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Taking ‘what ought to be’ to include both what is commonly judged to be ‘good’ and what is commonly judged to be ‘right’, that is to say, ‘the duty’ of a person, Sidgwick observes that there is a rationally based recognition of the variation in people's duties. Given the failure of people on many occasions to do their duty, we must acknowledge that ‘what ought to be’ to a large degree ‘is not’, and that the former is independent of whether it comes into being. Sidgwick asks if this distinction is ultimate and irreducible. He argues that, although no answer can be provided by considering moral judgements from a psychological or sociological viewpoint, adopting a philosophical or epistemological perspective may allow for the reduction between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’, as this perspective takes both duty and facts to be objects of thought, or knowledge, that exhibit similar relations in thought, relations like that between the universal and the particular, and between inductive method and deductive method.

In discussing the fact that it takes time to perform an action, distinguishes statements such as ‘I shall do x’ from statements such as ‘I shall be under an obligation to do x’ and ‘I was doing x’ from ‘I was under an obligation to do x’. The truth of the ‘ought’ statements is independent of whether the action is done, as it is not necessary that one not do the action at the time required in order to be under an obligation to do it at that time. For some contrasts between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ statements, the obligation, such as the obligation to go to bed, refers to the future. The statement ‘I am under an obligation to go to bed’ is equivalent to ‘from now on I shall be under an obligation to go to bed’, and does not require either that I shall not do the action or that I have not done the action for it to be true.

Prichard's topic here is the nature of ‘ought’. If we were to take ‘I ought to will x’ to be equivalent to ‘my willing x ought to exist’, then it is true that ‘If I were to will a certain change x, my willing x would be something that ought to exist.’ For this to hold, either my willing x would itself be something good or my willing x would cause something good (and so be something that ought to exist). Prichard, however, rejects this view on the grounds that one cannot know, in willing x to exist, whether one's willing x is something that ought to exist. One can only know that if one were to will x, one would be willing something that one thought ought to exist.

This chapter identifies and discusses the methodological flaws that make statism excessively subservient to the status quo. It focuses on three methodological commitments on the basis of which statist conclusions have been advocated. These are (a) the view that principles of justice are constructed by interpreting the values informing the specific practices they aim to regulate; (b) the view that principles of justice can only guide the conduct of authoritative agents, such as the state; and (c) the view that principles of justice apply only in the presence of specific cooperative or coercive relations. The chapter shows that all of these methodological commitments contain a bias in favour of the status quo, preventing the principles developed on their basis from being genuinely critical and action-guiding.

This chapter interprets and assesses Williams's ‘“Ought” and moral obligation’, together with a later unpublished lecture of his on ‘ought’. It describes a notion of ownership for oughts. For instance, in 'Alison ought to get a sun hat' the ought is intuitively owned by Alison, whereas in 'Alex ought to get a severe punishment' the ought is intuitively not owned by Alex. It argues that Williams in ‘“Ought” and moral obligation’ meant to deny that any oughts are owned. It also argues, however, that actually some oughts are owned.

This chapter focuses on the issue of how we are to understand ‘contributory reasons’, particularly as they are related to oughts. It begins by rehearsing six proposals for understanding contributory reasons in terms of an ‘overall ought’, and by rejecting them all. It is proposed that a ‘reason is something that favours action’, where favouring is a normative relation in which a reason stands to a particular way of acting. Since the contributory cannot be reduced to an overall ought (or any overall notion, such as goodness), the chapter proposes to go the other way and reduce overall oughts to the contributory. However, instead of attempting to reduce overall oughts to favouring reasons, the notion of a ‘contributory ought’ is introduced — ‘a monadic feature of an action which is consequent on, or resultant from, some other feature — the ‘ought-making’ feature, whatever it is’. How are we to understand how an overall ought is related to the contributory ought? Here is where the appeal to fittingness, a notion employed by the classical intuitionists, offers promise. In partially defending this claim, it is argued that Michael Smith's ‘Humean realism’ and Allan Gibbard's expressivism lack the resources needed for adequately understanding practical reasons and oughts.

This chapter surveys several theoretical stances that Hume takes. It discusses Hume's naturalism, and addresses the role of the is—ought argument in his moral theory. That argument is that theorists commonly move from is-statements to ought-statements without justification; and that move often seems to leave the implication that the normative ought-claims are merely objective observations. Because Hume specifically argues against them and is sometimes engaged in showing how his account refutes them, two schools of moral theory — rationalist and intuitionist ethics — are considered to set the background for Hume's theory. Hume's use of virtue theory, some of which is relatively novel and probably even objectionable to traditional virtue theorists is then analysed. It is argued that Hume used the language and paraphernalia of virtue theory primarily because it was the going language of his time and he had to use it if he was to join the ongoing debates.

