Yeah that makes sense to me. I still think that one doesn’t need to be conceptually confused (even though this is probably a common source of disagreement) to believe both that (i) one action’s outcome is preferable to the other action’s outcome even though (ii) one ought to perform the latter action. For example, one might think the former outcome is overall preferable because it has much better consequences. But conceptual possibility aside, I agree that this is a weird view to have. At the very least, it seems that all else equal one should prefer the outcome of the action that one takes to be the most choiceworthy. Not sure if it has some plausibility to say that this doesn’t necessarily hold if other things are not equal—such as in the case where the other action has the better consequences.
My main puzzlement there is how you could think that you ought to perform an act that you simultaneously ought to hope that you fail to perform, subsequently (and predictably) regret performing, etc. (I assume here that all-things-considered preferences are not cognitively isolated, but have implications for other attitudes like hope and regret.) It seems like there’s a kind of incoherence in that combination of attitudes, that undermines the normative authority of the original “ought” claim. We should expect genuinely authoritative oughts to be more wholeheartedly endorsable.
Yeah that makes sense to me. I still think that one doesn’t need to be conceptually confused (even though this is probably a common source of disagreement) to believe both that (i) one action’s outcome is preferable to the other action’s outcome even though (ii) one ought to perform the latter action. For example, one might think the former outcome is overall preferable because it has much better consequences. But conceptual possibility aside, I agree that this is a weird view to have. At the very least, it seems that all else equal one should prefer the outcome of the action that one takes to be the most choiceworthy. Not sure if it has some plausibility to say that this doesn’t necessarily hold if other things are not equal—such as in the case where the other action has the better consequences.
My main puzzlement there is how you could think that you ought to perform an act that you simultaneously ought to hope that you fail to perform, subsequently (and predictably) regret performing, etc. (I assume here that all-things-considered preferences are not cognitively isolated, but have implications for other attitudes like hope and regret.) It seems like there’s a kind of incoherence in that combination of attitudes, that undermines the normative authority of the original “ought” claim. We should expect genuinely authoritative oughts to be more wholeheartedly endorsable.
That seems like a strange combination indeed! I will need to think more about this...