Perform Your Best Option

Journal of Philosophy 110 (8):436-459 (2013)
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Abstract

We ought to perform our best option—that is, the option that we have most reason, all things considered, to perform. This is perhaps the most fundamental and least controversial of all normative principles concerning action. Yet, it is not, I believe, well understood. For even setting aside questions about what our options are and what our reasons are, there are prior questions concerning how best to formulate the principle. In this paper, I address these questions. One of the more interesting upshots of this inquiry is that the deontic statuses (e.g., obligatory, optional, and impermissible) of individual actions are determined by the deontic statuses of the larger sets of actions of which they are a part. And, as I show, this has a number of interesting implications both for normative theory and for our understanding of practical reasons.

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Douglas W. Portmore
Arizona State University

Citations of this work

Maximalism and Moral Harmony.Douglas W. Portmore - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):318-341.
Moral Obligations: Actualist, Possibilist, or Hybridist?Travis Timmerman & Yishai Cohen - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4):672-686.
Conceptual Ethics and The Methodology of Normative Inquiry.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 274-303.

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