Abstract
Can values be derived from facts? Is it possible to effect a valid inferential transition from factual premisses to an evaluative conclusion? This issue is well worth the considerable philosophical toil and struggle that has been expended on it over the years.' For large and substantial philosophical positions are at stake with this apparently small scale and somewhat technical-seeming question. As Hume remarked (Treatise, Bk. III, Pt. I, Sect. I), a person who makes mistakes in factual matters is at worst stupid or incompetent, but a person who is mistaken in evaluative matters e. g. who prizes what properly deserves to be disdained would for this very reason be deemed perverse and wicked. But if evaluations could be derived from facts, so that erroneous evaluations would be mere mistakes in inquiry and information-processing, then this line of differentiation would be breached. Mistakes in evaluation would be more to be pitied than censured, and the ethical aspect of evaluation would become unraveled. Moreover, the issue of a fact-to-values transit confronts us with a philosophical dialectic in which the following doctrines are in circulation:
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