Philosophical Perspectives, 23, Ethics, 2009

THE GOOD AND THE RIGHT REVISITED1

Ralph Wedgwood
Merton College, Oxford

0. Introduction

Moral philosophy has long been preoccupied by a supposed dichotomy

between the good and the right.2 This dichotomy has been taken to define
certain allegedly central issues for ethics. How are the good and the right related
to each other? For example, is one of the two (as many philosophers have put it)
prior to the other? If so, is the good prior to the right, or is the right prior to
the good?
The moral philosophers who engaged in these debates were rarely exclusively
concerned with the English words good and right themselves. They usually
supposed that there were many other words in English and in other languages
that could express the same concepts. Thus, many philosophers have assumed that
various evaluative terms, like value and valuable, can express the same range
of concepts as the term good. It is also widely assumed that there are various
normative terms that can express the same concepts as the term right
including the deontic terms ought and should, and perhaps even terms like
duty and obligation as well. In general, many philosophers supposed that
there are two fundamental kinds of ethical concepts evaluative concepts (such
as the concepts expressed by terms like good) and normative concepts (such as
the concepts expressed by terms like ought, right, wrong, and so on). Thus,
the debate about the relations between the good and the right can be read as
fundamentally concerned with the relationship between evaluative and normative
concepts.
As many philosophers have emphasized, however, there are many ways in
which things can be good: bonum est multiplex, as Thomas Aquinas memorably
said.3 In consequence, the term good can be used in many ways, to express many
different concepts in different contexts. So the question arises: Which of these
many different ways of being good are in question in these debates about the
good and the right? Is it all ways of being good that are in question here? Or is
it is only some of them and if so, which?
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Although it has been less extensively emphasized by philosophers, there

is also ample linguistic evidence that normative terms like right, ought and
should can be used in many ways as well. So another question that we also need
to ask about these philosophical debates concerns which of the many concepts
that can be expressed by terms like right, ought and should are in question
here.
Moreover, there are also different ways in which we might understand the
talk of priority that features in these debates. In particular, there are at least
two kinds of priority that we should consider here. First, there is what we
could call conceptual priority. If the good is conceptually prior to the right, then
our grasp of the concept right depends on our grasp of the concept good (and
not vice versa). Secondly, there is what we could call explanatory priority. If the
good is explanatorily prior to the right, then the facts about what is right are
explained by the facts about what is good (and not vice versa). For all that we
are in a position to say here, in advance of any further investigation, it might
turn out that the good is prior to the right in one of these ways but not in
the other for example, the good might turn out to be explanatorily but not
conceptually prior to the right. So we shall have to consider both of these two
senses of priority in what follows.
In some of my earlier work, I have defended a semantic account of the
meaning of normative terms like ought and should.4 As I shall argue here,
this account has some implications for the interpretation of these debates about
the good and the right: in particular, it implies that many of the philosophers
who took part in these debates have been mistaken about some of the essential
features of the concepts that are in question. The purpose of this paper is to
explain these implications of my semantic account for these debates about the
good and the right.
The plan of the paper is as follows. In Section 1 of the paper, I shall
rehearse some of the considerations that support the thesis that terms like good
are multivocal and capable of expressing many different concepts in different
contexts. In Section 2, I shall do something similar for terms like ought and
should that is, I shall try to show that ought and should are also multivocal
and capable of expressing many different concepts in different contexts. In Section
3, I shall briefly summarize my semantic account of the nature of these concepts.
Then, in Section 4, I shall outline my view of the relations between the evaluative
concepts and the normative concepts.
As I shall try to explain, normative concepts and evaluative concepts are
indeed very closely related to each other, but not in a way that makes it
plausible that there is any general sort of priority between the evaluative and
the normative. There may well be certain sorts of priority within the evaluative
domain, or within the normative domain. But it will not be true in general either
that the evaluative is prior to the normative, or that the normative is prior to the
evaluative. In this way, I shall argue for a no priority view of the relationship
between normative and evaluative concepts.
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After arguing that this is how evaluative and normative concepts are related
to each other, I shall turn in the last section to comment on the significance
of so-called fitting attitude accounts of values (which is one element of the
so-called buck-passing account of values).5 Here too I shall argue that many
recent philosophers have misunderstood the relationships that obtain between
the various different concepts that can be expressed by the relevant terms.

