Beyond the Is-Ought Divide: How Human Transgression Creates Normative Space

Philosophy has failed to achieve consensus on fundamental questions for over two millennia, while empirical sciences converge on core principles within centuries. We argue this stagnation stems from two structural flaws inherent to traditional philosophical methodology: (1) the inability to guarantee the truth of foundational premises through philosophical reasoning alone, generating irreducible circularity; and (2) the is-ought barrier—the logical impossibility of deriving normative prescriptions from purely descriptive premises (Hume’s guillotine). Both problems are typically treated as eternal features of rational inquiry. We propose instead that they can be productively dissolved—not by circumventing logic, but by recognizing a decisive natural fact: Homo sapiens underwent a unique evolutionary transgression, partially escaping the ecological constraints (~70–60 kya) and genetic mechanism constraints (~12 kya) that governed all life for 3.5 billion years. This transgression is empirically documented across four disciplines: archaeology (behavioral modernity and Upper Paleolithic Revolution), ecology (the human “super-niche” violating competitive exclusion), genetics (accelerated gene-culture coevolution and domestication signatures), and neuroscience (ten brain adaptors constituting a 'Third Nature'—cognitive capacities operating independently of survival and reproduction imperatives). Transgression created genuine normative space—a gap between “can do” and “ought to do” that does not exist for pre-transgression organisms—making ethical questions non-vacuous and scientifically tractable. We introduce principle-derived oughts: normative statements deriving from scientifically established constraints plus transparently acknowledged goals, structurally analogous to engineering imperatives. This framework (a) provides empirical rather than metaphysical grounding for philosophical premises, (b) offers a naturalistic response to Hume’s problem without committing the naturalistic fallacy, (c) generates five falsifiable cross-disciplinary predictions, and (d) diagnoses contemporary crises—climate destabilization, AI misalignment, civilizational inequality—as consequences of transgression without corresponding wisdom. We present Natural Human Philosophy (NHP) as a target article inviting critical peer commentary across philosophy, evolutionary biology, archaeology, neuroscience, ecology, and the social sciences.