In a recent article A. R. Konrad argues that, "There is no 'Fact-Value Gap' for Hume." 1 1 shall argue against this conclusion by showing both that Konrad's claims are ambiguous and that his interpretation of Hume is questionable.
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Some clarifications of Konrad's objectives are first required. One might suppose, after reading his opening paragraph, that he is investigating whether Hume maintains that factual statements do not entail moral statements. But Konrad explicitly disavows the relevance of discussing what may be called The Entailment Gap (133). Instead, he tries to show that some type of nondeductive connection between facts and values is made in Hume's writings. His principal concern is whether Hume's philosophy supports the "scepticism concerning the 'rationality' of ethics" which has crept into philosophy since Moore's formulation of the naturalistic fallacy. By "scepticism" Konrad means any theory in which values are judged arbitrary inasmuch as they cannot be justified by appeal solely to facts and in which ethical disagreements cannot be settled through the "rational method" of "appealing to the facts" (126). This Justification Gap, as I shall call it, is Konrad's major preoccupation.
However, Konrad has a tendency to conflate The Justification Gap with a third gap which may be called The Explanation Gap. He argues, for example, that Those who find an unbridgeable gap.., think an explanation is impossible since "ought"-statements cannos be deduced from statements of fact. Such an explanation would be impossible on Hume's terms only if it is thought that the only legitimate kind of explanation would be one which is a type of deduction. There is no reason to, suppose that Hume thought any such thing. (126f)
Here the central issue is whether values can somehow be explained in terms o~ facts. Unfortunately, Konrad never explicates the term "explanation." If he means causal explanation, then he is certainly correct, but irrelevantly so.