Abstract
According to the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, it is never the case that you ought to do something you cannot do. While many accept this principle in some form, it also has its share of critics, and thus it seems desirable if an argument can be offered in its support. The aim of this paper is to examine a particular way in which the principle has been defended, namely, by appeal to considerations of fairness. In a nutshell, the idea (due to David Copp) is that moral requirements we cannot comply with would be unfair, and there cannot be unfair moral requirements. I discuss several ways of spelling out the argument, and argue that all are unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons.
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Notes
In order to deal with cases of self-imposed inability, some add two time-indices, so that the principle, when fully spelled out, reads as follows: ‘for any agent S, action A, and times t i, t j, if S at t i has an all-things-considered moral obligation to perform A at t j, then at t i it is true that S can do A at t j. For this point, see Zimmerman (1996: 95–113), Howard-Snyder (2006: 235), and Vranas (2007: 175–78).
There are various other ways to interpret the principle; Vranas (2007) offers an extensive discussion and numerous references. Note that Vranas himself defends the principle for pro tanto as opposed to overall moral obligation, but this is a minority view.
For the requirement that it is merely nomologically possible that an agent perform a required act (if the act indeed is morally required) see Streumer (2007).
This assumption is not uncontroversial. To illustrate why it is not, consider the following famous anecdote:
During a trial about alleged police brutality, a lawyer asked Sydney [Morgenbesser] under oath whether the police had beat him up unfairly and unjustly. He replied that the police had assaulted him unjustly, but not unfairly. The lawyer was puzzled. “How is that possible?” he queried. “Well,” Sydney reportedly said, “They beat me up unjustly, but since they did the same thing to everyone else, it was not unfair.”
(This report is taken from Fletcher [2005: 548].) What Morgenbesser seems to suggests is that fairness is essentially distributive, i.e., that it makes no sense to say of some agent S that S has been treated unfairly if all of the other relevant agents received a similar treatment as S received, although S can be treated unjustly under such circumstances.
I am not sure Copp would agree to this way of interpreting the quoted passage, for he does not distinguish different ways of understanding the argument from fairness. Be that as it may, it is worth considering this version of the argument for its own sake, as it avoids the issued with the previous version. A different reading is considered in Section 4.
Shelly Kagan offers a comparable diagnosis of the suggestion that ‘morality’ might violate a constraint against harming if there are no options to pursue one’s own interest; as he puts it, ‘here we have a case in which the personification of morality can lead us into error’ (1989: 208). I am inclined to maintain that the same can be said if we formulate the argument from fairness such that it concerns the demands that morality makes, as opposed to putting it in terms of what morality requires: were we to claim that the demands that morality makes are unfair, we are again misled by our way of speaking—we are applying a criticism that is sensible when applied to demands made by a particular agent, but not to deontic facts, such as an act’s being morally obligatory. While we can express the fact that a certain act is required by saying that ‘morality demands that S performs this act’, we should not take the fact that this is a legitimate way of speaking lead us into thinking that the sort of criticism that applies to ‘personal demands’ also applies to morality’s demands. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.) Note, though, that if I am wrong, and we can meaningfully criticize morality’s demands as unfair, an argument building on this sort of criticism will run into the second, more compelling objection formulated in the text.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this alternative way of spelling out Copp’s argument.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Emily Given for discussion, and two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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van Someren Greve, R. ‘Ought’, ‘Can’, and Fairness. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 913–922 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9492-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9492-1