Volume 29, Number 1
November 2024
ARTICLE

Beyond Ought-Implies-Can: Impersonal Obligatoriness Implies Historical Contingency

Volume 29, Number 1, November 2024, Pages 29–61
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v29i1.1746
PDFPDF

Abstract

I argue first that some propositions are obligatory without being obligatory for anyone (i.e., they are impersonally obligatory): if each of us has promised to vote and thus has an obligation to vote, then it is obligatory (i.e., morally required) that we all vote, but it is not obligatory for anyone that we all vote (because, for example, what is obligatory for you is that you vote, not that we all vote). I argue next that “ought-implies-can” fails for impersonal obligatoriness: if each of us has promised to (and can) finish first in a given race, and thus it is impersonally obligatory that we all finish first (i.e., that we all finish at the same time), it does not follow that anyone (or we) can make it the case that we all finish first (we may be unable to coordinate). I defend instead the following principle: if a proposition is (impersonally) obligatory—or forbidden—at time t, then it is historically contingent at t (i.e., both the proposition and its negation are logically compatible with the history of the world up to and including t).
Copyright © 2024 Peter B. M. Vranas
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Do We Have Reasons to Obey the Law?

Edmund Tweedy Flanigan

The Significance of a Duty’s Direction: Claiming Priority Rather than Prioritizing Claims

Marcus Hedahl

Two Accounts of the Normativity of Rationality

Jonathan Way

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Luke Robinson

Supersession-Proof Reparations: Harms, Wrongs, and Historical Injustice

Felix Lambrecht

Can We Eat Animals Whose Existence Depends on It?

Karri Heikkinen

Can States Resist Migration Blackmail While Protecting Migrants?

Daniel Sharp

Can We Have Moral Status for Robots on the Cheap?

Sebastian Köhler

How We Can Make Sense of Control-Based Intuitions for Limited Access Conceptions of the Right to Privacy

Björn Lundgren

Why Extending Actions Through Time Can Violate a Moral Right to Privacy

Björn Lundgren

Can Streumer Simply Avoid Supervenience?

Luke Elson

Can “More Speech” Counter Ignorant Speech?

Maxime Lepoutre

Portico