The fact-value distinction is a disaster. The philosopher Hume famously argued we can't get an 'ought' from an 'is'. Hume even took this so-called fact-value distinction to its logical conclusion when he famously wrote: "It's not contrary to reason for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” But was Hume radically mistaken? Robert Ellis here argues that facts and values are interlocked with each other and cannot even in principle be separated. Instead, both facts and values are judgements about the world; judgements that must be thought through rigorously and with as many variables as possible in mind.

If your dog is hungry, should you feed him? In practice, as an embodied human being, you are likely to feel that you should. From the disastrous disembodied perspective pushed by analytic philosophers (and followed by many others), though, these two points are seen in complete isolation from each other. You may feel that you ought to feed your dog, they say, but this is entirely distinguishable from the facts of the situation. Instead, it’s due to the extra values you bring to the situation that you feel an ethical responsibility towards your dog. Some disembodied philosophers have even described ethical claims as ‘queer’ — in the sense of inexplicably different from ‘ordinary’ factual ones.

The fact-value distinction

This separation of facts from values has been disastrous because it entrenches the idea that facts can be justified and ethics cannot. Facts are supposed to be ‘objective’, checkable by scientific observation, but values are assumed to be ‘subjective’, either just random whims or else just social conventions.

The originator of this perspective was the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who wrote “Tis not contrary to reason for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” The disembodiment of this viewpoint is breath-taking. Hume’s distinction is a merely logical one, that facts do not necessarily imply values. Yes, if you were a completely disembodied mind there would be nothing to choose between these two outcomes, but this is (one would have thought, obviously!) not our situation. However, philosophers, scientists and others have usually taken this perspective and assumed that this is how we should understand both science and ethics in practice — to the detriment of both. If they have tried to question the distinction at all, it has usually been in a way that reduces values to facts or facts to values — actually leaving the underlying distinction intact.

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Why the fact-value distinction is a disaster