Does Ought Imply Ought Ought?
Daniel Immerman
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Abstract
Knows-knows principles in epistemology (KK principles for short) say that if you know some proposition, then you are in a position to know that you know it. This paper examines the viability of analogous principles in ethics, which I call ought-ought principles (OO principles for short). Several epistemologists have recently offered new defenses of KK principles and of other related principles and there has recently been an increased interest in examining analogies between ethics and epistemology and so it seem natural to examine whether defenses of KK and related principles carry over to OO principles. In this paper I introduce two OO principles and I show how some arguments in favor of KK carry over to them. Then I show how these OO principles can be used to shed light on a much-discussed case in ethics, that of Professor Procrastinate.
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