Facts and values

We have already come across an important metaethical discovery: whatever your moral beliefs, settling moral questions has to involve something over and above the kind of observation that is so central to science.

If John is eating strawberries, then someone is eating strawberries

can be established, in a sense, without relying on any premises at all. Just as they differ from empirical judgments, moral truths are not, in this crucial epistemological respect, like the a priori truths we have already met. So if we are to adopt moral rationalism—the view that moral questions are to be decided by reason—we need some way of using reason to establish moral premises.

The kinds of questions that observation and experiment or proof alone can help us to settle are factual questions. There is a matter of fact about whether they are true or not, and logic and experience are ways of finding out what is true. But moral questions are matters of value, and matters of value do not seem to be settled by experience or logic alone.

This is not to say that logic and experience are irrelevant to moral

decisions.

Killing innocent people is always wrong

and

Killing innocent civilians in warfare is sometimes right

that the case of the airman raised a problem for our moral beliefs.

One way of making the distinction between factual and evaluative questions is to point out that when you accept an evaluative claim it commits you to certain courses of action. You cannot reasonably both accept that killing innocent people is wrong and go ahead and kill an innocent person. When you judge that something is the right thing for you to do, you are committed to thinking that you ought to do it. On many occasions, therefore, “I ought to do it” commits you to a course of action.

I say “on many occasions” because we sometimes say “I ought to do it” in the course of discussing reasons for doing something and then go on to give other reasons against doing it. Thus, if I have promised my godchild, Liza, to take her to the zoo, I might say

I ought to take Liza to the zoo because I promised her I would.

but then go on to add that, unfortunately, I cannot take her, because I have to attend an important meeting. But when all of the relevant reasons for and against acting have been considered, and I say

All things considered, I ought to go to the meeting

that commits me to a course of action.

David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher who invented the problem of induction, was also one of the first people to put the difference between factual and evaluative questions in terms of the distinction between questions about what is so and those about what ought to be so. In the following famous passage from his Treatise of Human Nature he argues that once we recog­nize this distinction, we shall have to reject all the “vulgar”—that is, common or ordinary—’’systems of morality.”

I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hith­erto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning and establishes the being of God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but it is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers and am persuaded, that this small attention could subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is founded not merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

The conclusion of this passage is just Hume's way of saying that moral questions are not questions of fact.

The distinction between fact and value is central to all discussion of metaethics since Hume’s day, and his argument in this passage has been summarized in a famous slogan: you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.” One reason this distinction is so important is that it is relevant to both of the two great questions in metaethics:

a) What do moral judgments mean?

b)  What justifies them?

Let us call the first of these the “moral content question.” To answer the second question, we have to do some moral episte­mology. Once we accept the fact-value distinction, we are commit­ted to the view that the meaning of moral judgments has to be explained in such a way that moral claims cannot be derived from factual ones alone. And we are also committed to finding a moral epistemology that shows that moral beliefs are justified in different ways from factual ones.

5.3