" OUGHT" AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE AGENT

I MAGINE A DOCTOR WHO IS FACED with a patient's disease that she knows will lead to death unless treated shortly. (1) Two possible treatments are available: A and B. After careful consideration of the available evidence, the doctor concludes that treatment A will cure the patient, and B will kill him. Unbeknownst to her, however, in fact treatment B is the cure, while A will lead to the patient's death. What ought the doctor to do: give A or give B? Let us call facts about a person's beliefs, knowledge or evidence facts about that person's perspective. We may then ask more generally: Does what an agent ought to do depend on the agent's perspective, or is it perspective independent? Objectivists about "ought," such as G. E. Moore and J. J. Thomson, claim that "ought" is independent of the agent's perspective. (2) Hence, they would hold that the doctor ought to give treatment B--the one that in fact cures the patient. Perspectivists like H. A. Prichard and W. D. Ross, on the other hand, believe that "ought" depends on the perspective of the agent--a view that is sometimes spelled out in terms of the agent's actual beliefs, and sometimes in terms of the evidence available to the agent. (3) Both of these versions of perspectivism hold that the doctor ought to give A, not B. Others again try to solve the puzzle by distinguishing different senses of "ought." (4) According to them, all that we can say is that the doctor ought to give A, relative to her perspective, and that she ought to give B, relative to all the facts. I am willing to concede that it might be useful to speak of what an agent ought to do relative to certain considerations, and that different qualified notions of "ought" might be important in their own right. Nevertheless, I believe that there is a substantial question at issue between objectivists and perspectivists when it comes to what might be called the "overall ought" of practical deliberation. This is the concept involved in the deliberative question, "What ought I to do?" (or "What should I do?") and deliberative conclusions of the form, "I ought to [phi])" (or "I should [phi]"). (I take "ought" and "should" to be equivalent, but for simplicity's sake, I will mostly use "ought" in what follows.) Practical conclusions of this sort are supposed to guide rational decision-making and action directly. In other words, the "ought" at issue is the one that is appealed to in the common idea that it is irrational, or akratic, not to intend what one believes one ought to do. (5) Now, in order to make a rational decision guided by a belief that one ought to do something, one needs a univocal concept of "ought" that figures in such beliefs. It is perfectly consistent to believe, "I ought to [phi]), relative to X," and, "I ought not to [phi]), relative to Y," but one cannot rationally intend both to [phi] and not to [phi]). There must be one sense of "ought," the belief in which is the relevant one for decision-making. We need to be able to judge, "I ought to [phi], full stop." At any rate, this is what I shall assume in the following discussion. The concept that is (inter alia) used in such deliberative conclusions is sometimes called the "practical ought." (6) I think it is natural to consider the practical "ought" as the central, unqualified sense of "ought" and regard all other "oughts" as qualified senses. (7) This claim, however, will not function as a substantial assumption of the argument. This paper is about the question of whether the practical "ought" depends on perspective, and I will refer to this concept by using the word "ought" without qualification only for the sake of convenience. Against this background, we can understand objectivists and perspectivists as disagreeing about the question as to which of the qualified senses of "ought" that are relativized to a certain body of propositions (such as the body of all true propositions, all believed propositions or the propositions that constitute the agent's evidence) provides the correct truth conditions for the practical "ought": Objectivism: A ought to [phi] if, and only if, A ought to [phi] relative to all facts. …