You cannot logically derive an ought (a value) from an is (a fact).
That’s not an empirical statement — a hypothesis that an ethicist proposed and then tested experimentally. It’s a statement about the limits of thought, a statement about logic.
The remarkable thing is that though we understand why we can’t derive an ought from an is, we do it every day. Further, we blame people who don’t. Sometimes we put them in prison.
As Paul Woodruff points out, this is the story of Achilles in the Trojan War.
Achilles, furious at a slight, sulked in his tent while the other Greeks were fighting and, without his leadership, dying. When Achilles’s best friend was killed, Achilles came to his senses.
You cannot derive an ought from an is, but everyone did. All the Greeks acknowledged that Achilles was a great warrior. But no one thought he’d done the right thing by pouting in his tent. Even Achilles finally saw the light.
If you don’t see the point of the myth, take a case from everyday reality: Imagine driving down the freeway and seeing a toddler on the side of the road, about to wander into traffic.
Are you having trouble deriving an ought (an action you should do) from the is (the fact of the toddler’s situation)?
Wittgenstein’s point to the Vienna Circle was that vital human activity occurs in areas that logic, mathematics and science simply can’t reach.
That’s the human condition: we face challenges in finding ways to live meaningfully and ethically, and we have to improvise tools of thought as we go because the laws that govern our sciences don’t help us in these cases.
That’s why we need the humanities and people to teach them and people to study them. A failure to grasp that is a spectacular failure.
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