How Separating Facts from Values Left Ethics Illiterate

The is-ought distinction, as it emerged historically, was not a bloodless logical point. It was part of a larger emancipatory project — the differentiation of value spheres that Max Weber described — which broke the grip of religious ontology over both empirical inquiry and normative deliberation. When a metaphysical framework fuses descriptive and evaluative claims into a single package, it forecloses the question of what actually exists independently of how we should relate to it. The separation of scientific from ethical discourse was a genuine achievement: it recognized that justifying a normative claim requires a fundamentally different evidentiary structure than justifying an empirical one.

The pathology set in not with the differentiation but with what followed. The normative domain, once distinguished, was progressively delegitimized — treated as the residue of emotion, preference, or cultural conditioning rather than as a domain with its own rational standards. Modernity became technically sophisticated at fact-stating discourse while losing almost all literacy in the discourse of value. This asymmetry has concrete consequences: in fields like psychology and education, ostensibly descriptive categories — ADHD being a paradigmatic case — carry crypto-normative freight. The diagnostic label presents as empirical description, but the questions of whether the described pattern constitutes a deficit, what it means for flourishing, and what interventions are warranted are evaluative questions that require their own forms of Justification.

The intellectual task, then, is neither to re-collapse the distinction nor to accept the post-differentiation dismissal. It is to resuscitate normative reasoning on its own terms — to recover or construct evidentiary standards appropriate to evaluative claims, recognizing that the discourse of value is not science done poorly but a different and equally demanding form of rational inquiry.