Comment on Professor Bergstrom by

JAAKKO HINTIKKA (Academy of Finland and Stanford University)

T h e thrust of Professor Bergstrom’s remarks [l] has little to do with my partial reconstruction of the distinction between prima facie obligations and actual (overall) obligations. What Professor Bergstrom is pointing out is simply a new variety of the so-called paradoxes of implication (consequence). All that he is really saying can be put briefly thus: anything whatsoever is a deontic conse- quence of the assumption that an obligation is violated. Hence the notion of deontic consequence is useless.

I had hoped that those reddest of red herrings of philosophical logic, paradoxes of implication, had been buried for good a long while ago. Professor Bergstrom’s note shows me that they un- fortunately have not been disposed of, in spite of the fact that their atavistic character is at once shown by any satisfactory semantical analysis of the situation. In the case a t hand, the notion of deontic implication is calculated to capture the idea of conse- quence in a ”deontically perfect world”, i.e., to tell us what follows from what on the additional assumption that all obligations are ful- filled. No wonder, therefore, that it does not tell us anything as t o what follows from an assumption which in so many words says that an obligation has been violated. If this is a problem for some- one, it is a self-inflicted one.

In the case at hand, there nevertheless seems to be more to the problem than this. For someone might still think that the behavior of the relation of deontic consequence on countermoral assump- tions, even though unobjectionable in itself, spoils the use of the concept for the purpose of finding out what the deontic conse- quences of someone’s moral principles are, which on my reconstruc- tion amounts to finding out his prima facie obligations.

36 JAAKKO HINTIKKA

If this is Professor Bergstrom’s point, it is predicated on very strange ideas concerning the nature of philosophical enterprise. By the same token, he could almost have objected t o the ordinary notion of logical consequence. I t can be maintained that the beliefs of virtually each of us humans are inconsistent, and it would seem best t o make a clean breast of it and t o admit that one’s own beliefs are thus very likely inconsistent, too. Since from inconsistent premises everything follows, each of us ought, on this view, t o be prepared t o assent t o anything whatsoever, for it is very likely to follow logically from what one already believes.

If the reader finds this argument absurd, he ought t o find Professor Bergstrom’s line of thought equally absurd. In reality, we do not use either the notion of logical consequence or the notion of deontic consequence just t o codify what we are by im- plication committed to believing or what follows deontically from the actual facts. In each case, the cutting edge of the concepts involved is the discriminatory and critical one: t o see what precisely follows from precisely what, not for the purpose of just noting the result but in order t o change our beliefs or t o influence people’s moral behavior, to see (in Maxwell’s phrase) the ”partic- ular go” of our logical and moral concepts. In general, the worries generated by the paradoxes of implication are partly eliminated as soon as one realizes the critical and discriminatory task of philosophical analysis.

The critical and comparative function of the notion of deontic consequence is possible for the following reason. Even though one’s total normative system together with the totality of the facts about the world is apt t o imply everything deontically, one can still ask whether these particular norms, together with those particular facts, deontically imply a certain consequence. When an inconsistency is discovered in a system of axiomatic set theory, its author is unlikely t o give up the whole enterprise. Instead, he will try t o analyze precisely how the inconsistency came about, in order t o avoid it. There is little reason t o throw up our hands in despair if a violation of obligations takes place. There may still be plenty of reasons to see how the violation came about, precisely what obligations were violated, and how such violations can be

COMMENT ON PROFESSOR BERGSTROM 37

This additional proviso may in fact result in an even more satis- avoided in the future. And the notion of deontic consequence may be a useful tool in this enterprise; at the very least, its useless- ness is not at all proved by Professor Bergstrom’s note.

I t is especially surprising t o see Professor Bergstrom making heavy weather of the apparent incoherence of the notion of prima facie obligation on my reconstruction, for one of the rare things moral philosophers seem t o be relatively unanimous about is the fact that one’s different prima facie obligations are virtually always in conflict with each other. When judged in the light of one set of moral principles c u m one set of facts, one’s prima facie obligations point one way, but judged in the light of other prin- ciples and other facts they point in another direction. And if this conflict is not due to the inconsistency on one’s overall set of moral principles, it will be due t o the facts-to the different aspects of the actual situation. Thus it is virtually admitted by moral philosophers that anything at all is a logical consequence of one’s prima facie obligations, if they are based on an indiscriminate pooling together of all and sundry moral principles and/or facts. What is supposed to be wrong if this conclusion is reproduced on my reconstruction of the concept of a prima facie obligation? Moral philosophers do in fact come very close t o admitting that the notion of prima facie obligation behaves just in the way which Professor Bergstrom alleges t o be objectionable in my reconstruc- tion of the concept. If he had pushed his ideas just an inch further, I am tempted t o say, he would have found good reasons for my reconstruction rather than alleged reasons against it. (For this reason, no reply t o him is needed on my part, only a comment on it.) Professor Bergstrom is clearly taking an unduly holistic view of the notion of prima facie obligation, a view which is deeply alien t o its original spirit and purpose. All we need in order to have a supple conceptual instrument in our hands is t o think of the notion o fpr ima facie obligation as being relativized to particular norms and particular facts.

Alternatively, it may be suggested that one’s prima facie obligations ought t o be decided on the basis of one’s norms (obligations) alone, without regard t o the facts of the situation.

38 JAAKKO HINTIKKA

This additional proviso may in fact result in an even more satis- factory reconstruction of the notion of prima facie duty than my original one.

There may nevertheless remain a feeling of restriction here. The notion of deontic consequence says something directly only about deontically perfect worlds. Doesn’t this render it unrealistic and remote from actual moral problems? The answer is that most of the import of our normative notions can be spelled out in similar terms, that is t o say, by specifying what happens in deontically perfect worlds (deontically perfect vis-l-vis the actual one). This can be shown by developing a semantics for the notions of obliga- tion, permission, etc., for instance along the lines of my [2]. If there is a restriction here, it does not attach to my concept of deontic consequence, but t o our very own concepts of obligation and prohibition. Our basic normative concepts simply operate too much with contrasts of black and white t o be satisfactorily applic- able in the twilight world of actual moral problems. But even though this point has perhaps not been made sufficiently pointedly in the literature, t o have spelled out these restrictions is surely a virtue and not a shortcoming of deontic logic.

In so far as the concept of prima facie obligation was originally intended t o introduce finer distinctions into one’s picture of moral relations, it may very well be that no reconstruction of this notion within ordinary deontic logic is likely t o be completely satis- factory. This is a shortcoming either of present-day deontic logic at large or else of philosophers’ notion of prima facie obligation. No valid evidence against my specific reconstruction can be gleaned from Professor Bergstrom’s note.

References [ I ] LARS B m G s r R B M . “Hintikka on prima facie obligations.” Theoria, vol. 40

[2] JAAKKO HINTIKKA. “Deontic logic and its philosophical morals.” In idem, (1974), pp. 163-165.

Models for modalities (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969).

Received on March 3, 1975.