Those who want to deny the ‘ought implies can’ principle often turn to weakened views to explain ‘ought implies can’ phenomena. The two most common versions of such views are that ‘ought’ presupposes ‘can’, and that ‘ought’ conversationally implicates ‘can’. This paper will reject both views, and in doing so, present a case against any pragmatic view of ‘ought implies can’. Unlike much of the literature, I won't rely on counterexamples, but instead (...) will argue that each of these views fails on its own terms. ‘Ought’ and ‘can’ do not obey the negation test for presupposition, and they do not obey the calculability or the cancelability tests for conversational implicature. I diagnose these failures as partly a result of the importance of the contrapositive of ‘ought implies can’. I end with a final argument emphasizing the role the principle plays in moral thinking, and the fact that no pragmatic account can do it justice. (shrink)

Most philosophers believe that a person can have an obligation only insofar as she is able to fulfil it, a principle generally referred to as “Ought Implies Can”. Arguably, this principle reflects something basic about the ordinary concept of obligation. However, in a paper published recently in this journal, Wesley Buckwalter and John Turri presented evidence for the conclusion that ordinary people in fact reject that principle. With a series of studies, they claimed to have demonstrated that, in (...) people’s judgements, obligations persist irrespective of whether those who hold them have the ability to fulfil them. We argue in this paper that due to some problems in their design, Buckwalter & Turri’s conclusions may not be war- ranted. We present the results of a series of studies demonstrating the problems with their design and showing that, with an improved design, people judge that obligation depends on ability after all. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the current debate about the status of the “Ought Implies Can” principle and the growing body of empirical evidence that undermines it. We report the results of an experimental study which show that people judge that agents ought to perform an action even when they also judge that those agents cannot do it and that such “ought” judgments exhibit an actor-observer effect. Because of this actor-observer effect on “ought” judgments (...) and the Duhem-Quine thesis, talk of an “empirical refutation” of OIC is empirically and methodologically unwarranted. What the empirical fact that people attribute moral obligations to unable agents shows is that OIC is not intuitive, not that OIC has been refuted. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the “Ought Implies Can” (OIC) principle, as it is employed in epistemology, particularly in the literature on epistemic norms, is open to counterexamples. I present a counterexample to OIC and discuss several objections to it. If this counterexample works, then it shows that it is possible that S ought to believe that p, even though S cannot believe that p. If this is correct, then OIC, considered from an epistemic point of (...) view, is false, since it is supposed to hold for any S and any p. (shrink)

In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and moral blameworthiness.

l. There is an antinomy in Hare's thought between Ought-Implies-Can and No-Indicatives-from-Imperatives. It cannot be resolved by drawing a distinction between implication and entailment. 2. Luther resolved this antinomy in the l6th century, but to understand his solution, we need to understand his problem. He thought the necessity of Divine foreknowledge removed contingency from human acts, thus making it impossible for sinners to do otherwise than sin. 3. Erasmus objected (on behalf of Free Will) that this violates (...) class='Hi'>Ought-Implies-Can which he supported with Hare-style ordinary language arguments. 4. Luther a) pointed out the antinomy and b) resolved it by undermining the prescriptivist arguments for Ought-Implies-Can. 5. We can reinforce Luther's argument with an example due to David Lewis. 6. Whatever its merits as a moral principle, Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical truth and should not be included in deontic logics. Most deontic logics, and maybe the discipline itself, should therefore be abandoned. 7. Could it be that Ought-Conversationally-Implies-Can? Yes - in some contexts. But a) even if these contexts are central to the evolution of Ought, the implication is not built into the semantics of the word; b) nor is the parallel implication built into the semantics of orders; and c) in some cases Ought conversationally implies Can, only because Ought-Implies-Can is a background moral belief. d) Points a) and b) suggest a criticism of prescriptivism - that Oughts do not entail imperatives but that the relation is one of conversational implicature. 8. If Ought-Implies-Can is treated as a moral principle, Erasmus' argument for Free Will can be revived (given his Christian assumptions). But it does not 'prove' Pelagianism as Luther supposed. A semi-Pelagian alternative is available. (shrink)

The moral principle that Ought Implies Can (“OIC”) is often assumed without argument in normative discourse. Is this assumption defensible? Some would argue that it is not, as there are many purported counterexamples against it in the literature. However, OIC is not so much a single principle as rather a family of them. In this paper, I will argue that, while not every OIC-type principle is defensible, at least one of them may be. I defend the cognate moral (...) principle that Ought Implies Can or Could Have (“OICCH”). I first show that it is able to circumvent the traditional counterexamples to OIC. And then I show that OICCH is even more plausible than some of the best alternative OIC-type principles to date. The upshot of this paper is that those who find OIC compelling should consider accepting OICCH instead. (shrink)

