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Notes
It seems very plausible to me that one role of ideal ‘oughts’ is to reveal standards and values, rather than guide action, in which case it is not necessary that they imply ‘can’. See Lawford-Smith (2010). Graham (2011) has argued recently that positive obligations imply ‘can’ while negative obligations do not, e.g., we ought not kill, whether or not we can help it, but we ought give to charity, only if we have the resources to. For a good survey of the “ought implies can” debate, see Vranas (2007). See also Feldman’s (1986) discussion of accessibility.
That is not to suggest that these jobs exhaust moral and political philosophy. Moral philosophy should also tell us what a good person is like, and how persons ought to be; political philosophy should tell us what a good society is like, and how both domestic and international political culture ought to be. Both tell us about what is good or valuable, as well as what ought to be the case.
In general, conditional obligation is not well understood. It cannot involve the material conditional, because the logic of that conditional makes both the “wide-scope” and the “narrow-scope” readings implausible. Perhaps conditional obligation is best understood as primitive; the issue needs further discussion. See discussion in (Lewis 2000).
Some statements about moral obligation imply that ‘closer is better’, while others are silent on what ought to be the case given their failure to be realised. Percentage of income is linear; it seems clear that if you ought to give 10%, and yet you won’t, the next best thing is 9% (assuming for simplicity that the next percentage is not an integer). But what if you ought to ‘help the others rescue that drowning man’? This says nothing about what to do if the others refuse to cooperate, or you yourself are unwilling or unable to play your part.
Standardly P (S | A) is defined as P (S & A)/P (A), but it might be better to read it ‘subjunctively’—see discussion in (Joyce 2009 Ch. 5). It could also be read as the probability of the counterfactual conditional, namely, A □ → S.
More precisely: the proposition that the action occurs.
The alternative is to make it scalar, in which case instead of blocking a requirement (if it’s not the case that S is non-ideally accessible, then it’s not the case that x ought to A), it would count against a requirement in some to-be-specified way (e.g. the more non-ideally inaccessible S is, the less that x ought to A). But then accessibility ceases to play a negative role by restricting the set of actions/states of affairs that are candidates for what ought to be the case, and starts playing a positive role in what ought to be done/brought about. But that would require a much fuller discussion of how much accessibility should matter in deciding what to do. It can’t be straightforwardly that the more accessible an option is the more it ought to be done, because that would show a strong bias toward the status quo, or states of affairs and actions that are easy to bring about/do. For a nearby discussion on scalar feasibility see (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012; Lawford-Smith 2012b.
Whether there is one unique closest world is controversial. See discussion in Feldman (1986 17).
I assume that we can make sense of an intuitive idea of ‘most of the nearby worlds’, even though strictly speaking possible worlds are infinite.
Here I am assuming that there is a unique closest world where A is the case, and that the objective probability of S given A at the actual world is equivalent to the objective probability that the whole counterfactual conditional ‘if it were the case that A, it would be the case that S’ is true at that unique closest A world. But this is controversial; in general it is an open question whether we can translate talk about probabilities into talk about closeness of worlds. David Lewis has proved that conditional probability is not equivalent to the probability of a conditional (Lewis 1976). Williams and Robert (2011) has an interesting discussion about this result for counterfactual conditionals.
I owe this suggestion to David Weins in the context of the Moral, Social and Political Theory Reading Group at the Australian National University, and am grateful to David, Geoff Brennan, Nic Southwood, and Seth Lazar for discussion.
I borrow this example from (Louise 2009). Louise argues that both the oughts are relevant, because people genuinely find themselves caught between doing all that they ought to do, and failing in familiar ways and doing only what they ought to do in light of those failures (see esp. p. 346).
I am grateful to Michael Smith for discussion on this point.
On the usual constraints, see discussion in Gilabert and Lawford-Smith (2012).
See Cordes-de Waal’s (1996) discussion of omissions, and the correlation between omitting agents’ blameworthiness when the omission is intended compared with when it is a non-decision (i.e. the time in which a decision could have been made has simply run out).
I borrow this example from Pablo Gilabert. The other way to go, I suppose, is to say that escaping the office building is inaccessible in the low-stakes case and remains inaccessible even in the high-stakes case, but that sometimes we should do inaccessible things. Because I use accessibility as a way to rule-out obligations, I prefer not to go this way. If the actions are things we should do, then they’re things that it is accessible for us to do (because of the assumption that “ought implies non-ideal accessibility”). They can’t be both inaccessible and something we ought to do.
A further alternative is to take the normativity out of the definition of non-ideal accessibility entirely, and put it into the relevant principle. So we could shift to a non-binary definition, e.g. NIAx (S) = maxA P (S | A) (the non-ideal accessibility of a state of affairs for an agent is equal to the probability of the state of affairs given that action of the agent’s which gives the state of affairs the best chance of success), and modify the relevant principle from “non-ideal ought implies non-ideal accessibility” to “non-ideal ought implies accessibility greater than contextually-defined threshold z”.
Åqvist (1991 219) discusses moral oughts indexed to different times, which is one way of their being ideal to differing degrees (as time passes, the space of possibilities narrows).
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper, then titled “Agent-Relative Feasibility and Weakness of Will”, was presented at the workshop “Feasibility and Political Theory” at Jesus College, Oxford, March 15–16, 2011. I am grateful to my respondent John Filling for his commentary. I would like to thank Geoff Brennan, Bob Goodin, Nicholas Southwood, and audiences at the Australian National University, the University of Oxford, and Århus University for comments and suggestions on that paper; and Stephanie Collins, Wolfgang Schwarz, Daniel Stoljar, Christian Barry, Nicholas Southwood, Al Hájek, the audience at the University of Sheffield, and two anonymous reviewers, for useful discussion on the present version.
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Lawford-Smith, H. Non-Ideal Accessibility. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 653–669 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9384-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9384-1