home | what's new | other sites | contact | about

Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler's 

Six Great Ideas

return to 'Six Great Ideas' main-page

Is and Ought

The judgment that something is good or bad— or that it is
better or worse than something else—is one we make every
day, often many times a day. It is implicit in every choice we
make. It is expressed every time we appraise anything or esti-
mate its value for us. That is why judgments that attribute
goodness or some degree of goodness to things have come to
be called "value judgments."

We see at once a fundamental difference between truth and
goodness. We do not usually speak of things as being true or
false. In exceptional cases, such as that of counterfeit money,
we may think of the counterfeit as false and of the genuine
article as true, but when we do so, we are using the words
"true" and "false" in a metaphorical sense, borrowing the

words from their proper application to the verbal statements
we make or the judgments of our mind.

"Good" and "bad," on the other hand, are terms we normally
apply to the things of this world, not to our thoughts or state-
ments about them. Included among the items we appraise as
good or bad are human beings themselves, as well as their
intentions and actions, their institutions and productions, and
the lives they lead. In every case, it is the object we are con-
sidering, not our thought about it, that we call good or bad.

Traditional wisdom places the difference between truth and
goodness in the different relationships they involve. Truth re-
sides in the relation between the thinking mind and the objects
it thinks about. Our thoughts are true when they stand in a
relation of agreement with the state of the objects we are think-
ing about. Goodness resides in the relation between objects of
every sort and the state of our desires. Objects are good when
they satisfy our desires.

When we talk about the pursuit of truth, we are regarding
truth as an object of desire and, in doing so, we are in effect
attributing goodness to truth. Having possession of the truth in
some measure is a good of the mind, a good we seek when we
pursue the truth. If we seek to overcome ignorance and to avoid
error, we regard them as evils to be avoided; and in their place,
we desire knowledge, which consists in having some hold on
the truth about the way things are.

Now let us turn in the opposite direction and ask whether
there is any truth in our value judgments—our judgments
about things as good or bad. When such judgments are chal-
lenged, most people find it difficult to defend them by giving
reasons calculated to persuade others to agree with them. Since
individuals obviously differ from one another in their desires,
what one person regards as good may not be so regarded by
another.

Unless I am lying, my statement that I regard something as
good (which is tantamount to saying that I desire it) is a true
statement about me, but that would seem to be as far as it goes.

The judgment that the object in question is good would not
appear to be true in a sense that commands universal assent—
good not just for me but for everyone else as well.

We are thus brought face to face with the much disputed
question about the objectivity or subjectivity of value judg-
ments. In the contemporary world, skepticism about value
judgments prevails on all sides. Value judgments, it is generally
thought, express nothing more than individual likes or dislikes,
desires or aversions. They are entirely subjective and relative to
the individual who makes them. If they have any truth at all, it
is only the truth that is contained in a statement about the
individual who is making the judgment—the truth that he re-
gards a certain object as good because he, in fact, desires it.

Only if there could be truth in judgments that asserted that
certain objects are good for all human beings, not just for this
individual or that, would value judgments have objectivity.
They would then cease to be entirely relative to individual idio-
syncrasies. At least some value judgments would then belong
in the sphere of truth and be subject to argument. Others might
remain in the sphere of taste and be beyond the reach of argu-
ment. We might expect men to try to achieve agreement about
the former, but not about the latter. Instead of saying that good
and bad are entirely subjective values, we would then be main-
taining that they are partly objective and partly subjective.

However, this is precisely what is denied by skepticism con-
cerning value judgments, at least those that appraise objects as
good and bad, which is just another way of saying desirable
and undesirable. In the skeptic's view, the identification of the
good with the desirable makes it impossible to avoid the sub-
jectivity of judgments about what is good and bad, relative as
they must be to the differing desires of different individuals.