Haji argues that determinism threatens deontic morality, not via a threat to moral responsibility, but directly, because of the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. Haji’s argument requires not only that we embrace an ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ principle, but also that we adopt the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘able not to’. I argue that we have little reason to adopt the latter principle, and examine whether deontic morality might be destroyed on the basis of the (...) more commonly embraced ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ principle alone. I argue that despite what look like initially compelling reasons why we might suppose that this weaker conclusion is similarly destructive to deontic morality, we actually have good reason to doubt that it has any practical relevance for moral deliberation at all. (shrink)

Defenders of the Kantian maxim, i.e. ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, defend the maxim taking the term “implication” in the sense of ‘entailment’. But if it is granted that “implication” means entailment, then it can be shown that the Kantian maxim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ is false. Sinnott-Armstrong attempts to prove the falsity of the maxim by his argument from Self-Imposed Impossibility in which he offers his famous example of Adams. But Sinnott-Armstrong’s example of Adams appears to be (...) not strong enough to prove the falsity of the maxim; it is a subject to be captured by a version of the maxim, namely the Maxim-KT. That is why two new examples of the argument from Self-Imposed Impossibility are presented in this paper which are stronger and are able to prove the falsity of the Kantian maxim. (shrink)

Are John Rawls’s most noticeable methodological contributions, reflective equilibrium and the original position, consistent with each other? I draw attention to a worry that they stand in inconsistent relationships to the claim that ought implies can: it can only be the case that we ought to do something if we can do it.

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that S ought to form or maintain S’s beliefs in accordance with S’s evidence. A promising argument for this view turns on the premise that consideration c is a normative reason for S to form or maintain a belief that p only if c is evidence that p is true. In this paper, I discuss the surprising relation between a recently influential argument for this key premise and the principle that ought implies (...) can. I argue that anyone who antecedently accepts or rejects this principle already has a reason to resist either this argument’s premises or its role in support of deontological evidentialism. (shrink)

When we can’t live up to the ultimate standards of morality, how can moral theory give us guidance? We can distinguish between ideal and non-ideal theory to see that there are different versions of the voluntarist constraint, ‘ought implies can.’ Ideal moral theory identifies the best standard, so its demands are constrained by one version. Non-ideal theory tells us what to do given our psychological and motivational shortcomings and so is constrained by others. Moral theory can now both (...) provide an ultimate standard and give us guidance; this view also gives us new insights into demandingness and blame. (shrink)

Positing group level obligations has come under attack from concerns relating to agency as a necessary requirement for obligation bearing. Roughly stated, the worry is that since only agents can have moral obligations, and groups are not agents, groups cannot have moral obligations. The intuition behind this constraint is itself based on the ability requirement of 'ought implies can': in order for a group to have an obligation it must have the ability to perform an action, but only (...) agents can have abilities. This paper argues that from accounts of shared agency we can develop a concept of joint ability, undermining the problem of agency for group obligations. (shrink)

STIT logic is a prominent framework for the analysis of multi-agent choice-making. In the available deontic extensions of STIT, the principle of Ought-implies-Can (OiC) fulfills a central role. However, in the philosophical literature a variety of alternative OiC interpretations have been proposed and discussed. This paper provides a modular framework for deontic STIT that accounts for a multitude of OiC readings. In particular, we discuss, compare, and formalize ten such readings. We provide sound and complete sequent-style calculi for (...) all of the various STIT logics accommodating these OiC principles. We formally analyze the resulting logics and discuss how the different OiC principles are logically related. In particular, we propose an endorsement principle describing which OiC readings logically commit one to other OiC readings. (shrink)

Recent experimental studies dispute the position that commonsense morality accepts ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’, the view that, necessarily, if an agent ought to perform some action, then she can perform that action. This paper considers and supports explanations for the results of these studies on the hypothesis that OIC is intuitive and true.

