One Ought Too Many

Abstract

Normative branches of philosophy take special interest in claims expressed by sentences of the form 'S ought to φ', where S is some agent and φ-ing is some action (broadly conceived). We'll call sentences satisfying this description agential. These claims raise many important philosophical issues, such as: Which ones are true? What makes them true? How can we know if they are true? What follows from them? Some philosophers have hoped that light would be cast on these issues if we could get clearer on the exact meaning of this word 'ought'. Once we start looking to language for philosophical clues we should notice that the word 'ought' is also employed in different kinds of sentences. It appears in normative sentences with different grammatical forms, like 'It ought to be that Charlie was born a girl', and 'There ought to be less suffering in the world'. For convenience we'll call sentences like these nonagential.1 (It also has a non-normative epistemic use meaning approximately what is probable, as in 'The sky ought to get dark soon'.) In these other sentences, 'ought' appears to represent a propositional operator, O(p). Are these other kinds of sentences clues to the meaning of 'ought' in the cases of special interest to normative philosophy? This will be the case if 'ought' has just one linguistic meaning, a unified semantics and logical form (syntax) as many linguists hold. Many philosophers have also embraced this view, which we'll call the Uniformity Thesis.2 On this view agential sentences like 'Vince ought to stop driving drunk' are semantically and logically equivalent to nonagential sentences like 'It ought to be that Vince stops driving drunk', with 'ought' representing a propositional operator in both. This view is rejected by other philosophers who maintain that at least sometimes the 'ought' in agential sentences instead represents a normative relation between the agent S and the action of φ-ing, with the logical form O(S, φ) and meaning roughly is obligated to or has most reason to.3 According to this Ambiguity Thesis 'ought' is semantically and logically ambiguous, so it is a mistake to try to draw philosophical lessons about the agential 'ought' claims of interest to normative philosophy from the other uses of the word. In this paper we defend the Uniformity Thesis against the central objection that it cannot account for all the linguistic data from ordinary usage of 'ought'. Versions of this objection have been raised by a number of philosophers including Gilbert Harman, Peter Geach, Anthony Price, and most recently and rigorously, Mark Schroeder. After clarifying which ambiguity is at issue and explaining the Overgeneration problem it faces, we introduce a contrastivist semantics for 'ought' and show how it provides resources for accommodating and explaining the problematic data without attributing any semantic or logical ambiguity to the word 'ought'. Officially we remain neutral about whether contrastivism and the Uniformity Thesis itself are correct. But since contrastivism is independently well-motivated and the Uniformity Thesis has the virtue of parsimony, we believe this view should enjoy the presumption of truth unless and until better objections are found. The nonagential sentences (1) and (2) say that certain states of affairs ought to be the case (the "ought-to-be"). Here 'ought' is commonly glossed as meaning it is best that… , so we can call these readings evaluative.4,5 From some state of affairs being best nothing directly follows about how any agent has most reason to act, and so these sentences seem to have at most an indirect bearing on agents' deliberations. Sentence (2) entails neither that somebody has most reason to rig the lottery so Larry wins, for example, nor even that Larry has most reason to buy a lottery ticket (the odds of his winning would after all be extremely long). By contrast, the agential sentences (3) and (4) on a natural reading do seem to entail claims about the agents' reasons to act, and so to bear directly on their deliberations (the "ought-to-do"). They do not, however, entail that any particular state of affairs would be best. We can call these readings deliberative. Mark Schroeder identifies five hallmarks that distinguish deliberative readings from evaluative readings. Unlike the evaluative 'ought', the deliberative 'ought' (i) matters directly for advice; (ii) functions to close deliberation; (iii) is characteristically tied to assessments of agents' accountability; (iv) implies 'can';6 and (v) is closely related to obligation.7 We agree that these differences between readings exist, but reject the claim that the Uniformity Thesis cannot accommodate and explain them. How can ambiguities in 'ought' sentences coherently be admitted without accepting the Ambiguity Thesis? The issue between the Uniformity and Ambiguity Theses more precisely is whether any of these sentential ambiguities are due to the word 'ought' itself having more than one meaning. Other