1. The varieties of goodness

Several philosophers have rightly emphasized that there are many different
ways in which things can appropriately be called good. For example, this point
has been emphasized recently by Judith Thomson (1997), who herself draws
heavily on the classic work of von Wright (1963).
In their inventories of the many different ways of being good, Thomson and
von Wright draw a number of illuminating distinctions. However, it also seems
to me that they have omitted some important ways of being good from their list.
In what follows I shall try to present a list that is slightly more complete than
theirs.
So, to start our classification, we should note that one of the clearest ways
in which a thing can be good are the ways in which it can be good for someone
or something, in the sense of being beneficial for someone or something that can
be benefited. Thus, something might be good for you, or good for me, or good
for Oxford University, or good for the flowers in your garden, or good for the
citys cockroach population. Just to give it a label, this sort of goodness could
be called prudential goodness.
A second way in which a thing can be good is the way in which it can
be good for some end or purpose, in the sense of being useful for that end or
purpose. A third way of being good is to be good at some activity in the sense
of being technically skilled or efficient at that activity. These two ways of being
good could be called instrumental goodness and technical goodness respectively.
It seems to me that Thomson is probably right to claim that the attributive
use of the term good as when we say something of the form x is a good
F, where F is a sortal term like knife or dentist usually conveys that the
object in question is good in either this second or third way that is, either
instrumentally or technically good.6
All of these three kinds of goodness are, as I shall call them, forms of relative
goodness. When things are said to be good in any of these three ways, the term
good is being either explicitly or implicitly relativized in some way. We say that
something is good for me, that something is good for making cheesecake with, or
that someone is good at dancing. It seems to me that, in addition to these three
sorts of relative goodness, we should also recognize various kinds of absolute
goodness. For example, all the various ways of being admirable are also ways of
being good; and in my judgment, when we say that things are good in these ways,
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our use of the term good is not relativized in the same way as the uses that
ascribe the first three ways of being good that we have considered. Moreover,
if (as many philosophers believe) there are intrinsically valuable states of affairs,
such states of affairs would also be absolutely good in a broadly similar way.
Finally, there is another way of using the term good (and its comparative
and superlative better and best) that has often not received adequate attention
from philosophers. When considering a deliberative question about what to do,
one might put the question by asking: What is the best thing for me to do now?
One might answer this question by saying something of the form The best thing
for me to do now is to do A. Or one might say At all events, I had better not
do B. Any native speaker of English who attends carefully to the language can
easily verify that these are perfectly ordinary uses of the terms good, better,
and best.
These statements seem to express a certain kind of all-things-considered
practical judgment. In saying that something is the best thing for you to do all
things considered, we are not saying that it is morally the best thing for you to
do, or that it is prudentially best for you out of all the things that you might
do, or that it is best for some implicitly assumed goal or purpose; nor are we
saying that it is the most admirable thing that you could do, or that the state of
affairs of your doing it is intrinsically the most valuable. We are simply saying
that, taking all relevant considerations in account (which might include both
moral and prudential considerations among others), the action in question is the
best thing for you to do at the relevant time. Saying this is equivalent to saying
that the action in question is what you have most reason (all things considered)
to do.
A term that I have sometimes used to express this last sort of goodness is
choiceworthiness. I have used this term because I believe that the degree to which
an option is (all things considered) a good thing for you to do now is the same
as the degree to which it is appropriate or fitting for you to choose to perform
that option now. (I shall return to the significance of this point in discussing the
fitting attitude analysis of evaluative concepts in the last section.)
Choiceworthiness is not a kind of absolute goodness. On the contrary, it
is both agent-relative and time-relative: the question of what is choiceworthy
is always a question about what is choiceworthy for such-and-such an agent at
such-and-such a time. Indeed, it appears that choiceworthiness only generates
comparisons within sets of options that are available to a single agent at a
single time: it is not clear that it really makes any sense to ask, Which is
more choiceworthy Caesars crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC, or my watching
television on the night of 31 July 2009?
So there is compelling linguistic evidence that the term good is used in all
of these different ways. This is not to say that there is evidence that the list that
I have just given of the ways in which things can be correctly called good is
complete. On the contrary, there is overwhelmingly likely that the list that I have
given is incomplete, and that there are other ways of being good as well. But it
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 503

is enough for our purposes that there are at least the varieties of goodness that
I have listed here.

2. The varieties of rightness

It seems to me that there is also considerable linguistic evidence that the

term ought resembles the term good, and similarly expresses many different
concepts in different contexts. One philosopher who appears to have been aware
of this point was G. E. M. Anscombe (1964, 63):

In thinking of the word for should, ought etc. ( ) as it occurs in Aristotle, we

should think of it as it occurs in ordinary language (e.g. as it has just occurred
in this sentence) and not just as it occurs in the examples of moral discourse
given by moral philosophers. That athletes should keep in training, pregnant
women watch their weight, film stars their publicity, . . . that meals ought to
be punctual, that we should (not) see the methods of Linguistic Analysis in
Aristotles philosophy; any fair selection of examples, if we care to summon
them up, should convince us that should is a rather light word with unlimited
contexts of application . . .

Anscombe goes too far, I think, in suggesting that ought and should are
invariably light words, and that they have unlimited contexts of application.
But I believe that she is quite right that any fair selection of examples should
convince us that these terms have a considerable degree of context-sensitivity.
One way to see this is to look at the considerations that seem to show that
different sorts of ought entail different sorts of can. Even without solving
the question of exactly what sort of can is entailed by each sort of ought,
it seems overwhelmingly plausible that different sorts of ought entail different
sorts of can. In some cases, it is clear to everyone who understands a statement
involving ought that there is a particular agent and a particular time such that the
statement is true if and only if that agent is able at that time to realize whatever
according to the statement in question ought to be the case. (The particular
agent in question may be either a collective agent or an individual agent.) Thus
suppose that at some university, the Dean remarks to the Chair of the Philosophy
Department, which is aiming to appoint a new Professor of Moral Philosophy:

(1) We ought to hire that man Bernard Williams.

This statement can clearly be refuted by pointing out that it is impossible to hire
Bernard Williams, since (sadly) he is now dead. So, for this statement (1) to be
true, it must be possible for the particular university that is referred to here by
we, at the time of utterance, to hire Bernard Williams. Otherwise, the sentence
is false.
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On the other hand, consider Wordsworths lines from his poem England
1802:

(2) Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee . . .

