The Logical Conscience

This paper suggests a way of avoiding two very implausible claims. These are the claim that all our beliefs about how we ought to act are true and the claim that there are two senses of ‘ought’, one subjective and the other objective. We avoid these claims by appeal to a distinction between wide and narrow scope which has application not merely to moral theory but also to the theory of rationality. For the same question arises: is it rational to do what one (perhaps falsely) believes it rational for one to do? The trick is to recognize a structural ambiguity.