The hard cases for actualism Efficacious vs inefficacious oughts

Abstract

Joe is a firefighter who is sent to rescue a child from a burning building. He is the only person on the scene, and he has a professional duty to do it. Unfortunately, he was too busy gambling to learn anything useful when he was at the firefighter school. As such, suppose that if he enters the burning building, it is sufficiently unlikely that he can successfully rescue the child. It is more probable he will die alongside the child. Ought Joe to save the child? In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct types of ‘oughts’. In one sense, Joe ought to save the child and this is what I call the ‘inefficacious’ sense of oughts. In another sense, it is not the case that he ought to save the child, and this is the ‘efficacious’ sense of oughts. I show how this distinction helps actualism – the philosophical position that what matters for the assessment of options is what will actually happen – deal with a cluster of ‘hard cases’.