Monday, November 27th, 2006
Florida, 2006. South Beach.
On a completely unrelated note, lately I've been thinking about The Is-Ought Problem:
"...given our knowledge of the way the world is, how can we know the way the world ought to be? That question, prompted by Hume's small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. This complete severing of 'is' from 'ought' has been given the graphic designation of 'Hume's Guillotine'."
...
"The apparent gap between 'is' statements and 'ought' statements, when combined with Hume's fork—the idea that all items of knowledge either are based on logic and definitions or are based on observation—renders 'ought' statements of dubious validity. Since "ought" statements do not seem to be known in either of the two ways mentioned, it would seem that there can be no moral knowledge. Two responses to this are moral skepticism and non-cognitivism."
I have no conclusions to make at this point. I'm still just making an honest effort to wrap my brain around the whole concept.
