Obligation and Regret When There is No Fact of the Matter About What Would Have Happened if You Had not Done What You Did

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.