It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility (...) of non-distributive plural predications of agency, which are precisely the contexts in which we might expect non-agents to be obligation-bearers. (shrink)

According to the Ought-Implies-Can principle (OIC), an agent ought to perform a certain action only if the agent can perform that action. Proponents of OIC interpret this supposed implication in several ways. Some argue that the implication in question is a logical one, namely, entailment. Some think that the relation between ‘ought’ and ‘can’ is a relation of presupposition. Still others argue that ‘ought’ conversationally implicates ‘can’. Opponents of OIC offer a variety of counterexamples in (...) an attempt to show that there are cases in which an agent ought to perform a certain action even though she cannot perform that action. Such counterexamples often involve either culpable or nonculpable inability. In cases of culpable inability, the agent renders herself unable to fulfill an obligation. For example, a student is unable to submit a paper on the due date because she procrastinated until it became too late to write a paper by the assigned deadline. In cases of non-culpable inability, the agent somehow becomes unable to fulfill an obligation, through no fault of her own. For example, an agent becomes unable to pay back a loan to a bank because she was robbed on her way to the bank. This paper attempts to offer counterexamples to OIC of a sort different from the one discussed by opponents of OIC so far. If these counterexamples are correct, then they seem to suggest that there are cases in which an agent has an obligation to perform an action even though she may not be able to perform that action, and thus OIC is false. In other words, ‘ought’ does not imply ‘can’. (shrink)

In Morals from Motives, Michael Slote proposed an agent-based approach to virtue ethics in which the morality of an action derives solely from the agent’s motives. Among the many objections that have been raised against Slote’s account, this article addresses two problems associated with the Kantian principle that ought implies can. These are the problems of “deficient” and “inferior” motivation. These problems arise because people cannot freely choose their motives. We cannot always choose to act from good motives; (...) nor can we always avoid acting from bad ones. Given this, Slote’s account implies that we sometimes cannot do what we ought to do, contrary to Kant’s principle. In this article, I propose an alternative agent-based account which, I argue, circumvents these problems. While people cannot choose their motives, they can choose their intentions. By characterizing virtuous action, as I do, in terms of good intentions rather than in terms of good motives, the conflict between what people can do and what they ought to do is resolved. (shrink)

This paper tests a theory about the relationship between two important topics in moral philosophy and psychology. One topic is the function of normative language, specifically claims that one “ought” to do something. Do these claims function to describe moral responsibilities, encourage specific behavior, or both? The other topic is the relationship between saying that one “ought” to do something and one’s ability to do it. In what respect, if any, does what one “ought” to do exceed (...) what one “can” do? The theory tested here has two parts: (1) “ought” claims function to both describe responsibilities and encourage people to fulfill them (the dual-function hypothesis); (2) the two functions relate differently to ability, because the encouragement function is limited by the person’s ability, but the descriptive function is not (the interaction hypothesis). If this theory is correct, then in one respect “ought implies can” is false because people have responsibilities that exceed their abilities. But in another respect “ought implies can” is legitimate because it is not worthwhile to encourage people to do things that exceed their ability. Results from two behavioral experiments support the theory that “ought” exceeds but implies “can.” Results from a third experiment provide further evidence regarding an “ought” claim’s primary function and how contextual features can affect the interpretation of its functions. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has often been understood as a theory that concerns itself first and foremost with the rightness of actions; but many other things are also properly subject to moral evaluation, and utilitarians have long understood that the theory must be able to provide an account of these as well. In a landmark article from 1976, Robert Adams argues that traditional act utilitarianism faces a particular problem in this regard. He argues that a on a sensible utilitarian account of the rightness (...) of an agent’s motives, right motives will sometimes conflict with right actions, leaving the theory internally incoherent. The puzzle Adams raises has received a good deal of attention but few proposed solutions. Fred Feldman, however, has offered a solution that seems to be gaining adherents. In this paper I argue that Feldman’s approach cannot succeed. At bottom, it relies on a version of the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’—and subsequently an account of an agent’s alternatives—that is far too restrictive to be plausible. Despite the failure of this solution, however, I argue that the conflict Adams develops is not as theoretically troubling as he suggests. While traditional act utilitarianism may fail for other reasons, it will not fail due to the conflict between acts and motives. (shrink)

