The hypothesis of this book is easy to state: Thinking what I ought to do is thinking what to do. The concept of ought, I propose, is to be explained on this pattern—not for every sense of the term, but for a crucial sense that figures in a wide array of concepts. These are normative concepts, concepts “fraught with ought”, as Wilfrid Sellars put it: moral concepts, concepts of rationality, concepts of the shameful or the enviable, of meriting credence or meriting aesthetic admiration, and other concepts. Thinking what’s admirable, for instance, is thinking what to admire—this is another instance of the hypothesis. There is no special mystery, then, in normative concepts, even though they behave in ways that have led some philosophers to speak mysteriously of “non-natural qualities”. If we understand concluding what to do, then we understand concluding what a person ought to do.
Does this mean that there are no facts of what I ought to do, no truths and falsehoods?