What's 'Hume’s guillotine' in Philosophy

Also known as Hume’s law or the is-ought problem, this refers to the observation that many thinkers derive prescriptive moral statements (about how things should be) on the basis of descriptive statements (about how things are in reality). It is named after Scottish philosopher David Hume who elaborated on the concept in his 1738 book, A Treatise of Human Nature . Hume criticised the moral philosophers of his time for deriving normative conclusions from positive statements.