Peter VranasRelated papers
Interpreting Action with Norms: Responsibility and the Twofold Nature of the Ought-Implies-Can Principle
Ratio Juris, 2024
This article examines the application of the ought-implies-can principle in the legal domain, especially in the relationship between obligations and responsibility. It addresses the challenge of cases in which an agent cannot do what is required of her, and yet it seems plausible to say that she has an obligation. To deal with these cases, two parallel distinctions are made: between rules of conduct and rules of imputation, and between doings and things done. It is proposed that these distinctions show that the principle operates in two different but complementary ways: as part of prescriptive relations and as part of responsibility practices.
A Logic of Objective and Subjective Oughts
Logics in Artificial Intelligence
The relation between agentive action, knowledge, and obligation is central to the understanding of responsibility-a main topic in Artificial Intelligence. Based on the view that an appropriate formalization of said relation would contribute to the development of ethical AI, we point out the main characteristics of a logic for objective and subjective oughts that was recently introduced in the literature. This logic extends the traditional stit paradigm with deontic and epistemic operators, and provides a semantics that deals with Horty's puzzles for knowledge and obligation. We provide an axiomatization for this logic, and address its soundness and completeness with respect to a class of relevant models.
Impossible Obligations Are Not Necessarily Deliberatively Pointless
Many philosophers accept that ought implies can (OIC), but do we have a good argument for that principle? I consider one sort of argument for it, which seems to be a development of an Aristotelian idea about practical deliberation and which is proposed by, amongst others, R. M. Hare and James Griffin. After briefly rehearsing some well known objections to that sort of argument (which is based on the supposed pointlessness of impossible obligations), I present a further objection, based on a maximally charitable reading of the argument, and conclude that nobody ought to think that it gives them a reason to accept OIC.
Does 'Ought' Still Imply 'Can'?
Philosophia
According to ‘ought’ implies‘can’ (OIC), your obligation can never be to do what you cannot do. In a recent attack on OIC, Graham has argued that intuitions about justified intervention can help us determine whether the agent whose actions we use force to prevent would have acted permissibly or not. These intuitions, he suggests, cause trouble for the idea that you can be obligated to refrain from doing what you can refrain from doing. I offer a defense of OIC and explain how nonconsequentialists can accommodate his intuitions about his cases.
'Ought', Ownership and Agentive Ought.pdf
Studia Philosophiae Christianae, 2018
Bernard Williams in his essay Ought and moral obligation (OMO) takes a stand on the proper logical interpretation of ‘ought’ sentences. He claims that ought being central to ethical reflection, that is, ought issuing personal requirements to agents, is to be interpreted like any ordinary ‘ought’ – as a propositional operator that is not indexed to a person. The driving idea behind Williams’s logical point about ‘ought’ seems to be that logical interpretation of ‘ought’ sentences with moral content in terms of indexed ought lacks semantic significance. John Broome disagrees. In a series of his recent writings devoted to an analysis of the notion of normative ought, he defends the view opposite to the one fostered by Williams. According to Broome, indexation of ‘ought’ to agent matters for extra-logical reasons; it is a way of exhibiting that ought has its normative owner, which in turn is important for determining the holder of responsibility for the ought in question. In the paper I argue that Broome may be right, but his arguments do not show that fact. In particular, I claim that he is wrong in thinking that indexation in terms of ownership is useful in the analysis of ‘ought’ sentences with agentive content, and thus nicely applies to moral ought being a paradigmatic example of such sentences. According to my diagnosis, Broome’s positive view about the semantic and ethical significance of interpreting agentive ought as indexed ought, suffers from one central problem. It alludes to an unsuccessful substantive semantics of ‘indexed ought’ that fails to give an accurate explanation of the meaning of the ought in question. I conclude the paper by offering an alternative to Broome’s substantive semantics of ‘indexed ought’, and explain why I think that it fares better in capturing the nature of the agentive ought.
The Irreducibility of Personal Obligation
Journal of philosophical logic, 2010
It is argued that claims about personal obligation (of the form s ought to ϕ) cannot be reduced to claims about impersonal obligation (of the form it ought to be the case that p). The most common attempts at such a reduction are shown to have unacceptable ...
You ought to do something! The Logic of Obligation as Weakest Permission (Short Version)
This paper studies the following interpretation of obligations: A person i ought to do A in a situation S just in case everything else i may (and can) do in S is consistent with A. In such a case A can be called the weakest permission that i has in S. We show that, under this interpretation, obligation and permission are not dual notions, and that it gives rise to an interesting interplay between deontic and alethic notions. We also discuss the logics adequacy w.r.t. the paradoxes of (classic) deontic logic and provide a sound and complete axiomatization for it. We finally show that practical, rational recommendations in games provide a natural, concrete application of such an understanding of obligations and permissions.
“‘Ought’ implies ‘can’” and the scope of moral requirements
Philosophia, 1989
The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether moral requirements range over actions or attempts. In particular, I shall examine two contexts in ethics theory that some have thought provide a basis for believing that attempts are what are morally required of agents. In both of these contexts there is an implicit appeal to the principle that 'ought' implies 'can'. In order to set the stage for my discussion of the central question, therefore, I need to begin by explaining how I think appeals to the principle that 'ought' implies 'can' typically work. Article: Part 1 If an agent is charged with wrongdoing, there are several ways that he might defend himself. He might, for example, admit that he has done something wrong, but contend that he should not be blamed for doing so. An agent who makes this defense is said to be offering an excuse for his behaviour. That one acted under duress is an example of an excuse. If I am rude to you after having been up all night tending to my sick mother. I will admit that I have behaved improperly but claim that because of the circumstances, I ought not to be blamed.
