Is Hume’s Law a Threat to Positivism and Naturalism? Hume’s Law—roughly, that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”—has long been baldly declared to pose a serious problem for legal positivism and moral naturalism. We point out that there is a gap between Hume’s Law (understood as a logical thesis about entailment relations between sentences) and positivism or naturalism (understood as metaphysical theses about grounding relations between facts), such that the former cannot imperil the latter all on its own. We then offer the most plausible and direct route to bridge this gap, via two defensible, albeit controversial bridge principles, which link grounding to necessitation and necessitation to entailment (respectively). We show why Hume’s law coupled with these bridge principles does pose a threat to positivism and naturalism. But we then argue that it also, surprisingly, poses an equally serious threat to many existing forms of anti-positivism and non-naturalism. The dialectical upshot here is two-fold: first, one must sign up for and defend some very strong views about the relationship between entailment and grounding in order to maintain that Hume’s Law is a problem for positivism or naturalism; and second, that in doing so one may well end up undermining one’s preferred alternative to positivism or naturalism.
When
Thu Jun 7, 2018 5am – 6:30am Coordinated Universal Time
