Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
1 - Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
It ought not to be that you are robbed. A fortiori, it ought not to be that you are robbed and then helped. But you ought to be helped, given that you have been robbed. The robbing excludes the best possibilities that might otherwise have been actualized, and the helping is needed in order to actualize the best of those that remain. Among the possible worlds marred by the robbing, the best of a bad lot are some of those where the robbing is followed by helping.
In this paper, I am concerned with semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic that embody the idea just sketched. Four such are known to me: the treatments in Bengt Hansson [4], Sections 10–15; in Dagfinn Føllesdal and Risto Hilpinen [2], Section 9; in Bas van Fraassen [9]; and in my own [8], Section 5.1. My purpose here is to place these four treatments within a systematic array of alternatives, and thereby to facilitate comparison. There are superficial differences galore; there are also some serious differences.
My results here are mostly implicit in [8], and to some extent also in [7]. But those works are devoted primarily to the study of counterfactual conditionals. The results about dyadic deontic logic that can be extracted thence via an imperfect formal analogy between the two subjects are here isolated, consolidated, and restated in more customary terms.
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- Information
- Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy , pp. 5 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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