Does Ought Imply Ought Ought?
Knows-knows principles in epistemology (KK principles for short) 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 (OO principles for short). Several epistemologists have recently offered new defenses 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 seem natural to examine whether defenses 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 favor 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.
volume 18, no. 1
january 2018
I Ought, Therefore
I Can Obey
Abstract: 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 (e.g., because you cannot synthesize a vaccine);
what you can do instead, I propose, is make it the case that the conditional obligation is not violated (i.e., that you do not both synthesize
a vaccine today and fail to vaccinate me tomorrow). 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.e., can
make it the case that the obligation is not violated). 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 (i.e., stop having) obligations, including conditional ones.
1. Introduction
Peter B. M. Vranas
University of Wisconsin — Madison
© 2018 Peter B. M. Vranas
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
<www.philosophersimprint.org/018001/>
Twenty years ago, when Paul’s daughter was in kindergarten, Paul
promised her that, if she ever obtained a doctorate, he would immediately buy her a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan as a gift.
Motivated by this promise, which Paul repeatedly reairmed in later
years, Paul’s daughter has studied hard, and she has just obtained her
doctorate today. Paul was very wealthy when he made the promise,
but he has recently gambled away his wealth; he is now heavily in
debt, and no one will give him a loan. Despite his promise, Paul cannot
buy his daughter an apartment in Manhattan today (or indeed anytime soon). Does he nevertheless have an obligation to do so?
I believe that he does not. I subscribe to the following ought-implies-can principle: (OIC) If an agent at a given time has an obligation
to do something, then the agent at that time can do the thing. (I formulate OIC more carefully in §2.) Using OIC and the claim that right now
Paul cannot buy his daughter an apartment in Manhattan, I infer that
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I Ought, Therefore I Can Obey
right now he has no obligation to do so. I have extensively defended
OIC in previous work (Vranas 2007), but it remains highly controversial.1 Nevertheless, my main goal in this paper is not to defend OIC
further. (I do this in Vranas 2017a.) My main goal is instead to ill two
lacunas in the literature on ought-implies-can principles.
To explain one of the lacunas, suppose Paula has just promised her
son that, if she wins a thousand dollars in the lottery this month, she
will buy him a château in southern France as a gift next month. Paula
is very poor, and is currently unable to buy her son a château next
month. Therefore, according to OIC, Paula currently has no (unconditional) obligation to buy her son a château next month. But does
she currently have a conditional obligation to buy her son a château
next month if she wins a thousand dollars in the lottery this month?
According to the spirit of OIC, she does not: a thousand dollars is not
nearly enough money, even as a down payment, to enable Paula to buy
a château. OIC, however, like every other ought-implies-can principle
in the literature with which I am familiar, fails to deliver this result:
OIC is uninformative about conditional obligations. In this paper, I ill
this lacuna by formulating and defending an ought-implies-can principle — which I call the ought-implies-live-option principle (OILO) — that
entails OIC but has the advantage of being also informative about
conditional obligations.
To explain the other lacuna, suppose Pauline has won a million dollars in the lottery, and has spent it to buy her nephew a château in
southern France as a gift. Her nephew, however, due to an irreversible biochemical imbalance, is unable to ever feel gratitude. Does he
have an obligation to feel grateful to her? According to the spirit of OIC,
he does not, since he cannot. OIC, however, like almost every other
ought-implies-can principle in the literature with which I am familiar
(see Brennan & Southwood 2007 for an exception), fails to deliver
this result: OIC is formulated only in terms of obligations to do, not
in terms of obligations to feel. In this paper, I ill this lacuna by formulating my preferred ought-implies-can principle — namely OILO — in
terms of all obligations that agents have, not just obligations to do. I
argue that OILO has the advantages of (1) explaining why people normally have no obligations to feel and (2) being also informative about
obligations to believe.
To sum up: my main project in this paper is to generalize OIC so
as to reach an ought-implies-can principle that is informative about
all kinds of obligations that agents have. I also have a secondary project, namely to defend a principle which captures the idea that ‘ought’
implies ‘can avoid’. These projects may be most appealing to those
who are sympathetic to ought-implies-can principles to start with.
Nevertheless, even opponents of such principles should ind parts of
the paper interesting; for example, I propose novel counterexamples
to some ultimately unsatisfactory ought-implies-can principles before
I reach my preferred principle, namely OILO. I reach OILO in three
steps. (1) In §2, I generalize OIC to reach the ought-implies-can-satisfy
principle (OICS), which is informative about unconditional obligations.
(2) In §3, I generalize OICS to reach the ought-implies-can-obey principle (OICO), which is also informative about conditional obligations.
In parallel, I also defend the ought-implies-possible-violation principle
(OIPV), which captures the idea that ‘ought’ implies ‘can avoid’. (3)
Finally, in §4, I conjoin OICO with OIPV to get OILO.
