Ephilophiles, I have a problem I hope you can help me with.

I recently banged my head and entirely forgot what 'ought' means*. Not the commonplace way we use it, I mean -- I still know what a ruffian means when he says "You ought to get out of my face" (a threat), and I know what my dad means when he tells me "You ought to give your brother a turn on the swing set" (discipline looms, good behaviour may lead to approval), and I know what a peer means when she tells me "You ought to maintain good personal hygiene like everyone else" (social disapproval will fall upon those who do not). All those hypothetical imperatives I get. People say 'ought' when they want to change my behaviour or inform me of codes of behaviour that my society follows. They make appeals to my interests, which are really just factual claims ("You ought not to drive on the wrong side of the street" is plainly true if I don't like getting smashed into). It's a handy, informative language game we play.

But, while convalescing, I spoke with a philosopher friend and realized she was purporting to play a different game altogether. She was talking about these categorical imperatives, unconditional oughts, which explicitly involve no such appeals. She explained, when a philosopher tells me "You ought not do X," he doesn't mean he's going to beat me up if I don't do it, or that I'll be injured by doing it, or that I'll be struck by lightning or that my peers or superego disapprove of it. Apparently this rarefied new ought that a philosopher deals with has been abstracted fully away from all of these merely material concerns. But I realized I now did not know what this new species of 'ought' actually was supposed to mean. The conversation went like this:

• : So, wait, if it's so completely different, what does your 'ought' mean, then?


• : Well, you ought to do those acts that are right.


• : (Realizing with horror that I forget that word too) Wait, what's a right act?


• : It's the sort a good person must do.


• : And what's a good person!?


• : Someone who does what he ought to.

At this point I entered a fit and the doctors had to usher her out of the room.
It seemed as though the actual reference of the categorical-ought -- for all that her appropriation of this perfectly familiar word conjured up the sense that disapproval, karmic punishment, the action of my conscience and the like were likely to be involved -- was totally lacking. I don't have on hand any strict criteria for what makes words go from meaningless to meaningful, but such a tight definitional loop plainly has no content -- if that is how those words are defined, then they are meaningless. Maybe she's a crappy philosopher, though, I don't know. So can you help me understand? What does the word mean?

It's gotten so bad that, in cynical moments, I'm starting to suspect that when moral philosophers wield the word 'ought,' what they are really doing is just wielding all of those everyday connotations that come along with the hypothetical oughts we all use in real life, while disingenuously holding that the content of their oughts is in fact in the oddly empty denotation of the categorical-ought. Because when my philosopher friend and I talk, and she says things like "You just absolutely, categorically, unconditionally ought to never torture a kitten even if you'd really like to," for a moment my mind is flooded with associations (of deep guilt, of having disappointed my peers and my internalized parents, of how cute kittens are, of God shaking his head and consigning me to hell) and I think I really get what that sentence means, what it feels like to categorically-ought something. But then I remember that she already explicitly swore off the connection to all of those material associations, and my feeling of understanding drains out.

(And then I darkly wonder: "What if she, and the other philosophers, are really just playing the exact same social game everyone else in our society plays when they talk about 'oughts', but falsely making their brand of oughts sound supremely authoritative when they are, at base, supremely vacuous?". If someone walked up to me on the street and told me to absolutely, categorically, unconditionally do something, I'd probably find them to just be rather rude or confused, but philosophers seem to have created for themselves (at least, among themselves) a sort of mystique that lets them believe they can in fact wield this sort of social authority. They appear to me now as just playing the social role of a sort of priestly accountant who collects our society's codes of behaviour and works to rejig them into a more aesthetically pleasing, less contradictory bundle before broadcasting them back, stamped with the sanction of 'categoricalness'. Of course, they then perform all sorts of perfectly valid logical operations on the oughts they are working with, and usually descend so far into abstruse complexity that it might be quite easy for them to miss that what they are really conveying to each other and their readers when they say 'ought' is just that same psychosocial package of everyday, material connotations that is attached to our everyday use of the word.)

So, anyway, if you would, please: supply me with a decent definition of the categorical-ought so as to assuage these worries!

* Unfortunately, I also forgot whether I've posted this angle of argument here before. I really don't know. The search isn't much use right now.

Also, I realize that philosophers aren't the only people who phrase ought statements in a categorical sort of way (a priest might do so, or a parent, although I again think what they are both really conveying when they do so is the threat of sanction/promise of approval which we eventually internalize), and that latter part may all have come off as wildly accusatory, but I'm just trying to give a picture of how this enterprise of the study of ethics could subsist while still being fundamentally mistaken. The question of how to define this term in a substantial way is what's most important here.

Good question. I have no idea what moral philosophers think they are doing with categoricals. I keep having it explained to me, and keep forgetting.

But some form of consequentialism seems alright to me.

Sometimes when we reason, we reason from information we already have to some refinement of it, or new representations of the same. But we can also go backwards and try to figure out where the judgments we've already made do or might have come from. So reasoning goes in both a progressive and a regressive direction.

Say we're going to the store and ask ourselves why we're doing this. We know we're doing it to get some milk. But why are we getting some milk? Because it will help keep our bones strong (and whatever else calcium does). But why keep our bones strong? Eventually, maybe we realize that there's one or a few things we're doing for their own sakes, not for the sake of something else. Not only that, but they're things we <em>can't</em> choose to do for the sake of something else.

The general definition of <em>ought</em> would be "some action supported by reasoning," so hypothetical imperatives support actions by virtue of progressive rationality, categorical imperatives regressively. QED?

—Another way to put it is that the idea of a categorical imperative runs parallel to the idea of immediate/non-inferential justification re: the epistemic regress.

