Ought Low Alcohol Intake to be Promoted for Health Reasons?

Practical Reasons and Moral ‘Ought’

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’1 When we say that someon...

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

'ought', 'can', and Practical Reasons 1

As intuitive as OIC might seem, we should acknowledge that the arguments offered in its support often do not warrant the sort of confidence many of us have in the principle. For example, friends of OIC often say that the principle is needed to explain certain linguistic behaviors. 3 Suppose Smith sees Jones sitting in a chair and Jones tells Smith that he has just been robbed. 'You ought to cal...

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...

There ought to be a law?