1. For responses to my defense of OIC, see Littlejohn 2009 and Mizrahi 2009.
For recent objections to ought-implies-can principles, see Buckwalter & Turri
2015; Chituc et al. 2016; Graham 2011a, 2011b; Henne et al. 2016; Mizrahi
2015a, 2015b; Talbot 2016; Turri 2017. For replies to some of these objections,
see Cohen 2017; Hannon 2017; Hobbs 2013: 59; Kurthy & Lawford-Smith
2015; Kurthy et al. 2017; Littlejohn 2012. For further recent discussion of
ought-implies-can principles, see Besch 2011; Bloomield 2007; Copp 2008;
Haji 2012; Heuer 2010; Hobbs 2013; Howard-Snyder 2006, 2013; King 2014,
2017; Lowry 2012; Martin 2009; Southwood 2016; Streumer 2007, 2010;
Wedgwood 2013.
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this paper.) Other authors, by contrast, use the term ‘can’ in diferent
ways.3 (4) I made the above choices in order to formulate a defensible
ought-implies-can principle, namely OIC. I believe that many alternative ways of using the terms ‘implies’, ‘ought’, and ‘can’ yield indefensible
ought-implies-can principles. Nevertheless, if you are unsympathetic
to OIC, you can substitute your preferred ought-implies-can principle
as an alternative starting point in the quest for a general principle. Mutatis mutandis, you may still be able to beneit from much of the discussion that follows.
Obligations and abilities are relative to times. In the morning you
do not have an obligation to run in tomorrow’s marathon, but in the
afternoon you do: at noon you promise to run. In the afternoon you
can run in tomorrow’s marathon, but in the evening you cannot: at
2. Unconditional obligations
2.1. The starting point: OIC
Since my project in this paper is to generalize the ought-implies-can
principle that I have defended in previous work, namely OIC, I start by
formulating OIC precisely (Vranas 2007: 169–71):
(OIC) By virtue of conceptual necessity, if an agent at a
given time has an (objective, pro tanto) obligation to do
something, then the agent at that time can (i. e., has both
the ability and the opportunity to) do the thing.
Several remarks are in order. (1) I formulate OIC in terms of conceptual
necessity, such as the necessity of the claim that, if I am taller than you,
then you are not taller than me. Other authors, by contrast, formulate
ought-implies-can principles in terms of logical or metaphysical necessity, or in terms of presupposition or conversational implicature. (2) I
formulate OIC in terms of objective, pro tanto (i.e., prima facie) obligations.
Other authors, by contrast, formulate ought-implies-can principles in
terms of subjective or all-things-considered obligations, or in terms of
ought-claims (such as the claim that you ought to grant someone’s request for a favor, a claim which arguably does not entail that you have
any obligation). (3) I formulate OIC in terms of ability plus opportunity:
I understand the claim that you can do something as the claim that you
have both the ability to do it (i.e., you have the requisite skills, physical
and mental capacities, and knowledge) and the opportunity to do it
(i.e., you are in a situation that allows you to exercise your ability; e.g.,
you have entered a competition, and thus you have the opportunity
to win).2 (For simplicity, I omit mention of opportunity in the rest of
sequence; cf. Carlson 1999: 91–3, 2000: 280–1; Haji 2012: 23; Andrić 2016:
69–71), and even if (by pure luck) you in fact dial that sequence and thus
open the safe without forcing it (cf. Southwood & Wiens 2016; contrast Miller
2003: 54). According to OIC, in this case (1) you have no objective obligation
to open the safe without forcing it (even if you have promised to do so). On
the other hand, OIC is compatible with the claim that (2) you have an objective obligation to dial 2–5-7–6-9–0-1–2-8–8. It is an interesting question how
to formulate a theory of objective obligations which accommodates both (1)
and (2); cf. Bergström 1996: 81–4.
3. Here are some references on alternative formulations of ought-implies-can
principles: (1) Conceptual necessity: Brennan & Southwood 2007: 5; Hobbs
2013: 82–4; Manning 1981: 118; cf. Jacobs 1985. Logical necessity: Gensler
1996: 49–52. Metaphysical necessity: Howard-Snyder 2006: 236, 2013: 3749.
Presupposition: Atkinson 1958: 58–9; Besch 2011: 352; Cooper 1966: 46; Hare
1963: 53–4; King 2017: 640–9, 656–9; Shaw 1965: 197; cf. Hampshire 1951:
163–4. Conversational implicature: Driver 2011: 191–6; King 2017: 649–56;
Sinnott-Armstrong 1984, 1988: 121–6; cf. Oppenheim 1987: 376–7; Pigden
1990: 16–21; Vogelstein 2012: 255. (2) Objective obligations: Frankena
1950/1963: 158–9; Graham 2011b: 340–1. Pro tanto obligations: Brennan &
Southwood 2007: 7; Velleman 1998: 99. Subjective obligations: O’Connor
1971: 26. All-things-considered obligations: Copp 2008: 68; Dahl 1974: 487;
Graham 2011b: 339; Hobbs 2013: 44; Howard-Snyder 2006: 234; Littlejohn
2009: 364; van Someren Greve 2014: 913. Ought-claims: Wedgwood 2013: 72.
(3) Ability plus opportunity: Haji 1999: 180, 2002: 22, 65–6; Hobbs 2013: 82.
Other uses of ‘can’: Besch 2011: 353; Chuard & Southwood 2009: 614–5; Dahl
1974: 487–9; Lichtenberg 2010: 126–8; Smith 1961; cf. Kenny 1975: 131, 1976:
217.
2. I understand the claim that you can do something as entailing that you have
the relevant know-how. For example, if you do not know how to open your
safe (because you cannot remember the combination and you have no way
to ind out what it is), then you cannot open the safe without forcing it, even
if you can dial the particular ten-digit sequence (say, 2–5-7–6-9–0-1–2-8–8)
that happens to be the combination (because you can dial any ten-digit
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5pm you have an accident that leaves you paralyzed.4 OIC is a synchronic principle: it relates obligations and abilities at the same time.
For example, according to OIC, if at noon you have an obligation to call
me by midnight, then at noon you can call me by midnight. In support
of OIC, note that it explains why at any time after midnight you have
no obligation to call me by midnight: because, setting the possibility of
backwards causation aside (as I do throughout this paper), at any time
after midnight you cannot call me by midnight (regardless of whether
you called me by midnight). I believe that this is properly called an
explanation;5 if you disagree, you can replace in this paper ‘explain(s)
why’ with ‘entail(s) that’ whenever appropriate.
2.2. A new and more useful formulation of OIC
One might argue that the explanatory power (or the range of consequences) of OIC is rather limited. If at noon you have an obligation to
call me by midnight and you irst call me at 4pm, then at any time after
4pm you no longer have that obligation. One might argue that OIC
does not explain why after 4pm you no longer have the obligation to
call me by midnight: after you call me at 4pm, can’t you still call me
by midnight? In reply, I will argue that OIC does explain this. Besides
providing further support for OIC, my argument will lead to a new
formulation of OIC, a formulation that will prove useful to my project
of generalizing OIC. Before I give my argument, I introduce some important concepts.
Your obligation to (sooner or later) visit me is satisied exactly if
you visit me and is violated exactly if you do not visit me; call the
proposition that you visit me the “satisfaction proposition” of your obligation, and call the proposition that you do not visit me the “violation
proposition” of your obligation. More generally, for every obligation
there are two corresponding (logically incompatible) propositions:
the satisfaction proposition of the obligation, which speciies the conditions under which the obligation is satisied, and the violation proposition of the obligation, which speciies the conditions under which the
obligation is violated.6 Say that an agent at a given time can satisfy an
obligation exactly if the agent at that time can make it the case that the
obligation is satisied; in other words, exactly if the agent at that time
can actualize the satisfaction proposition of the obligation (i.e., can
4. One might claim that agents have abilities to do things only in the present,
not in the future: when we say that now you can run in tomorrow’s marathon,
we mean that, as far as we now know, tomorrow you will be able to run. I
reply that, although we can indeed mean that, in many cases agents have
present abilities to do things in the future, not in the present. For example,
suppose that your hands are not touching your nose, and consider your present ability to scratch your nose “now”. Strictly speaking, this is not an ability
to scratch your nose at the present instant; it is instead an ability to scratch your
nose in the very near future. This is because it will take at least a few nanoseconds before one of your hands touches your nose. But if you now have the
ability to scratch your nose in the very near future, why can’t you now also
have the ability to scratch your nose in the more distant future? (You may
not know whether you have the latter ability, but that is a diferent matter.) In
response, one might grant that agents have present abilities to do things in
the distant future, but might claim that, for example, you now have the ability
to scratch your nose at noon tomorrow only if tomorrow you also have this
ability. In reply, suppose that you do not scratch your nose at noon tomorrow:
agents do not always do what they can do. Then, one nanosecond before
noon tomorrow, you no longer have the ability to scratch your nose at noon
tomorrow: it is too late for your hands to move so as to scratch your nose at
noon. But if you now have the ability to scratch your nose at noon tomorrow
although you no longer have it shortly before noon tomorrow, why can’t you
now also have it even if you no longer have it long before noon tomorrow?
6. Although every obligation has both a satisfaction proposition and a violation
proposition, identifying the satisfaction proposition and the violation proposition of a particular obligation is not always straightforward. For example,
one might argue that your obligation (arising from your promise) to visit me
is satisied not exactly if you visit me, but rather exactly if you visit me with
the motive of keeping your promise (cf. King 2014; Williams 1981: 117). In reply,
distinguish (1) an unconditional obligation O1 whose satisfaction proposition
is the proposition that you visit me from (2) an unconditional obligation O2
whose satisfaction proposition is the proposition that you visit me with the
motive of keeping your promise. For simplicity, I understand your obligation
to visit me as O1; I need not deny that, if you promise to visit me, sometimes
you acquire O2 instead of O1 (but see note 18).
5. Cf. Andrić 2017: 75. It is a non-causal explanation, but some explanations are
deinitely non-causal, at least in mathematics (Lange 2014), and maybe elsewhere (Lipton 2009: 621–2; contrast Skow 2014). I am not claiming that every
entailment provides an explanation.