—Another way to think about this is to describe instrumental reasoning as equivalent to modus ponens, et. al. but applied to our intentions. So hypothetical imperatives are products of reason, and it's easy to see how (inasmuch as availing oneself of modus ponens is reasonable). Whether there are reasonable categorical imperatives would depend on whether reason contains within itself any extralogical procedure for deciding the rationality of our choices, which in turn is analogous to the question of whether any of our theoretical knowledge emerges from pure reason itself, apart from experience.

I'm sort of confused by your answer, Szav.
I don't think you're just saying categoricals are immediately, non-inferentially justified (because that still wouldn't tell me what the meaning of the sentence being justified is). But I'm not sure what the parallel to non-inferential justification in epistemology is here, exactly.

I'm also not sure how anything like a categorical comes into play if my motivations for milk-shopping eventually boil down to some 'unjustified' core element like, say, "I like drinking milk, and I go shopping for things I like". If that is supposed to resemble a categorical, or, more importantly, explain what one is, I don't know how it does.

As for the third option, I think we might risk just extending the circular-definition problem to 'rationality' unless we're very clear what we mean by it in the first place. ("And what's a 'rational person'?!" "Someone who does what he ought to." etc.)

It's not really justification that concerns me here -- I don't know what it would mean in the first place for a categorical ought to be justified because I don't know what they are. A hypothetical can be an order from a person in authority or a statement about what results from my preferences or information about norms that others expect me to follow or a threat or promise. As far as I can tell, a categorical is supposed to be an order issued by no-one, tailored to some platonic set of preferences that one may or may not share (that one ought to share, in fact, which only worsens matters), holding irrespective of (giving no information about) any set of social circumstances, and making no claim about any empirical events that might follow. I don't know what that's supposed to be.

<strong>Fence wrote:</strong>
I don't think you're just saying categoricals are immediately, non-inferentially justified (because that still wouldn't tell me what the meaning of the sentence being justified is). But I'm not sure what the parallel to non-inferential justification in epistemology is here, exactly.

Let's say we accept a certain set of prescriptions for how to live our lives, just like we accept a certain set of beliefs (descriptions?) about how the world works. From either set, we can derive additional prescriptions and beliefs. But we can also question our starting points themselves. If we're foundationalists, our ultimate answer to the question of those starting points is going to be some prescriptions we just have to accept and some abstract epistemological or metaphysical principles that we can't help but believe in (like the law of identity).

I'm also not sure how anything like a categorical comes into play if my motivations for milk-shopping eventually boil down to some 'unjustified' core element like, say, "I like drinking milk, and I go shopping for things I like". If that is supposed to resemble a categorical, or, more importantly, explain what one is, I don't know how it does.

I've noticed a few regressive series in our practical reasoning. The one involving our intentions doesn't so explicitly relate definitively to ethics, granted, but consider this (I'll let the SEP do my work for me this time):

Suppose that someone were to ask you whether it is good to help others in time of need. Unless you suspected some sort of trick, you would answer, “Yes, of course.” If this person were to go on to ask you why acting in this way is good, you might say that it is good to help others in time of need simply because it is good that their needs be satisfied. If you were then asked why it is good that people's needs be satisfied, you might be puzzled. You might be inclined to say, “It just is.” Or you might accept the legitimacy of the question and say that it is good that people's needs be satisfied because this brings them pleasure. But then, of course, your interlocutor could ask once again, “What's good about that?” Perhaps at this point you would answer, “It just is good that people be pleased,” and thus put an end to this line of questioning. Or perhaps you would again seek to explain the fact that it is good that people be pleased in terms of something else that you take to be good. At some point, though, you would have to put an end to the questions, not because you would have grown tired of them (though that is a distinct possibility), but because you would be forced to recognize that, if one thing derives its goodness from some other thing, which derives its goodness from yet a third thing, and so on, there must come a point at which you reach something whose goodness is not derivative in this way, something that “just is” good in its own right, something whose goodness is the source of, and thus explains, the goodness to be found in all the other things that precede it on the list. It is at this point that you will have arrived at intrinsic goodness.[10] That which is intrinsically good is nonderivatively good; it is good for its own sake. That which is not intrinsically good but extrinsically good is derivatively good; it is good, not (insofar as its extrinsic value is concerned) for its own sake, but for the sake of something else that is good and to which it is related in some way. Intrinsic value thus has a certain priority over extrinsic value. The latter is derivative from or reflective of the former and is to be explained in terms of the former. It is for this reason that philosophers have tended to focus on intrinsic value in particular. ("Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value," sec. 2)

In light of this, consider some of what Aristotle and Mill say about what's good: "that at which everything aims," "the only thing desirable for its own sake." Now maybe our shopping for milk is going to run out of background reasons at some point; but if we can trace our motives for our actions back to something we necessarily (as a psychological or metaphysical necessity) intend, then just those actions which we can connect up with that necessary intent would be the ones reasoning (both regressive and progressive) would support no matter what (in other words, independently of the particulars of my actual goals). In other words, the prescriptions of those necessarily intended actions would be categorical imperatives.

As for the third option, I think we might risk just extending the circular-definition problem to 'rationality' unless we're very clear what we mean by it in the first place.

Well, you said you don't doubt the truth of hypothetical imperatives like, "You ought not to drive on the wrong side of the street if you don't like getting smashed into." What do you mean by saying that you ought to do something in this case? That I'm ignoring the facts of safe driving if I think, "I don't want to get smashed into," but proceed to be reckless? Then "ought" functions as a way of saying that our actions are logically inconsistent or somehow otherwise factually out of line with our beliefs. Maybe this keeps things in a circle, but I'm not sure why "such a tight definitional loop plainly has no content—if that is how those words are defined, then they are meaningless."