Some new comments on an old thread of Brian's about the epistemic and normative meaning of "ought"; this came up here, in relation to "supposed to," because of these comments.
Brian notes Judith Jarvis Thomson's observation that this "ought" really seems to be ambiguous--you can't say "Jane and Joe ought to be here" if you mean that Jane promised to come and Joe is probably here.
I tossed in the following comments:
There's another underdetermination that takes place with "ought." I've seen it described as the difference between ought to be and ought to do, but that's not quite right--it's not determined by the verb following "ought."
Consider the following two situations.
(1) We are at a family reunion hosted by my notoriously feckless nephew. There is anxiety about whether he has laid in enough supplies. I say, "He ought to have enough food for his family."(2) We are watching a documentary about poverty in America. A Wal-Mart cashier is describing how, given his and his wife's low salaries, they sometimes do not know where their children's next meal is coming from. I say, "He ought to have enough food for his family."
Both of these are cases of the moral "ought," but the onus falls differently. In (1), the onus falls on the subject of "ought"; in (2), the onus is impersonal. My nephew has done wrong if he does not have enough food to feed his family; it is wrong tout court if the Wal-Mart cashier does not have enough food to feed his family.
I think you can't conjoin these oughts:
(3)??My nephew and the cashier both ought to have enough food to feed their famililes.
But of course (3) is an odd thing to say anyway; I'd have to come up with something more natural to prove this case.
Interestingly, in the epistemic "ought" the onus doesn't fall on the subject of the "ought." In the epistemic sense, "P ought to phi" seems to mean, given what the speaker knows, it is likely that P phis; or maybe that it is likely tout court that P phis.
Posted by Matt Weiner at February 9, 2004 07:02 PMI think what's going on with your (1) and (2) is the difference between
(1) There exists a person x, such that it ought to be the case that x sees to it that there is enough food to feed the family.
(2) It ought to be the case that there exists a person x, such that x sees to it that there is enough food to feed the family.
You may want to massage that, but basically its the difference between an "ought" inside vs. outside of a quantifier.
It's interesting that the epistemic case doesn't have a similar ambiguity. Or doesn't seem to, anyway.
Posted by: Heath White at February 12, 2004 10:06 AM