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Hume discusses the problem in book III, part I, section I of his book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739): In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that ...
In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), David Hume discusses the problems in grounding normative statements in positive statements; that is, in deriving ought from is.It is generally regarded that Hume considered such derivations untenable, and his 'is–ought' problem is considered a principal question of moral philosophy.
The total two-part collection appeared within a larger collection of Hume's writings titled Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. [4] This was a collaborative publication with the important Scottish bookseller Alexander Kincaid, with whom the bookseller Andrew Millar had a lucrative but sometimes difficult relationship.
Hume's introduction presents the idea of placing all science and philosophy on a novel foundation: namely, an empirical investigation into human psychology.He begins by acknowledging "that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings [i.e., any complicated and difficult argumentation]", a prejudice formed in reaction to "the present imperfect condition of the sciences" (including the ...
Hume puts forward sentimentalism as a foundation for ethics primarily as a meta-ethical theory about the epistemology of morality. Hume's sentimentalism is akin to the moral epistemology of intuitionism (although, of course, different in many respects). According to such a theory, one's epistemological access to moral truths is not primarily ...
The term naturalistic fallacy is sometimes used to label the problematic inference of an ought from an is (the is–ought problem). [3] Michael Ridge relevantly elaborates that "[t]he intuitive idea is that evaluative conclusions require at least one evaluative premise—purely factual premises about the naturalistic features of things do not entail or even support evaluative conclusions."
The is-ought problem and the naturalistic fallacy: According to David Hume, it is hard to see how moral propositions featuring the relation ought could ever be deduced from ordinary is propositions, such as "the being of a God." [80] Divine command theory is thus guilty of deducing moral oughts from ordinary ises about God's commands. [81]
Recognise that Hume believed the problem to be a genuine counter-example; Recognise that Hume included the example for a purpose; Provide an explanation that harmonizes well with other features of Hume's epistemology. The problem has been tackled in various ways: