Research Paper on:
Williams' Is and Ought

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
The question of is and ought is  one which is concerned with the way in which a prescriptive conclusion - in other words, an ought statement - can or cannot be concluded from a set of descriptive  statements. Hume asserted that even if ones knowledge of the elements of an object, in terms of the way in which it was described, was complete, it would still not  be possible to deduce from this that the object possessed innate goodness or that it ought to be desired.  Therefore, to make a judgement about what ought to be  desired cannot be achieved by reasoning, even if the reasoning is deduced from true facts which are known. Consequently, no prescriptive statement can be asserted to be either true or  false. If it is impossible to decide what ought to be desired, then the concept of good becomes subjective: good cannot be said to be desirable in an absolute sense,  only in the perception of the one who desires it.  There is therefore no way of distinguishing that which is genuinely good from that which only appears to be  so. In order to challenge this it would be necessary to show that it is possible for prescriptive statements to contain objective truth, in which case there would be some