@X
Case in point and point in case. I understand and know the meaning of all the words, but they're so entwined and he's writing in so many directions all the time that I stop reading in the middle of it and start from the top. I repeat that until the paragraph is done and I have understood it completely.
"Since a large part of my argument hinges on the assumption, hitherto not fully defended, that value-judgements, if they are action-guiding, must be held to entail imperatives, and since this assumption may very well be questioned, it is time to examine it. It might be held, for example, that I can without contradiction say 'You ought to do A, but don't', and that therefore there can be no question of entailment; entailment in any case is a very strong word, and though many might be found to agree that value-judgements are action-guiding in some sense, it might be held that they are action-guiding only in the sense in which even plain judgements of fact may be action-guiding. For example, if I say 'The train is just about to depart', this may guide a person who wants to catch the train to take his seat; or, to take a moral case, if I say to a person who is thinking of giving some money to a friend supposedly in distress, 'The story he has just told you is quite untrue', this may guide him to make a different moral decision from that which he would otherwise have made. And similarly it might be held that value-judgements are action-guiding in no stronger sense than these statements of fact. It might be urged that, just as the statement that the train is going to depart has no bearing upon the practical problems of someone who does not want to catch the train, and just as, if the man who is thinking of giving money to his friend does not recognize that the truth or otherwise of his friend's story has any bearing on the question, it may not affect his decision, so, if a man has no intention of doing what he ought, to tell him that he ought to do something may not be accepted by him as a reason for doing it. I have put as forcibly as possible this objection, which strikes at the root of my whole argument. The objection alleges, in brief, that 'ought'-sentences are not imperatives, neither do they entail imperatives without the addition of an imperative premiss. In answer to this, I have to show that 'ought'-sentences, at any rate in some of their uses, do entail imperatives. "
