Eliezer, I think your proposed semantics of “ought” is confusing, and doesn’t match up very well with ordinary usage. May I suggest the following alternative?
ought refer’s to X’s would-wants if X is an individual. If X is a group, then ought is the overlap between the oughts of its members.
In ordinary conversation, when people use “ought” without an explicit subscript or possessive, the implicit X is the speaker plus the intended audience (not humanity as a whole).
ETA: The reason we use “ought” is to convince the audience to do or not do something, right? Why would we want to refer to ought, when ought would work just fine for that purpose, and ought covers a lot more ground than ought?
Eliezer, I think your proposed semantics of “ought” is confusing, and doesn’t match up very well with ordinary usage. May I suggest the following alternative?
ought refer’s to X’s would-wants if X is an individual. If X is a group, then ought is the overlap between the oughts of its members.
In ordinary conversation, when people use “ought” without an explicit subscript or possessive, the implicit X is the speaker plus the intended audience (not humanity as a whole).
ETA: The reason we use “ought” is to convince the audience to do or not do something, right? Why would we want to refer to ought, when ought would work just fine for that purpose, and ought covers a lot more ground than ought?