Intervention in deontic reasoning

Abstract

The ‘if p , ought p ’ problem, famously known as Zvolenszky’s puzzle (Zvolenszky 2002), questions whether possible world semantics can assign proper truth conditions to sentences of the form ‘if p , ought p ’. This paper suggests that it is not a problem of possible worlds semantics of modality, but rather, the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem reveals the counterfactual nature of deontic modals which otherwise would have gone unnoticed. I propose that a counterfactual-based formulation of deontic necessity that implements intervention, jointly with the assumption that indicative conditionals facilitate backtracking, offers a principled solution to the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem. I also present empirical evidence in favor of an interventionist approach to counterfactuals as opposed to similarity-based theories, at least in the domain of deontic reasoning. EARLY ACCESS