Many of us feel internally conflicted in the face of certain normative claims that make infeasible demands: say, normative claims that demand that agents do what, given deeply entrenched objectionable character traits, they cannot bring themselves to do. On the one hand, such claims may seem false on account of demanding the infeasible, and insisting otherwise may seem to amount to objectionable unworldliness – to chasing “pies in the sky.” On the other hand, such claims may seem true in spite (...) of making infeasible demands, and insisting otherwise may seem to amount to treating the agents in question with undue lenience – to mistakenly letting them “off the hook.” What is going on? One possibility is that we are making a mistake. I explore the alternative hypothesis that our ambivalent reactions, far from involving any mistake, are entirely consistent and appropriate. Rather than some single privileged ought such that the idea that “ought” implies “feasible” is either true or false, there are simply different oughts that are supposed to be capable of operating in the service of, and playing distinct roles associated with, what I shall call different core normative practices. In particular, there is a) some salient core practice-serving ought for which it’s true that “ought” implies “feasible” and b) some other salient core practice-serving ought for which it’s false that “ought” implies “feasible.” I sketch a framework for understanding different core practice-serving oughts in general and then use this framework to consider which particular core practice-serving oughts might be capable of vindicating our ambivalence. I begin by considering and rejecting a prevalent and prima facie promising account according to which the relevant oughts are the prescriptive ought and the evaluative ought. I then propose a different account that holds that the oughts we need are instead the deliberative ought and the hypological ought. (shrink)

An open question in the semantics of modality is what relations there are among different modal flavours. In this article, we consider the thorny issue of whether ascribing to an agent the obligation to φ implies that it is possible for the agent to φ. Traditionally, this issue has been interpreted as whether ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. But another linguistic interpretation is available as well, namely, whether ‘must’ implies ‘can’ (MIC). We show that ‘must’ does imply ‘can’ (...) via a convergent argument. The first strand of the argument is theoretical: it consists in proving MIC from a well-established theory of modality in natural language, i.e., that proposed by Kratzer. The second strand is empirical: we present novel acceptability judgment studies showing that MIC predicts and explains the linguistic behaviour of native English speakers. (shrink)

A familiar complaint against the principle that “ought” implies “can” is that it seems that agents can intentionally make it the case that they cannot perform acts that they nonetheless ought to perform. I propose a related principle that I call the principle that “the thing to do” implies “can.” I argue that the principle that “the thing to do” implies “can” is implied by important but underappreciated truths about practical reason, and that it is (...) not vulnerable to the familiar complaint against “ought” implies “can.” Moreover, I suggest that “the thing to do” implies “can” has interesting implications for “ought” implies “can” - implications that depend on the relation between claims about what we ought to do and claims about the thing to do. (shrink)

Knows-knows principles in epistemology say that if you know some proposition, then you are in a position to know that you know it. This paper examines the viability of analogous principles in ethics, which I call ought-ought principles. Several epistemologists have recently offered new defences of KK principles and of other related principles, and there has recently been an increased interest in examining analogies between ethics and epistemology, and so it seems natural to examine whether defences of KK (...) and related principles carry over to OO principles. In this paper, I introduce two OO principles, and I show how some arguments in favour of KK carry over to them. Then I show how these OO principles can be used to shed light on a much-discussed case in ethics, that of Professor Procrastinate. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the results of an experimental study on intuitions about moral obligation (ought) and ability (can). Many philosophers accept as an axiom the principle known as “Ought Implies Can” (OIC). If the truth of OIC is intuitive, such that it is accepted by many philosophers as an axiom, then we would expect people to judge that agents who are unable to perform an action are not morally obligated to perform that action. The results (...) of my experimental study show that participants were more inclined to judge that an agent ought to perform an action than that the agent can perform the action. Overall, participants said that an agent ought to perform an action even when they said that the agent cannot do it. I discuss the implications of these results for the debate over OIC. (shrink)

I defend the following version of the ought-implies-can principle: (OIC) by virtue of conceptual necessity, an agent at a given time has an (objective, pro tanto) obligation to do only what the agent at that time has the ability and opportunity to do. In short, obligations correspond to ability plus opportunity. My argument has three premises: (1) obligations correspond to reasons for action; (2) reasons for action correspond to potential actions; (3) potential actions correspond to ability plus opportunity. (...) In the bulk of the paper I address six objections to OIC: three objections based on putative counterexamples, and three objections based on arguments to the effect that OIC conflicts with the is/ought thesis, the possibility of hard determinism, and the denial of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

There are cases in which, intuitively, an agent’s action is both morally right in one sense, and morally wrong in another sense. Such cases (along with other intuitions about blameless wrongdoing and action-guidance) support distinguishing between the objective moral ‘ought’ and the subjective moral ‘ought.’ This chapter argues against drawing this distinction, on the grounds that the prescriptions delivered by an adequate objective moral theory must be sensitive to the mental states of agents. Specifically, an adequate theory of (...) the objective moral ‘ought’ must respect a strong ought-implies-can principle—morally ought implies agentially can—in order to prescribe actions to real-life agents. An agent’s mental states determine what is agentially possible for that agent; thus, what an agent objectively morally ought to do is in part determined by the agent’s mental states. This chapter describes the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory that is both objective and mental state-sensitive. This non-ideal theory illuminates the shortcomings of extant objectivist and subjectivist moral theories, and illustrates how we can dispense with the subjective moral ‘ought.’. (shrink)

