Hume's is-ought gap is the claim that no normative conclusion follows purely from descriptive premises. It's one of the most-cited claims in metaethics and also one of the most misunderstood. Hume didn't say facts and values are completely separate; he said you can't silently sneak from one to the other. Naturalist responses (from Moore's open question argument to the contemporary 'reasons fundamentalism' of Scanlon) tend to either bite the bullet and accept some irreducible normativity in their premises, or try to reduce 'ought' to natural properties. I find neither fully satisfying. The question I keep circling: is there a non-arbitrary way to select which natural properties count as value-making without already importing normative assumptions?
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