The Scottish philosopher David Hume famously deduced that you cannot derive an ought from an is.
I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around this. Can someone explain to this to me in simplified terms?
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It’s the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive explanations of things. Just because anything in the world is the way it currently is, that never means that’s the way that it absolutely should be. Or at least, that’s not enough to explain why it should be the way it is, per se.
I am hungy.(is statement)
There is food in the kitchen.(is statement)
Based on these two statements alone you cannot actually reason yourself into an ‘ought statement’ like
I ought walk into the kitchen and fix myself a sandwich.
This seems counterintuitive, but the reason is we operate off of assumed ought statements like ‘I ought not die’ or
‘I ought eat when I am hungry’.
Here is an example.
Let’s pretend society is dominated by right-handed people and left-handed people are slaves. That’s the reality, that’s how it *is*.
However, just because right-handed people dominate, it does not mean they should. Their current dominance does not prove some universal law or moral imperative. It does not prove that right-handed people are better or that their treatment of left-handed people is correct. The current reality does not prove that this is how it *ought* to be. It just is.
The point is that you cannot derive values from facts.
Let’s say we ought to fight tyranny because it is making people unhappy. This doesn’t work without the previous OUGHT statement that we should strive to maximize happiness. And again you can’t get to that statement with an IS proposition. You always need values to get to values.
No amount of observation of how reality is gives you what reality should be like.
Edit: changed the example for clarity
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