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• Literature of Liberty a Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
• Editorial Staff
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• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Henry B. Veatch, Natural Law: Dead Or Alive?
• I: Natural Law
• “nature” and “law” In Natural Law
• The Anatomy of Natural Rights
• Egoism and Rights
• The Is/ought Chimera
• Deriving “ought” From “is”
• Facts Vs. Value-laden Whims
• Is/ought and Probable Reasons
• Does Righteous Anger Imply Rights?
• Why Be Moral?
• Truth As an Objective Value
• Was the Revolution Objectively Necessary?
• Natural Law and State of Nature
• Natural Law and the State
• Natural Rights and Anarchism
• Dworkin On Rights
• Liberalism, Rights, and Abortion
• Rights and “mercy Killing”
• Rights and the “brain Drain”
• The Natural Law Right to Work
• Grotius: Contract and Natural Law
• Rights and Communication
• II: Autonomy, Privacy, and Authority
• Bureaucracy and “the Organization Man”
• Autonomy and Anarchism
• Autonomy and Taking Responsibility
• Autonomy, Motivation, and “buck-passing”
• Schooling For Conformity
• The Schoolroom Vs. Autonomy
• Obedience to Authority
• The Meaning of Privacy
• Privacy and Autonomy
• Privacy and Consent
• The Court and Privacy
• III: The Ambiguities of Liberty
• Clarifying Freedom
• Rehabilitating Mill's “harm Principle”
• Experiencing Freedom
• Do Offers Coerce Freedom?
• The Danger of “dangerousness”
• Freedom, Motivation, and Government Programs
• Freedom Vs. Determinism
• Negative Vs. Positive Freedom
• Smith and Utilitarian Economic Freedom
• Locke, Freedom, and Tacit Consent
• Religious Freedom
• Freedom, Existentialism, and Innocent Victims
• Does Censorship Harm Freedom?
• IV: Slavery
• Slavery, Ideology, and Subordination
• Slavery and Imperialist Ideology
• Enlightenment Liberalism Vs. Slavery
• The Anatomy of a Slave Revolt
• Colonial American Slave Law
• Jefferson On Slavery
• Slavery and the Poor
• V: Planning
• Regulation and the Warfare State
• Mail, Privacy, and Social Control
• Corporate State Capitalism: Coal
• French War “planification”: Chlorates
• Bureaucracy and British Regulation
• British Foreign Policy and Stagnation
• Political Decisions and the Economy
• Government, Labor, and Multinationals
• Black Markets Vs. Regulation
• Regulation Vs. Academic Autonomy
• Government Schools and Social Control
• The Economics of Charity
• International State Planning and Inflation
• Competition and Individual Knowledge

Deriving “Ought” from “Is”

Ralph McInerny

• University of Notre Dame

“Naturalism and Thomistic Ethics.” The Thomist 40 (April 1976): 222–242.

Can we logically construct an objective human ethics that grounds moral obligations and the norms for being a “good” man in factual reality? “Prescriptivists” have joined battle with “descriptivists” (or naturalists) on this crucial issue.

Prescriptivists including R.M. Hare deny that we can legitimately derive values from such facts as human nature. Their doubts stem from Hume's fact/value dichotomy and G.E. Moore's “naturalistic fallacy”: We cannot logically derive a moral “ought” from a factual or descriptivists “is.” Seeking a single meaning for “good” behind all its different uses, prescriptivists claim that the function of “good” in moral evaluation is to emotionally commend. There is, they assert, no necessary or logical tie connecting our commending something as “good” with the descriptive qualities that we select as the criteria for an object's goodness.

On the other hand, naturalists seek to root values and the standard of “good” in the nature of things, namely man's distinctive characteristics. When we “commend” something to someone as “good” we mean to express more than our subjective emotional approval; we seek to suggest that there are sound reasons or objective qualities in the thing that should rightly commend it to someone.

Aquinas identified humans as “good” when they exercised well their distinguishing trait of the rational will to achieve specific goods because these human goods tended to perfect man's nature. Aquinas did not, as D.J. O'Connor asserts in Aquinas and Natural Law (1968), commit a fallacy moving from what men do in fact seek as ends to what they ought to seek. The Thomistic approach may circumvent Hume's stricture against derving such an “ought” from an “is.” The author formulates a way to derive human values from facts:

• (1) Men are de facto engaged in the pursuit of a vast variety of objectives, ends, goods.
• (2) The pursuit of the good involves the judgment that, say, a particular action, A, has the formality G, goodness; that is, A is regarded as perfective of the agent.
• (3) That A has G is the reason for, the justification of, desiring A.
• (4) It is possible that A, which is thought to have G, does not really have G.
• (5) One desiring A under the assumption that it has G who comes to see that it does not have G, should not pursue A.
• (6) If A is seen not to have G, there is no longer any justification of pursuing it.
• (7) And if B is seen to have the G, A was mistakenly thought to have, one who ought not to pursue A, ought to pursue B.

Thus, human good is the set of “virtues,” values, or excellences which do in fact perfect individual human nature. This set of values is hierarchically ordered; human reason and will are said to function well in defining and directing us to achieve these many and varied goods.