Subjective Ought

Abstract

T his paper concerns the subjective ought in natural language. If you think the apple is poisoned, there's a sense in which you ought not eat the appleeven if, unbeknownst to you, the apple isn't poisoned. This ought, the subjective ought, isn't just sensitive to sources of value in the world: it's also sensitive to what information is available. The objective ought, by contrast, is insensitive to knowledge and ignorance: it's the ought from a God's-eye view.The subjective and objective ought and related expressions (should, arguably must and have to, attitude verbs like want and need, comparatives like better, and so on) aren't technical terms in philosophy. They are a part of natural language, the language we use to express intuitions in ethics, philosophy of action, and decision theory. When we investigate the relations between what we ought to do and considerations like what morality or prudence requires, what we want or intend, what we're able to do, and so on, our claims are expressed in natural language. They reflect the logical structure of natural language. And our theorizing often tacitly makes assumptions about the entailment relations between various considerations and what we ought to do.So we should get clear on how ought and related expressions work in natural language. The subjective ought, in particular, is not well understood. The recent literature on the Miners Puzzle, initiated by Kolodny and MacFarlane (2010) and developed by Charlow (2013), Cariani, Kaufmann, and Kaufmann (2013), Dowell (2012), von Fintel (2012, and Silk (2014a), discredits a widespread misconception about the subjective ought: that ought claims in natural language must obey classical inference rules like modus tollens. In fact, subjective ought provides a wealth of examples that show that those rules aren't valid. In Section 1, I summarize Kolodny and MacFarlane's argument that indicative conditionals don't obey modus ponens, and I provide some new empirical and theoretical arguments against the validity of classical inference rules for natural language conditionals.

A Proof‐Theoretic Account of the Miners Paradox

“…In the literature on the Miners Paradox so far two kinds of interpretation have been employed to meet the above desideratum: emendations of the semantics for modal expressions and conditional sentences developed especially by Kratzer (e.g., 1981) and extensions of update semantics (Veltman, ). The former approach was initiated by Kolodny and MacFarlane themselves, and has been developed in various directions by Cariani et al (), Charlow (), Silk (), Bledin () and Carr (). The latter approach is taken by Willer (, ) and Marra ().…”

“…A discussion of this reaction to the Miners Paradox more thorough than that given here can be found in Kolodny and MacFarlane (, pp. 117–120) and Carr ().…”

Clause-Type, Force, and Normative Judgment in the Semantics of Imperatives

“…43. For varying accounts of this dependence-which goes by the name of "serious informational dependence" in the literature-see Kolodny & MacFarlane (2010); Charlow (2013b); Cariani et al (2013); Carr (2015).…”

Resolving Turri's Puzzle about Withholding

“…Chrisman (2008) uses the same terminology. 16 See Kolodny and MacFarlane (2010), Björnsson and Finlay (2010), Dowell (2012Dowell ( , 2013, Charlow (2013), Carr (2015) and Wedgwood (forthcoming). Kolodny and MacFarlane (Ib.) is a special case.…”