That the good is the desirable and the desirable is the good
cannot be denied. But we can note a certain duplicity in the
meaning of "desirable.” When we speak of something as desir-
able, we may mean, on the one hand, that it is in fact desired
and, on the other hand, that it ought to be desired, whether or
not it is. Certainly, when we say that something is admirable,
we can either be reporting the fact that it is admired or be laying
down the injunction that it ought to be admired, whether or not
it is. The same duplicity would seem to be present in the mean-
ing of desirable.

With this duplicity in mind, we can ask the following critical
question: Do we regard something as good simply because we
in fact desire it, or ought we to desire something because it is
in fact good? In both cases, the good remains the desirable, but
in one case the goodness is attributed to the object only because
it is desired, while in the other the object ought to be desired
only because it is good.

The alternatives here presented are not exclusive. We can
affirm that some of an individual's value judgments attribute
goodness to an object on the basis of the fact that he or she
desires it. We can also affirm that some of an individual's value
judgments recognize a goodness in the object that makes it an
object that ought to be desired.

The skeptical view of value judgments holds that they are all
of the same sort. All consist in an individual's calling an object
good on the basis of his actual desires. That which he in fact
desires appears good to him insofar as he desires it. The object
that appears good to him may not appear good to someone else
whose desires are different. One man's meat is another man's
poison.

Against the skeptic, are we able to defend the opposite view
that, while some objects appear good to an individual simply
because he or she in fact desires them, there are other objects
that he or she ought to desire because they are good—really
good, not just apparently good.

To do this, we must manage to get across another hurdle. The
obstacle that now stands in our way is a difficulty that has been
raised about prescriptive as opposed to descriptive statements.

A prescriptive statement or judgment is one that asserts what
ought or ought not to be done. A statement about what ought
or ought not to be desired imposes a prescription that may or
may not be obeyed. In contradistinction, a descriptive state-
ment or judgment is one that asserts the way things are, not
how they ought to be. A statement about what is desired by a
given individual simply describes his condition as a matter of
fact.

How, it is asked, can prescriptive injunctions be true or false?
Have we not adopted the view that the truth of statements or
judgments consists in their conformity with the ways things
are—with the facts that they try to describe? If a statement is
true when it asserts that that which is, is, and false when it
asserts that which is, is not, how then can there be truth or
falsity in a statement that asserts what ought or ought not to
be?

Even if we possessed all the descriptive truth that is attain-
able, how could our knowledge of reality, our knowledge of the
way things are, lead us to any valid conclusion about what
ought to be done or about what ought to be desired?

It was long ago quite correctly pointed out by the skeptical
philosopher David Hume that no prescriptive conclusion (in
the form of an “ought" statement) can be validly inferred from
a set of premises, no matter how complete, that consists solely
of descriptive statements about the way things are. Even if we
had perfect knowledge of all the properties that enter into the
description of an object, we could not infer the goodness of the
object or that it ought to be desired.

We are thus confronted with two obstacles, not one. The first
is the difficulty raised by the question. How can prescriptive
statements be either true or false, if truth consists in the corre-
spondence between what is asserted and the way things are?
The second is the objection raised by David Hume, to the effect
that truths about matters of fact do not enable us to reach by
reasoning a single valid prescriptive conclusion—a true judg-
ment about what ought or ought not to be done or desired.

Unless we can surmount these difficulties, no prescriptive
statement or judgment can be true or false. If we cannot truly
say what ought to be desired, then the good is the desirable
only in the sense that it appears good to the individual who in
fact desires it. Acquiescing in the rejection of the alternative
sense of the desirable as that which ought to be desired, we
also must give up the notion that some objects are really good
as distinguished from other objects that only appear to be good
and may not be really so.

To refute the skeptical view, which makes all value judg-
ments subjective and relative to individual desires, we must be-
able to show how prescriptive statements can be objectively
true. An understanding of truth as including more than the
kind of truth that can be found in descriptive statements thus
becomes the turning point in our attempt to establish a certain
measure of objectivity in our judgments about what is good
and bad.

Only through such understanding will we be able to show
that some value judgments belong to the sphere of truth, instead of all being relegated to the sphere of taste and thus reduced to matters about which reasonable men should not argue
with one another or expect to reach agreement.