premises.
Thanks, Charles. As far as I can tell, that’s a great answer. It’s not clear to me, however, in what way it can be merely a logical problem without ALSO qualifying as a moral proclamation that says “one ought to be logical”.
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