ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
Bridging the Is-Ought Divide:
Life is. Life ought to act to remain so
Edward Gibney
“The naturalistic fallacy…seems to have become something of a superstition. It is dimly understood and widely feared, and its ritual incantation is an obligatory part of the apprenticeship
of moral philosophers and biologists alike.”1
Competing Oughts
You ought to keep the Sabbath holy. You ought to honor your ancestors. You ought to
kill your daughter if she’s dishonored your family. You ought to treat others as you
would wish to be treated yourself. You ought to hold the door open for strangers. You
ought to listen to your gut. You ought to cut down on your intake of saturated fats.
You ought to act “only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time,
will that it should become a universal law.”2 Oughts come from many different
sources – various world religions, socially agreed upon norms, biological urges, scientific recommendations, philosophical arguments – and so far these systems have remained separate, agreeing in some areas, contradicting in others. These oughts are
what make up our morals.3
Morality, from the Latin moralitas, meaning manner, character, or proper behavior, is
“the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good
and those that are bad.”4 It’s “a conformity to the rules of right conduct.”5 But who
gets to define what good, bad, or right mean? Philosophers have fallen into divided
camps over this issue, setting up tents as deontologists, consequentialists, virtuists,
and nihilists. Social scientists and positive psychologists have meta-studied commonly
accepted ethical systems to try to unite them into standard lists of morals and virtues.6
None of these ethical systems, however, have ever been grounded in objective facts
that offer conclusive justification for their existence, so humanity has thus far been
left to either rely on revealed dogmas or ignore the relativism that lurks beneath persistent questioning about our morals. Why is this still the case?
The Is-Ought Divide
Since at least the beginning of ancient history, religions have claimed to know what is
good and bad according to some kind of divine revelation. Around 400BCE though,
Plato recorded Socrates asking a religious expert named Euthyphro, “Is the pious
loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”
The Euthyphro Dilemma7, as it is known, perfectly frames the question of whether or
not there is an independent source for morality, beyond what gods or human beings
say that it is. This question has been tackled by legions of philosophers ever since, but
in 1739 David Hume made what has become the definitive argument against most of
these attempts. Hume compared moral values to “sounds, colors, heat, and cold,”
which “are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.”8 Having established
this subjective nature of moral values as something different than objective facts about
the world, Hume then chastised those who ignore this difference:
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