Conditional preferences and practical conditionals

Abstract

I argue that taking the Practical Conditionals Thesis (PCT) seriously demands a new understanding of the semantics of such conditionals.

Practical Conditionals Thesis: A practical conditional [if A][ought(B)] expresses B’s conditional preferability given A

Paul Weirich has argued that the conditional utility of a state of affairs B on A is to be identified as the degree to which it is desired under indicative supposition that A. Similarly, exploiting the PCT, I will argue that the proper analysis of indicative practical (as well as imperative) conditionals is in terms of what is planned, desired, or preferred, given suppositional changes to an agent’s information. Implementing such a conception of conditional preference in a semantic analysis of indicative practical conditionals turns out to be incompatible with any approach which treats the indicative conditional as expressing non-vacuous universal quantification over some domain of relevant antecedent-possibilities. Such analyses, I argue, encode a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to be best, given some condition. The analysis that does the best vis-à-vis the PCT is, instead, one that blends (i) a Context-Shifty account of indicative antecedents with (ii) an Expressivistic, or non-propositional, treatment of their practical consequents.