David Hume famously argued that you cannot derive an “ought” (a prescriptive or moral statement) solely from an “is” (a descriptive or factual statement). In other words, just because something is a certain way doesn’t logically entail that it ought to be that way. This is sometimes called Hume’s Guillotine or the “is-ought problem.”
Psychologically, humans do fuse “is” and “ought.” For example, if you see a dog that is hungry (an “is”), you immediately think it ought to be fed (an “ought”). This blending in our minds suggests that moral judgments might be psychological constructs—products of how we naturally connect facts and values.
Then there is the chilling person who holds God comes first. "The child is precious to God and drowning. I ought to pull her out of the water."
If the connection between “is” and “ought” is not logically grounded but instead a messy, external psychological (spiritual or social) patch, then the idea that morality is neatly and perfectly rooted in divine commands or a perfectly rational God becomes shaky.
If morality were truly grounded in divine will or a perfectly rational divine nature, we’d expect the “ought” to follow from the “is” smoothly and coherently — no need for a clumsy psychological “glue” to hold things together.
The fact that human morality feels like a patchwork, forced fusion of “is” and “ought,” suggests either:
• Our understanding of divine morality is incomplete or distorted, filtered
through messy human psychology.
• Or that there might not be a perfect divine source for morality at all – there
cannot be when the basic link is so fragile.
• Or both.
In other words:
This kind of “psychological glue” problem casts serious doubt on divine competence—if God exists and is responsible for morality, why would such an important connection be so fragile and subject to error? It makes the person who claims to have the right to assess and judge for God illegitimate. One is best making up one's own mind. A God unworthy of confidence, denotes that his supposed emissaries and preachers are unworthy too.
Conclusion
Because we:
• experience morality through conscious/subconscious bias, subjective emotion and intuition,
• disagree about it even when reasoning carefully,
• are threatened by society if our view of morals differs too much from the "norm",
• explain morality well through psychology and evolution,
• lack access to independent moral facts, and
• cannot consult and learn from God, the alleged source of morality,
...it follows that nobody should confidently argue that morality is more than psychological.
…it follows that it should not be elevated to a near-divine status or married to the notion of a God.
[If we cannot be confident that morality is more than psychology, we can be less confident when we redefine morality as God’s will, a reflection of his just and good nature. Grounding morality in God looks like a shortcut around a difficult question. It offends us for we need honesty not tricks like that. Even if the person is sincere, they cannot blame us or discourage us from being suspicious of them. We have every right.]
Morality might be—but asserting it firmly goes beyond what the evidence allows. The humble, intellectually honest stance is this:
“We experience moral judgments psychologically. Whether they also point to something beyond that is unknown—and may be unknowable.”
That’s not moral nihilism. It’s just philosophical caution.