What is the core issue of facts and values?
Whilst all of the facts of a case may be agreed the dispute around the values may still remain- leading to the same facts but different takes on the morality
For example if Judith Jarvis Thomson (American philospher) and Mother Theresa both agree a third teenage woman is pregnant and that it will impact their life
Judith would produce more and more facts that show the economic and social impact of teen pregnancy
And Theresa would keep producing examples of how all living things reproduce and care for their young.
What is the is-ought gap?
Humes realisation of this leap in moral reasoning which highlights the difficulty of deriving moral or prescriptive statements (“ought”) from purely descriptive or factual statements (“is”).
It asserts that there is no necessary logical connection between how things are (facts) and how they should be (values or moral obligations)
For example observing the ‘is’ of people often lying does not logically entail that lying is morally acceptable
What is the open question argument?
It was developed by G.E Moore (1873-1958) in order to refute the idea that the property of goodness can be equated with some non-moral property, whether natural (e.g. pleasure) or supernatural (e.g. gods command)
What is the naturalistic fallacy within the open question argument?
Moores argument attempts to show that no moral property is identical to a natural property
If X is (analytically equivalent to) good, then the question “Is it true that X is good?” is meaningless.
But Moore states that the question of “Is it true that X is good?” is not meaningless (i.e. it is an open question).
And therefore X is not (analytically equivalent to) good.
What is Moores characterisation of an open and closed question?
“Is it true that X is Y?”
Such a question is an open question if a conceptually competent speaker can question this; otherwise it is closed.
For example, “I know it is a dog, but is it a canine?” would be a closed question.
However, “I know that it is pleasurable, but is it good?” is an open question; the answer cannot be derived from the meaning of the terms alone.
What does his defining of an open question mean for the argument?
Any attempt to identify morality with some set of observable, natural properties will always be an open question, therefore moral facts cannot be reduced to natural properties and thus ethical naturalism is false.