I report the results of a follow-up study, designed to address concerns raised by Kurthy and Lawford-Smith in response to my original study on intuitions about moral obligation (ought) and ability (can). Like the results of the original study, the results of the follow-up study do not support the hypothesis that OIC is intuitive. The results of both studies suggest that OIC is probably not a principle of ordinary moral cognition. As I have argued in my paper, I take (...) this to mean that OIC can no longer be taken as axiomatic. It must be argued for without appealing to intuitions. (shrink)

Some recent defenses of the 'ought' implies 'can' (OIC) principle try to derive that principle from uncontroversial claims about reasons for action. Reasons for action, it's said, are reasons only for 'potential' actions, which are actions that an agent can perform. Given that 'ought' implies 'reasons', it seems we have our proof of OIC. In this paper, I argue that this latest strategy for defending OIC fails.

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. (shrink)

According to typical ought-implies-can principles, if you have an obligation to vaccinate me tomorrow, then you can vaccinate me tomorrow. Such principles are uninformative about conditional obligations: what if you only have an obligation to vaccinate me tomorrow if you synthesize a vaccine today? Then maybe you cannot vaccinate me tomorrow ; what you can do instead, I propose, is make it the case that the conditional obligation is not violated. More generally, I propose the ought-implies-can-obey (...) principle: an agent has an obligation only at times at which the agent can obey the obligation. I also propose another principle, which captures the idea that ‘ought’ implies ‘can avoid’. I defend both principles mainly by arguing that they help explain why agents lose obligations, including conditional ones. (shrink)

This is a short response to Sybille Schmidt's paper (in the same volume) "Is There an Ethics of Forgetting?". The response starts out by admitting that forgetting is an essential function of human existence, that it serves, as it were, an important evolutionary function: that it is good, since it contributes to our well-being, to have the ability to forget. But this does not give us as answer, affirmative or not, to Schmidt’s title question: “Is There an Ethics of Forgetting?” (...) The main impediment to answering this question, certainly to answering it in the affirmative, seems to be a problem that Schmidt mentions but does not in the end tackle head on: the question whether we can willfully forget – or, for that matter, remember – our own or others' past deeds. For if we cannot forget even what we will to forget, then, by the so-called "ought implies can" principle, no obligations (or even permissions) arise for us to forget (or remember) anything. The rest of the response spells out four possible ways of tackling this problem, ultimately arguing that, given the advances in medicine, it might well become possible - and to some extent it is already possible - to forget what we will to forget. (shrink)

I develop and defend the view that subjects are necessarily psychologically able to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Specifically, subjects can revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence, given their current psychological mechanisms and skills. If a subject lacks this ability, then the mental state in question is not a belief, though it may be some other kind of cognitive attitude, such as a supposi-tion, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary (...) view of belief: while most mental states we thought were beliefs are beliefs, some mental states which we thought were beliefs are not beliefs. The argument for this view draws on two key claims: First, subjects are rationally obligated to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Second, if some subject is rationally obligated to revise one of her mental states, then that subject can revise that mental state, given her current psychological mechanisms and skills. Along the way to defending these claims, I argue that rational obligations can govern activities which reflect on one’s rational character, whether or not those activities are under one’s voluntary control. I also show how the relevant version of epistemic ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ survives an objection which plagues other variants of the principle. (shrink)

Morality, it is commonly argued, cannot be extreme in the demands it makes of us, because “ought” implies “can”, and normal human psychology places limits on the extent to which most of us are capable of devoting our lives to the service of others. To evaluate this argument, we need to distinguish different uses of “ought” and “can”. Having distinguished these uses, we find that there is more than one defensible version of the principle that “ought” (...) implies “can”. However, these distinctions can also be deployed to show that the attempt to argue from this principle to the conclusion that morality cannot be extremely demanding fails. (shrink)

From the dictum "ought implies can", it has been argued that no account of belief's normativity can avoid the unpalatable result that, for unbelievable propositions such as "It is raining and nobody believes that it is raining", one ought not to believe them even if true. In this article, I argue that this move only succeeds on a faulty assumption about the conjunction of doxastic "oughts.".

