One Ought Too Many ∗

Some philosophers hold that ‘ought’ is ambiguous between a sense expressing a propositional operator and a sense expressing a relation between an agent and an action. We defend the opposing view that ‘ought’ always expresses a propositional operator against objections that it cannot adequately accommodate an ambiguity in ‘ought’ sentences between evaluative and deliberative readings, predicting readings of sentences that are not actually available. We show how adopting an independently well-motivated contrastivist semantics for ‘ought’, according to which ‘ought’ is always relativized to a contrast set of relevant alternatives, enables us to explain the evaluative-deliberative ambiguity and why the availability of these readings depends on sentential grammar. Normative branches of philosophy take special interest in claims expressed by sentences of the form ‘S ought to φ’, where S is some agent and φ-ing is some action (broadly conceived). We’ll call sentences satisfying this description agential. These claims raise many important philosophical issues, such as: Which ones are true? What makes them true? How can we know if they are true? What follows from them? Some philosophers have hoped that light would be cast on these issues if we could get clearer on the exact meaning of this word ‘ought’. Once we start looking to language for philosophical clues we should notice that the word ‘ought’ is also employed in different kinds of sentence. It appears in normative sentences with different grammatical forms, like ‘It ought to be that Charlie was born a girl’, and ‘There ought to be less suffering in the world’. For convenience we’ll call sentences like these nonagential. (It also has a non-normative epistemic use meaning approximately what is probable, as in ‘The sky ought to get dark soon’.) In these other sentences, ‘ought’ appears to represent a propositional operator, O(p). ∗ We owe this play on Bernard Williams’ famous line to Jake Ross; it has also been previously used in a different connection by Terence Cuneo as a section title of his book The Normative Web (Oxford University Press, 2007). For help with the content of the paper, we are grateful to Matthew Chrisman, Brian Cutter, Shyam Nair, Jake Ross, Mark Schroeder, Robert Shanklin, and audiences at UT Austin, USC, the Conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the IVth annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Justin Snedegar’s work on this paper was supported by the USC Oakley Fellowship. 1 ‘Agential’ and ‘nonagential’ are here used merely as labels of convenience for two sentence groups of interest, and 1 ‘Agential’ and ‘nonagential’ are here used merely as labels of convenience for two sentence groups of interest, and do not provide an exhaustive or deep classification of ‘ought’ sentences, many of which are neither agential nor nonagential by our definitions.