11 - Conflicts and Counterfactuals

Summary

Situationist deontic logic, as delimited in Section 9.4 and outlined in Chapter 10, represents that fraction of deontic discourse that refers to only one (actual) situation and one normative appraisal of it. Deontic statements overstep these limitations primarily in two ways: First, they may refer to some situation that does not actually obtain. Second, they may refer to situations and alternative sets in general (deontic rules).

Ordinary language uses the same type of expressions, namely conditional sentences (“if”-sentences) to represent both hypothetical reasoning and reasoning by rules. As was indicated in Section 9.4, it is nevertheless essential to distinguish between these two types of normative expressions. Hypothetical deontic statements are treated in this chapter and deontic rules in Chapters 12 and 13.

Section 11.1 gives a formal account of a common move in informal normative discourse, namely to shift from a non–action-guiding to an action-guiding sense of a deontic word such as ‘ought’ or ‘should.’ In Section 11.2, it is shown how such shifts can be used for the (pragmatic) resolution of moral dilemmas. Section 11.3 outlines in general terms how the formal analysis from Chapter 10 has to be modified in order to deal with hypothetical deontic conditionals. In Section 11.4, this modification is performed for restrictive counterfactuals, a group of deontic conditionals that includes the contrary-to-duty conditionals.