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cause that proposition to be true).7 Say also that a proposition is settled — in other words, is historically necessary — at a given time exactly
if it is logically entailed by the history of the world up to and including
that time (understood as the conjunction of all true propositions that
are not about any later time).8 For example, the proposition that the
sun rose yesterday is settled today. Since I am setting the possibility
of backwards causation aside, I am assuming that an agent at a given
time cannot actualize a proposition that is already settled (or whose
negation is already settled) at that time. For example, today you cannot
actualize the proposition — i.e., make it the case — that you skipped
breakfast yesterday (or the proposition that you did not skip breakfast
yesterday). Consequently, if the satisfaction (or the violation) proposition
of an obligation is settled at a given time, then an agent at that time cannot
satisfy the obligation.
Go back now to the example in which at noon you have an obligation to call me by midnight and you irst call me at 4pm. As I said, one
might argue that OIC does not explain why after 4pm you no longer
have the obligation to call me by midnight: after you call me at 4pm,
can’t you still call me by midnight? Yes, after 4pm you can still call
me by midnight, but you can no longer satisfy the obligation: you can
no longer actualize its satisfaction proposition (i.e., the proposition
that you call me by midnight), since this proposition is already settled
(given that you called me at 4pm). So, if one understands (as I do),
in the formulation of OIC in §2.1, ‘can … do the thing’ as ‘can satisfy
the obligation’, then OIC does explain why after 4pm you no longer
have the obligation to call me by midnight: because after 4 pm you
can no longer satisfy this obligation (although you can still call me
by midnight). Here is, then, my new formulation of OIC (omitting for
simplicity — both here and in the rest of this paper — the phrase ‘by
virtue of conceptual necessity’ and the parenthetical qualiications of
the formulation in §2.1):
(OIC) If an agent at a given time has an obligation to do
something, then the agent at that time can satisfy the obligation (i.e., can actualize its satisfaction proposition).
I take the new formulation of OIC to be an improvement over the formulation in §2.1 because the new formulation enables one to generalize OIC more easily (see §2.3 below), and also because the new formulation enables one to see that OIC has greater explanatory power than
one might initially think:9 one might initially think that OIC does not
explain why after 4pm you no longer have the obligation to call me by
7. The claim that an agent causes a proposition to be true (i.e., actualizes the
proposition) does not entail that the causal relata are the agent and the
proposition. I take instead causes and efects to be facts (Mellor 2004) — for
example, the fact that the agent does something and the fact that the proposition is true. (However, nothing substantive in this paper hangs on this issue.)
One might argue that, because the locution ‘an agent causes a proposition to
be true’ is not an intuitive or ordinary bit of English, the concept of actualizing requires explication. I reply that, to a irst approximation, I understand
actualizing as bringing about. Nevertheless, I introduce the term ‘actualize’ (instead of using the familiar term ‘bring about’) because I want to avoid taking
a stand on certain debates in the literature concerning bringing about (see
note 41).
9. One might object as follows: Suppose that you have ofered to treat some
friends to dinner for your birthday. When you ask for the check, you realize
to your embarrassment that you have forgotten your wallet at home, so you
cannot pay. One of your friends ofers to pay in your stead. One might argue
that the “old” formulation of OIC (in §2.1) enables one to see that OIC explains why you have no obligation to pay the check (since you cannot pay) but
the new formulation does not enable one to see this (since you can actualize
the satisfaction proposition of such an obligation, by allowing your friend to
pay). I reply that you cannot (actualize the proposition that you) pay the check
yourself, so both the old and the new formulation enable one to see that OIC
explains why you have no obligation to pay the check yourself. (Moreover, assuming that by asking and then allowing your friend to pay you can actualize
the proposition that the check is paid, OICS — see §2.3 — is compatible with
the claim that you have an obligation to the efect that the check be paid.)
8. This conjunction includes propositions that are not about any time, like the
proposition that some prime number is even, but excludes propositions that
correspond to “soft facts”, like the proposition that before t you knew that it
was going to rain after t (cf. Hasker 1989: chap. 5; Hofman & Rosenkrantz
1984). Note that the concept of being settled does not become trivial in a
deterministic world: in such a world, every true proposition is logically entailed by the history of the world (up to and including any particular time) in
conjunction with the laws of nature, and thus need not be settled at every time.
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midnight, but the new formulation enables one to see that OIC does
explain this.10
my wedding, understood as satisied exactly if you are present at my
wedding. This is not an obligation to make it the case that you attend
my wedding: if someone kidnaps you and brings you to my wedding
by force, then your obligation to attend my wedding is satisied (since
you attend) but an obligation to make it the case that you attend is not
satisied (since you do not make it the case that you attend).13 Since
your obligation to attend my wedding is not an obligation to make it
the case that you attend, and is clearly not an obligation to make anything else the case either, it is not an obligation to do.14 But are there
any circumstances in which you would have an obligation to attend
my wedding, as opposed to an obligation to make it the case that you
attend? There are: if you have promised to attend my wedding and you
have explicitly distinguished your promise from a promise to make it
the case that you attend, then arguably you have an obligation to attend — assuming that you can attend.15 But what if you cannot attend?
