PEA Soup

Reparations for Slavery?

I just read a chapter about slave reparations by my colleague David Boonin. David presents an interesting and surprisingly strong argument in favor of reparations. (This argument apparently has been advanced before, but this is the first time I heard it.) Here's an abstract of how it goes:

The is-ought gap

In another thread, A.N. Prior's attempted refutation of the is/ought gap came up. Here's one of Prior's examples:

a. Tea-drinking is common in England.
b. Therefore, tea-drinking is common in England, or all New Zealanders ought to be shot.

(a) entails (b), (a) is descriptive, and allegedly, (b) is evaluative.

There's an unjustly neglected article by Toomas Karmo ("Some Valid (but no Sound) Arguments Trivially Span the Is-Ought Gap", Mind [1988]: 252-7) that responds to this sort of example and provides a general proof of a version of the is-ought gap. Karmo's argument goes roughly like this: