The ANU Philosophy Society is a group of academics and graduate students in Philosophy and other disciplines, who meet regularly, giving seminars and discussing them.

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This week’s Thursday Philosophy Seminar will be given by Melissa Fusco from Berkeley. The talk is between 4pm and 6pm in Seminar Room A in the HC Coombes Building, Fellows Road.

There will be a pre-talk for graduate students at 2pm in the Benjamin Library.

Title: Deontic Disjunction

Abstract: 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.