explanations of different readings of 'ought' sentences are possible that are compatible with a uniform semantics for the word 'ought' itself. One possibility is an ambiguity in some other part of the sentence. A solution of this kind is the agency-in-the-prejacent theory of Nuel Belnap and John Horty. This theory explains the difference between evaluative and deliberative readings of 'ought' sentences by postulating an implicit agency operator, stit ('sees to it that'), present in deliberative readings and absent in evaluative readings.8 While Schroeder discusses and rejects the agency-in-the-prejacent theory, other explanations of sentential ambiguities are available to uniformity theorists that to our knowledge have not previously been explored. 'Ought' sentences could be context-sensitive, in either a semantic or a pragmatic way. (i) If 'ought' were indexical like 'now' and 'I' then it would contribute differently to the proposition expressed by a sentence, as determined by a uniform semantic rule that selects a value from the context of use. The word 'now' does not have a different semantic meaning at each different time of use, for example, though it is used to refer to different times. Alternatively, (ii) if 'ought' is semantically incomplete in having one or more implicit places filled by some value intended by the speaker—as, for example, 'poisonous' has an argument place for a type of individual: poisonous to whom or what?—then a uniform semantics for 'ought' would allow indefinitely many different readings of the same 'ought' sentences. Interpreters would identify the intended proposition through pragmatic cues arising from the speakers' choice to use those particular sentences in those particular contexts.9 Our solution in section 4 is a form of this second strategy, involving semantic incompleteness resolved by pragmatics. Ambiguity theorists believe that the evaluative/deliberative ambiguity provides an especially and perhaps even uniquely strong case for an ambiguity in 'ought' itself, because it appears to be not merely semantic but also logical (syntactic).10 Grammatically, this means that these two senses of 'ought' would obey different rules in composing meaningful sentences with other words. Whereas the evaluative 'ought' takes a sentence as its object and logically expresses an operator on propositions, the deliberative 'ought' takes two objects, a noun referring to an agent and an infinitival verb phrase referring to an action, and logically expresses a relation between the agent and the action. Consequently the Ambiguity Thesis yields a testable kind of prediction: that 'ought' sentences with certain syntax will only admit one kind of reading and not the other. have natural evaluative readings as equivalent to (1) and (2) respectively, lacking Schroeder's five hallmarks of the deliberative 'ought'. The linguistic explanation of this is that 'ought' is a raising verb, like other sentential operators in English. An idiosyncrasy of English grammar is the requirement that every sentence have a grammatical subject (noun or noun-phrase). For example, although the word 'might' takes a whole sentence (like 'Today is Sunday') as its object, it is ungrammatical to say 'Might be that today is Sunday'. One way of complying with the rule is by employing an expletive or non-referring subject term like 'there' or 'it', as in 'It might be that today is Sunday'. This is found in the nonagential 'ought' sentences like (1) and (2) with the constructions 'There ought to be…' and 'It ought to be that…'. A different way of complying with the rule is by "raising" the noun from the subordinate or prejacent sentence (e.g. 'Today is Sunday') to the subject position before the verb (e.g. 'Today might be Sunday')—hence the name "raising verb". English grammar therefore allows the nonagential sentence (2) to be transformed via subject-raising into the agential sentence (2a) without change in meaning or logical form. The upshot is that if the Ambiguity Thesis is correct then agential 'ought' sentences will be logically ambiguous between (i) evaluative readings where 'ought' is a raising verb like 'might', and (ii) deliberative readings where 'ought' is rather a control verb like 'wants' and 'tries'. (A control verb has a semantic subject for its verb argument that is also the semantic subject of the control verb itself. For example, in 'Bill wants to kiss Lucy', Bill is the subject of both the control verb 'want' and its verb argument 'kiss'—i.e. the wanting and the kissing at issue are both Bill's.) Therefore it is impossible to confirm the Ambiguity Thesis by finding that agential 'ought' sentences do not admit evaluative readings, as it concedes to the Uniformity Thesis that evaluative readings of these sentences will always be available. However, the behavior of raising and control verbs do differ in some significant ways, and it is to these differences that ambiguity theorists must appeal for evidence that deliberative readings can only arise