Most of ethics involves determining which action in any given situation is morally correct. My theory, for example, chooses an action based on its impact on human rights.
Each ethical theory will at some point run in to the problem of inferring an “ought from an is”. The “is” part is the supposed morally correct option. For example, not killing someone out of boredom is morally better than killing someone out of boredom. The “ought” part is obligation to do a certain action, such as “you ought not to kill someone out of boredom”. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a valid jump from “this is morally better” to “I should act morally”.
Generally, this problem has been approached from one of these angles:
1. You should act morally because ____ commands it (God, law, etc.)
-Problem: Morality seems arbitrarily decided, what motive is there to follow God/law?
2. You should act morally because you will be punished if you don’t (by God or jail)
-Problem: Morality becomes egoistic (self-centered), as you only act morally when it is in your best interest to do so, such as avoiding punishment. If you can get away with acting immorally and not get punished, no reason for you not to do so.
3. You should act morally because you will ultimately be better off by treating people morally (what goes around comes around, some utilitarians).
-Problem: Also egoistic, if you know you won’t be rewarded more for acting morally in a given case, no reason for you to do so.
4. You should act morally because pure reason compels you to do so (Kant).
Problem: You have to accept Kant’s ideas to accept this, and most people won’t. Basically, you’d have to accept that morality works in absolutes (if something is immoral, it is immoral regardless of the harm it could prevent) and that reason compels you not to see yourself as an exception to any rule. The latter is a bit easier to accept, but it doesn’t disprove the egoist idea that “I want to only benefit myself, so I will”.
5. The jump from an “ought” to an “is” can be made by seeing morality as a goal for people. For example, if you have a goal to be moral, you should act in a way that works toward that goal. (This logic basically says that if you want to eat your sandwich, you should eat your sandwich. Want=is, and should=ought in this case).
Problem: For this to work, you need to already have the goal to be moral. If you don’t want to be moral, and you don’t value the benefits to others that morality brings, then this doesn’t compel you from egoism.
My take: I accept the problem for the 5th solution. I think it is logically impossible to compel an egoist to act morally; if you want to only benefit yourself, I can’t logically convince you to benefit others for their own sake.
This makes morality an alternative option to egoism. Basically, each person can decide whether or not they want to act morally or purely egotistically. If you choose the former, then you have the goal of acting morally and therefore should act morally. If you choose the latter, then you cannot genuinely act morally, as you are only acting to benefit yourself.
fensel.net 
For method (1) of generating morality, one possible Christian response is that God’s will is simply inherently good. As to your criticism that following the will of God is arbitrary, I have no answer, but I do know that anything at all can be easily decried as arbitrary. If there is an all-powerful good being that created the universe, I would imagine that his will would be the least susceptible of all to charges of being arbitrary.
For method (2), it is interesting that you consider obedience based on sanctions to be unsatisfactory. You approve of the government using a variety of sanctions to force people to cooperate in making your vision of the world come about, but I don’t see you condemning government because it causes people to do the right things for the sake of self-interest. Anyone who believes government has any role at all knows that constructing a morally free from concerns about negative sanctions is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Option (3) sounds like a curiously optimistic de-Christianized version of option (2). It has the same moral content, but with no plausible mechanism at all for how its sanctions will be enforced.
I won’t even bother with option (4). I have no idea what Kant is talking about, and I strongly suspect that he’s got engaged in some sort of high-IQ self-deception.
Option (5) is a curious one to me, though. Whatever “is-ought” barrier it manages to leap over is far different from the “is-ought” barrier that concerns me. After all, option (5) starts with the assumption that we already know what is morally right, which seems to me to be simply a way of starting with “ought”. It certainly does help us get from where we are to knowing what he should do and why we should do it. In its own strange way, option (5) is merely a rephrasing of the problem presented as a solution.
Imagine, for example, that a boy tells his mother that he sees no reason he ought to do his homework.
In response, she says that the jump to ought can be made by thinking of doing the homework as a goal. That is, if the boy wishes to do his homework, he ought to do his homework.
If I was that boy, and if I didn’t have at least an implicit faith in the commandment to obey my mother, I’d stare at her blankly for a minute, chuckle, and go do something more interesting.
1. The arbitrary part is best described by the Euthyphro dilemma: Does God command us to act morally because it is just, or is us acting morally just because God commands it?
The first explanation doesn’t explain why acting morally is just, while the second uses God’s commands to justify it. Basically, whatever God commands is just, irregardless of consequences and such.
So a person stuck in the “is-ought” problem can either accept that they should obey God’s commands, or not. To make the jump would require saying “you should obey God’s commands because God commands it”.
2. “but I don’t see you condemning government because it causes people to do the right things for the sake of self-interest. Anyone who believes government has any role at all knows that constructing a morally free from concerns about negative sanctions is nothing more than wishful thinking.”
I don’t actually understand what these two sentences mean?
