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Hume's law or Hume's guillotine [1] is the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred from purely descriptive factual statements. [ 2 ] A similar view is defended by G. E. Moore 's open-question argument , intended to refute any identification of moral properties with natural properties , which is asserted by ethical ...
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.
Hume's lack of concern might be explained by the fact that, although it contradicts the claim that all simple ideas are preceded by simple impressions, this is not a problem because it is not Hume's primary concern. This answer draws attention to what Hume says at the end of Section 2 of the Enquiries:
Hume also put forward the is–ought problem, later known as Hume's Law, [121] denying the possibility of logically deriving what ought to be from what is. According to the Treatise (1740), in every system of morality that Hume has read, the author begins by stating facts about the world as it is but always ends up suddenly referring to what ...
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."
Hume's strong empiricism, as in Hume's fork as well as Hume's problem of induction, was taken as a threat to Newton's theory of motion. Immanuel Kant responded with his Transcendental Idealism in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attributed to the mind a causal role in sensory experience by the mind's aligning the environmental input by arranging those sense data into the experience ...
David Hume, a Scottish thinker of the Enlightenment era, is the philosopher most often associated with induction. His formulation of the problem of induction can be found in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, §4. Here, Hume introduces his famous distinction between "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact".
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 ...