§ Introduction

My aim in this post is to argue that the ‘ought,’ predicate, interpreted in a global sense, agglomerates. I’ll henceforth refer to this position as agglomeration. The position is as follows.

Agglomeration: If “I ought to do A,” and “I ought to do B,” then “I ought to do A and B,” where A and B are actions, and “A and B,” is a weak conjunctive action.

I use the term ‘weak conjunctive action,’ to mean an action of the form “A and B,” where A and B are actions. For any agent X, the sentence “X did ‘A and B,’” is true at time t when (1) “X did A,” is true at time t and (2) “X did B,” is true at time t. There is a sense in which the action ‘A and B’ is constructed by a very weak form of conjunction since the conjunction of actions A and B does not imply that A and B must be done in a particular order or near each other in space or time. To understand how weak these conditions are, contrast the sense in which I use the word ‘and’ in this paper with the work that ‘and’ does in the common-sense interpretation of the action ‘running and thinking.’ In the common-sense interpretation, ‘and’ implies that the agent runs and thinks simultaneously. However, if we interpret ‘running and thinking,’ as a weak conjunctive action, then it is true on Friday that an agent who ran on Wednesday and thought on Thursday did the action of ‘running and thinking.’

I use the term ‘ought statements’ to refer to statements of the form “X ought to do A.” I distinguish between global and local ought statements. An ought statement is global if and only if the obligation to do A in circumstance C that the ‘ought’ statement points too reflects and incorporates all the relevant moral factors in C. Not all obligations are global. A local obligation to do A in circumstance C is an obligation that is true in virtue of a subset of the morally relevant factors in C. For instance, suppose that I borrowed Alice’s sword and promised to return it. In virtue of my promise, it seems that I ought to return Alice’s sword. However, suppose further that I know with certainty that if I give Alice her sword, she’ll use it to kill Bob. Moreover, if I never return her sword, Alice will instead try to kill Bob by punching him, fail to kill Bob, and be imprisoned such that she poses no further risk to public safety. Considering all these facts, including that fact that I...

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