I gave a short introduction to the climate conference in Mölndal 26-27 October 2024. The theme of the conference was “Science and Politics” so I picked up a couple of basic philosophical words of wisdom for this occasion.
The first sentence comes from the 18th century philosopher David Hume with the following logic statement:
¬ (Is → Ought)1
1 The symbol ¬ is the logic symbol for NOT, the symbol → means implication.
Or in words: “it is not the case that is-statements imply ought-statements”, i.e. it is not possible to deduce what we ought to do from a description of what is the case. After all, the task of science is to describe how different things in the world look and function. But it says nothing about how we ought to act. In order to arrive at how we should act, we have to insert an ethical ought-premise into the reasoning.