Hume's Guillotine sets up an ethical regress problem
April 12, 2014 at 9:14 pm
(This post was last modified: April 12, 2014 at 9:17 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
I don't see how moral realism is that difficult.
Hume's Guillotine (the is-ought problem) is the problem of justifying an evaluative statement with purely descriptive premises. The idea is that an evaluative claim would be objectively true if it could be piggy-backed on an objectively true descriptive claim, and then it could be used as the premise for other evaluative claims.
I thought Hume's Guillotine was this insurmountable problem until I looked at it as a regress problem. If the only justification for an evaluative claim can be other evaluative claims, then where does this regress of moral justification end? As it turns out, descriptive claims encounter the same sort of regress problem. There are different responses to the epistemological regress problem: foundationalism, coherentism, intuitionism, pragmatism...
I think qualia (mental experiences) provide foundations for both descriptive and evaluative frameworks. Qualia are indefinable yet undeniable. Most or all epistemological theories assume qualia to be a reliable source of information. Finally, certain qualia are intrinsically good or bad.
Hume's Guillotine (the is-ought problem) is the problem of justifying an evaluative statement with purely descriptive premises. The idea is that an evaluative claim would be objectively true if it could be piggy-backed on an objectively true descriptive claim, and then it could be used as the premise for other evaluative claims.
I thought Hume's Guillotine was this insurmountable problem until I looked at it as a regress problem. If the only justification for an evaluative claim can be other evaluative claims, then where does this regress of moral justification end? As it turns out, descriptive claims encounter the same sort of regress problem. There are different responses to the epistemological regress problem: foundationalism, coherentism, intuitionism, pragmatism...
I think qualia (mental experiences) provide foundations for both descriptive and evaluative frameworks. Qualia are indefinable yet undeniable. Most or all epistemological theories assume qualia to be a reliable source of information. Finally, certain qualia are intrinsically good or bad.
