Agential obligation as non-agential personal obligation plus agency
✍ Scribed by Paul McNamara
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2004
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 326 KB
- Volume
- 2
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1570-8683
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
I explore various ways of integrating the framework for predeterminism, agency, and ability in [P. McNamara, Nordic J. Philos. Logic 5 (2) ( 2000) 135] with a framework for obligations. However, the agential obligation operator explored here is defined in terms of a non-agential yet personal obligation operator and a non-deontic (and non-normal) agency operator. This is contrary to the main current trend, which assumes statements of personal obligation always take agential complements. Instead, I take the basic form to be an agent's being obligated to be such that p. I sketch some logics for agential obligation based on personal obligation and agency, first in a fairly familiar context that rules out conflicting personal obligations (and derivatively, conflicting agential obligations), and then in contexts that do allow for conflicts (of both sorts). Finally, a solution to van Fraassen's puzzle is sketched, and an important theorem is proved.