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Minding the Is-Ought Gap

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Abstract

The ‘No Ought From Is’ principle (or ‘NOFI’) states that a valid argument cannot have both an ethical conclusion and non-ethical premises. Arthur Prior proposed several well-known counterexamples, including the following: Tea-drinking is common in England; therefore, either tea-drinking is common in England or all New Zealanders ought to be shot. My aim in this paper is to defend NOFI against Prior’s counterexamples. I propose two novel interpretations of NOFI and prove that both are true.

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Correspondence to Campbell Brown.

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Brown, C. Minding the Is-Ought Gap. J Philos Logic 43, 53–69 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-012-9253-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-012-9253-3

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