For this statement (2) to be true, it does not seem to be required that any agent
has the ability to ensure that Milton is alive in 1802. (Indeed, the most that this
statement clearly entails is that it is logically possible for Milton to be alive in
1802.) As I interpret it, Wordsworths point is just that in the logically possible
states of affairs that are in the salient way most desirable, Milton would be
alive in 1802.
I shall call these two sorts of ought the practical ought (which some
philosophers have called the ought of deliberation, or the ought of advice),
and the ought of general desirability, respectively. One of the main differences
between these two sorts of ought is this. The practical ought is at least implicitly
indexed to an agent and a time. For example, in the reading of (1) on which
it involves the practical ought, this occurrence of ought is indexed to the
collective agent that is being referred to by we and to some time (presumably,
the time of utterance); for this reading of (1) to be true, that collective agent must
be able to hire Bernard Williams at that time. The ought of general desirability,
on the other hand, is not indexed to any particular agent and time in this way. This
is why the reading of (2) on which it involves the should of general desirability
can be true even if there is absolutely no one who is able to ensure that Milton is
alive in 1802. Since these two sorts of ought have different logical implications,
they must also differ in their reference or semantic value. I shall use the term
concept in such a way that the concept that a term expresses determines its
semantic value. So these two sorts of ought must express different concepts. In
this way then, the term ought is context-sensitive: it expresses different concepts
in different contexts.
Besides the practical ought and the ought of general desirability, there
seem to be other kinds of ought as well. For example, on some occasions,
ought seems to be relative to a particular goal or purpose. Thus, to take an
example from some unpublished work by Bernard Williams (2002), one might
say, pointing to someone who is fiddling with a safe:

(3) He ought to use a Phillips screwdriver to open that safe

Intuitively, this statement is true just in case using a Phillips screwdriver is

necessary for opening the safe in the best available way. The practical ought
and the ought of general desirability seem not to be in the same way relativized
to any particular goal or purpose. When one makes a statement of the form
x ought to do A, using either the practical ought or the ought of general
desirability, one is in a way unconditionally endorsing xs doing A whereas
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 505

if this statement involves the purpose-relative ought, one is only endorsing xs

doing A as a way to achieve the relevant end (which might be an end that one in
fact strongly disapproves of).
Finally, it seems plausible to me that in addition to the unconditional ought,
there is also a conditional ought. Suppose that an adviser says to an inveterate
drug addict:

(4) You ought to stop shooting up heroin, of course; but if you dont stop,
you ought at least to shoot up with clean needles.

Here the sentence If you dont stop shooting up heroin, you ought to shoot up
with clean needless involves the conditional ought. As deontic logicians such
as Lennart Aqvist (1967 and 1984) have persuasively argued, we cannot plausibly
interpret these sentences simply by means of an unconditional ought operator
and an ordinary material conditional. On the one hand, if we put the ought in
the consequent of the conditional (so that the ought has narrow scope), the result
is a sentence that is intuitively false: even if you do not stop taking heroin, it is
still true that you ought not to shoot up at all (even with clean needles). On the
other hand, if we interpret the sentence as consisting of a material conditional
inside the scope of the ought (so that the ought has wide scope), then the result
is that what is said is that you ought to do one of the following two things
either (i) stopping taking heroin, or (ii) shooting up with clean needles. But that
is clearly much weaker than what the speaker presumably intends to convey with
this sentence, as we can see from the fact that it is equally true to say that you
ought to do one of the following two things either (i) stopping taking heroin,
or (ii) killing yourself immediately. For these reasons, it seems more plausible to
take these sentences as involving a distinctive conditional ought.
In the face of all this evidence, then, it seems to me overwhelmingly plausible
that the term ought is a systematically context-sensitive term, just like good.
Recently, many philosophers seem to have started to assume that the most
fundamental normative concept might not be any of the concepts that can be
expressed by ought or should, but rather the notion of a reason instead. In
the remainder of this section, I shall argue that the terminology of reasons is
every bit as context-sensitive as ought and good.
Philosophers have long recognized that explanatory reasons and motivating
reasons must be distinguished from normative reasons. Examples of purely
explanatory reasons include such reasons as the reason why the solution turned
blue or the reason why the bridge collapsed. A purely explanatory reason for a
fact F is simply a fact that can be cited as the explanans in correct explanation
of F. Examples of motivating reasons include such reasons as Martins reason
for flying to Ireland, Inspector Malletts reason for believing that the Professor
was the murderer, and the reason for which Helen decided to go to Troy.
Motivating reasons seem to be the facts that play an explanatory role in a
certain sort of explanation of an agents attitudes or intentional behaviour. On
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this understanding of motivating reasons, there cannot be a motivating reason in

the absence of the intentional behaviour or attitude that the motivating reason
motivates. For example, there cannot be any such thing as Martins reason for
flying to Ireland unless Martin actually did fly to Ireland.
By contrast, there can be a normative (or justifying) reason that counts in
favour of an agents taking a certain course of action, or in favour of an agents
having a certain attitude, even if the agent never does take that course of action
or have that attitude. For example, it can be true that there is a (normative)
reason for Martin to fly to Ireland, even if Martin never in fact flies to Ireland.
Our concern here is not with purely explanatory reasons or motivating
reasons, but with normative reasons. In recent years, different philosophers have
developed several different theories about normative reasons for action. First,
consider Kieran Setiyas (2007, 12) recent account of reasons:

The fact that p is a reason for x to just in case x has a collection of psychological
states, C, such that the disposition to be moved to by C-and-the-belief-that-p
is a good disposition of practical thought, and C contains no false beliefs.

Here, Setiya talks about good practical thought. This is obviously close to
what some other philosophers have meant by good practical reasoning. So
the general idea here is that there is a close connection between reasons and
reasoning. Reasons are the appropriate starting points for good reasoning. It is
natural to take this as implying that the fact that p is a reason for x to if and
only if the belief that p is an appropriate starting point for a possible process
of good reasoning that can lead from xs current state of mind to xs being
motivated to . I shall label this conception of reasons reasons as the starting
points of good reasoning.
Another quite different conception of normative reasons is found in John
Broomes (2004) theory that a reason for x to is a fact that plays a certain sort
of role in what Broome calls a weighing explanation of whether or not x ought
to . As he puts it, a pro tanto reason for x to is a fact that plays the for-
role in a correct explanation of whether or not x ought to . I shall label this
conception of reasons reasons as normative explanations.
Both of these two accounts of reasons sound extremely plausible. But it also
seems clear that if they involve the very same concept of a reason, they cannot
both be true. The fact that you ought to , and the fact that the evidence seems
to indicate that you ought to , are facts that can serve as the starting points
of a process of good reasoning that could lead you to be motivated to . So,
according to Setiyas account of reasons as starting points for good reasoning,
these facts count as reasons to . But it is surely doubtful whether either of these
facts can play the for- role in an explanation of why you ought to . So,
according to Broomes conception of reasons as normative explanations, these
facts do not count as reasons to .
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 507

