Intention and the Meaning of ‘Ought’

This paper argues that the standard semantics for ‘ought’ is, as it stands, incorrect. I begin by arguing that the standard semantics is morally tendentious, in precisely the way ethicists have suspected it to be: it rules out substantive alternatives to consequentialism. The problem is in the very inclusive inheritance principle that the standard semantics validates. I then review a number of classic paradoxes and puzzles that afflict (a particular part of) that inheritance principle, and introduce one new puzzle of my own. Those arguments give cause to examine the closure rules for ‘intention’; I argue that the restricted contours of an inheritance rule for intention solve a number of the problems that the unrestricted inheritance rule for ‘ought’ faces. Using the similarities between ‘intention’ and ‘ought’, I propose a unified explanation for the inheritance failures of ‘ought’, and offer two conjectures about how an adequate semantic account of ‘ought’ should be developed.