Conditional Obligations in Strategic Situations

We investigate Horty’s action constants and their functioning in action obligations of the form “In the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform action K” and in conditional action obligations of the form “If group H of agents performs action L, then in the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform action K”. We show that a straightforward Horty-style analysis of action obligations leads to counterintuitive results. To make amends, we introduce weak action obligations. This new type of action obligations is exactly what we need to show that an action is obligatory for a group of agents if and only if this action is obligatory for this group of agents regardless of what the others do. 1 Moral Reasoning by Cases Consider a soldier at the front, waiting with his comrades to repulse an enemy attack. It may occur to him that if the defense is likely to be successful, then it isn’t very probable that his own personal contribution will be essential. But if he stays, he runs the risk of being killed or wounded—apparently for no point. On the other hand, if the enemy is going to win the battle, then his chances of death or injury are higher still, and now quite clearly to no point, since the line will be overwhelmed anyway. Based on this reasoning, it would appear that the soldier is better off running away regardless of who is going to win the battle. (Ross, 2006) Our soldier’s line of reasoning can be rendered as follows: ∗Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Groningen, Oude Boteringestraat 52, 9712 GL Groningen, E-mail: {B.P.Kooi, A.M.Tamminga}@rug.nl.