Obligation and Regret When There is No Fact of the Matter About What Would Have Happened if You Had not Done What You Did
Name
Hare_Obligation and.pdf
Size
140.91 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a885e365e801e48e68109dfe3cc4dbad
Author(s)
Hare, Caspar
Date Issued
January 2011
Journal
Noûs
Publisher
Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Citation
Hare, C. (2011), Obligation and Regret When There is No Fact of the Matter About What Would Have Happened if You Had not Done What You Did. Noûs, 45: 190–206.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
It is natural to distinguish between objective and subjective senses of ‘ought’.
Roughly: what you ought to do in the objective sense has to do with the merits and demerits
of the options available to you, while what you ought to do in the subjective sense
has to do with the merits and de-merits of the options available to you, from your
epistemic position. So, for example, when a respectable doctor gives you some pills, it
may be (if they are poisonous, though you have no way of knowing that) that subjectively
speaking you ought to take them, but objectively speaking you ought to throw them in the
bin.Here are two ways of thinking about the objective ought:
The Ought of Omniscient Desire: What you oughtOD to do is what an omniscient,
rational creature with appropriate interests would
want you to do.
The Ought of Most Reason: What you oughtMR to do is what there is most reason
to do.
These notions are extensionally different. There are situations in which you oughtOD to do
one thing but oughtMR to do another thing. Or so I will argue in the first part of this paper.
In the second part I will look at some useful work to which this distinction can be put.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00806.x