from a control sense of 'ought'. We turn now to examine this evidence. The central problem for the Uniformity Thesis is overgeneration. Semantic and logical uniformity seems to predict the availability of deliberative readings of 'ought' sentences which in fact only admit evaluative readings.11 There are two major pieces of data here. The first comes from nonagential 'ought' sentences, with the grammatical constructions 'It ought to be that…' and 'There ought to be…'. Only raising verbs can occur in these constructions. Control verbs cannot because they require genuinely referring nouns in subject position; hence 'It wants to be the case that…' and 'There wants to be…' are impermissible. The Ambiguity Thesis therefore predicts that nonagential 'ought' sentences should never admit deliberative readings, as they have only non-referring nouns in subject position. By contrast, the Uniformity Thesis entails that every agential 'ought' sentence can be grammatically transformed into a semantically and logically equivalent nonagential sentence. So it seems to predict rather that nonagential 'ought' sentences should admit all the same readings as their agential transformations, including the deliberative readings of those sentences. Our opponents claim that the data confirms the prediction of the Ambiguity Thesis against the prediction of the Uniformity Thesis: nonagential 'ought' sentences like (1) and (2) admit only evaluative and never deliberative readings. This is the first piece of the case for semantic and logical ambiguity in 'ought'. For convenience we will refer to 'ought' sentences like (5b) as passive.14 Here too the data is claimed to confirm the prediction of the Ambiguity Thesis and not that of the Uniformity Thesis. Whereas (5a) has a deliberative reading, "on which it is appropriate for advice for Bill, on which it settles Bill's deliberative question of what to do, on which Bill is accountable if he does not kiss Lucy, which implies that Bill is able to kiss Lucy, and which is on a par with the claim that Bill has an obligation to kiss Lucy",15 it is maintained that (5b) allows no deliberative reading. This is the second major piece of the case for semantic ambiguity in 'ought'. At first glance this seems a strong case for ambiguity.16 Our primary response will be to demonstrate that the Uniformity Thesis can accommodate and explain these data. However, we pause briefly here to voice some doubts about the While we agree that nonagential and 'ought' sentences do not deliberative readings, it seems to that these readings can sometimes be especially with a the of a show where the is about to which of the is to a In this context we it natural to his of ought to be as having all five of Schroeder's hallmarks for deliberative The we of 'It ought to be A might be to that the of these deliberative readings itself the Ambiguity Thesis the Uniformity Thesis. This of nonagential and 'ought' sentences is that a of the Uniformity Thesis is to we try to this in section But if our about the data are correct this a more problem for the Ambiguity which predicts that deliberative readings of these nonagential and sentences should not be possible at just as is no reading of as equivalent to For the of argument we will by that the ambiguity description of the data is correct. Only one for explaining the difference between evaluative and deliberative readings of 'ought' sentences with a raising semantics for 'ought' has been directly by ambiguity On that strategy, the agency-in-the-prejacent theory, evaluative readings from 'ought' sentences as an implicit agency operator, stit ('sees to it in the A can then be between It ought to be that Bill and It ought to be that Bill to it that he as two possible readings of 'Bill ought to kiss Schroeder that this theory to the Overgeneration it the ambiguity in the prejacent sentence, 'Bill Lucy', it predicts that this ambiguity would also occur in nonagential and 'ought' sentences, which are by 'ought' to the same if this objection against the agency-in-the-prejacent theory is are other of explaining the ambiguity with a raising 'ought', which do not the ambiguity in the prejacent sentence. A contrastivist semantics for 'ought' provides the that we to According to contrastivism 'ought' claims are always to a For example, to claim that it ought to be the case that Larry the lottery is to claim of some of in the context that it ought to be the case that Larry the lottery rather than that any other of different readings for 'ought' for example, that it ought to be that Larry the lottery rather than that a or is to a different claim than that it ought to be that Larry the lottery rather than that or about 'ought' is independently having been embraced by philosophers and for a of If the normative 'ought' is glossed as meaning for example, then it would its from the of better In the is on a with a of which each some other than Bill kissing Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, In the is on a with a of in which