 Okay, I'm going to talk about David Hume again, but I'm not going to lead with any jokes about analytic statements or induction. After all, they weren't funny the first couple of times. In episode 63, I covered two broad categories of metaethics. Moral realism, the belief that there are facts about right and wrong that are objectively true, and moral anti-realism, the belief that no such facts exist. Many of the responses to that video were theories about how moral facts might be derived How we could tell real moral facts from all the various things that people have claimed to be objectively right or wrong throughout human history, everything from slavery to recreational sex. There were citations of evolutionary pressures, religious texts, psychology, all sorts of interesting stuff. The idea being that there are certain facts about the world which imply principles, by which one might determine what the real rules for morality are. Of course, this isn't just a YouTube comments thing. Many philosophers have posited different systems of thought by which they believe one might use facts and analysis to derive the underlying rules of morality, and often to compel others to follow those rules. Life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short. Without absolute governance, people would kill and steal all the time. Therefore, we ought to submit to absolute governance. It may be legal to sell something for more than it's worth, but divine law leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary to virtue. Therefore, we should be honest in our business dealings. There are starving people in Africa. You ought to finish your dinner. These sorts of arguments were all the rage and philosophy for a long time. After all, if we could reason our way to the rules that make certain things good or evil, the same way that we discovered rules about how rocks fall through observation, induction, and deduction, then we could stop arguing and waging war over this stuff, change the legal code to match those rules, and be done. But there's an interesting thing happening in these sorts of moral arguments, something that might go unnoticed if you aren't paying close attention. David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, is most commonly credited with realizing that there's a fundamental difference between moral arguments and other kinds. See if you can spot it. Here's a standard rational argument. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. And here's a moral argument. Seeing someone get brutally murdered is nauseating. There is a law against murder in almost every legal code we've ever discovered. Murder is evolutionarily disadvantageous. Therefore, we ought not murder each other. Did you catch it? In the moral argument, there comes a necessary switch between is statement and an ought statement. There is a significant difference between those. A statement using is is a description of the world, a fact that someone might be able to confirm or deny through research or analysis. Ought, on the other hand, is a value judgment, something which calls on preferences and intuitions, neither of which are necessarily universal. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong or irrational about ought statements. We use them a lot when describing conditional if then scenarios that depend on what a particular person wants or feels, refer to as hypothetical imperatives. If you want to make a sandwich, then you ought to get some bread. These sorts of claims can be valid or invalid, and you can confirm or refute them using experience or analysis. But when we start talking about universal everyone ought to statements about morality, we sort of lose the if thenness. It's not like anyone's going, if you're the sort of person who cares about evolutionary advantage, then you shouldn't murder anyone. But if you don't, then, you know, whatever. The truth of a moral statement isn't generally supposed to depend on the tastes and values of the person saying it. It's usually more of a categorical imperative, an unqualified rule about what every person ought to do regardless. Hume, realizing this distinction, asserted that there was a gap between statements of fact and statements about values. A gap that those who were trying to generate these rational justifications for moral principles were ignoring as they tried to pass off value judgments as foregone conclusions. For Hume, we could list as many facts about murder as we liked, and arrange them into something that kind of looked like a logical proof. But as soon as we transitioned from is statements to an ought statement, we were basically just assuming the thing that we were trying to prove in the first place. Murder is bad. This poignant observation has colored the development of almost all moral philosophy that came after Hume. It has a bunch of different names. The is-ought problem, the is-ought fallacy, Hume's law, Hume's gap, or if you have a flair for the dramatic and are looking for a name for your philosophy metal band, Hume's guillotine. It's not universally accepted and some philosophers still believe that it's possible to derive an ought from an is, but it's definitely not an easy thing to get away with anymore. Now, with this sort of realization about the distinction between facts and values, one might be inclined to believe that all rational discussion and morality is now pointless, that people are just stuck with whatever morals they're first taught, everyone's opinions are just as valid as everyone else's, and there's nothing to be gained by rational discussion of right and wrong. But in the same book, Hume notes that even if our morals are founded on intuition and custom, even if there's no gleaming obelisk anywhere that dictates what right and wrong truly are, there's still something to be gained by reasoning about them. He makes a comparison to art. Few people would argue that we all need to share the same aesthetic values and think the exact same things are beautiful or ugly, but there are certain works of art that require us to engage and think critically to appreciate. Maybe you've had the experience of watching a movie, playing a video game, or reading a book that you thought was stupid, until you discussed it with a friend and realized something, some nuance that you missed the first time around that was essential to really getting it. You might have an entirely different sort of appreciation for it after that epiphany, but it's not like your friend reasoned you into a different feeling about beauty, like you preferred reds and oranges until they convinced you that greens and blues were better. It's just that by turning it over in your mind and examining it from different angles, you found a new way of looking at it that satisfied some of those feelings in a different way, something not apparent at first blush. Our first reactions to something might not be the most authentic expressions of our values, it might take some work to figure out exactly how your morals apply. You might believe that obeying the law is intrinsically good until you start thinking about how certain discriminatory laws violate your sense of equality or justice. You might have strong sentiments that killing babies is wrong, but if you're a time traveler and it's baby Hitler, there may not be a categorical basis of morality, a way to bridge Hume's gap from izzes to aughts, but there are more or less rational ways to approach the hypothetical imperatives that we generate from our own morals. Just like if you want to make a sandwich, then you ought to get some camels, doesn't make a whole lot of sense, sometimes we can use some help seeing how our values don't map to our actions or our beliefs. So long as we remember that those values might not match up perfectly from person to person, so long as we stay firmly in the realm of hypothetical imperatives and realize that if someone doesn't care about the same things that we do, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with exploring the relationships between our values and our choices rationally. Because a delicious sandwich may or may not be worth killing for, but it's definitely wrong to kill the guy who makes delicious sandwiches. What's the name of your philosophy metal band? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.