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 control at t, including the simultaneous choices of other agents. Thus, if, at t, some other agent, y, chooses to , then we treat this fact as settled, and we consider only those possibilities in which y makes this choice. By contrast, when we ask what ought to be the case at t, we do not hold fixed the choices made by any agent at t. Even if, as a matter of fact, at t, y chooses to , in evaluating claims about what ought to be the case at t we consider both the possibilities in which y chooses to , and the possibilities in which y makes alternative choices. Moreover, how deontic claims are to be evaluated depends crucially on what possibilities count as relevant, and hence on what facts count as settled. Therefore, claims about what a given agent, x, ought to do cannot be understood in terms of claims about what ought to be the case simpliciter. They must instead be understood in terms of claims about what ought to be the case holding fixed all those facts that are outside x’s control, that is, what ought to be the case conditional on the conjunction of these facts. And so we should move from the reductions we have been considering (MCR and MCRstit) to one of the following reductions: