The deontic quadecagon.

THE DEONTIC QUADECAGON SEPTEMBER 1990 PAUL MCNAMARA, B.A., CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI Ph . D . , UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS Directed by: Professor FRED FELDMAN There are a number of concepts of common— sense morality, what one must do, what one ought to do, the supererogatory, the minimum that duty allows, the morally optional and the morally indifferent, that philosophers have been hard-pressed to represent in an integrated conceptual framework. Indeed, many philosophers have despaired at the attempt and concluded that only a fragment of these concepts belong to that fundamental sphere of morality that is the central focus of the ethicist. For ex amp 1 e, the traditional scheme, with its triad of the obligatory , the forbidden and the permissible, pigeonholes all actions into three mutually exclusive and exhaustive classes: those which are obligatory, those which are forbidden and those which are optional. Hence, at best, it can represent exactly two of the six aforementioned concepts. For from the standpoint of this scheme, what one must do and what one ought to do can’t be distinguished and