David Hume noticed something strange about moral arguments. People describe how things are, then suddenly jump to how things should be. No bridge between them.
“Divorce rates are rising. Therefore, we should make divorce harder.”
“Humans evolved to be competitive. Therefore, capitalism is natural and good.”
“This is how we’ve always done it. Therefore, we should keep doing it this way.”
The gap is real. Facts about the world don’t automatically generate moral conclusions. You need something extra — a value judgment — to cross from “is” to “ought.”
Take the divorce example. Yes, divorce rates might be rising. But why is that bad? Maybe it means people feel freer to leave unhappy marriages. Maybe it means we’ve reduced the stigma around failed relationships. The rising rate is just a fact. Whether it’s good or bad depends on what you think marriage is for.
This doesn’t mean facts are irrelevant to ethics. They absolutely matter. You can’t make good moral decisions with bad information about the world.
But facts alone don’t make the decisions for you.
I see this mistake everywhere. People treat their moral intuitions like natural laws they discovered rather than choices they made. They point to evolution, or history, or human nature, as if these things could settle ethical questions by themselves.
They can’t. At some point, you have to decide what matters.