2.3. The “ought-implies-can-satisfy” principle (OICS)
I formulated OIC in terms of obligations to do (something), which I
understand as obligations to make something the case (i.e., to actualize a proposition). For example, your obligation to lock the door is
an obligation to do: it is an obligation to make it the case that you
lock the door.11 Obligations to do are unconditional obligations (unlike obligations to do something if some non-tautologous condition
obtains, which are conditional obligations; I distinguish unconditional
from conditional obligations more precisely in §3.1).12 Arguably, however, some unconditional obligations are not obligations to do. For
example, suppose you have an (unconditional) obligation to attend
10. One might disagree with a component of the above explanation, namely with
my claim that after 4pm you can no longer satisfy the obligation to call me by
midnight: one might insist that after 4pm you can still satisfy this obligation
(since you can still call me by midnight), so one might reject my deinition
of the expression ‘can satisfy’. In reply, I can just replace my new formulation
of OIC in the text with the following formulation: ‘If an agent at a given time
has an obligation to do something, then the agent at that time can actualize
the satisfaction proposition of the obligation.’ This formulation of OIC does
not contain the expression ‘can satisfy’, and still enables one to see that OIC
explains why after 4pm you no longer have the obligation to call me by midnight: after 4pm you can no longer actualize the satisfaction proposition of
this obligation (since this proposition is already settled). For convenience, I
will continue to use the formulation of OIC in the text.
13. Cf. McNamara 2004: 121. One might similarly argue that, contrary to what I
claimed, your obligation to lock the door is not an obligation to make it the
case that you lock the door: if someone gives you a drug that makes you lock
the door, then (1) your obligation to lock the door is satisied (since you lock
the door) but (2) an obligation to make it the case that you lock the door is
not satisied (since you do not make it the case that you lock the door). In
reply, distinguish two ways in which the drug might work. First, suppose the
drug makes you decide to lock the door (and then you lock it as a result of
this decision). Then you do make it the case that you lock the door: the drug
causes you to make it the case (and thus you make it the case) that you lock
the door. But then (2) is false. Second, suppose the drug makes your hand
move so as to lock the door against your will. Then, as in a case in which
someone forcibly moves your hand, it is false that you lock the door. But then
(1) is false. So (1) and (2) are not both true, and the above argument fails.
11. I do not understand an obligation to make it the case that you lock the door
as satisied only if you get yourself (through self-manipulation) to lock the
door (contrast Baier 1970: 653); I understand it instead as satisied exactly
if you make it the case that you lock the door (which happens even if you
lock the door directly, without self-manipulation), and thus exactly if you lock
the door.
14. For another example of an unconditional obligation which is not an obligation to do, suppose you have an (unconditional) obligation O1 not to kill me,
understood as satisied exactly if it is not the case that you kill me. This is not
an obligation O2 to make it the case that you do not kill me: if I kill you and
thus you do not kill me, then O1 is satisied (since it is not the case that you
kill me) but O2 is not satisied (since you do not make it the case that you do
not kill me; by contrast, if you refrain from killing me, then you do make it the
case that you do not kill me). For further examples of obligations not to do,
see notes 21 and 31.
12. One might claim that in practice our obligations are almost always conditional. For example, if you promise to lock the door, typically you do not acquire
an unconditional obligation to lock the door; you acquire instead a conditional
obligation to lock the door if, for example, no bomb destroys the door before
you have a chance to lock it. I reply that I need not deny this claim: its truth
would render even more urgent and important my project of reaching an
ought-implies-can principle that is informative about conditional obligations.
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15. My distinction between obligations to do and unconditional obligations that
are not obligations to do is the distinction between agential and non-agential
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Then, according to the spirit of OIC, you have no obligation to attend.
OIC, however, fails to deliver this result, since OIC is formulated only
in terms of obligations to do. These considerations lead me to propose
a generalization of OIC to all unconditional obligations, namely the
ought-implies-can-satisfy principle:
Here are three observations in support of OICS: (1) Like OIC, OICS
explains why at any time after midnight you have no obligation to call
me by midnight: because at any time after midnight you cannot make
it the case that you call me by midnight (§2.1). (2) Unlike OIC, OICS
explains why today you have no obligation to the efect that the sun
rises tomorrow (understood not as an obligation to do, but instead as
an unconditional obligation satisied exactly if the sun rises tomorrow): because today you cannot make it the case that the sun rises tomorrow. (OIC, by contrast, explains why today you have no obligation
to make the sun rise — i.e., to make it the case that the sun rises — tomorrow; OICS also explains this.) (3) Unlike OIC, OICS explains why
normally you have no obligation to feel grateful to me right away (understood not as an obligation to do, but instead as an unconditional
obligation satisied exactly if you feel grateful to me right away): because normally you cannot make it the case that you feel grateful to
me right away.17 (OIC, by contrast, explains why normally you have no
(OICS) If an agent at a given time has an unconditional obligation, then the agent at that time can satisfy
the obligation.
I explain in §3.1 why I formulate OICS only in terms of unconditional
obligations. OICS entails OIC: since all obligations to do are unconditional obligations, if something holds (as per OICS) for all unconditional obligations, then it also holds (as per OIC) for all obligations to
do. If one accepts OIC, to accept OICS one need not accept that some
unconditional obligations are not obligations to do: it is enough to
accept instead that, if some unconditional obligations are not obligations to do, then they are related to abilities in the same way in which,
according to OIC, obligations to do are related to abilities.16
make it the case that you make it the case that you attend, and thus exactly
if (4) you can satisfy an obligation to make it the case that you attend. ((2) is
equivalent to (3) on the plausible assumption that any proposition p to the
efect that you do something — i.e., that you make something the case — is
equivalent to the proposition that you make p the case (cf. the “stit paraphrase
thesis” in Belnap et al. 2001: 7–8); in particular, the proposition that you make
it the case that you attend is equivalent to the proposition that you make it
the case that you make it the case that you attend.) Given the result that (1)
is equivalent to (4), one might ask: is it plausible to propose (as OICS does)
the same condition (namely the condition of having the ability to attend my
wedding) as necessary both for having an obligation to attend my wedding
and for having an obligation to make it the case that you attend? I reply that
it is plausible: if you cannot attend my wedding, then you have neither an
obligation to attend nor an obligation to make it the case that you attend. To
propose the same condition as necessary for having either obligation is not
to confuse the two obligations.
