ABSTRACT
Contrastivism about “ought” is the view that “ought” claims are always relative to a set of alternatives. If “Emmy ought to study” is true, then there is some contextually determined set of alternatives, Q, relative to which it is true. To put the point nonlinguistically: if Emmy ought to study, then there is some set of alternatives out of which Emmy ought to study. Several philosophers have argued that “ought” is contrastive in this way. 1 These philosophers have not, however, extended their contrastive frameworks to other deontic modals, like “must” and “may,” and some have explicitly denied that these are contrastive. 2
