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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A paper which looks at Williams' treatment of the 'is and ought' question in social and moral philosophy.
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Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: JL5_JLisought.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
The question of is and ought is
one which is concerned with the way in which a prescriptive conclusion - in other words, an ought statement - can or cannot be concluded from a set of descriptive
statements. Hume asserted that even if ones knowledge of the elements of an object, in terms of the way in which it was described, was complete, it would still not
be possible to deduce from this that the object possessed innate goodness or that it ought to be desired.
Therefore, to make a judgement about what ought to be
desired cannot be achieved by reasoning, even if the reasoning is deduced from true facts which are known. Consequently, no prescriptive statement can be asserted to be either true or
false. If it is impossible to decide what ought to be desired, then the concept of good becomes subjective: good cannot be said to be desirable in an absolute sense,
only in the perception of the one who desires it.
There is therefore no way of distinguishing that which is genuinely good from that which only appears to be
so. In order to challenge this it would be necessary to show that it is possible for prescriptive statements to contain objective truth, in which case there would be some
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