William Alston’s argument against epistemological deontologism rests upon two key premises: first, that we lack a suitable amount of voluntary control with respect to our beliefs, and, second, the principle that “ought” implies “can.” While several responses to Alston have concerned rejecting either of these two premises, I argue that even on the assumption that both premises are true, there is room to be made for deontologism in epistemology. I begin by offering a criticism of Richard Feldman’s invaluable (...) work on ‘role-oughts’, whereupon I development my own positive view in light of Feldman’s shortcomings. The upshot is that while we as epistemic agents are not responsible for the beliefs we form, we are nonetheless responsible for the various bodily or mental activities that typically bear a causal influence on belief formation. (shrink)

The syntactic structure of the deontic “ought” has been much debated in philosophy and linguistics. Schroeder argues that the deontic “ought” is syntactically ambiguous in the sense that it can be associated with either a control or raising construction. He distinguishes between deliberative and evaluative “ought”s and argues that the deliberative “ought” is control while the evaluative “ought” is raising. However, if there is a control sense of “ought,” it implies that there is (...) a sense of “ought” in which the word carries an external argument. Chrisman (2012) proposes two linguistic tests to verify this prediction. I add a new test, which I call the intensionality test, to the list. (shrink)

One natural way to argue for the existence of some subjective constraint on agents’ obligations is to maintain that without that particular constraint, agents will sometimes be obligated to do that which they lack the ability to do. In this paper, I maintain that while such a strategy appears promising, it is fraught with pitfalls. Specifically, I argue that because the truth of an ability ascription depends on an (almost always implicit) characterization of the relevant possibility space, different metaethical accounts (...) take obligation to be constrained by different senses of ability. As a result, what initially looks to be a point of consensus—that ability constrains obligation—turns out to be a point of contention, and arguments with this at the foundation are much more likely to obscure, rather than resolve, metaethical disputes. Despite this, appeals to ability in metaethics aren’t doomed to be fruitless. On the contrary, if we can independently establish a particular sense of ability as the normatively relevant one, then we have good grounds for ruling out metaethical accounts that are inconsistent with it. In the final section, I make just such an argument. What seems right about the thought that ability constrains obligation is that an agent cannot be obligated to do that which her circumstances prevent her from doing. I argue that only a sense of ability that is both epistemically and motivationally restricted adequately respects the limits of agential control. (shrink)

Morally speaking, what should one do when one is morally uncertain? Call this the Moral Uncertainty Question. In this paper, I argue that a non-ideal moral theory provides the best answer to the Moral Uncertainty Question. I begin by arguing for a strong ought-implies-can principle---morally ought implies agentially can---and use that principle to clarify the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory. I then describe the ways in which one's moral uncertainty affects one's moral prescriptions: moral (...) uncertainty constrains the set of moral prescriptions one is subject to, and at the same time generates new non-ideal moral reasons for action. I end by surveying the problems that plague alternative answers to the Moral Uncertainty Question, and show that my preferred answer avoids most of those problems. (shrink)

The paper argues that applications of the principle that “ought” implies “can” (OIC) depend on normative considerations even if the link between “ought” and “can” is logical in nature. Thus, we should reject a common, “factualist” conception of OIC and endorse weak “normativism”. Even if we use OIC as the rule ““cannot” therefore “not ought””, applying OIC is not a mere matter of facts and logic, as factualists claim, but often draws on “proto-ideals” of moral agency.

It is natural and relatively common to suppose that feasibility is a constraint on what we ought to do all-things-considered but not a constraint on what we ought to do as a matter of justice. I show that the combination of these claims entails an implausible picture of the relation between feasibility and desirability given an attractive understanding of the relation between what we ought to do as a matter of justice and what we ought to (...) do all-things-considered. (shrink)

Compatibilism is the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Natural compatibilism is the view that in ordinary social cognition, people are compatibilists. Researchers have recently debated whether natural compatibilism is true. This paper presents six experiments (N = 909) that advance this debate. The results provide the best evidence to date for natural compatibilism, avoiding the main methodological problems faced by previous work supporting the view. In response to simple scenarios about familiar activities, people judged that agents had (...) moral responsibilities to perform actions that they were unable to perform (Experiment 1), were morally responsible for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 2), were to blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiments 3-4), deserved blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 5), and should suffer consequences for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 6). These findings advance our understanding of moral psychology and philosophical debates that depend partly on patterns in commonsense morality. (shrink)

