More remarks on the logic of commands and permissions

It's interesting that even invalid commands typically result in permissions.  I am a civilian and I successfully impersonate your commanding officer, point to my car, and say: "Blow up this car!"  You do so.  My command was invalid.  You blew up a civilian's vehicle without a valid order to do so.  Now, if it was another civilian's car than mine, you would be wronging that someone else, by blowing up a car without any valid order to do so.  Of course you wouldn't be culpable for the action, but it would still be something wrong, and the civilian might well seek compensation from the army.  But in the case where it is my car, you didn't even inculpably wrong the car's owner.  Why not?  Presumably because by issuing the order, I gave you permission.

So an invalid order can result in a permission.  Consider another case.  Your Department Cchair hands you her cellphone and tells you to phone me and humiliate me.  Suppose there is no sufficient justification for humiliating me.  That's an invalid order, since she can't validly command you to wrong me.  Suppose you do what you're told nonetheless.  You wrong me, then, and maybe even wrong your chair by making her be responsible for a bad outcome.  But you can't be accused of using her phone without her permission.

Notice, though, that in both of these two cases, the permission issued comes "labeled" with a different role than the putative order does.  The Department chair putatively orders you to use her cellphone as chair.  But she permits you to use her cellphone as a private individual (I assume it's her private phone).  As chair, she has no right to permit the use of any private individual's cellphone.  Likewise, I pretend to order you to blow up the car as your commanding officer, but the permission comes from me as a private individual--it can't come from me as your commanding officer because I am not your commanding officer.

So, typically, a command, valid or invalid, issued by an individual x under some role R results in permission by x in x's role as a private individual.  But not always, not even in the case of a valid order.  "The colonel has ordered you to blow up my private car.  I hereby, acting under protest, order you to blow up my private car."  In this case, I didn't give you permission as a private individual to blow up my private car, which has the normative consequence that I may be entitled to compensation from the service for the unpermitted destruction of my property.

This means that the issuing of permission as a private individual needs to be logically separated from giving an order under some other role R.  Normally, by giving an order in an official capacity I implicate private permission, but this implicature can be canceled, say by an "acting under protest" qualifier.

But now we have an interesting question: Likewise, normally by giving an order in role R, I also permit the commanded thing in role R.  Is the connection here just a matter of contingent implicature, so that (a) even if the order is invalid, the permission remains, and (b) the order can be validly given without the permission?

The answers to both questions are negative, I think.

First take (a).  The most obvious counterexample.  I impersonate a commanding officer and order you to shell an enemy installation.  I invalidly command as your commanding officer, but you do not thereby receive your commanding officer's permission, since I am not your commanding officer.  Maybe, though, (a) is true in the special case where the putatively commanding party actually fills the role?  I don't think so.  Suppose that as a an American sergeant I order my men to initiate war against Canada.  Do my men have sergeant permission to make war on Canada?  Certainly not: initiating a war exceeds the authority of a sergeant both in respect of command and in respect of permission, and there is no such thing as sergeant permission to make war on Canada--there may be such a thing as presidential permission to make war, but surely not sergeant permission.  So R-permission doesn't follow automatically from an invalid R-command.

Now take (b).  Can one give a valid order in role R without giving a permission in role R?  I think not.  I don't have a very precise argument, but the basic idea seems to be something like the following (adapting stuff I heard from Mark Murphy).  By attempting to give in role R an order to A, I am attempting to create a normative situation where you have reason in light of your authority connection with R to A.  Creating such a normative situation requires the wiping away of any relevantly R-connected reasons not to A that I can wipe away qua occupier of R.  Without that wiping away, there is no attempt to create the right kind of normative situation, and hence there is no valid order given.  Besides, I can't think of a counterexample to the claim that valid R-command entails valid R-permission.

