Normative-descriptive and the Naturalistic Fallacy

The Anti-naturalistic Fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s ‘law’ are frequently appealed to for the purpose of drawing limits around the scope of scientific inquiry into ethics and morality. These two objections are shown to be without force. Thus two highly influential obstacles are removed from naturalizing ethics. The relative merits of moral skepticism and moral realism are compared. Moral skepticism and some for...

Notes and Commentary Hayek, Logic, and the Naturalistic Fallacy

In his paper titled “Did Hayek Commit the Naturalist Fallacy?” published in the September 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Erik Angner develops three theses. The first is that Friedrich Hayek’s own writings and those of competent commentators give plentiful evidence that Hayek appears to have inferred values from facts. (The appears is stressed because Angner himsel...

Normative notions in descriptive dialogues

Developments in the theory of individual decision-making have been partly shaped by two criteria: a desire for models consistent with experimental evidence; and a pre-commitment to models built on normatively appealing axioms. This paper explores the compatibility of these two selection criteria. The paper reconstructs and scrutinises an argument due to Friedman and Savage asserting that the no...

Normative and Descriptive Aspects of Decision Making

The problems of human behavior in decision processes are central in this chapter. The gaps between the requirements of decision methods and the possibilities of human information processing systems are analyzed. The qualitative model describing the decision maker’s behavior is proposed. The model defines the guidelines for the construction of decision methods justified from behavior point of vi...

When normative and descriptive diverge: how to bridge the difference