Is-ought problem
Apr. 6th, 2005 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackOK, I haven't found the useful explanations that erika_freak hinted at, but I've found a discussion and official name for the discussion I reinvented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem, apparently famously raised by Hume.
I didn't find that page very clear, but it's probably a better place to start than my witterings. Apparently Hume thought it was normally a fallacy to go from saying something *is* to what something *ought* to be[1], which he found many people making.
"ought" statements, I think correspind to my 'belief-' statements, which I *think* are characterised by any statements that:
make a moral judgement
or say something ought to be
or people would make differently given the same information and reasoning powers
or you cannot make a decision without
or that if you had a book describing the universe at this moment in time you'd probably leave out
I still think these statements have something fundamentally in common, though apparently I'm incapable of describing what. Go and google Hume :)
That said, I will attempt to follow with a post tomorrow leading on from atreic's explanations making a start on what I *do* think ought to be.
[1] Possible exception: if you believe a universal morality has an objective existance. Though I still see no way of finding out what this universal morality *is* :)
I didn't find that page very clear, but it's probably a better place to start than my witterings. Apparently Hume thought it was normally a fallacy to go from saying something *is* to what something *ought* to be[1], which he found many people making.
"ought" statements, I think correspind to my 'belief-' statements, which I *think* are characterised by any statements that:
make a moral judgement
or say something ought to be
or people would make differently given the same information and reasoning powers
or you cannot make a decision without
or that if you had a book describing the universe at this moment in time you'd probably leave out
I still think these statements have something fundamentally in common, though apparently I'm incapable of describing what. Go and google Hume :)
That said, I will attempt to follow with a post tomorrow leading on from atreic's explanations making a start on what I *do* think ought to be.
[1] Possible exception: if you believe a universal morality has an objective existance. Though I still see no way of finding out what this universal morality *is* :)