Since both of these two conceptions of reasons seem so plausible, we should

conclude that these two conceptions are both true but are concerned with
different kinds of reasons. Moreover, given that (as I have argued) the terms good
and ought are both systematically multivocal and context-sensitive, it also seems
likely that there are many different ways in which a process of reasoning can count
as good reasoning, and many different ways in which it can be true that you
ought to . So each of these two conceptions of reasons in fact has many
different versions, depending on which concept is expressed by the term good
reasoning or by ought. Again, the most natural assumption, it seems to me,
is that the term reason in English can be used to refer to any of the kinds of
reasons that are defined by any of these different versions of these conceptions. It
seems then that there is a plethora of different kinds of normative reasons, and a
corresponding plethora of ways in which the term reason can be understood.

3. The semantics of ought and good

In this section, I shall give a quick sketch of the kind of semantic account
that I favour of the concepts that can be expressed by terms like ought and
should; then I shall give an even quicker sketch of the kind of account that I
favour of the concepts that can be expressed by good. For each of these concepts,
this sort of account would first identify the conceptual role of the concept, and
then it would explain how that conceptual role determines the semantic value
of the concept that is, the contribution that the concept makes to the truth
conditions of thoughts in which it appears.7
This sort of account is based on a certain assumption about the logical form
of the thoughts that can be expressed by using the term ought. Specifically,
according to this sort of account, every kind of ought or should expresses a
concept that attaches to a proposition. So every thought in which such a concept
has largest scope has the form It ought i to be that p. (The point of the subscript
is to indicate which sort of ought this is. As we have seen, the practical ought
is always at least implicitly indexed to the situation of a particular agent at
a particular time; so in the case of the practical ought, the subscript must
indicate not just that this is the practical ought but also which agent and time
it is indexed to.)
So this account of ought is based on the assumption that the concept
expressed by ought attaches to a proposition. I shall also assume that within
the scope of this concept, the proposition stands for a state of affairs. (We could
regard a state of affairs either as a set of possible worlds, or as a sui generis
entity composed out of properties, individuals, and relations, and the like; the
difference will not matter for our present purposes.) Thus, for example, to say
that I ought to buy a new pair of shoes is to say that one of the things that ought
(in the relevant sense) to be the case is the state of affairs of my buying a new
pair of shoes at the relevant time.
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According to this account, there is a fundamental similarity between all the

concepts that can be expressed by ought. In particular, they all have a similar
sort of conceptual role. Broadly speaking, each of these roles is in a sense a
regulative role that the concept plays in some type of reasoning: in various
ways, normative judgments (that is, judgments involving a concept that can be
expressed by ought) articulate or keep track of the commitments that govern
our reasoning.
So, for example, to put it roughly, the essential conceptual role of the
practical ought (when it is indexed to the situation of a particular thinker at
a particular time) is that a first-person judgment involving this kind of ought,
of the form I ought to , commits the thinker to planning on -ing at that
time. Slightly more precisely, we should distinguish between two ways in which
normative concepts can play a regulative role in reasoning. First, in the case
of some normative concepts, the proposition embedded inside the ought is a
proposition about the thinkers attitudes, so that the normative judgment commits
the thinker to directly realizing that embedded proposition. Secondly, in the case
of other normative concepts, the embedded proposition concerns the external
world, so that the normative judgment commits the thinker to having some
attitude towards that proposition (such as making that proposition part of his or
her plans about what to do).8
However, the main way in which the different concepts that can be expressed
by ought differ from each other is in virtue of the fact that their essential
conceptual role is a regulative role within a different kind of reasoning. Thus
(1) the essential conceptual role of the practical ought is a regulative role in
practical reasoning the sort of reasoning that involves forming and revising
ones plans about how to act. (2) The essential conceptual role of the ought
of general desirability is a regulative role in a kind of reasoning that involves
forming a kind of wish about what will be the case (where such wishes are more
contemplative and less practical attitudes than plans or intentions about how
to act). (3) The essential conceptual role of the purpose-relative ought is a
regulative role within a kind of purpose-relative practical reasoning: this sort of
reasoning involves thinking about how to achieve some end (such as opening
a certain safe), while completely bracketing the question of whether or not to
pursue this end at all; the conclusion of such purpose-relative reasoning is a
conditional intention (roughly, a contingency plan) to use certain means in order
to achieve the end if one ever sets out to achieve the end at all. (4) The
essential conceptual role of the conditional ought is a kind of suppositional
practical reasoning where one reasons about what to do under a certain
supposition (such as the supposition that one will not stop shooting up heroin).
In addition to assigning each of the concepts that can be expressed by ought
a distinctive conceptual role, the sort of semantic account that I have developed
also aims to explain the semantic value of these concepts. In the full version of
this account, the semantic value of a concept is in a certain sense explained by
its essential conceptual role: specifically, the concepts semantic value must make
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 509