So the relevant deontic statuses can be rather logically complex.  As CEO, I order you to build a bridge.  You seek all the relevant legally required permissions.  I didn't realize this when I gave the order, but the bridge is close enough to my house that vibration from the construction would endanger my china collection.  Suppose the law requires permission from all private individuals affected by vibration from construction and you failed to seek my permission.  Because I didn't know about the issue, you can't just presume on my private permission, but you do presume, and my china is destroyed.  Then you didn't wrong me qua CEO, but you did wrong me qua private citizen.

Suppose, however, that the law allows you to build as long as you get permission from nine tenths of the citizens affected by any particular kind of harmful effect.  You get permission from the other nine tenths of the relevant citizens, so you don't bother to ask me.  Assuming that I am validly under the authority of this law, and that the law is just, it may well be that you haven't wronged me.  But neither have I permitted the damage to my china.  So you're permitted vis-à-vis me-qua-private-individual to cause the vibration, but you do not have my permission as a private individual to cause the vibration--rather, the law gave you the permission.

Suppose that the vibration causes both property damage and health damage, and that the law requires everyone's permission in respect of health damage, but only nine-tenths' majority permission in respect of property damage.  Then by causing the vibration you (i) don't wrong me qua CEO; (ii) do something not permitted vis-à-vis me-qua-private-individual in respect of health damage; and (iii) have the relevant permissions vis-à-vis me-qua-private-individual in respect of property damage.

There are, no doubt, neater ways of spelling out these normative statuses.

Remarks on the logic of commanding and permitting

Disjunctions

If I command you to do something, I thereby permit you to do it. But suppose I command you to do A or B or both. Then it seems that not only do I permit the disjunction, but I also permit each disjunct.

It is, I think, necessary that if I command you to do something, I also permit you to do it. Working out why exactly would be interesting.

But I do not think it is necessary that if I command you to do A or B or both, then I permit you to do A and I permit you to do B. Imagine a case where you are under all sorts of orders that I have no authority to override and which I do not know all of, but I know that you're not both prohibited from doing A and from doing B. I might then say: "Do A or B or both. Of course, stay within the scope of your other orders." If one of your other orders is never to do B, you can't say that my disjunctive command permitted you to do B. If this is right, then it's not part of the fundamental logic of commanding and permitting that by commanding a disjunction one permits the disjuncts.

Interesting question. Is it ever morally licit to issue the command to do A or B or both, when B is morally illicit? It is, I take it, always wrong to command or permit something wrong (I distinguish permission proper from waiving punishment). If commanding a disjunction always involves permitting the disjuncts, it follows that one may not licitly command a disjunction when one of the disjuncts in it is wrong. But if it is possible to command the disjunction without permitting each disjunct, then it may be licit to command a disjunction one disjunct of which is wrong, though not a disjunction both disjuncts of which are wrong. We can imagine a situation where very bad things will happen (to you and to your subordinates) if you refuse to issue an order you were commanded to issue, and the order is to do A or B or both, and B is morally wrong. In that case, it may be licit to say: "I command you to do A or B or both. And I forbid you from doing B." You've fulfilled your order to the letter and haven't commanded or permitted anything wrong. Still, in ordinary contexts, commanding A or B or both carries the implicated (and still real) permission of doing A and of doing B and of doing both.

Conjunctions

Suppose now I command you to do both A and B. Interestingly, while it does follow that I permit you to do both A and B, it does not follow that I permit you to do A. I may only be permitting you to do A if you're going to do B as well. So commands are not closed under logical entailment. For if they were, then in commanding A and B, I would be commanding A, and hence also permitting A.

Fun semantic paradoxes

If you're told "Don't do anything Jones tells you to do today", and the speaker is Jones, have you done what you were told to?

If you promise to do today whatever I ask for, and I ask you to do nothing today that a fool asks you for, but unbeknownst to me I am a fool, have you done what you promised?

If I say: "I'll have whatever the chef recommends" and the chef recommends that I have what I ordered, and I get fried bananas, have I got my order?

