Someone Ought to Say Williams

Teaching someone to fish

IT IS NOT OFTEN that textbooks cross my desk, and it has been a shockingly long time (more than 30 years) since I last attended university courses. So when a copy of Wayne Wolf’s updated Computers as Components (second edition; the first appeared in 2000), I was in a bit of a quandary as to how to review it. Luckily, Wayne’s preface to the second edition indicated that this kind of material, on...

An Integrated Framework for Ought-to-be and Ought-to-do Constraints 1

What Everyone Ought to Know

WVHAT EVERYONE OUGHT TO KNOW. By Oliver T. Osborne. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Ill. This is a book on health, disease and accident, and should enable the fifteen-minute-a-day reader to talk impressively about a variety of things without thoroughly understanding any of them. One who is reasonably familiar with the fields of biology may wonder if it is useful to present to laymen a variety o...

An Integrated Framework for Ought-to-be and Ought-to-do Constraints (Extended Abstract)

Deontic logic is the logic to reason about ideal and actual behaviour. Besides the traditional role as an underlying logic for law and ethics (for a survey see [MW]), in the realm of computer science, deontic logic has been proposed as a logic for the specification of legal expert systems [BMT87],[Sta80], authorization mechanisms [ML85], decision support systems [Kd.,88], [Lee88b],[Lee88a], dat...

Does ought imply can?

Most philosophers believe that a person can have an obligation only insofar as she is able to fulfil it, a principle generally referred to as "Ought Implies Can". Arguably, this principle reflects something basic about the ordinary concept of obligation. However, in a paper published recently in this journal, Wesley Buckwalter and John Turri presented evidence for the conclusion that ordinary p...