the kind of reasoning that features in the concepts essential conceptual role in a
sense a correct or valid form of reasoning. This point, I have argued, leads to a
version of the fitting attitude account of the semantic value of these concepts.
For example, the semantic value of the practical ought can be explained in
terms of the notion of plan that is correct (or fitting). Roughly, if It ought i to
be that p involves the practical ought, indexed to the situation of a particular
agent x at a time t, then it is true if and only if it is correct for x to make the
proposition p part of his plans about what to do at t, and incorrect for x to make
the negation of p part of his plans about what to do at t.
Given some plausible assumptions about the logical features of the relevant
notion of a correct attitude, this account of the semantic value of ought can
also be put in terms of possible worlds.9 First, for every thought of the form
It ought i to be that p, there is some background set of circumstances that is
held fixed, with the result that it is only possible worlds that are compatible with
this set of circumstances that count as the possible worlds that are relevant to
the truth conditions of the thought. Secondly, for every ought-concept, there is
a special selection function, which picks out what I shall call the favoured subset
of this set of relevant possible worlds. We can now specify the semantic value of
the concept as follows: the thought It ought i to be that p is true if and only the
embedded proposition p is true at all possible worlds in this favoured subset.10
The semantic value of the conditional ought can be specified as follows: If q,
it ought i to be that p is true if and only if p is true at all worlds in the relevant
favoured subset of the relevant q-worlds.
For example, if the relevant ought i is the practical ought, indexed to the
situation of an agent x and time t, then the relevant set of possible worlds will be
the possible worlds that are practically available to x at time t that is, the
worlds that are compatible with all the background circumstances that the agent
x lacks the power to change at time t. The favoured subset of these worlds picked
out by the relevant selection function is intuitively the set of worlds where xs
conduct is entirely as it ought to be at t (that is, where x does everything that x
has most reason to do at t). It ought i to be that p is true if and only p is true
at all worlds in this favoured subset of the set of worlds that are compatible with
the relevant background circumstances.
If this sort of account of ought is plausible, then it seems to me that a
broadly parallel account of terms like good and better will also be plausible.
To simplify our discussion of good, I shall just focus on two ways of being
good namely, the ways that in Section 1 above I called choiceworthiness
and absolute goodness. I shall also assume that the only things that can be
good in either of these two ways are states of affairs.11 At least with these ways
of being good, what is good seems to be definable in terms of what is better.
The concept of what is better generates a ranking (which may be only a partial
ranking) of the relevant states of affairs; and in any context when we use the
word good, we have some standard or paradigm in mind, such that a state of
affairs counts as good in that context if and only if it comes at least as high
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up in the relevant ranking as that standard or paradigm.12 So for our purposes,

we can simply ignore the non-comparative concepts that can be expressed by
good, and focus purely on the comparative concepts that can be expressed by
better instead.
According to my account, the essential conceptual role of each of the various
concepts that can be expressed by better consists, roughly, in the fact that the
judgment that one state of affairs S 1 is better than a second state of affairs
S 2 commits the thinker to having a corresponding kind of preference for S 1
over S 2 . The main way in which the different concepts that can be expressed
by better differ from each other is that they are connected to different kinds
of preference. The kind of preference for S 1 over S 2 that one is committed to
by the first-person judgment S 1 is more choiceworthy for me now than S 2 is a
kind of conditional choice the attitude of choosing S 1 rather than S 2 , on the
supposition that one chooses either. The kind of preference for S 1 over S 2 that
one is committed to by the judgment that S 1 is more intrinsically valuable than
S 2 is a kind of conditional wish, rather than a conditional choice. This account
of these concepts essential conceptual role naturally leads to a parallel account
of these concepts semantic value, according to which the judgment that S 1 is
better than S 2 is true if and only if the corresponding kind of preference for
S 1 over S 2 is the only correct (or fitting) preference to have between these two
states of affairs.
This sketch of my semantics for the concepts that are expressed by terms
like ought and better will have to suffice for our present purposes. In the next
section, I shall explain what this shows about the relations between ought and
better.

4. The relation between ought and better

In this section, I shall argue that for every concept that can be expressed by
ought there is a corresponding concept that can be expressed by better, such
that the two concepts stand in a particularly intimate relation to each other.
One simple way to make this argument is by focusing on the possible-worlds
semantics that I sketched in the previous section. According to the semantics,
for every judgment of the form It ought i to be that p there is (i) some relevant
domain of possible worlds (typically, the possible worlds that are compatible with
the relevant background circumstances), and (ii) a selection function that selects
what I called the favoured subset of this domain (such that the judgment is true
if and only if the embedded proposition p is true at all worlds in this favoured
subset).
Now it will in fact always be possible to carve up the space of relevant
possible worlds into a partition such that the relevant selection function will
generate a ranking (that is, an at least partial ordering) of the members of this
partition. Of course, this might just be the trivial ranking that only orders
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 511

two items the favoured subset of the relevant possible worlds, and its
complement, the other, non-favoured subset. In fact, however, there is a reason
for thinking that the selection function will typically generate a ranking with
much more structure than this. The reason has to do with the conditional ought
that I discussed in the previous section. First start with the truths involving
the unconditional ought, such as You ought to do A. Then take the series
of truths involving conditional ought If you dont do A, you ought to do B,
If you dont do either A or B, you ought to do C, and so on. These truths
involving the conditional ought generate a ranking of states of affairs (or sets
of possible worlds): the top-ranked state of affairs is the state of affairs of your
doing A; the second-ranked state of affairs is the state of affairs of your doing
B; the third-ranked state of affairs is the state of affairs of your doing C; and so
on.13
Now, we have already seen that the term better is highly context-sensitive,
and can express any kind of ranking that corresponds to some kind of preference.
But it seems clear that the ranking that is generated by these truths involving
the conditional ought does correspond to some kind of preference. With the
practical ought, for example, the ranking corresponds to a kind of conditional
choice, and so seems to be the same as the ranking that is generated by the
comparative concept of relative choiceworthiness. With the ought of general
desirability, the ranking corresponds to a kind of conditional wish, and so seems
to be the same as the ranking that is generated by some concept of relative
intrinsic value.
So it seems that the ranking generated by these truths involving the
conditional ought can always be expressed by the term better. In our example,
the state of affairs (or set of possible worlds) of your doing A is in some way
better than the state of affairs of your doing B, which is in turn better than
the state of affairs of your doing C. This means that the truth conditions of
judgments involving ought can also be specified using terms like better. I shall
just give the specification for the practical ought (the specification for each of
the other kinds of ought is exactly parallel): if the practical ought i is indexed
to the situation of a particular agent x and time t, then It ought i to be that p
is true if and only p is a necessary consequence of every state of affairs that is
optimal or maximally choiceworthy for x at t.
We can sum up the relations between the concepts expressed by good and
by ought in the following way. On the one hand, the concepts expressed by
the terms good and ought have a clear formal difference. First, the concepts
expressed by good have a comparative, better, which generates a ranking of
the items to which the concept applies, whereas neither ought nor should
has any corresponding comparative. Secondly, ought and should are closed
under logical consequence (so if It ought to be that p is true, and q is a logical
consequence of p, then It ought to be that q is also true), whereas best does
not have this feature (even if the state of affairs of ps being the case is the best
state of affairs, and q is a logical consequence of p, it certainly does not follow
that the state of affairs of qs being the case is also the best state of affairs).
512 / Ralph Wedgwood

