“Ought” and intensionality

Abstract

Forthcoming in SyntheseThis paper concerns a debate on the syntactic structures of deontic "ought"s. There are two debates on this topic. The first concerns whether epistemic and deontic "ought"s are associated with different syntactic structures. The second concerns whether two different senses of deontic "ought"s -"ought-to-do"s and "ought-to-be"sare associated with different syntactic constructions. 1 This paper focuses on the second debate. Some philosophers and linguists have embraced what has been called the ambiguity view, according to which deontic "ought"s are ambiguous between a propositional operator and a relation between an agent and an action/proposition. 2 The main goal of this paper is to present some new negative evidencewhat I call the intensionality testagainst the ambiguity view. I'll treat (1a−c) as non-normative. I'll focus on (1d−f), which express clearly normative readings of "ought." The prudential "ought" roughly means that it is best for the agent's interest that s/he performs some action, so (1e) can be paraphrased as "It is best for John's interest that he stops smoking." The ethical "ought" roughly means that the agent is obliged, or has most reason, to do some action. (1f) can be paraphrased as "John is obliged not to kill innocent people." The evaluative "ought" roughly means that it would be good for a certain event to happen (or for a certain state to obtain). ( 1d) conveys something on a par with the claim that it would be good for there to be world peace. (1d) can be true even if it is practically impossible to obtain world peace. Among these readings, (1e−f) seems particularly important to moral philosophers. This is because (1e−f) are agential in the sense that they describe some action that the agent ought to do. On the other hand, (1d) is non-agential or situational in the sense that it just expresses a desirable state of affairs that ought to be the case.More specifically, Schroeder (2011) suggests five hallmarks of deliberative "ought"s (= "ought-to-do"s) and each reading can be examined in light of these hallmarks: (i) deliberative "ought"s matter directly for advice (MacFarlane & Kolodny 2010). When someone comes to you with the question of what to do, if you know what s/he deliberatively ought to do, you know what is advisable for him/her. (ii) Deliberative "ought"s close practical deliberation (Ross 2010). If you know what one deliberatively ought to do, then that settles the question of what to do. (iii) Deliberative "ought"s are closely related to the notion of accountability (Broome 2013). If an agent S deliberatively ought to do some action X, S is accountable if S fails to perform X. (iv) The deliberative "ought" implies

The Onus in ‘Ought’

“…14 As far as we can tell, our puzzle puts considerable pressure on the position staked out in Lee (2021), according to which 'ought' is univocal, but not a control verb, and therefore not relativized to an agent.…”