“‘Ought’ implies ‘can’” and the scope of moral requirements

‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ and the principle of alternate possibilities

In his paper ‘What we are morally responsible for’,1 Harry Frankfurt claims, in passing, that while the ‘Frankfurt Counterexamples’2 are counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP: An agent is morally blameworthy3 for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise), they are not counterexamples to the famous Kantian maxim that ‘Ought’ implies ‘Can’. In an Analysis...

Internal Reasons and the Ought-implies-can Principle1

The task of this essay is to use the ought-implies-can principle (OIC) to clarify and defend Bernard Williams’ claim that all reasons are internal. On the interpretation offered here, the internalism/externalism controversy initiated by Williams is about the indexicality of normative practical reasons. The central question is this: Are all of our reasons anchored to our current beliefs and desi...

“Ought implies Can”: secondary and higher-order interpretations

In this paper we will investigate the “Ought implies Can” (OIC) thesis. We will concentrate on explanations and interpretations of OIC, clarifying its uses and relevance. The OIC thesis is relevant to debates that ranges from semantics and pragmatics to legal philosophy, deontic logic and the philosophy of action and mind. We state the different theses that have been proposed concerning OIC and...

Practical Reasons and Moral ‘Ought’

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’1 When we say that someon...

More on “Ought” Implies “Can” and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities