Melissa Fusco (Berkeley): Deontic Disjunction

I propose a unified solution to two puzzles: Ross's puzzle (the apparent failure of 'Ought phi' to entail 'Ought (phi or psi))' and free choice permission (the apparent fact that 'May(phi or psi)' entails both 'May phi' and 'May psi').  I begin with a pair of cases from the decision theory literature illustrating the phenomenon of \emph{act dependence}, where what an agent ought to do depends on what she does.  The notion of permissibility distilled from these cases forms the basis for my analysis of 'May' and 'Ought'.  This framework is then combined with a generalization of the classical semantics for disjunction---equivalent to Boolean disjunction on the diagonal, but with a different two-dimensional character---that explains the puzzling facts in terms of semantic consequence.

Date & time

Thu 23 Jun 2016, 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Location

Coombs Seminar Room A

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