Paradox

264 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PARADOXplease an ideal judge. This mild idealization takes awayprejudice and ignorance but is intended to preserve thehumanity of the judge. The ideal judge is still animated byemotions—just untainted emotions.Hume enforces this emotive approach by contendingthat there is an is/ought gap. Past ethicists began frompremises describing empirical realities and then moved onto claims about what ought to be the case. According toHume, moral arguments require moral premises. Thesepremises about what ought to be the case cannot be deducedsolely from premises about what is the case. Consequently,ethicists cannot answer “Why be moral?” For Hume, thequestion of moral motivation never arises because moralityis a matter of feeling.He argues that there is also a gap in inductive reasoning.How do we know that the sun will rise tomorrow? True, thesun has risen repeatedly in the past. But that does not entailthe sun will rise tomorrow. We can conceive of the earthstanding still or the sun exploding. Thus, there is no deductivejustification for “The sun will rise tomorrow.” Could therebe inductive justification? Only if we are justified in believingthat the future will resemble the past. We can imagine thisproposition being false, so it cannot be established deductively.But any inductive argument for “The future willresemble the past” will rely on that principle itself and so becircular. For instance, some say the future will resemble thepast because past futures have always resembled past pasts.But this does nothing to remove the possibility that there isa discontinuity between past futures and future futures.Hume realized that the empiricist has trouble inferringcauses from correlations. We can observe that when a movingbilliard ball strikes a stationary billiard ball, then the ball that