Abstract

Are there things that we must never do, no matter how untypical the circumstances and “unorthodox” our deontic ideas might be? In this essay I try to make evident that acts I call “pure sadist acts” satisfy this description. I discuss several examples of such acts and alert to their being not always easy to distinguish from certain others. Norms prohibiting such acts I call “true”, and I suggest that other, less suggestive, norms might also be (derivatively) true, if the pertinent acts stand in certain relations with the former ones. I incorporate some ideas from Hume, as well as from elementary model theory, to make mine clearer.