On the other hand, there is also an extremely intimate connection between

ought and best. Specifically, for every kind of ought there is a corresponding
kind of best, such that what ought to be (in this sense of ought) is everything
that is necessarily entailed by the best state of affairs (in the corresponding sense
of best).
Many philosophers will view these claims with intense scepticism. In
particular, some philosophers will argue that this view of the semantics of
ought is committed to a controversial consequentialist moral theory. But this
would be a misinterpretation of what I am claiming. My claim does not imply a
consequentialist theory of what ought to be. This is because relevant kind of
better may be an agent- and time-relative notion.
For example, for the practical ought, the relevant ranking of states of affairs
is a ranking in terms of relative choiceworthiness. As I have already explained, a
state of affairs cannot be choiceworthy simpliciter: it can only be choiceworthy
for a given agent, at a given time. Since choiceworthiness is an agent- and time-
relative notion, my claims about the connection between the practical ought
and choiceworthiness does not lead to a consequentialist account of the practical
ought.14
If the two concepts are related in this way, some philosophers might wonder
which of the two is conceptually prior to the other. On the one hand, we might
define what ought to be (in the relevant sense) as what is necessary for what is
best (in the corresponding sense). Or, alternatively, we might define what it is
for one state of affairs S 1 to be better than an alternative state of affairs S 2 by
means of the conditional ought, in the following way: S 1 is better than S 2 just
in case, if none of the states of affairs that are alternatives to both S 1 and S 2
obtains, then S 1 ought to obtain rather than S 2 . Some philosophers might claim
that the correctness of the first definition shows that the good is conceptually
prior to the right, whereas other philosophers might claim that the correctness
of second definition shows that the right is conceptually prior to the good.
As I shall argue here, the sort of conceptual role semantics that I have
developed implies that both of these claims of conceptual priority are false. In
every one of these pairs of concepts consisting of one concept that can be
expressed by ought and the corresponding concept that can be expressed by
good neither concept is conceptually prior to the other: the two concepts are
conceptually on a par.
The reason for this is that in my conceptual role semantics, each of these
two concepts has a broadly analogous or parallel conceptual role where each
conceptual role consists in a different kind of regulative role that the relevant
concept can play in reasoning. So the semantic theory does not say that we possess
any of these concepts by means of having implicit knowledge of any definition
of the concept. On the contrary, we possess the concept by having a disposition
to use it in accord with its essential conceptual role. Each of these concepts has
a broadly similar kind of conceptual role, which determines a semantic value of
the same general kind, in essentially the same way.
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 513

Admittedly, any thinker who possesses one of these concepts will presumably
be in a position to possess the other concept as well. But the essential conceptual
role of each concept does not in itself essentially involve the other concept. For
example, the conceptual role of the practical ought consists in the way in which
certain judgments involving this kind of ought commit the thinker to certain
corresponding plans or intentions; this conceptual role does not itself the concept
of what is good or choiceworthy. For this reason, a thought-process can be
an instance of this conceptual role even if it contains no evaluative or normative
concepts of any kind except for the practical ought itself. A precisely analogous
claim would be true of the concept of what is better or more choiceworthy.
In this sense, neither concept is constitutively dependent on the other: neither
concept is such that possessing the concept itself essentially involves possessing
the other concept.
Of course, if one does possess both of these concepts, then it is possible,
purely a priori, purely by means of reflecting on the nature of the two concepts,
to come to appreciate that the two concepts are interdefinable; that is, one can
come to appreciate that something ought to be (in the relevant sense) if and
only if is necessarily entailed by what is best (in the corresponding sense). But
to appreciate the truth of this biconditional one needs to reflect equally on ones
grasp of both concepts. So this point does not cast doubt on the point that neither
claim of conceptual priority is correct. Neither the evaluative notion best nor
the normative notion ought is conceptually prior to the other.
A better model for thinking of the relationship between normative concepts
and evaluative concepts is by comparing it to the generally accepted view of the
relation between the concepts of possibility and the concepts of necessity. There
are many sorts of possibility (and correspondingly many concepts that can be
expressed by words like can); and there are equally many sorts of necessity (and
correspondingly many concepts that can be expressed by words like must). But
for every one of these possibility-concepts, there is a corresponding necessity-
concept (and conversely, for every necessity-concept there is a corresponding
possibility-concept) such that these two corresponding modal concepts are
interdefinable. It would be implausible to claim that either the possible or
the necessary is prior to the other. On the contrary, it seems clear that
each pair consisting of a possibility-concept and the corresponding necessity-
concept are simply correlative concepts of fundamentally the same kind, which
are conceptually on a par with each other.
It is roughly the same sort of relationship that holds between the concepts
that are expressed by each kind of ought and by the corresponding sort of
best. Although the concepts differ in the formal way that I have described, they
are in a way too closely akin for any claim of conceptual priority to be plausible.
If the notion of what ought to be and the notion of what is best are
interdefinable in this way, then this seems to support the thesis that the fact that
x ought to is simply the very same fact as the fact that xs -ing is necessarily
entailed by the most choiceworthy state of affairs available to x (at the relevant
514 / Ralph Wedgwood

