[lbo-talk] "Ought" from "Is" (Was: I'm not sorry)

[Curtiss Leung]

Hilary Putnam (is he still considered a proper analytic philosopher
these days?)
takes on this matter in a recent volume of essays, _The Collapse of the
Fact/Value
Dichotomy_.  He does mention Hume w/r/t this topic and glosses the
passage most
commonly interpreted as "inferring 'ought' from 'is'" to mean rather
that ethical
terms have a different ontological status from terms with empirical
reference and
goes on to say that Hume was indeed deeply concerned with matters
ethical (caveat:
I don't have the book by my side, and I hope everyone reading this knows
that
my memory isn't the best)

Whether or not this is a plausible reading of Hume, I think Putnam's
point is 
well taken anyway.  Maybe some will find it trivial, but (a) that there
is a difference
of kind between the terms and (b) that there is a possibility of a
relationship 
between them is interesting and useful to me.

That said:
1.  w/r/t the original topic, I think an "I'm not sorry day"
for women who've had abortions is a good thing.  I've known 
women who've had abortions and whose attitude towards having 
terminated their pregnancies was nothing but relief pure and 
simple.  The practice is legal, yet it's surrounded by shame,
which is a ridiculous situation.  It's their right--well, last
time I checked it is, and you can't check too often under
Bush the Younger--to have their say.

That's a hopelessly unsophisticated non-argument, I know.  But
even if you're not an emotivist, emotive statements play a role
in discussion.

2.  Chomsky's attempts at a universal grammar underlying
languages are all *descriptive*, not *prescriptive*.  His
famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
is supposed to demonstrate that humans recognize an utterance
as a sentence on the basis of its syntax, not its semantics.
By extention, I don't see how one could postulate that he 
would support a prescriptive, substantial universal grammar
of human behavior.  The basis for his ethical thought must
lie elsewhere.

Curtiss

> > CGE: 
> > I don't think the so-called naturalistic fallacy (roughly, 
> > deriving "ought" from "is") is a fallacy at all.  Where 
> > else do ethics come from? Whim? Unmotivated taste?  Chomsky 
> > (who would not quite agree on abortion) would reject such 
> > emotivism in favor of ethics as a sort of universal grammar 
> > of human behavior. --CGE
>
>
> On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> In this, as in everything else on the topic from Messrs. Estabrook and

> Campbell (not to mention all the other prohibitionists) is a glaring 
> exhibition of what has aptly become known as the *naturalistic 
> fallacy*, first analyzed by David Hume.  "...Hume maintains that no 
> propositions about what ought to be can validly be deduced from 
> premises stating quite neutrally what as a matter of fact actually 
> did, or does, or will occur..." (Article *Philosophy* in Collier's 
> Encyclopedia, vol.18, p.725)
> 

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