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Throughout the history of philosophy, nobody has been able to bridge the gap between “is” and “ought.” Most efforts are really answers to other questions, such as “What is the nature of Man?” Lofty and philosophical as these speculations are, they are factual, not ethical. They may abstract from what “is,” but they do not obligate it. There is also a common, practical realm of casuistry that confronts a person's different moral judgments with each other. That is the ordinary function of ethics in our social world, as for instance in medical ethics. The limits to this are amusingly evident in psychological experiments that show people judging actions on varying principles (“I shouldn't push the person off the bus to save the others, but I shouldn't avoid driving into him if that would endanger the others.” “I may kill him but I shouldn't torture him”). In no case is the overarching rule itself subject to logical debate.
Freud taught that moral judgments are individually derived from our childhood (we abbreviate the process in the term superego (see Friedman 1956). Individual conscience gives us our marching orders. Ricoeur (1970, pp. 519-524) adds to this that we are pre-equipped with an open file for “oughts” and our psychodynamics simply fill in the particulars. That is probably the best bone we can throw to the philosophic moralist, though he might find additional nourishment in recent evidence that even some details, such as the rule of fairness, may be inborn. But the fact that most of us make moral judgments does not tell us that we should make moral judgments, and if someone is lacking that category, there is no way to demonstrate that he should have it. In particular, of course, desire is a matter of fact, and not a voluntary act. Analysts believe that desire is the rain that falleth from the heavens upon the earth below.
The general features of a “world” created by conscience are described by Kant (1781, 1788): Within our individual moral world, the rules dict