Sincerity conditions

The following seem plausible necessary conditions on sincerity:

• Assertion: If I sincerely asserted that p, I intended (at least) that I not be asserting something not true.
• Promise: If I sincerely promised you that p, I intended (at least) that I not be promising something I wouldn't do.
• Command: If I sincerely commanded you that p, I intended (at least) that I not be commanding something you wouldn't do.
• Performative declaration: If I sincerely performatively declared that p, I intended (at least) that I not be performatively declaring something that doesn't come off.

(I intend at least p iff I intend q where q is either p or a strengthening of p. Below I shall for simplicity just talk of "intending p" when I mean "intending at least p".)

These may not be the standard sincerity conditions for these illocutionary acts. More standard conditions would be something like this: if I sincerely commanded you that p, I intended that p or I desired that p, etc. However, these more standard sincerity conditions are incorrect. In earlier posts I've shown this for assertions and promises. The examples adapt to commands, questions and performative declarations. For instance, suppose I send you a command by mail. I may not care at all whether you get the command, but intend that if you get it, you fulfill it (imagine a case of an action which is only an exercise in obedience—it is pointless unless you actually get the command). Interestingly, the sincerity condition for commands rules out some interesting cases. It is, on this view, insincere to command something with the intention that the commandee should fail to fulfill the command and thus earn a punishment. (This rules out certain readings of Scripture, assuming that God is always sincere.) Likewise, if I name a ship "the Queen Mary", I am being insincere if the ship already has been named something else (what if it's already been named "the Queen Mary"?) and I have no authority to change the name. But I need not intend that the ship should have the name "the Queen Mary". I may have reluctantly agreed to try to name it thus, but hope that something will interrupt my naming.

What is striking about the above sincerity conditions is that they all involve truth. Granted, promises are restricted to what I will do and commands to what you will do, but all of these illocutionary acts involve a proposition, and in all of them sincerity requires that I intend not to make the illocutionary act with respect to a false proposition. Curiously, thus, in all these cases, sincerity involves an intention to avoid falsehood. There is thus a deep similarity between asserting, promising, commanding and performatively declaring.

Is this common necessary condition on sincerity also sufficient? No, for if it were, then if p reports a future action of one's own, one could sincerely promise that p under exactly the same conditions under which one could sincerely assert that p. And that isn't so. For instance, I can sincerely promise that I will quit smoking, even though I expect I won't, but I cannot sincerely assert that I will quit smoking when I expect I won't. So the sincerity conditions of some of the above four illocutionary acts must add something to the common condition. I do not know what the appropriate addenda are.

Is what I said above applicable to all illocutionary acts? Well, not directly. Certainly it is not the case that sincerely denying p requires that I intend not to deny something false! However, a surprisingly large number of illocutionary acts can be rephrased so that the above rule should apply. For instance:

• "I deny that p" → "I assert that not p", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be asserting something that isn't true.
• "I congratulate you that p" → "I congratulate you that the good G has befallen you", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be congratulating you on something that isn't true (i.e., in a case where G either isn't good or didn't befall you).
• "I thank you that p" → "I thank you that you provided me with good G", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be thanking you for something that isn't true.
• "I protest that p" → "I protest that you are doing the bad thing B", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be protesting something that isn't true.

In these cases, there is a deep propositional content that differs from the surface propositional content. "I thank you that you gave me a cookie" has a shallow content that you gave me a cookie but for purposes of analysis should be seen as having the deep content that you gave me a cookie which it was good for me to get. (That is why there is a pragmatic contradiction in saying "I thank you that you gave me a cookie that was bad for me to get." And of course "I thank you that 2+2=4" is malformed, unless addressed to Descartes' God.)

If the above moves work, then a large class of illocutionary acts have a common necessary sincerity condition that involves the truth of the proposition forming the deep propositional content of the act. Is this true of all illocutionary acts? I don't know. Is joking or asserting-on-stage an illocutionary act? If so, it would be hard to defend the generality of the claim (though maybe not impossible).