Results for 'ought-implies-can'

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  1. Ought Implies Can Or Could Have.Andrew Dennis Bassford - 2022 - Review of Metaphysics 75 (4):779-807.
    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 (...)
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  2. 'Ought' Implies 'Can' and the Argument from Self-Imposed Impossibility: a Critical Examination.Mostofa N. Mansur - 2013 - Copula 30:12.
    Defenders of the Kantian maxim, i.e. ‘oughtimplies ‘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 ‘oughtimplies ‘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 (...)
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  3. "Ought Implies Can,” Framing Effects, and "Empirical Refutations".Alicia Kissinger-Knox, Patrick Aragon & Moti Mizrahi - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (1):165-182.
    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 (...)
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  4. Ought implies can, asymmetrical freedom, and the practical irrelevance of transcendental freedom.Matthé Scholten - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):25-42.
    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.
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  5. Does ought imply can?Miklos Kurthy - 2017 - PLoS ONE 12 (4):e0175206.
    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 (...)
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  6. Ought Implies Can’: Not So Pragmatic After All.Alex King - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (3):637-661.
    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 (...)
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  7. Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Can’ from an Epistemic Point of View?Moti Mizrahi - 2012 - Philosophia 40 (4):829-840.
    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 (...)
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  8. Ought-implies-can: Erasmus Luther and R.m. Hare.Charles R. Pigden - 1990 - Sophia 29 (1):2-30.
    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 (...)-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)
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  9. Determinism, ‘OughtImplies ‘Can’ and Moral Obligation.Nadine Elzein - 2020 - Dialectica 74 (1):35-62..
    Haji argues that determinism threatens deontic morality, not via a threat to moral responsibility, but directly, because of the principle that ‘oughtimplies ‘can’. Haji’s argument requires not only that we embrace an ‘oughtimplies ‘can’ principle, but also that we adopt the principle that ‘oughtimplies ‘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 (...)
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  10. Deontological evidentialism and ought implies can.Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (10):2567-2582.
    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 (...)
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  11. 'Ought Implies Can' and the Possibility of Group Obligations.Isaac Hadfield - 2020 - British Undergraduate Philosophy Review 1 (1):40-49.
    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 (...)
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  12. Some Contemporary Issues about Ought Implies Can: Where Does Kant Fit in?Samuel Kahn - 2023 - Jahrbuch für Recht Und Ethik 31 (1):187-207.
    Die meisten Philosophen stimmen darin überein, dass Kant sich dem Prinzip „Sollen impliziert Können“, bzw. „ought implies can“ (OIC), verschrieben hat. Allerdings sind sich nur wenige darüber einig, wie die Bedeutung von OIC zu verstehen ist. Außerhalb der Kant-Wissenschaft gibt es Debatten über die Bedeutung von „sollen“, die Bedeutung von „impliziert“ und die Bedeutung von „können“ in diesem Prinzip. Innerhalb der Kant-Forschung besteht kein Konsens darüber, was Kant zu diesen Themen dachte. In diesem Artikel versuche ich, diese Situation (...)
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  13. The Varieties of Ought-implies-Can and Deontic STIT Logic.Kees van Berkel & Tim Lyon - 2013 - In Sergei Artemov & Anil Nerode (eds.), Logical Foundations of Computer Science (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7734). Springer.
    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 (...)
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  14. Ought-implies-can, the original position, and reflective equilibrium.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    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.
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  15. Ideal Theory and "Ought Implies Can".Amy Berg - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):869-890.
    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 (...)
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  16. An Analysis of Recent Empirical Data on ‘OughtImplies ‘Can’.Yishai Cohen - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (1):57-67.
    Recent experimental studies dispute the position that commonsense morality accepts ‘OughtImplies ‘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.
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  17. Internal reasons and the ought-implies-can principle.Jonny Anomaly - 2008 - Philosophical Forum 39 (4):469-483.
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  18. Ought’ Does Not Imply ‘Can’.Moti Mizrahi - 2009 - Philosophical Frontiers 4 (1):19-35.
    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 (...)
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  19. Global obligations, collective capacities, and ‘ought implies can’.Bill Wringe - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1523-1538.
    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 (...)
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  20. How “ought” exceeds but implies “can”: Description and encouragement in moral judgment.John Turri - 2017 - Cognition 168 (C):267-275.
    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 (...)
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  21. Acting with Good Intentions: Virtue Ethics and the Principle that Ought Implies Can.Charles K. Fink - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Research 45:79-95.
    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; (...)
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  22. Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Might’? How (not) to Resolve the Conflict between Act and Motive Utilitarianism.James Skidmore - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (1):207-221.
    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 (...)
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  23. “The Thing To Do” Implies “Can”.Nicholas Southwood - 2013 - Noûs 50 (1):61-72.
    A familiar complaint against the principle that “oughtimplies “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 (...)
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  24. ‘Must’ implies ‘can’.Miklós Kürthy, Fabio Del Prete & Luca Barlassina - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (3):620-643.
    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 ‘oughtimplies ‘can’. But another linguistic interpretation is available as well, namely, whether ‘must’ implies ‘can’ (MIC). We show that ‘must’ does imply ‘can’ (...)
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  25. Does “Ought” Imply “Feasible”?Nicholas Southwood - 2016 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 44 (1):7-45.
    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 (...)
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  26. (3 other versions)Review: M. v. Ackeren and M. Kühler (Eds.) The Limits of Moral Obligation: Moral Demandingness and Ought Implies Can (New York: Routledge, 2016), 210 pages. ISBN: 9781138824232 (Hbk). Hardback: £90.00. [REVIEW]Alfred Archer - forthcoming - Journal of Moral Philosophy.
