Ought, Agents, and Actions

Philosophical Review 119 (3):1-41 (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

According to a naive view sometimes apparent in the writings of moral philosophers, 'ought' often expresses a relation between agents and actions—the relation that obtains between an agent and an action when that action is what that agent ought to do. It is not part of this naive view that 'ought' always expresses this relation—adherents of the naive view are happy to allow that 'ought' also has an evaluative sense, on which it means, roughly, that were things ideal, some proposition would be the case. What is important to the naive view is that there is also a deliberative sense of 'ought', on which it relates agents to actions. In contrast, logically and linguistically sophisticated philosophers have typically rejected this naive view. According to them, there is no argument-place for an agent in any relation expressed by 'ought', nor is there any argument-place for an action. According to this view, if Jim ought to jam, that is not because there is a special distinctive deliberative ought relation between Jim and jamming; rather, it is because a certain proposition ought to be the case: namely, that Jim jams. This essay defends the naive view, by first arguing that there are two distinct normative senses of 'ought', which actually exhibit different syntactic behavior, and then going on to argue that the deliberative sense of 'ought' relates agents to actions, rather than to propositions. It closes by drawing lessons for a range of issues in moral theory.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Ought, Agents, and Actions.Mark Schroeder - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (1):1-41.
Agency as difference-making: causal foundations of moral responsibility.Johannes Himmelreich - 2015 - Dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science
Deciding as Intentional Action: Control over Decisions.Joshua Shepherd - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2):335-351.
An Agent-Causal View of Free Will.Randolph Kent Clarke - 1990 - Dissertation, Princeton University
Expressive Actions.Monika Betzler - 2009 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (3):272-292.
What Is Naive Realism?Damian Leszczyński - 2010 - Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia 5 (2):89-106.
Judgment, Deliberation, and the Self-effacement of Moral Theory.Damian Cox - 2012 - Journal of Value Inquiry 46 (3):289-302.
Some tensions between autonomy and self-governance.Jonathan Jacobs - 2003 - Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2):221-244.
Virtue Ethics and Right Action.Diana Courtney Fleming - 2003 - Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
Composite Action.Sara Rachel Chant - 2004 - Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison
Agents and their actions.Maria Alvarez & John Hyman - 1998 - Philosophy 73 (2):219-245.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-02-20

Downloads
59 (#244,539)

6 months
10 (#135,615)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Mark Schroeder
University of Southern California

Citations of this work

The Normativity of Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Game of Belief.Barry Maguire & Jack Woods - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (2):211-249.
Thinking and being sure.Jeremy Goodman & Ben Holguín - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):634-654.
Two Ways to Want?Ethan Jerzak - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (2):65-98.

View all 91 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references