” You approve of the government using a variety of sanctions to force people to cooperate in making your vision of the world come about”
The reason is because they are two different questions: what should people do to act morally, and what should the government do to maintain/improve society? Government sanctions are necessary to compel people to act “morally”, because punishing murderers helps society/enacts justice. Avoiding killing because you are afraid of the punishment isn’t acting morally though. You’re making a decision out of your own self-interest. Avoiding killing because of the effect on the victim is moral.
3. I agree, though keep in mind this post is about the “is-ought” jump, not the way to force morality through government (is-ought jump is a personal decision, if that makes sense)
4. He definitely does. In my opinion, Kant takes a few good ideas and takes them to illogical extremes.
5.
” After all, option (5) starts with the assumption that we already know what is morally right, which seems to me to be simply a way of starting with “ought”.”
It doesn’t say what is morally right because the “is-ought” jump is the middle link between “this is morally right” and “everyone should act this way”. It doesn’t establish the second part without the first, but you don’t need the first to establish the link.
Your example: I think this illustrates my point pretty well. The key note is that morality is a personal choice, you are not acting morally if you are being forced to act a certain way. If the boy doesn’t wish to do his homework, then you can’t compel him to want to without manipulating his desires in some way (like giving a dessert for finishing).
Same with morality. If you don’t want to act morally, then you can’t be compelled to do so without being manipulated in some way.
If I am correctly understanding Euthyphro dilemma, it is a false dilemma. The basic choices you pose, if I understand you right, is this: is there (a) some moral standard to which God must conform, or (b) does God invent the moral standard arbitrarily? Basically, we are asked whether justice is prior to God or God is prior to justice. Such a question may be meaningful if we are dealing with some sort of god who is nothing more than a giant tricked-out supernatural human, but it is a much more difficult question to ask about the sort of God posited by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These three religions believe in an eternally pre-existent God, who has always been just by his very unchanging nature, which is the ultimate and true standard of justice and morality. I don’t think the Abrahamic religions conceive of a God who is subject to Euthyphro’s dilemma, a dilemma which, after all, was originally conceived of as a problem for polytheistic worldviews — and indeed, any polytheistic worldview which, like Greek popular religion, ascribes ultimate authority to a plurality of gods, will collapse under the weight of its own logical contradiction.
As to your statement/question about point 2, what I mean to say is that you seem to scoff at the idea of obeying God out of fear of punishment, while at the same time you wish to use fear of punishment to make others obey your ideas. There has to be an inconsistency hidden somewhere in such a view. Where we disagree is in the clean division you seem to be between self-interested action and moral action. I see self-interest and morality, properly conceived, as inextricably bound up together. You seem to see them as incompatible. That reflects another major difference between my Christian worldview and your atheist-philosophical one.
Finally, I’m afraid we might be talking about two different things when we talk about the is-ought jump.
You’re understanding the Euthyphro dilemma correctly, and you used a similar defense I did when I wrote a paper on it. Basically, you choose the second part of the dilemma: actions are just because God commands it, or in your words God is “prior” to morality.
The above description however is arbitrary in that morality is decided by one will, without a set of rules to guide them. It is odd to call the commands of God arbitrary, but it is. Most Christians though shouldn’t have a problem with that, it is only unacceptably arbitrary to those who disagree that God should be able to command morality.
Pertaining to the post that isn’t the problem at hand, as if there were a God, I wouldn’t try to argue that a higher standard for morality is needed. The “ought from an is” problem focuses on “why follow morality”, and in divine command theory’s case, you can’t justifiably claim “you should obey God’s morality because he commands it”, as “he commands it” is no more compelling than God commanding morality (in that, if someone rejects God commanding morality, they would not be compelled by knowing God is commanding them to act morally).
“As to your statement/question about point 2, what I mean to say is that you seem to scoff at the idea of obeying God out of fear of punishment, while at the same time you wish to use fear of punishment to make others obey your ideas”
The reasoning to justify laws that “compel” people to act morally through the threat of punishment is the same that God would have. You command things/threaten punishment to ensure the best outcome instead of relying on individual free choice.
“Where we disagree is in the clean division you seem to be between self-interested action and moral action”
This is definitely where we disagree. To be clear, what I am arguing is that there are more requirements to someone intending to act morally than simply the end result that they make the right choice. My example:
Person A wants to unjustly kill person B. If there were no laws, Person A would kill person B unjustly. However, due to the law, Person A refrains from killing so they won’t go to jail.
Important facts about the case: Person A ultimately chose the moral decision: refraining from unjustly killing Person B. The motive for this: Person A acted entirely out of self-interest (avoiding jail). If killing Person B was in Person A’s self-interest, they would have done so.
What I am claiming is that Person A did not act morally, they simply acting out of their own self-interest.
So the next question is: what necessary/sufficient conditions are there for someone to have acted morally? This is actually a pretty difficult question to answer, but here’s a simple answer that I like:
X acts morally if and only if they intend to produce the best moral consequences, and the motivation for their action are the same moral consequences.
In Person A’s case, the consequence that made the decision moral was Person B still living, but what motivated Person A was avoiding jail.