| OCR Text |
Show Chapter IX. "Ought" 370 (17) A postal carrier is supposed to deliver the mail. and (18) A rational being is supposed to keep his promises. Ordinarily we have a greater personal investment in (18), and feel greater disappointment and resentment when it is violated. But it is not difficult to imagine circumstances under which we might feel as strongly about (17). In that case, I would suggest, our reaction to its violation would have the same "emotive flavor." So we who issue judgment (18) about someone suppose him to be the kind of agent who keeps his promises, namely a rational being in the sense defined by Theory K. But we also mean to acknowledge that our supposition may be false; that he may not be, after all, as we suppose him to be. This implies that we who issue this judgment also recognize the observational fallibility of our ideal descriptive moral theory, and so a measure of uncertainty as to whether our justified expectations will be in fact confirmed by his behavior. Moreover, when we say that someone should keep his promise, we indicate our awareness that he has not or might not always thus meet our justified expectations. We thereby acknowledge the possibility that our moral theory does not adequately predict his behavior, and that these lapses (and not, say, our cynicism or lack of good faith) explain our uncertainty over his anticipated performance. Thus we express vacillation between the possibilities that the agent is not the kind of rational being described by the theory, and that the theory is inadequate to satisfy the counterfactual condition for that kind of being. In both of these ways, the moral "should" expresses epistemic ambivalence. Finally, when we address this "should" or "ought" to the agent directly, we remind him of what is expected of him; of the moral being we suppose him to be. But we recognize that of course it always remains open to him to confirm or violate this moral supposition in his actual conduct. This is to suggest that the moral "ought" expresses our relation to an ideal descriptive moral theory like K, under the condition that we are unsure, on a given occasion, to what extent the laws of K are or are not well-confirmed. In order to use the moral "ought," we must already entertain the possibility that the laws of K do not hold universally. Only a pristine innocent believes in the moral "is." 6. Some Counterexamples Resolved Next I consider three objections to this analysis. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
