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"Ought", Agents and Ambiguity that Matters

100%

Klimczyk J.

Studia Semiotyczne

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2017

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vol. 31

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issue 2

113–138

EN

According to a well-homed view in linguistic semantics, deontic logic and logic of agency, some ‘ought’ sentences, like ‘Kate ought to write the report’, are ambiguous between the socalled agentive sense as when Kate is the agent of writing the report, and the non-agentive, or evaluative sense as when, in the light of some norm or things being ideal, the proposition that Kate writes the report would come out true. Within this approach to the semantics of ‘ought’, the ambiguity in question is not due to any semantic ambiguity of the word ‘ought’, but the ambiguity traced to Kate writes the report. We may call the view in question, after Schroeder, the agency-in-the-prejacent theory, or APT for short. APT’s explanation of ambiguity has been put under heavy criticism by Mark Schroeder’s 2011 influential paper. Schroeder tried to undermine APT by exposing its central theoretical drawbacks, their being: (i) that APT badly overgeneralizes because if ambiguity is in Kate writes the report, then it should equally well be preserved under the non-agentive interpretation of ‘Kate ought to write the report’, but it is not, and (ii) that APT also undergeneralizes, since it ‘inscribes’ the same ambiguity as observed in ‘Kate ought to write the report’ to a sentence that lacks it, e.g. ‘Bill ought to kiss Lucy’. I argue that both the ‘overgeneralization problem’ and the ‘undergeneralization problem’ are harmless for the criticized view, since Schroeder’s two central arguments against the respective problems are seriously defective. Also, the third problem identified by Schroeder, that APT cannot accommodate the deliberative sense of ‘ought’, is mistargeted. I argue that identifying the salient property of the deliberative ought is crucial for assessing whether APT is able to accommodate it or not, and that Schroeder failed to recognize this properly.

2

‘Ought’, ownership and agentive ought: Remarks on the semantic meaning of ‘indexed ought’

100%

Klimczyk J.

Studia Philosophiae Christianae

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2018

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vol. 54

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issue 1

25-63

EN

Bernard Williams in his essay “Ought and moral obligation” (OMO) takes a stand on the proper logical interpretation of ‘ought’ sentences. He claims that ought being central to ethical reflection, that is, ought issuing personal requirements to agents, is to be interpreted like any ordinary ‘ought’ – as a propositional operator that is not indexed to a person. The driving idea behind Williams’s logical point about ‘ought’ seems to be that logical interpretation of ‘ought’ sentences with moral content in terms of indexed ought lacks semantic significance. John Broome disagrees. In a series of his recent writings devoted to an analysis of the notion of normative ought, he defends the view opposite to the one fostered by Williams. According to Broome, indexation of ‘ought’ to agent matters for extra-logical reasons; it is a way of exhibiting that ought has its normative owner, which in turn is important for determining the holder of responsibility for the ought in question. In the paper I argue that Broome may be right, but his arguments do not show that fact. In particular, I claim that he is wrong in thinking that indexation in terms of ownership is useful in the analysis of ‘ought’ sentences with agentive content, and thus nicely applies to moral ought being a paradigmatic example of such sentences. According to my diagnosis, Broome’s positive view about the semantic and ethical significance of interpreting agentive ought as indexed ought, suffers from one central problem. It alludes to an unsuccessful substantive semantics of ‘indexed ought’ that fails to give an accurate explanation of the meaning of the ought in question. I conclude the paper by offering an alternative to Broome’s substantive semantics of ‘indexed ought’, and explain why I think that it fares better in capturing the nature of the agentive ought.

3

Ethics of supernaturalism

59%

Chwedeńczuk B., Chwedeńczuk B.

Przegląd Filozoficzny. Nowa Seria

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2019

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issue 2

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"Ought", Agents and Ambiguity that Matters

‘Ought’, ownership and agentive ought: Remarks on the semantic meaning of ‘indexed ought’

Ethics of supernaturalism