The appealing principle that you can't get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, sometimes called Hume's Guillotine , faces a well-known challenge: it must give a clear account of the distinction between normative and descriptive sentences while dodging counter-examples. I argue in this paper that recent efforts to answer this challenge fail because the distinction between normative and descriptive sentences cannot be described well enough to be of any help. As a result, no version of the principle is both true and (...) adequate. Yet a different principle—that no normative terms are synonymous with any descriptive terms—can satisfy much of the motivation we had for defending Hume's Guillotine in the first place. I show briefly how this second principle can explain why is-ought arguments are invalid, block some attempted deductive justifications of beliefs with normative terms, and create an explanatory advantage for moral non-cognitivism. Just so, giving up Hume's Guillotine is the prudent thi.. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense against the primary objection to the view that goodness and other value properties give normative reasons, which is T. M. Scanlon’s influential redundancy argument. Scanlon reasons that value properties cannot add anything over and above what non-evaluative properties contribute. I suggest this line of reasoning is analogous to Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument against non-reductive physicalism, and adapt Ned Block’s objection to exclusion—a generalization and regress argument—into a reason for rejecting Scanlon’s argument. Differences between reasons (...) and causes make Scanlon’s task more difficult than Kim’s. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.