time). Now if this is indeed just one and the same fact, this is relevant to the
question of whether either the right or the good has explanatory priority to
the other.
It is plausible that the fact that the jug contains water is the very same fact
as the fact that it contains H 2 O. But it also seems that we can say that the jug
contains water because it contains H 2 O. In some sense, then, one specification
of a fact can appear as an explanation of another specification of the very
same fact. However, this only seems possible if the specification that does
the explaining somehow reveals the essential constituents of the fact in more
metaphysically fundamental terms than the specification that gets explained.
If we identify a substance as H 2 O, we are identifying it in terms of its
fundamental constituents namely, molecules consisting of two hydrogen atoms
and one oxygen atom whereas if we identify it as simply as water, its essential
constituents are not revealed.
However, it seems to me that although we can specify the same fact both as
the fact that (in the practical sense) x ought to and as the fact that xs -ing
is necessarily entailed by the state of affairs that is best or most choiceworthy
(for the relevant agent at the relevant time), neither specification of this fact can
be regarded as revealing the facts essential constituents in more metaphysically
fundamental terms than the other. So I do not think we can plausibly say that
either specification of the fact really explains the other. For this reason, I also
think that it is not plausible to claim that either specification of this fact is
explanatorily prior to the other. Thus, if we are using a pair of concepts consisting
of an ought-concept and the corresponding best-concept, it also seems that
neither what ought to be nor what is best has any explanatory priority either.
In short, it seems that there is neither conceptual nor explanatory priority here.
So, given any such pair of corresponding concepts, there is no priority of
any kind in either direction: neither the ought-concept nor the better-concept
is either conceptually or explanatorily prior to the other. It follows that there is
also no general priority of all the concepts that can be expressed by one of these
terms over all of the concepts that can be expressed by the other.
It must be conceded that the argument that I have just given only applies to
the kinds of better that express a concept that corresponds to the concept that
is expressed by some kind of ought. The argument does not show that there
cannot be other kinds of good or better as well: First, there could for example
be kinds of better that do not apply to states of affairs at all. Secondly, even
if a kind of better does apply to states of affairs, it might be that in English,
we never use the term ought to pick out the states of affairs that are necessary
consequences of what is best in that way. (For example, the notion of what is
prudentially good, or good for a person, does not obviously correspond to any
kind of ought that is in use in ordinary English.) So in this way, the scope of
my argument is limited. I have not argued that for every kind of better there
is an intimately related corresponding kind of ought; I have argued only that
for every kind of ought there is an intimately related corresponding kind of
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 515

better. Still, given how many kinds of ought there are, this is still a significant
result.
It should also be conceded that my argument does not imply that there are
no true priority claims that can be made anywhere in moral philosophy. Some
kinds of normative-or-evaluative concepts may conceivably be explanatorily prior
to other such concepts. For example, suppose that an agent-neutral form of
consequentialism is correct. Then certain agent-neutral normative-or-evaluative
concepts (such as the kind of better that expresses intrinsic value, and the
corresponding kind of ought, which in Section 2 I called the ought of general
desirability) would be explanatorily prior to certain agent-relative normative-or-
evaluative concepts (such as the practical ought, or the kind of better that
expresses comparative choiceworthiness).
However, although there may be some true general priority claims of this
kind, it is utterly misleading to articulate the question of whether this sort of
priority holds as the question of whether or not the good is prior to the right.
It would be more revealing to put the question as being about whether one kind
of ought (say, the ought of general desirability) is prior to another kind of
ought (say, the practical ought) or as being about whether one kind of
good (say, the good of intrinsic value) is prior to another different kind of
good (say, the good of choiceworthiness). It is not helpful to formulate these
questions as concerning the relative priority of the good and the right.

5. Fitting attitude equivalences

There is a specific train of thought that has led some philosophers to think
that there is at least one normative concept that is prior to all evaluative concepts.
This train of thought focuses on what I shall call fitting attitude equivalences
(or FA equivalences, for short). In this final section, I shall explain what my
approach implies about the significance of these FA equivalences.
Quite a number of evaluative terms seem to contain some implicit reference
to a type of attitude. For example, the term admirable seems to contain an
implicit reference to the attitude of admiring; the term desirable seems to
contain an implicit reference to the attitude of desiring; and so on. This fact
has suggested to many philosophers that the following sort of biconditional
might be a fundamental truth:15

For all x, x is admirable if and only if it is fitting or correct to admire x.

