David Hume

The Pandemic And The Is-Ought Problem

Let’s re-think it all, while we can.

Clark Boyd
8 min readJul 22, 2020

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The philosopher David Hume wrote of the ‘Is-ought problem’.

He found that writers tie positive statements (what is) to normative statements (what ought to be).

In Hume’s opinion, these are potentially two separate worlds.

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Clark Boyd

Tech/business writer, CEO (Novela), lecturer (Columbia), and data analyst. >500k views on Medium. I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.