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    Hume's guillotine establishes that no set of purely descr... — Carmelics
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    Supports→Moral knowledge cannot be based solely on experience of the natural world.

    Hume's guillotine establishes that no set of purely descriptive 'is' statements can logically entail a normative 'ought' statement without a suppressed normative premise.

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    1 reason for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Logical entailment requires that a conclusion's truth-conditions are already contained in premises. Normative and descriptive statements have fundamentally different truth-conditions.
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    • 2.We can coherently conceive of any descriptive state of affairs existing while an opposite normative conclusion holds. This logical possibility proves they're not entailed.
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    • 3.Every valid argument deriving 'ought' from 'is' in practice smuggles in hidden normative commitments when scrutinized carefully, confirming the gap.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against
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    • 1.Descriptive facts about human flourishing, pain, or well-being may intrinsically carry normative force without requiring separate normative premises—the facts themselves matter.
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    • 2.The is-ought distinction assumes normative and descriptive statements occupy separate logical categories, but this categorical separation itself is philosophically controversial and unproven.
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    • 3.Hume's principle confuses psychological persuasiveness with logical entailment; our difficulty seeing the connection doesn't prove a logical gap actually exists.
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    Connections

    1 linked claim · 2 topics

    Truth & Knowledge1 linkedSkepticism1 linked
    Moral knowledge cannot be based solely on experience of the natural world.

    Related

    Descriptive facts about human flourishing, pain, or well-being may intrinsically...Every valid argument deriving 'ought' from 'is' in practice smuggles in hidden n...Hume's principle confuses psychological persuasiveness with logical entailment; ...Logical entailment requires that a conclusion's truth-conditions are already con...
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    Moral knowledge cannot be based solely on experience of the natural world.The is-ought distinction assumes normative and descriptive statements occupy sep...We can coherently conceive of any descriptive state of affairs existing while an...

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    Perspectives
    2 (1 for, 1 against)
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