To take the mechanistic stance on human behaviour is to remove any talk of reasons and purposes, which means that insofar as there are facts about human beings, they cannot involve reasons and purposes, thus they cannot be about morality as traditionally understood. — jamalrob
And I'm saying Hume can't have it both ways.... either you can get an Ought from an is, or you can't. — anonymous66
Hume said "you can't get an Ought from an is, so that means...."
If you're right, what does it mean? — anonymous66
It looks to me like we have no other options. Now that I've read Holbo, I see "Oughts" all over the place. — anonymous66
And I'm saying Hume can't have it both ways.... either you can get an Ought from an is, or you can't. — anonymous66
You cannot. It is a matter of logic. However, this does not preclude telling folks what they ought to do, fortunately. It merely precludes telling them that the facts (the is-ness of things) prove it.
His 'ought' here is a recommendation in order to avoid error. If one is in the business of proving conclusions from premises, one cannot get an 'ought' conclusion from 'is' premises. If one is in the bullshit trade, other considerations apply. — unenlightened
I'm not sure if this answers your question, as you have not in fact provided a counter example by way of an argument... — unenlightened
That, to me at least, seems to imply there is some connection between the is and ought statements. — m-theory
Commonly, if something is claimed to be objectively so, that is to be a fact, this means that it is inter-subjectively verifiable, most satisfactorily by direct observation. — John
And math fits that paradigm? And you know morality doesn't? It seems to me that just as other facts are not decided by consensus, they are objective in that way, then morality could also be universal, and discovered, not created. I'm not sure how to prove it either way, though.. I'm just pointing out that all facts seem odd. Math certainly has an oddness about it . Numbers not even existing in the real world, and all. — anonymous66
Aristotle uses nature in the same way. How do we know what is ethical? Not by knowing what is ethical, but rather by understanding this foundational idea of "nature." — TheWillowOfDarkness
I think the question is, which facts are facts even though they can't be verified? The point of this thread is that facts are odd things. And I don't think the statement "you can't get an ought from an is" stands up to scrutiny. An obvious question is "why not?" I'm starting to wonder why Hume didn't notice his own contradiction (he said "you can't" and then he went and did it himself).I don't know if you read the rest of the post where I gave some examples of common claims that are usually considered to be facts, but are not susceptible of easy verification by observation? — John
Simple math like 2+2=4 is easily verifiable by observation.
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