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Notes
A metaphor related to “called on to” is “call for”. I am sure that no problem or question or disease has ever telephoned, or shouted at, a person to ask for something; but a problem, question, or disease of kind K1 might well call for treatment of kind K2. The fussy reader may notice that I made sure to use this metaphor several times in what follows.
Wallace is right to call his list a grab-bag since the three I attend to in the text above differ radically from the two I attend to here. The three are in the passive, and therefore plainly call for treatment different from the treatment I recommended for sentences not in the passive. The other two, by contrast, are not in the passive: “The water pressure ought to be strong and constant” and “The meeting ought to begin promptly at 4:10.” But I don’t know why Wallace thinks the two are countercases. There is surely a defect in that meeting if it begins late, and the water pressure (in the contextually specified pipe? tank? tub?) is defective if it is insufficiently strong and constant (for the contextually specified purposes).
This might be the place for a brief reply to yet another of Wallace’s objections. I had suggested that there are directives about the inanimate of the form “X must V” as well as of the form “X ought to V.” Wallace allows that he understands what you would mean if you said to him “The toaster ought to toast bread,” but he says, nevertheless: “if you said to me, ‘The toaster must toast bread,’ I would not know what you were talking about.”
That just shows lack of imagination on Wallace’s part. No doubt it is rarely a matter of life or death whether an artifact does what it ought, but that is entirely possible. Escaping from a villain might require that we construct a ladder to climb out of the dungeon, and having done the constructing, I might say to you, nervously, “The ladder must hold.” Less likely, but also possible: the villain’s releasing us from the dungeon might require our repairing his toaster, and having done the repairing, you might say to me, nervously, “The toaster must toast.” (“It absolutely has to!” each of us might add.) Compare the doctor who says when the machinery malfunctions: “That patient’s heart must start beating on its own soon, or he’ll die.” Nothing unintelligible here.
But I was wrong in one respect. I said that whether we say merely “X ought to V,” or more strongly, “X must V,” turns on the gravity of the defect in X if he does not V. I should have said that what matters is not gravity of defect, but rather the disjunction of gravity of defect and gravity of outcome of a defect. For it might be that X’s not V-ing would mark X as possessed of only a minor defect, yet that its not V-ing would cause a disaster; and if so, then all the same, X must V.
In his footnote 5, Wallace urges his readers not to think that my account of directives derives plausibility from being a unified treatment of directives about both the animate and the inanimate, for he says of the second of the two footnotes in which I discuss the likes of (2): “As this passage confirms, Thomson herself acknowledges several irreducibly different meanings of ‘ought’: in addition to the defect-based directives, there are also not only epistemic ‘oughts’, but also ‘oughts’ that are to be understood by reference to thoughts about betterness relations between possible ways the world might be.”
Wallace evidently did not bother to read the first of the two footnotes in which I discussed the likes of (2), though I referred to it in the second. In the first, I said that I do not take the existence of the likes of (2), assertions of which are evaluatives, along with the likes of “Alfred ought to give Bert a banana,” assertions of which are typically directives, to show that “ought” is ambiguous. I said that that difference is arguably due to the difference between the structures of the two sentences. (Anyone who wants to fix that “ought” is ambiguous had better find one sentence containing it that has two meanings.)
When I introduced these ideas in Normativity, I drew attention to the fact that what a toaster ought to do is only to toast in suitable circumstances. (Not if you have it in your lap and are sitting in the bathtub. And not if there is a power outage in town.) It is only for brevity that I say that a toaster ought to toast. Moreover, it was only for brevity that I said in the text above that for it to be the case that an inanimate thing x ought to V is for it to be the case that there is a kind K such that (roughly) x is a defective K if it does not V—that “roughly” allows me to bypass, among other requirements, the requirement that the circumstances in which x does not V be suitable.
I might also have quoted a claim by Rav, a leading Talmudist, to the effect that “Man will have to render an account [to God] for all the good things which his eyes beheld but which he refused to enjoy.” I quote from Feldman (1968, p. 82). Feldman says—by way of explanation of our having to render that account, I take it—that “renunciation of the pleasures of this world is characteristically regarded as sinful ingratitude to its Creator.” But that can’t be the defect in a renouncer, or anyway can’t be the only defect in a renouncer, for you would be at least as ungrateful to the world’s Creator if you did not renounce the pleasures but merely refused to thank him for them, or denied that he had given them to us.
Scanlon muddies the water when he goes on to say “Perhaps ‘interests’ is not the best word here. ‘Purposes’ may be more accurate.” I say that this muddies the water since a thing’s purposes are or anyway issue from what the thing takes an interest in, thus from subjective interests. So shifting from “interests” to “purposes” would therefore invite a reader to think that the interests identified by goodness-fixing kinds are all subjective interests—not true, of course, for Scanlon tells us that it is the dandelion’s (objective) interest that is identified by the kind ‘dandelion root’.
Before going on, I stop for a moment to respond to Scanlon’s objection to my account of “good” that relies on his taking me to be committed to a certain unfortunate evaluative. He claims (α) that a human being ought to have ten toes, and (β) that he himself would be “defective as a human being” if he had fewer or more. He then takes me to accept both of those claims, and thinks that I would therefore accept (γ) that a good human being has ten toes. But about (γ) he says: it “seems to me odd.”
I think it clear enough that if (β) is true, then so is (γ). But I explicitly denied (on p. 215) that a physical defect marks a human being as a defective human being. I am not committed to (β), and therefore not committed to (γ), which I am sure is not merely odd but false.
Compare the fact that if we have found out that A has all the features that mark a dandelion root as a good one, then we have already found out that it is a good one. We don’t have first to travel to a corollary about anyone’s or anything’s wants—or about anyone’s carings.
Reference
Feldman, D. M. (1968). Birth control in Jewish law. New York: New York University Press.
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Thomson, J.J. Reply to critics. Philos Stud 154, 465–477 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9735-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9735-0