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This rendered all facts about human action examinable under a normative framework defined by cardinal virtues and capital vices. "Fact" in this sense was not value-free, and the fact-value distinction was an alien concept. The decline of Aristotelianism in the 16th century set the framework in which those theories of knowledge could be revised. [6]
A value judgment is a thought about something based on what it "ought" or "should" be given an opinion about what counts as "good" or "bad" — a contrast from a thought based on what the facts are. E.g. "The government should improve access to education" is a value judgment (that education is good).
Many normative value judgments are held conditionally, to be given up if facts or knowledge of facts changes, so that a change of values may be purely scientific. [16] Welfare economist Amartya Sen distinguishes basic (normative) judgments, which do not depend on such knowledge, from nonbasic judgments, which do. [17]
Ethical or aesthetic judgments express feelings, not propositions, and have no objective validity. Value-judgments are not analytic, and are not verifiable as 'matters of fact.' According to Ayer when we argue about whether a value-judgment is right or wrong, we are really arguing about the empirical facts on which a value-judgment is based, or ...
There is large debate in philosophy surrounding whether one can get a normative statement of such a type from an empirical one (i.e. whether one can get an 'ought' from an 'is', or a 'value' from a 'fact'). Aristotle is one scholar who believed that one could in fact get an ought from an is.
Naturalistic fallacy – inferring evaluative conclusions from purely factual premises [105] [106] in violation of fact-value distinction. Naturalistic fallacy (sometimes confused with appeal to nature) is the inverse of moralistic fallacy. Is–ought fallacy [107] – deduce a conclusion about what ought to be, on the basis of what is.
These two notions being granted, it can be said that statements of "ought" are measured by their prescriptive truth, just as statements of "is" are measured by their descriptive truth; and the descriptive truth of an "is" judgment is defined by its correspondence to reality (actual or in the mind), while the prescriptive truth of an "ought ...
Ayer's defense is that all ethical disputes are about facts regarding the proper application of a value system to a specific case, not about the value systems themselves, because any dispute about values can only be resolved by judging that one value system is superior to another, and this judgment itself presupposes a shared value system.