Gem. Ideas about morality must be supported by something more than just the facts of physics, biology and anthropology. You cannot tell what people ought to do just from facts about what they are. We think it is bad to make people suffer because we bring to them the idea that suffering is bad. That idea is not found in any fact about any person. The fact that people can suffer does not imply, by itself, the fact that suffering is wrong, any more than the fact that paper hats can burn can imply any fact about whether it is right or wrong to burn them.
Teagan. This Is-Ought dichotomy states that ideas about what a person ought to do cannot be logically deduced from ideas about what a person is, and thus it erects an insurmountable barrier between a thing and its proper behavior. This is like the doctrine of vitalism, which held that life could not be generated purely from chemical forces, and thus erected an insurmountable barrier between chemistry and life. Vitalism has conclusively been proven false, so we should conclude that the Is-Ought dichotomy is false also.
From what I can see here, moral claims, (it's wrong to kill, it's wrong to torture), cannot be derived from physical truths, (kittens can die, politicians can feel pain). This is because the fact that something can be done never by itself implies that it should or should not be done. Teagan calls this the "Is-Ought" dichotomy, and argues that it is false because it is like saying that chemical forces can never by themselves generate life. Teagan's argument fails because the only thing these two ideas have in common is that they both say that one thing cannot be gotten out of another thing. This is a very superficial feature, and it is shared with ideas like "dancing
by itself cannot generate rain" and "toads cannot by themselves cause
warts," both both of which are perfectly true. Since Teagan's counter argument
would only work if all such statements were false, that counter argument fails.
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