From 'Is' to 'Ought'in Moral Epistemology

Synthese, 2007

Various formally valid counterexamples have been adduced against the Humean dictum that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." There are formal rebuttals-some very sophisticated now (e.g., Charles R. Pigden's and Gerhard Schurz's)to such counterexamples. But what follows is an intuitive and informal argument against them. I maintain that it is better than these sophisticated formal defenses of the Humean dictum and that it also helps us see why it implausible to think that we can be as decisive about the truth or falsity of the dictum as both the formal counterexamples or formal barriers to them purport to be.

2000

A logical investigation of the Is-Ought problem is in a subtle position with respect to the question of ethical cognitivism. It has to presuppose at certain portion of cognitivism, but it has to remain ignorant with respect to rest of it. Let me therefore start my talk with a differentiation in the concept of cognitivism. What a logical investigation of the Is-Ought problem has to assume is what I call (1.) Semantic Cognitivism: (a) Normative (ethical) assertions have semantical contents which can be represented as propositions, and (b) these propositions can be semantically evaluated by a meta-logical 'truth' or 'correctness' predicate.

Survey talk delivered to the Cambridge Meta-Ethics group in 2011. After some brief remarks on the ambiguities in Hume's version of No-Ought-From-Is, I outline Prior's paradox and discuss the various responses, principally mine (the New Zealand Plan) and Schurz's (the Austrian Plan). In this text I add seven appendices drawn mainly from my introduction to Hume On Is and Ought, amplifying the argument, discussing matters arising and outlining rival approaches to the problem, principally the relevantist solution, due to Ed Mares, and the Inference Barrier solution (the Scottish/Australian Plan) due to Gillian Russell and Greg Restall. I also discuss the work of Stephen Maitzen and Mark Nelson. In this talk I emphasize the logical aspects of the issue. Drafts of my contributions to this debate available above in 'Papers'. 'The Triviality of Hume's Law', 'Coda: Truth and Consequences' and 'Subtance, Taxonomy, Content and Consequence' emphasize the logical and meta-ethical aspects of the the issue, whilst 'Letter From a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose' emphasize meta-ethics and the historical Hume. 'Comments on "Hume's Master Argument"' deals with all three themes. The kick-off paper is 'Logic and the Autonomy of Ethics' (1989). The last in the sequence is 'Hume on is and Ought: Logic Promises and the Duke of Wellington'.

Journal of Philosophical Logic, 1991

Hume's famous is-ought thesis (cf. Hume, 1739/40, p. 469) saying that nothing about what ought (or ought not) to be the case can be deduced from what is (or is not) the case, was the object of a continu- ing philosophical debate, without leading to agreement (cf. Hudson, 1969). ...

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Many take the claim that you can’t ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non-­moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are often justified exclusively by non­moral beliefs– a view I call moral inferentialism – presents an attractive non­skeptical moral epistemology.

Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 2017

Charles R ed. (2010) Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’, Houndmills, Palgrave, pp. 1-38. , 2010

This contains 1) A methodological meditation in blank verse, defending a broadly collegial vision of the history of philosophy, as applied specifically to Hume. 2) A conspectus of the debate on the role of No-Ought-From-Is within the Treatise itself. What does Hume mean by ‘deduction’ and are the deductions from Is to Ought actually or only seemingly inconceivable? Why after having made so much of NOFI in the Treatise does Hume drop it in the EPM? 3) A summary of the debate surrounding Heathcote’s contention that NOFI is an instance of Hume’s Ockhamist ‘Master Argument’. 4) A potted history of the reception of NOFI from Reid and Bentham to Hudson. 4) A conspectus of the debate on the meta-ethical implications of NOFI, specifically targeting the idea that it implies either non-naturalism, non-cognitivism, expressivism or a fact/value split (I say ‘none of the above’). 5) A survey of four major responses to Prior’s famous counterexamples both to NOFI and to the conservativeness of logic (the thesis that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in). These are the New Zealand Plan (due to me) which devises and proves an amended version of NOFI (No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is), the Austrian Plan (due to Gerhard Schurz) which devises and proves another version of NOFI (No-Ought-Relevant-Ought-From-Is), the Scottish/Australian Plan (due to Gillian Russell and Greg Restall) which defends a revised version of NOFI by constructing and proving an implication barrier thesis, and the relevantist solution, (represented in this collection by Edwin Mares) which defeats Prior’s dilemma by lopping off one of its horns. 6) A summary of the debate about Stephen Maitzen’s interesting claim that though it may be impossible to derive substantively moral conclusions from FORMALLY non-moral premises, it is possible to derive substantively moral conclusions from SUBSTANTIVELY non-moral premises, thus rendering the formal proofs of his opponents redundant. (I say his argument presupposes an implausible form of taxonomic essentialism.)

Philosophical Issues, 2019

Are epistemic reasons normative reasons in the same sense as, for instance, moral reasons? In this paper I examine and defend the claim that epistemic reasons are normative only relative to an epistemic standard. Unlike moral reasons they are not substantially normative, because they fail to make an independent contribution to obligations or permissions simpliciter. After presenting what I take to be the main argument for this view, I illustrate that the argument has often been defended by examples which controversially presuppose strong epistemic obligations or pragmatic reasons for belief. Opponents of the argument often deny the existence of obligations and reasons of these kinds. I therefore examine whether the argument can withstand that line of critique by employing new examples.

Noûs, 1974

This paper is the beginning of an explication of the "normative-descriptive" or "ought-is" distinction by way of the notion that our knowledge of other minds is the result of our imposition of constraints on the interpretation of events as actions by agents. My hope is that a general theory of rationality and the normative can be derived from an examination of the constraints it is rational to impose on agent-interpretation, i.e., of the fundamental knowledge we have of persons as persons. My attempt at an explication of the "ought-is" distinction takes the following form: I want to find an absolutely general way of determining when "ought"-sentences are true. Since the extensions of the account given below to interesting cases of "ought"-sentences such as moral and prudential cases depend on relatively complicated constraints on agent-interpretation,l this paper will deal only with the simplest case of "ought"-sentences, the "logical ought". If logic is thought of as a normative science of belief, it yields one of the simplest cases of the "normative-descriptive" dichotomy. By the "logical ought" I understand what might be called consequences of the canons of obedience to the laws of thought. An instance of such an "ought" occurs in "If you believe that frogs are green, you ought to believe that anything that's not green is not a frog." The "logical ought" is, as it were, the minimal rational "ought", the one that prescribes closure of belief under logical consequence and proscribes inconsistency of belief. It should be pointed out that the principles of the "logical ought" often come into conflict with other canons of rationality, just as principles of moral "oughts" come into conflict with each other. The example above is surely true even if NOUS 8 (1974) ?) 1974 by Indiana University 233