The present paper concerns arguments whose conclusions take the form of a prescription such as you
ought to do such-and-such, which have centered much public discussion and policy since the beginning of
the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to tackle a hitherto under-explored characteristic of many such
normative arguments, namely, the relationship between evaluative and deontic propositions, depending on
whether they occur as premises or conclusions in such arguments. In order to investigate how willing
people are to argue from what is good to what one ought to do, and the other way round, we conducted an
Inferential Judgment Experiment. Participants were presented with arguments involving deontic and
evaluative propositions, and had to judge whether they could infer the conclusion from the premise. The
stimuli that we used are tightly related to the argumentation surrounding the pandemic, regarding the
measures of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The results of the study show that there is a robust
inferential connection between evaluatives and deontics, but at the same time, a significant asymmetry as
well. We explore several theoretical approaches to the relationship between the deontic and the evaluative
realm, and test their predictions against the results of our study.
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European Network for Argumentation and Public Policy Analysis