For every conditional norm, there is a statement about the occurrence of the act of which the conditional norm is the meaning, such as ‘God commanded that if someone makes a promise he is to keep it’ or ‘The legislator has commanded that if someone commits theft he is to be punished’. These statements are true even if no one makes a promise or commits theft. For it is not the act of which the norm is the meaning which is subject to a condition, but the meaning of the act: the ought-to-keep-promises, the ought-to-be-punished.

This chapter responds to arguments for the conclusion that participants in persistent peer disagreement ought to suspend judgment about the disputed proposition by noting that ‘ought implies can’ and that belief (and suspension of judgment) are typically not under the relevant kind of voluntary control. It is argued that issues about disagreement are better seen as being about acceptance rather than belief, and that continuing to accept propositions in the face of disagreement can have sufficient value to make it rational, and thus that peers can rationally accept conflicting propositions.

The focus here is on the emotivist/expressivist contention that normative concepts are constituted non-cognitively, by their motivational role. This chapter defends that contention against the influential double-barreled objection (known as the Frege-Geach point) that (i) deployments of such concepts often have no motivational import, and that (ii) unless normative pronouncements express genuine beliefs (rather than mere desires) the validity of inferences amongst them cannot be accommodated. It is suggested here, in response, that that the use conception of meaning provides a general perspective from which this objection can be deflected. For we can suppose that the meaning of a primitive normative term (e.g., ‘ought’) is constituted by the tendency for certain desire-like states to causally correlate with the internal acceptance of certain sentences containing these terms (hence, with the beliefs that are expressed by those sentences). Thus (and pace Blackburn and Gibbard) we can accommodate the essential motivational import of certain normative beliefs without compromising either on their genuineness, or on the reality of the normative facts that make them true or false.

The first chapter prepares the ground, and the conceptual tools, for an exploration of reasons in contexts of human agency, by exploring reasons broadly. It examines the normative and explanatory force of reasons. It argues that reasons have normative force in so far as they make acting, wanting, or believing something right or appropriate; and that, in the case of believing, the rightness or appropriateness concerns the concept of truth; while in the case of acting and wanting, it concerns the concepts of what is valuable and of the good, broadly conceived. It then examines the variety of roles that reasons can play and focuses on the justifying, motivating, and explanatory roles of reasons.

Practical judgements (such as ‘I must/ought to ψ’) are commonly to be understood relatively to a set of ends, quasi-ends (e.g., side-constraints), and circumstances. One can ask: necessary/fitting for what, in virtue of what? It may be true that I must ψ, in order to φ, because my end is to φ, although there is no necessity for me to φ: necessities can be superficial. It is the agent's ends and quasi-ends that play a role in his own deliberations. Yet a speaker can invoke what ends and quasi-ends he likes, and say what the agent must/ought to do relatively to those. ‘Ought’s may be all-in, or pro tanto. The practical ‘ought’ is an operator upon predicates, not sentences. ‘Ought’ entails ‘can’ and ‘may’ relatively to a constant set of circumstances.

Hypothetical imperatives are problematic: does ‘If you want to get drunk every evening, you ought to work in a bar’ entail, given ‘You want to get drunk every evening’, ‘You ought to work in a bar’? What of the inference from ‘Given that you are going to stab him, you ought to stab him with the shorter knife’, and ‘You are going to stab him’, to ‘You ought to stab him with the shorter knife’? One might cite Broome's ‘normative requirements’ supposedly governing thinking, which are not subject to such detachment. Doubts may be entertained about both the content, and the role, of these requirements. Their logic needs scrutiny, in respect of detachment and contraposition. So long as the concluding ‘ought’ is relative to the circumstance stated in the second premise, it may be allowed to follow, even if one has no reason to act upon it.

The goal of this chapter is to explain how the various reasons at work in a situation can support conclusions about what an agent ought to do—in the language of Ross, how prima facie duties, or prima facie oughts, can lead to all things considered oughts. This chapter describes a systematic procedure, applicable in the broad range of ordinary cases, through which ought statements can be derived from default theories and the reasons they provide. Indeed, the chapter presents two such procedures—two deontic logics—one that allows for the possibility of conflicting all things considered oughts and one that does not.

This chapter appraises the possibility of all things considered moral conflicts. The chapter considers three kinds of objections to the possibility, based on considerations from deontic logic, on conceptual considerations concerning the nature of all things considered oughts, and on an analogy between moral and physical forces.

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.