unconditional obligations (cf. McNamara 2004: 120–3): an unconditional
obligation is agential exactly if its satisfaction proposition is a proposition to
the efect that an agent makes something the case, and is non-agential otherwise. This distinction difers from the distinctions between ‘ought to do’
and ‘ought to be’ (Tunsollen vs Seinsollen; cf. Castañeda 1970: 449–52; García
1986; Geach 1982/1991: 35–8; Hansson 2013: 197; Harman 1986: 131–2; Horty
2001: chap. 3; Krogh & Herrestad 1996; Monteiore 1958: 30–1; von Wright
1963: 112, 1981a: 9, 1981b: 409–11) and between ‘oughts’ that are prescriptive vs
evaluative, praxiological vs axiological (Guendling 1974: 122–3), agent-implicating vs situational (Humberstone 1971: 8), deliberative vs judgmental (Thomason
1981: 179–80), and action-guiding (Hansson 1999) vs ideal (Copp 1997: 446;
Haji 2002: 15; Mason 2003: 319; Robinson 1971: 193–6; cf. Haines 1972), idealexpressing (McConnell 1989: 438; Stocker 1971: 304; cf. Moore 1922: 315–23;
Sidgwick 1907/1981: 33), or Utopian (Brown 2000: 103–4).
17. Admittedly, in some cases (for example, if you know that I have just saved
your daughter’s life) it is natural to say that you ought to feel grateful to me
right away. Arguably, however, to say this is not to ascribe an obligation; it is
instead to say that it would be itting or good if you were to feel grateful to me
right away. One might respond that, if you fail to feel grateful to me right away,
it makes sense for me to blame (and resent) you, and this indicates that you
violated an obligation (cf. McHugh 2012: 87). In reply, I suggest that blaming
you makes sense not because you violated an obligation to feel grateful to
16. When I say that they are related to abilities in the same way, I do not just
mean that, for example, an obligation to attend my wedding and an obligation to make it the case that you attend are related in the same way to corresponding abilities; I also mean that, according to a plausible argument, they
are related in the same way to the very same ability. Here is the argument:
(1) you can satisfy an obligation to attend my wedding exactly if (2) you can
make it the case that you attend, and thus (see below) exactly if (3) you can
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obligation to make yourself feel grateful to me right away; OICS also
explains this.) For further discussion and references, see Vranas 2007:
174–5, 199–200 n. 7.18
2.4. OICS and the loss of obligations
Just as one can acquire (i.e., start having) obligations, for example by
making promises, one can lose (i.e., stop having) obligations, for example by being released from promises. OICS provides a suicient
condition for losing an unconditional obligation: becoming unable to
satisfy it. More precisely, say that an agent loses an obligation at time t
exactly if (1) right before t (i.e., at every time before t in some open time
interval that includes t) the agent has the obligation but (2) right after
t (i.e., at every time after t in some open time interval that includes t)
the agent does not have the obligation. Similarly, say that at time t an
agent becomes unable to satisfy an obligation exactly if (1’) right before
t the agent can satisfy the obligation but (2’) right after t the agent cannot satisfy the obligation.19 OICS entails that, if at t an agent becomes
unable to satisfy an unconditional obligation that the agent has right
before t, then the agent loses the obligation at t.20
In addition to the timeless concepts of being satisied or violated that
I have been using so far, it is useful to have the following time-indexed
concepts of becoming satisied or violated at a given time: say that a
proposition becomes settled at a given time exactly if it is not settled
me, but rather because you violated in the past an obligation to cultivate a
disposition to feel gratitude whenever appropriate. This suggestion (in conjunction with OICS) also explains why it makes no sense to similarly blame a
person who, due to an irreversible biochemical imbalance, is unable to ever
feel gratitude (§1): such a person had no obligation to cultivate a disposition
to feel gratitude. Adams (1985) disagrees with my suggestion: “what we chiefly blame in the present immoral state of mind is not the imprudence of the
previous voluntary omissions” (1985: 14). Adams suggests instead that blaming you can make sense even if you violated no obligation at all: “If someone
says to me that I am incapable of feeling gratitude, … this claim about my
feelings … is already an ethical indictment …. There is no need to search for
guilty actions or omissions of which I may be accused” (1985: 13). I reply irst
that Adams’s suggestion does not explain why it makes no sense to blame a
person who is unable to ever feel gratitude. Moreover, Adams’s suggestion
would support my main point that (contrary to what McHugh 2012 presupposes) it can make sense to blame you (if you fail to feel grateful to me right
away) even if you had no obligation to feel grateful to me.
