Abstract:

Strong deontic necessity modals, unlike their weak counterparts, give rise to Moorean infelicities: ‘You must go to confession, but I don’t know whether you will’ sounds strange, while ‘You should go to confession, but I don’t know whether you will’ sounds fine (Ninan 2005, Portner 2009, Mandelkern 2021, Silk 2022). Two recent proposals explain the difference in terms of speech acts: deontic must is used to command; deontic should, by contrast, is not. In this paper, I argue against the speech act approach. Instead, I propose to explain the difference in terms of mood.