Conditional Obligation and Detachment

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (1):11 - 26 (1986)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Suppose that John has a moral obligation to stop smoking given that smoking is dangerous to his health. Suppose further that smoking is dangerous to his health. Does it follow that John has a moral obligation to stop smoking? Although intuition inclines one to answer in the affirmative, recent developments in deontic logic apparently call this inference into question. The issue at hand is whether unconditional obligations are detachable from conditional obligations on the basis of purely factual considerations. I believe that they are not. In the course of arguing for this position I defend a novel restricted rule of detachment which is constructed out of both factual and normative components.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-05-29

Downloads
37 (#375,012)

6 months
2 (#670,035)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?