I think most philosophers nowadays take it for granted that there is a distinction between judgments about how things are and what we ought to do, and that claims of one type cannot be logically derived from nothing but statements of the other type–you’re going to need a premise in there of the form “if this is how things are, then this is what we ought to do.”

In Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, a defense of Aristotelian virtue ethics, attacks this idea. He’s really interested in judgments of “goodness” rather than “oughts”–fair enough, since the is-ought problem is supposed to apply to ethics in general. Then he cites the cases of “good farmer” and “good watch,” where it seems like we can make judgments about who the good farmers are and what the good watches are based on descriptive facts alone, precisely because the terms “farmer” and “watch” contain within them a certain notion of what farmers and watches are for.

MacIntyre then goes on to make this generalization:

Within the Aristotelian tradition to call x good (where x may be among other things a person or an animal or a policy or a state of affairs) is to say that it is the kind of x which someone would choose who wanted an x for the purpose for which x’s are characteristically wanted.

Apply this to the question “what is a good man?” and some humorous thoughts immediately pop up: stereotypical images of a military commander barking “I need a few good men” and yuppie women wondering where all the good men are in their city. Having read Geoffrey Miller, part of me wants to believe there’s more to the second image than meets the eye–Miller’s thesis is that humanhttp://www.amazon.com/Mating-Mind-Sexual-Choice-Evolution/dp/038549517X evolution was driven by the need to attract sexual partners, and that doing so is the ultimate reason for a wide range of human activities with apparently diverse purposes. That thought is especially tempting given that Aristotle’s account of virtue was as something only a few could achieve, and that, in spite of attempts by the Catholic church to make Aristotle underwrite good Christian morality, he is probably better understood as part of the “pagan virtues” tradition where virtue (or, what may be a better translation of the Greek, excellence) is largely about being better than other people (and, on Miller’s account, a more attractive item on the sexual market place).

When looked at from the point of view of the is-ought problem, however, this answer isn’t very satisfying. Even if it just were part of the definition of the word “man” that “good man” meant “good soldier” or “attractive mate for a heterosexual woman,” this wouldn’t mean that those qualities are what are ultimately worth trying to attain in life. That question remains, as G. E. Moore said, an open question. The is-ought gap remains unbridged.