Estudio de la rentabilidad del proyecto diseñado

First, the terms ‘norm’, ‘normal’, and ‘standard’ are each ambiguous between roughly two distinct senses, and only one of these concerns us here. Such terms can stand for, be near synonyms for, the typical, the frequent, the average, etc.: e.g., “The norm for the American household is 2.5 children”, “It is normal that Larry’s dog barks at the passing mailman,” “The standard weight of books produced in the 18th century was 2 lbs.”, etc. Such usages, serving to indicate the average, the typical, the frequent, etc., are what I want to set aside here. What was of concern in the previous chapters was not that certain behavior or traits are frequent or typical for biological types; no one, I suspect, disputes that. Rather, what was of concern was that sense of “norm” in which an act, event, or entity is correct or incorrect. Deviation from a norm in the first sense is just the quantitative distance from the mean; such deviance is not acting incorrectly or a failure. Driving over the speed limit is to violate a norm in the second sense – that is, it is to act incorrectly, even when driving over the speed limit is the norm in the first sense.

Second, it is a common enough refrain when discussing the normative to talk about the “prescriptive” versus the “descriptive” as if this captured the difference between the normative and the non-normative, respectively. The prescriptive is, however, a species of the normative, namely what Sellars’ (1968 [chapter 7] & 1969) described as the “ought-to-do”s. The genus of the normative includes norms, however, that are not rules or prescriptions to act. “Fire exits ought to be unblocked” or “A hammer head’s face ought to be 1 ¼ inches diameter” are standards that are not prescriptions. Each might imply63 some prescription or another such that one brings about, say, that fire exits are not blocked, but the standard itself does not prescribe any course of action. We should not think, then, that the difference between the normative and the non-normative is somehow captured in distinguishing the prescriptive from the descriptive.

Lastly, the presence or absence of ‘ought’ in a statement is no sign that the statement is or is not one of a norm, respectively. The statement of a norm does not require the presence of an ‘ought’: “The Manchester train arrives at 6 o’clock” on a printed train schedule is not a prediction but is a statement of a standard. Nor does the presence of an ‘ought’ suffice to render a statement into that of a norm. It is correct to

63_{Sellars would not have agreed to the “might”; he thought that “ought-to-be”s do imply “ought-to-do”s:}

… though ought-to-be’s are carefully to be distinguished from ought-to-do’s they have an essential connection with them. The connection is, roughly, that ought-to-be’s imply ought-to- do’s. Thus the ought-to-be about a clock chimes [“Clock chimes ought to strike on the quarter hour.”] implies, roughly,

(Other things being equal and where possible) one ought to bring it about that clock chimes strike on the quarter.

This rule belongs in our previous category [ought-to-do], and is a rule of action. As such it

requires that the item to which it applies (persons rather than chimes) have the appropriate concepts or recognitional capacities. (1969, 508)

Sellars’ claim here (“standards imply rules of action”) rests on the assumption that the existence of a standard presupposes an intentional and psychological agent seeing to it or ensuring conformity to that standard. Part of the purpose of this chapter is to undermine the plausibility of that assumption.

say “The train ought to arrive at 6 o’clock” either after reading the train schedule (presumably a list of standards of train arrival) or after having some factual evidence that the train usually arrives at 6 o’clock. This is not because there are two senses of ‘ought’ in English.64As White writes,

… The current half-truth that ‘the word “ought” is used for prescribing’ is no more indicative of the meaning of ‘ought’ than the opposite half-truth that word ‘ought’ is used for predicting. In both the subjunctive-governing use and the indicative-governing use ‘ought’ has exactly the same sense…. What ought to be is, as its etymology in several languages shows, what among the alternatives is

owing in these circumstances, and under this aspect in order that the requirement

be met. It is as if the situation were a pattern with one missing piece, namely what ought to be.

In the indicative use ‘ought to V’ the only requirement is conformity to the facts and the only aspect is factual. Since, however, the relation expressed by ‘ought’, unlike that expressed by ‘must’, is not one of necessity, but of what is owing, what ought to be is that which follows non-deductively from given or presupposed circumstances. For example, if the train left London at 10 o’clock at its usual speed, at what time ought it to arrive at Hull? If he usually works late at the office, then he ought to be there now. If the square root of 900 is 30, then the square root of 837 ought to be about 29. (White 1975, 140-1)

‘Ought’ serves exactly the same function in the differing contexts of prediction and prescription, namely to indicate what is owing. ‘Ought’ is no different in this respect than any other modal auxiliary, e.g. ‘must’, ‘can’, ‘may’, etc. Not only do each of these find their way into normative contexts (moral, legal, etiquette, conduct, etc.) but they also find their way into a variety of non-normative contexts (economic, physical, biological, romantic, etc.). Notwithstanding the context, ‘must’, ‘can’, and ‘ought’ perform the univocal functions of indicating what is necessary, possible, or owing, respectively. That is, what must be, can be, or ought to be is what is necessary, possible, or owing,

64

Both Frankena (1950) or Gauthier (1963, 10-12), for example, suggest that there is a prescriptive and predicative sense of ‘ought’.

respectively, given the legal, moral, physical, economic, etc. facts.65 Consequently, I will forgo Sellars’ language of “ought-to-be”s and “ought-to-do”s for the more straightforward language of standards and rules, respectively. The moral here is simply that one should not look to a linguistic analysis of ‘ought’ to distinguish the normative from the non-normative.