In 1935, the Nazi government introduced what came to be known as the abrogation of the pro- hibition of analogy. This measure, a feature of the new penal law, required judges to stray from the letter of the written law and to consider instead whether an action was worthy of pun- ishment according to the ‘sound perception of the people’ and the ‘underlying principle’ of existing criminal statutes. In discussions of Nazi law, an almost unanimous conclusion is that a system (...) of criminal law ought not to contain legislation of this sort. This conclusion is often based on how the abro- gation relates to the normative claim that the law ought to be predictable. In particular, it has been argued that since the law ought to be predictable, and since this type of analogy legis- lation implied, caused or contributed to the diminution of the law’s predictability, this type of legislation ought to be prohibited. In this paper, we argue that this argument is not entirely correct. While we believe that the law ought to be predictable and that there is evidence for the claim that the Nazis’ intro- duction of analogical reasoning implied, caused, or contributed to a diminution of predictability, this fact is logically too weak to ground the conclusion that necessarily a penal system ought not to contain legislation of this kind. Despite the undeniable wickedness of the Nazi penal system, this type of analogical reasoning can be made consistent with the pre- dictability of the law. We argue that consistency of this sort depends on whether the use of analogy is supplemented by certain contextual background conditions. The occurrence of these conditions blocks an inference from the fact that the law ought to be predictable to the conclusion that a penal system ought not to allow for this type of analogical reasoning. (shrink)

Epistemic burdens – the nature and extent of our ignorance (that and how) with respect to various courses of action – serve to determine our incentive structures. Courses of action that seem to bear impossibly heavy epistemic burdens are typically not counted as options in an actor’s menu, while courses of action that seem to bear comparatively heavy epistemic burdens are systematically discounted in an actor’s menu relative to options that appear less epistemically burdensome. That ignorance serves to determine what (...) counts as an option means that epistemic considerations are logically prior to moral, prudential, and economic considerations: in order to have moral, prudential, or economic obligations, one must have options, and epistemic burdens serve to determine our options. One cannot have obligations without doing some epistemic work. We defend this claim on introspective grounds. We also consider how epistemic burdens distort surrogate decision-making. The unique epistemology of surrogate cases makes the priority of the epistemic readily apparent. We then argue that anyone who accepts a principle similar to ought implies can is committed to the logical priority of the epistemic. We also consider and reject several possible counterarguments. -/- . (shrink)

According to a common caricature of Kant’s ethics, it is synonymous with the Categorical Imperative (CI) and with the sublime and clarion call of duty. But in this paper, I argue that the conjunction of Kant’s concept of duty and his idea of morality as a system of imperatives is unsustainable on the grounds that it commits him to the following two theses: (I) If an agent has a duty to D, then she must be constrained to D, and (II) (...) the Supreme Law of Morality always manifests in the form of duty for humans. I begin by examining (and rejecting) various attempts to defend these two theses. I then explore how this bears on various central aspects of Kant's thought including “ought implies can” (OIC), “ought implies able not to” (OIAN), his system of duties, and the nature of respect. (shrink)

A type of transcendental argument for libertarian free will maintains that if acting freely requires the availability of alternative possibilities, and determinism holds, then one is not justified in asserting that there is no free will. More precisely: if an agent A is to be justified in asserting a proposition P (e.g. "there is no free will"), then A must also be able to assert not-P. Thus, if A is unable to assert not-P, due to determinism, then A is not (...) justified in asserting P. While such arguments often appeal to principles with wide appeal, such as the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, they also require a commitment to principles that seem far less compelling, e.g. the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘able not to’ or the principle that having an obligation entails being responsible. It is argued here that these further principles are dubious, and that it will be difficult to construct a valid transcendental argument without them. (shrink)