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  27. Does Ought Imply Ought Ought?Daniel Immerman - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (273):702-716.
    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 (...)
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  28. Ought, Can, and Presupposition: An Experimental Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Methode 4 (6):232-243.
    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 (...)
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  29. I Ought, Therefore I Can.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (2):167-216.
    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. (...)
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  30. Dispensing with the Subjective Moral 'Ought'.Amelia Hicks - 2022 - In Mark C. Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 11.
    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 (...)
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  31. If You Can't Change What You Believe, You Don't Believe It.Grace Helton - 2018 - Noûs 54 (3):501-526.
    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 supposition, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary (...)
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  32. I Ought, Therefore I Can Obey.Peter Vranas - 2018 - Philosophers' Imprint 18.
    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 (...)
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  33. Ought’, ‘Can’, and Fairness.Rob van Someren Greve - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (5):913-922.
    According to the principle that ‘oughtimplies ‘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 (...)
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  34. Ought’, ‘Can’, and Practical Reasons.Clayton Littlejohn - 2009 - American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (4):363-73.
    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.
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  35. Blameworthiness Implies 'Ought Not'.Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette - 2024 - Philosophical Studies:1-21.
    Here is a crucial principle for debates about moral luck, responsibility, and free will: a subject is blameworthy for an act only if, in acting, she did what she ought not to have done. That is, ‘blameworthiness’ impliesought not’ (BION). There are some good reasons to accept BION, but whether we should accept it depends on complex questions about the objectivity of ought and the subjectivity of blameworthiness. This paper offers an exploratory defence of BION: (...)
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  36. Ought We to Forget What We Cannot Forget? A Reply to Sybille Schmidt.Attila Tanyi - 2015 - In Giovanni Galizia & David Shulman (eds.), Forgetting: An Interdisciplinary Conversation. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press. pp. 258-262.
    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?” (...)
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  37. Ought, Can, and Presupposition: A Reply to Kurthy and Lawford-Smith.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Methode 4 (6):250-256.
    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 (...)
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  38.  96
    When does ‘Can’ imply ‘Ought’?Stephanie Collins - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (3):354-375.
    ABSTRACTThe Assistance Principle is common currency to a wide range of moral theories. Roughly, this principle states: if you can fulfil important interests, at not too high a cost, then you have a moral duty to do so. I argue that, in determining whether the ‘not too high a cost’ clause of this principle is met, we must consider three distinct costs: ‘agent-relative costs’, ‘recipient-relative costs’ and ‘ideal-relative costs’.
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  39. Non-ideal prescriptions for the morally uncertain.Amelia Hicks - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (4):1039-1064.
    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 (...)
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  40. Factualism, Normativism and the Bounds of Normativity.Thomas M. Besch - 2011 - Dialogue 50 (2):347-365.
    The paper argues that applications of the principle that “oughtimplies “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.
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  41. Unbelievable thoughts and doxastic oughts.Adam C. Podlaskowski - 2010 - Theoria 76 (2):112-118.
    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.".
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  42. Demandingness, "Ought", and Self-Shaping.Cullity Garrett - 2016 - In Michael Kuhler Marcel van Ackeren (ed.), The Limits of Moral Obligation: Moral Demandingness and Ought Implies Can. Routledge. pp. 147-62.
    Morality, it is commonly argued, cannot be extreme in the demands it makes of us, because “oughtimplies “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 (...)
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  43. Epistemic Deontologism and Role-Oughts.Jon Altschul - 2014 - Logos and Episteme 5 (3):245-263.
    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 “oughtimplies “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 (...)
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  44. Rethinking Kant on Duty.Samuel Kahn - 2021 - Review of Metaphysics 74 (296):497-526.
    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) (...)
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  45. From Radical Evil to Constitutive Moral Luck in Kant's Religion.Robert J. Hartman - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
    The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous (...)
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  46. The Priority of the Epistemic.Parker Crutchfield & Scott Scheall - 2021 - Episteme 18 (4):726-737.
    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 (...)
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  47. The Feasibility of Collectives' Actions.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3):453-467.
    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 (...)
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  48. Individual Maxim Tokens, not Abstract Maxim Types.Samuel Kahn - 2024 - Kantian Review:1-17.
    I argue that Kant’s Categorical Imperative should be applied to individual maxim tokens rather than abstract maxim types. The article is divided into five sections. In the first, I explain my thesis. In the second, I show that my thesis disagrees with Rawls. In the third, I argue for my thesis on the basis of the wording of the Categorical Imperative and on the basis of considerations about autonomy. In the fourth, I argue for my thesis on the basis of (...)
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  49. To be able to, or to be able not to? That is the Question. A Problem for the Transcendental Argument for Freedom.Nadine Elzein & Tuomas K. Pernu - 2019 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (2):13-32.
    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 (...)
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  50. Devoting ourselves to the manifestly unattainable.Nicholas Southwood & David Wiens - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):696-716.
    It is tempting to think (1) that we may sometimes have hopelessly utopian duties and yet (2) that “oughtimplies “can.” How might we square these apparently conflicting claims? A simple solution is to interpret hopelessly utopian duties as duties to "pursue" the achievement of manifestly unattainable outcomes (as opposed to duties to "achieve" the outcomes), thereby promising to vindicate the possibility of such duties in a way that is compatible with “oughtimplies “can.” The main (...)
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