A similar approach has been advocated by T. M. Scanlon (1998, 97), who says:

Being good, or valuable, is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond
to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other
properties that constitute such reasons.
516 / Ralph Wedgwood

As the larger context makes clear, by speaking of responding to a valuable

thing in certain ways, Scanlon means both having certain attitudes towards the
thing, and also acting towards the thing in ways that express those attitudes.
Strictly speaking, Scanlons claim is an identity statement (for x to be good =
for x to have properties that constitute reasons to respond to x in such-and-such
ways); but presumably Scanlon would accept the corresponding biconditional (x
is good if and only if x has properties that constitute reasons to respond to x in
such-and-such ways).
I shall call any such biconditional a FA equivalence. There has been
extensive discussion of whether these FA biconditionals are true.16 I shall not
discuss this issue here. Instead, I shall investigate what would follow if they were
true.
Several philosophers have claimed that these FA equivalences can be used
to give an analysis of evaluative terms by means of normative and psychological
terms. Indeed, several philosophers have maintained that approaches like Scan-
lons amount to a normative or deontic definition of the evaluative.17 As I
shall argue, this interpretation of the FA equivalence is fundamentally mistaken.
The simplest way to see this is to reflect that my semantic account involves
a sort of FA equivalence for the practical ought. Roughly, according to my
account, if ought i is the practical ought indexed to the situation of an agent x
and time t, then It ought i to be that p is true if and only if it is correct or fitting
for x to incorporate p into his plans for what to do at t, and incorrect for x to
incorporate any proposition that is incompatible with p into any such plans.18
But the practical ought is surely a paradigm example of a normative concept.
So there are FA equivalences with normative concepts on the left-hand side, just
as much as FA equivalences with evaluative concepts on the left-hand side.
So it is a misunderstanding of the FA equivalences to suppose that they all
postulate a connection between the evaluative and the normative. The point of
these FA equivalences is, rather, to postulate a connection between (i) normative-
or-evaluative concepts that apply in the first instance to mental states and (ii)
normative-or-evaluative concepts that apply to the objects of those mental states.
Even though the FA equivalence is not fundamentally about the relationship
between the normative and the evaluative, essentially the same arguments that
supported the no-priority view of the relationship between normative and
evaluative concepts seem to me to support a similar no-priority view of the
relationship between the normative-or-evaluative concepts that apply to mental
states and the normative-or-evaluative concepts that apply to the objects of those
mental states. Yet again, we possess each of these concepts, not by virtue of
implicitly grasping any definition, but by being disposed to use it in accordance
with its essential conceptual role. So the two concepts are interdefinable; but
neither is conceptually prior to the other.
Again, it seems plausible to me that the fact that x is admirable is even more
obviously the same fact as the fact that it is correct or fitting to admire x, but,
again, neither specification of this fact reveals the essential constituents of the
 The Good and the Right Revisited / 517

fact in metaphysically more fundamental terms than the other. So I do not think
that there can be any explanatory priority here either. The FA equivalence does
not support any priority claims of this kind. On the contrary, here too a no
priority thesis seems correct.
In conclusion, once we achieve a better understanding of the working of
ethical language, we see that when the terms good and ought are interpreted
strictly and literally, the no priority thesis is clearly correct. There are some
good questions in moral philosophy about the explanatory priority of certain
concepts in relation to other concepts, but they are not well understood as
questions about the relative priority of the good and the right.

Notes

1. Most of the work on this paper was carried out while I was a Visiting Fellow at
the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
in 2008; I thank the IAS for their generous support. Earlier drafts of this paper
were presented at a conference (Metaethics Etc.) in Jerusalem in 2008, and at
the annual meeting of the Danish Philosophical Association in Aarhus in 2009.
I am grateful to both audiences for their helpful comments.
2. This preoccupation goes back at least as far as Ross (1930).
3. Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 82, Article 2, Reply 1.
4. See Wedgwood (2007, Chapters 4 and 5).
5. Recent discussion of the buck-passing view of values has been initiated by
Scanlon (1998, Chapter 2).
6. For this reason, I am inclined to agree with Thomsons scepticism about the
theory of Geach (1967).
7. For the most detailed statement of my account of ought, see Wedgwood (2007,
Chapters 4 and 5); for a proposal for an analogous account of better, see
Wedgwood (2001). Ideally, the account should also be supplemented by an
account of the linguistic features of a context that help to determine which
of these many concepts is expressed by the use of the word ought or better
in the context; but unfortunately, I still have not found the time to develop an
account of these linguistic features of context in any detail.
8. In fact, in my account of normative concepts, I also drew another distinction,
between normative judgments of the kind that I have discussed in this paragraph,
which themselves ground a commitment, and normative judgments that instead
articulate a commitment (Wedgwood 2007, 120). In my theory, some of the
concepts that can be expressed by ought are relativized to a certain body
of information. For example, there is an information-relative version of the
practical ought, which is very often relativized to the information that is
available to the relevant agent at the relevant time. The essential conceptual role
of this concept is given by the fact that a judgment involving this information-
relative practical ought, of the form In relation to information i, I ought to
(where -ing is a course of action), articulates the fact that the body of
information in question i commits the thinker to planning on -ing. In this
case, the commitment is grounded in the relevant body of information, not in
518 / Ralph Wedgwood

the judgment itself. However, to simplify the discussion, I shall just ignore these
information-relative ought-concepts completely for the rest of this paper.
9. For my argument for this claim, see Wedgwood (2007, 10916). This possible-
worlds semantics is essentially the same as the semantics that has been pioneered
by Kratzer (2002).
10. So long as this favoured subset is never empty, this guarantees that standard
deontic logic will hold for every kind of ought.
11. For some justification for this focus on states of affairs, see Wedgwood (2009,
34850).
12. For a defence of this point, see Broome (1999).
13. For a more formal argument (drawing heavily on the work of David Lewis) for
the claim that this selection function will generate an ordering, see Wedgwood
(2007, 1268).
14. Other philosophers may complain that positing this fundamental connection
between ought and best implausibly rules out the possibility of a satisficing
view that can more easily accommodate supererogation. In my view, all of these
objections fail, because they do not take account of quite how many different
kinds of ranking can be expressed by terms like better and best. For my
response to these objections, see Wedgwood (2007, 12832).
15. See Brentano (1969, 18), Broad (1930, 283), and Ewing (1947, 142).
16. See especially Rabinowcz and Rnnow-Rasmussen (2004).
17. For a statement of this sort of view, see Tappolet (2004, 395402).
18. For a defence of this sort of fitting attitude equivalence, see Wedgwood (2007,
Section 4.5).

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