Bill in some different way with Lucy, Bill to Lucy, Bill Lucy, In the is on with a of in which Bill other than Bill Bill In the is on Lucy', with a of in which Bill does other perhaps with other In the case of where no part of the sentence is possible of in which different perhaps involving different and For example, in In each case the makes it natural to the 'ought' sentence as that the state of affairs that Bill is better some than any of the in the by that for example, we as that it is better that Bill be the who that it be or or who we as that it is better that what Bill does to is kiss that he These natural readings of all differ from each that with the Uniformity Thesis can accommodate major ambiguities in 'ought' sentences. These contrastivist ambiguities are to the difference between evaluative and deliberative readings of 'ought' sentences. We that to get a deliberative reading of an 'ought' claim for an agent S is approximately to it as having a that S could use to deliberations about what to at on one of action of a of the try to identify the best of the their We can then the of a deliberative for a of involving S is able to So the kind of by the on for example, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, will not be a deliberative for Bill, or for any other But each of can be as a deliberative for whether to kiss Lucy, rather than or here will be at he whether to kiss Lucy, rather than or here will be at Our contrastivist is that to get a reading of an 'ought' sentence as deliberative for it is that it be as to a deliberative for do not claim that a deliberative is also be other The availability of deliberative readings can be to on a of pragmatic in to Some 'ought' sentences, like ought to the will deliberative readings because they that in the Some of will deliberative readings as what is for a to the to Bill ought to kiss he is to on for example, will a deliberative reading like that by since the that it is better that he Lucy, than that or not be so in that an 'ought' sentence will Schroeder's five hallmarks for the deliberative 'ought' if and only if it is a deliberative reading, as (i) as an agent to identify the best of of action (ii) a to an agent about which is best of of action (iii) it is that 'ought' implies if to a deliberative since we have this as a of the (iv) are accountable for the best of action their and not accountable for what is not their (v) an agent has an to an action (e.g. having most reason to if and only if it is the best action in therefore a way to accommodate and explain a difference between evaluative and deliberative readings of 'ought' sentences without any semantic or logical ambiguity in 'ought' itself. this contrastivist theory the Overgeneration the central objection to the Uniformity Thesis? Schroeder the problem as an of the ambiguity in the prejacent instead of in 'ought'. the contrastivist explanation it rather in an implicit argument place of the 'ought' might we the But the data a that the 'ought' sentences deliberative readings and nonagential are precisely those grammar that they can only a raising 'ought' and not a control 'ought'. It makes no difference whether the uniformity the ambiguity in the prejacent or either way he the of an explanation of this that is not Ambiguity theorists maintain that this cannot be and therefore that the only of deliberative readings are those to a sense of 'ought' as a control At first glance contrastivism about 'ought' seems to nothing that the If the ambiguity in 'ought' sentences neither from 'ought' itself nor from the prejacent sentence but rather from differences in a of then one might that grammatical differences in how 'ought' and the prejacent sentence are any difference for the availability of particular readings. readings should be no less available for nonagential sentences like 'It ought to be that Bill and sentences like ought to be by than for agential 'ought' sentences like 'Bill ought to kiss each of these of sentences does not have different truth But the of the second of each that a who uses it has some special reason for it the For perhaps the to that this particular is less to be than is or that the possibility it will be is too to For the to that Bill to stop the in an way because the We now that a uniform contrastivist semantics for 'ought' can explain the data by to first the case of a 'ought' sentence like ought to be by This sentence is less than its 'Bill ought to kiss Lucy', and so to a special reason for its use. the ambiguity claim that the choice of or voice makes no difference to our of a sentence is The voice from the voice in where it places In voice provides a means of the agent by to or 'The were with the This cannot be with the voice because of the requirement that every sentence have a grammatical which in sentences must be the We have that is a natural way of the of different A natural is therefore that 'ought' sentences deliberative readings because

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