Supererogation and conditional obligation

Conditional Analyses of Personal Obligation

In evaluating any deontic claim, be it a claim about personal or impersonal obligation, we need a conception of the relevant possibilities. But which possibilities count as relevant will depend on whether we are evaluating claims about personal or impersonal obligation. When we are asking what a given agent, x, ought to do at time t, we hold fixed all those facts that are outside this agent‟s c...

The logic of conditional obligation

Praise, blame, obligation, and DWE: Toward a framework for classical supererogation and kin

Continuing prior work by the author, a simple classical system for personal obligation is integrated with a fairly rich system for aretaic (agent-evaluative) appraisal. I then explore various relationships between definable aretaic statuses such as praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and deontic statuses such as obligatoriness and impermissibility. I focus on partitions of the normative status...

On a Dilemma of Conditional Obligation

Conditional obligations play an important role in normative argumentation. A large number, if not the majority of norms have a conditional form: if p then it ought to be that q: An important class among the conditional obligations are the so-called commitments, that is, sentences of the form 'the performance of (the action described by) p commits one person to perform q'. The concept of conditi...

Conditional Obligation and Positive Permission for Agents in Time

This paper investigates the semantic treatment of conditional obligation, explicit permission (often called positive permission), and prohibition based on models with agents and branched time. In such models branches (rather than moments) are taken as basic, and the branching provides a way to represent the indeterminism which is normally presupposed by talk of free will, responsibility, action...