During the idea generation phase of the design process, designers often search for inspirations in external sources of information, such as photographs, written descriptions and physical examples. These sources have potential to enhance creative performance. However, they sometimes become too attached to particular ideas of external precedents or various examples. It refers to fixation which is identified as inadequate adoption of features from existing examples. Influence of the existing examples on creativity and fixation, specifically textual examples, have been discussed in (...) this research. -/- For the nature of design, researchers highlighted the restructuring process of design problem by new sources because the capabilities and boundaries of design problems are not defined very well. Further, the design problem is not knowable at any specific point. Design knowledge identifies itself by its ambiguity. Many models have been developed for design process. The various numbers of divided phases of the models can be seen as having two main areas: (1) idea generation phase (or “ideation”); (2) later phase for details. Idea generation plays an important role in the design process. It is the area of new and creative configurations on design. -/- Creativity is an integral part of the design process. Designers purpose to achieve original ideas to demonstrate their ability and unique designs. External stimuli or inspirational inputs play important roles to increase creativity. They can support moments of stimulation. Associations between information from memory and external stimuli can contribute to the creation of new meanings. Designers are widely influenced by their surroundings in daily lives. However, each stimulus may not be the part of a more creative result Even if designers want to utilize stimulus as an inspirational source, somehow it may fixate their mind to its surface features and they may lose potential creative contributions of the source. It is called fixation. There is much research that shows significant evidence of conformity effects across the design problems. -/- The given examples to designers may cause higher-level fixation and lower-level creativity or vice versa. Fixation may occur when example solutions are introduced, on the other hand, the designers may create more original ideas as well. There is a need for research to find ways to avoid fixation traps or reduce their adverse impact. Thus, this research focuses on variables of the given example. -/- The following claims show some research areas remained unclear: (1) Some researchers investigated textual examples as - one of the modalities of representation - but did not focus on forms of textual examples. (2) Much research has been conducted with examples which are selected by the researcher. Nevertheless, designers can also choose or produce their own stimuli. There is not much research on this possibility. In this context, my research focuses on the following two variables through two studies (Study 1 and 2): (1) forms of textual examples; (2) self-construction of textual examples. First, most of the studies in the literature have focused on visual presentation and there is not enough research on the content and form of the text. The study of textual examples has still not been awarded enough attention especially as various forms of text. Some forms of text are as follows: keyword, paragraph, sentence, poem. These observations lead me to the following research question: Which forms of textual example increase creativity and reduce fixation more? (Study 1). -/- Second, most of the studies regarding textual examples have used prose or keywords. The poems have been ignored. However, poems imply more meaning with fewer words. The structure of the poems enables more creative narratives than structure of prose. Because unusual organization of words stimulates the readers and draws their attention. This activates the creative performance of the reader. The surrealist poem is the extreme form of this activation. It is random assemblies with headlines and sentences which is cut from newspapers. Thus, novel meaning networks are formed. The method of creating a surrealist poem offers a new way of getting inspiration. It is termed as self-construction practice by this research. Through this method, designers create their own example from the given one. Reconstruction of the text may increase the creative process and prevent fixations from the given text. This suggestion led me to the following research question: If the designers write their own poem instead of a given poem (as a self-construction practice), can they internalize the textual example? In addition, does it produce more creative and less fixated designs? (Study 2). Two experimental studies were planned to partially answer the research questions, in which novice students of architecture were asked to solve two different design problems, under different conditions. All of the experimental sessions were conducted in a design education studio. The participants produced sketches and added a written explanation relating to their designs. Fluency, flexibility and repetition of key attributes were calculated by the researcher. -/- Originality, practicality, understanding of the task and quality were ranked by judges. Study 1 shows us tendencies of using various textual forms. Distinctions of keywords and of poems have appeared among them. This emphasizes the role of keyword and poem in the design process as inspirational sources and provides many tips for their potential use. The keyword also leads to a high degree of fixation. However, a low degree of fixation is observed when poems are presented as inspirational examples. -/- In Study 2, the self-constructed poem seems to support develop more successful design ideas from many perspectives. In the context of the surrealist poem, writing and reading the surrealist poem trigger the designers’ imagination. At first, the words and lines of poems seem unrelated to each other and designers try to relate them and solve the puzzle of meaning. Hence, novel meaning networks are formed. It indicates that surrealist poems are able to activate the creative performance of the designers. Writing their own surrealist poems ,as a self-construction practice, motivated designers to begin to produce by having fun. Motivated designers have stimulated themselves to produce creative ideas. In other words, the self-construction process may be added to the design process models in the earlier part of the idea generation phase which is called as pre-design and warm-up phase. This earlier phase makes designers highly motivated and they internalized the given examples. -/- Following the conclusions, several implications and recommendations for the design process and education are discussed. (shrink)

Does ?ought? imply ?can? for collectives' obligations? In this paper I want to establish two things. The first, what a collective obligation means for members of the collective. The second, how collective ability can be ascertained. I argue that there are four general kinds of obligation, which devolve from collectives to members in different ways, and I give an account of the distribution of obligation from collectives to members for each of these kinds. One implication of understanding collective obligation (...) and ability in the proposed way is that a group can be blameworthy for failing to realize its obligation even when no member of the group is blameworthy for failing to realize her obligation. (shrink)