A Middle Course for Ethicists

Abstract

THE three papers on inferring what to from what that appeared recent issues of Ethics' illustrate admirably extent to which agreement among philosophers necessarily depends upon familiarity with a common universe of discourse. Evidently no two of three authors2 are of same mind, and it doubtful if any of three of same mind with Hume. Hume made observation that although normative judgments are regularly deducible from factual ones, in every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with ... author proceeds if they were. The practice-by no means confined to systems of morality, and quite widespread our day Hume's-consists establishing facts by ordinary way of reasoning (proving existence of God, for example) and making observations about human affairs, then switching from propositions having the usual copulations . . . and not to entirely different ones having copulations and not. On face of it, this a type of inconsequence. A committee of scholars, for example, concludes its voluminous statistical study3 with these words: Thus low salaries, heavy teaching loads, and inadequate research facilities constitute outstanding sources of dissatisfaction and concern. Concerted efforts toward improvement to made all three of these directions. The to be proposition simply does follow from descriptive propositions preceding it. Had Hume been content to report his discovery, it doubtful that it would have created stir it has philosophical world. Had he attached a cryptic prophecy, men would have suspected at once that his irritation arose from nothing more than a stubborn philosophical insistence that concealed assumptions brought into open. For, obviously, concealed assumptions do operate when what to deduced from what is. They take form If a b, and c d ... then x to y. They function generally major premises relation to which expressed is propositions represent simply affirmations of antecedent, and expressed ought propositions, perfectly logical affirmations of consequent. Thus, underlying entire report cited above, one can note unexpressed but nonetheless effective major premise, If low salaries, heavy teaching loads, etc., are sources of dissatisfaction, then efforts toward improvement these directions to made. This sufficiently evident that reader supplies it automatically, and only meticulous logician would object to its being simply assumed. But Hume appended to his observation two others of a very different nature: (1) that it seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation can a deduction; (2) that as authors do commonly use this precaution . . . this small attention would subvert all vulgar systems of morality. It appears thus that what required merely missing major premise-for that, we have seen, readily conceivable and hardly threatens to subvert anythingbut, instead, some necessary connection binding its consequent to its antecedent. From a complex proposition asserting p implies q, plus a simple proposition asserting p, where both propositions are factual and implicant q normative, desired normative conclusion deducible. The deduction appears inconceivable-and