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Ought we accept Hume’s severing of any connection between ‘is’ and ‘ought’?

Name: The is/ought problem
Uploaded: 2016-08-12T10:05:04.000Z
Duration: 1 min
Description: Ought we accept Hume’s severing of any connection between ‘is’ and ‘ought’?

How do you decide whether you ought to do something? Chances are you’ve employed statements about how things are or have been as the basis for making a judgment call. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume forcefully argued against this approach. According to ‘Hume’s law’, also known as the ‘is/ought problem’, determining what you ought to do based on what is represents a logical mistake because there’s a gap that reason cannot bridge between the facts of the world and the values you might espouse.

Video by BBC Radio 4 and The Open University

Script: Nigel Warburton

Animator: Andrew Park

12 August 2016