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The chapter addresses a puzzle. In an objective sense, one ought to believe all and only what’s true. This loses the normative/natural distinction, making objective oughts conceptually equivalent to naturalistic claims. The needed ought ignores costs and limitations in reasoning. The subjective ought can’t be characterized in terms of objective oughts, but using Hare conditionals to characterize hypothetical imperatives, we can say this: The objective ought is what one ought subjectively to do were it that one ought to believe all that’s so. This involves an idealized self thinking herself the actual self. The special case of what one objectively ought to believe falls out immediately. The suppositions here may be counternormative as well as counterfactual. Putting meaning in terms of truth-conditions, it follows, will be empty. So we must characterize meanings in terms of subjective oughts. Oughts of advice come in a note at the end.

The chapter explains the motivation for the book, which is to find a moral theory that accommodates what's compelling about act-utilitarianism while avoiding most, if not all, of its counterintuitive implications. It is argued that what's compelling about act-utilitarianism is the idea that an act's deontic status is determined by the agent's reasons for preferring its outcome to those of the available alternatives such that it can never be morally wrong for her to act so as to bring about the outcome that she has most reason to want to obtain. And it is argued that what is most problematic about act-utilitarianism is its implication that agents are sometimes required to act in ways that they lack decisive reason to act. The chapter also lays out the plan for the book and explains the book's focus on what we objectively ought to do and why this is of fundamental importance.

This chapter offers an account of the truth conditions of sentences involving terms like ‘ought’. These truth conditions involve a function from worlds of evaluation to domains of worlds, and an ordering of the worlds in such domains. Every such ordering arises from a probability function and a value function—since it ranks worlds according to the expected value of certain propositions that are true at those worlds. With the objective ‘ought’, the probability function is the omniscient function, which assigns 1 to all truths and 0 to all falsehoods; with the subjective ‘ought’, the probability function captures the uncertainty of the relevant agent. The relevance of this account for understanding conditionals is explored, and this account is defended against objections. For present purposes, the crucial point is that any normative use of ‘ought’ is normative because of the value that is semantically involved. The fundamental normative concepts are evaluative.

This chapter answers the first two of the four objections from the end of Chapter 1. (1) When thinking rationally has disastrous consequences, in one sense (reflecting the ‘wrong kind of reasons’) you ‘ought not’ to think rationally, but in another sense (reflecting the ‘right kind of reasons’) you ‘ought’ to think rationally. This corresponds to the difference, not between ‘state-given’ and ‘object-given’ reasons, but between the norms that are, and those that are not, constitutive of the mental states to which they apply. (2) If it is really possible to have rational false beliefs about what one ‘ought’ to do, the sense of ‘ought’ featuring in the content of this belief must be different from the sense in which one ‘ought’ never to act contrary to one’s beliefs about what one ought to do. The former is an ‘objective “ought”’ while the latter is a more ‘subjective “ought”’.