Moralists and Is-Ought Conflation

I think Machiavelli would be a classic example. His commentary, "The Prince" is taken either as his view on how politics should be, or as satire, when it was more probably just commentary on the state of the region's politics.

>>2209935
>I was just DESCRIBING the world,

Not really. 'You' were deducing from dust principles about the assumed nature of humanity the, or a, logical resolution to the conflict which was theoretically inevitable given those assumptions

'You' may have been correct, or largely correct, in your assumptions, but that does not mean 'you' were, nor even understood 'yourself' to be, describing things 'as they are'.

>>2209980

dust=first

etc.

It is also preposterous to suppose that 'you' were not making a judgment claim about the desirability of a certain socio-political arrangement when the very motivation for 'your' work was the dissolution if the social order in 'your' native country into civil war and anarchy.

>>2209935

Description and prescription are the same thing. The way things 'ought' to be is just a function of their design, or the role they play in the world. To say that "a mother looks after her children" is prescriptive, but is also description, for instance.

>>2210004
>To say that "a mother looks after her children" is prescriptive, but is also description
No, because not all mothers look after their children.
Some species don't do that.