PDF《Actualism, Possibilism, and Beyond1》

t give Emily Drano is the actual world, where he gives her arsenic. Thus, Ace ought to prefer what would obtain if he gave her Drano (namely, that Emily is harmed but not killed) to what would obtain if he didn'

t give her Drano (namely, that Emily is killed). And so, objectively speaking, he ought to prefer the outcome of giving her Drano to the outcome of not giving her Drano, which implies, according to actualism, that he ought to give her Drano. For similar reasons, actualism implies that he ought to give her bleach, and it likewise implies that he ought to give her ammonia. In this case, we can see two problems with actualism. First, there are many cases where it implies that agents ought to do really awful things: for any action φ, no matter how bad φ is, actualism entails that one ought to φ so long as φ-ing isn'

t quite as bad as what one actually does. In addition to implying that agents ought to do really awful things, there are simply too many things that actualism entails one ought to do. If there are a million options that are less bad than what one actually does, then actualism will entail, for each of these options, that one ought to do it. In the case just considered, we have seen that actualism entails, of each of three incompatible courses of action, that Ace ought to do it. But these aren'

t the only things it entails that Ace ought to do. Consider the course of action that consists in giving Emily Drano and then telling his boss where to go;

or the course of action that consists in giving Emily Drano and then

3 ?A similar counterexample to actualism is presented in Wedgwood 2009. ? 3? lighting the cat on fire;

or the course of action that consists in giving Emily Drano and then spending the rest his one'

s life dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte. Each of these options is such that the outcome of carrying it out is preferable to the outcome of giving Emily the arsenic solution. And so actualism entails, for each of these courses of action, that Ace ought to do it. Thus, actualism leads to a deontic explosion of obligations to do terrible things. 1.2 The Contextualist Response How might the actualist respond to this objection? One response, suggested by Jackson and Pargetter (1986), is to distinguish between two questions: the question of whether an agent ought to φ at t, and the question as to what the agent ought to do at t. On the Jackson-Pargetter view, whether x ought to φ at t depends on whether φ-ing at t is better than what x would do if x didn'

t φ at t. But what x ought to do at t is whichever of the maximally relevantly specific options available to x at t would have the best outcome. Assume that, in Arsenic and Old Ace, the time of action is noon. While Jackson and Pargetter are committed to saying that Ace ought to give Emily Drano at noon (since doing so is better than what he would do otherwise, namely give her arsenic), they are not committed to saying that what he ought to do at noon is give Emily Drano. Rather, on their view, there is only one correct answer to the question of what Ace ought to do at noon, namely, that he ought to give her a glass of water. For, among the maximally relevantly specific options that are available to Ace at noon, giving her a glass of water is maximally preferable, as it would have the best outcome. Perhaps, therefore, we can explain away our intuition that Ace ought not to give Emily Drano at noon, as a result of our conflating the two questions that Jackson and Pargetter distinguish. Perhaps we correctly judge that it is not the case that giving Emily Drano is what Ace ought to do at noon, and from this we fallaciously infer that Ace ought not to give Emily Drano at noon. On the face of it, this solution does not appear coherent. If Ace ought to give Emily Drano at noon, then how could this fail to be (or to be part of) what he ought to do at noon? Jackson and Pargetter suggest a way of avoiding this charge of incoherence. The suggestion is that '