18. Similar points to those I made in note 17 can be made about cases in which
it seems that an agent has an obligation which (is not an obligation to feel,
but instead) requires for its satisfaction that the agent have a certain motive
or feeling. For example, one might argue that one’s obligation to be a good
parent is satisied only if one acts with certain motives (cf. Card 1988: 117; see
also note 6). For another example, King (2014) argues that one’s obligation to
apologize is satisied only if one says that one is sorry while feeling sorrow or regret: if a child said she was sorry “but sneakily thought to herself that she was
really fooling Grandma, she was merely pretending to apologize without actually doing so” (2014: 318). As King in efect recognizes, proponents of OICS
can say that “the sulky child, if she’s suiciently and irreparably sulky, is under
no obligation to apologize. She has, at best, only an obligation to utter the
words ‘I’m sorry’ [and] may have an additional obligation to try to improve
her attitude” (2014: 326). King responds: “This is already a costly counterintuitive conclusion. It seems like her being irreparably sulky shouldn’t exempt
her from obligations that the less sulky incur” (2014: 326). In reply, I ask: in
what sense is the child “irreparably” sulky? If it is in the sense of having an irreversible biochemical imbalance that prevents her from ever feeling sorrow
or regret, why shouldn’t this exempt her from obligations that the less sulky
incur? But if it is instead in the sense of being extremely sulky, then, strictly
speaking, she can (with great efort, which may take some time) bring herself
to recognize that she behaved inappropriately and as a result feel sorrow or
regret, so the alleged counterexample to OICS fails (unless one — implausibly — insists that the child’s obligation to apologize as understood above,
namely as distinct from an obligation to just say something like “I’m sorry”, is
an obligation to quickly apologize).
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19. To avoid artiicial precision, these deinitions leave it open whether the agent
has or can satisfy the obligation exactly at t. Nevertheless, it might still be
considered artiicially precise to say that an agent loses or becomes unable to
satisfy an obligation at a speciic time instant. To alleviate this worry, one can
similarly deine what it is to lose an obligation over (for example) a closed
time interval T (rather than at a speciic time instant t). For that purpose, deine “right before (after) T” as “at every time earlier (later) than all members of
T in some open time interval that has T as a subset”. I ignore this complication
in the text.
20. If the qualiication ‘that the agent has right before t’ is omitted, one gets the
false claim that, if at t an agent becomes unable to satisfy an unconditional
obligation, then the agent loses the obligation at t. To see that this claim is
false, suppose that at 1pm you promise to meet me tomorrow, at 2pm you
are released from your promise, and at 3pm you become unable to meet me
tomorrow. Then you lose your obligation (to meet me tomorrow) at 2pm,
before you become unable (at 3pm) to satisfy it. (Right before 3pm you can
still satisfy the obligation, although you no longer have it: you can still actualize its satisfaction proposition, namely the proposition that you meet
me tomorrow.)
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at any earlier time but it is settled at every later time, and say that an
obligation becomes satisied (or violated) at a given time exactly if its satisfaction (or violation) proposition becomes settled at that time. For
example, if you irst visit me at 2pm, then the satisfaction proposition
of your obligation to visit me (i.e., the proposition that you visit me)
becomes settled at 2pm, so your obligation becomes satisied at 2pm.21
For another example, if you burn my diary at 2pm, then the violation
proposition of your obligation not to burn my diary (i.e., the proposition that you burn my diary) becomes settled at 2pm, so your obligation becomes violated at 2pm. It is a consequence of OICS that in both
of these examples you no longer have the obligation after 2pm (since,
as I explained in §2.2, if the satisfaction or the violation proposition
of an obligation is settled at a given time, then the agent at that time
cannot satisfy the obligation). One might object to OICS by claiming
that, although indeed you no longer have an obligation after it becomes satisied, you keep having your obligations after they become
violated: after 2pm, you still have the obligation not to burn my diary
(the very diary that you have burned). In reply, I ask: if you still have
the obligation not to burn my diary after you burn it, when do you lose
this obligation? It would be implausible to claim that you still have
this obligation on your deathbed.22 Moreover, if you keep having your
obligations after they become violated, then you have obligations to
do things in the past: for example, in 2015 you still have the obligation
to meet me for lunch in 1985, an obligation that became violated when
you failed to show up. But this is implausible if (as I assume in this paper) backwards causation is impossible. I conclude that the objection
to OICS fails.
In the examples in the previous paragraph, your obligations (to
visit me and not to burn my diary) are lost approximately when they
become satisied or violated. (See the last paragraph of §2.5 below for
an explanation of ‘approximately’.) In other examples, however, an
obligation is lost long before it becomes satisied or violated. To see
this, suppose that right before noon you are in Detroit and you have
an obligation — because you have promised — to attend my wedding
(which is scheduled to start in Boston at 4pm), but at noon you miss
your light from Detroit and thus you become unable to attend my
wedding (because the Detroit airport is shutting down due to a major
snowstorm, and no further lights are scheduled to depart from it — or
from any other airport that you can reach on time — for the rest of the
day). Although your obligation to attend my wedding does not become violated (i.e., its violation proposition does not become settled)
until 4pm, it is a consequence of OICS that you lose the obligation
at noon. This consequence of OICS is controversial (especially if you
miss your light on purpose, to avoid attending my wedding), but I
have in efect provided an extensive defense of it in previous work
(Vranas 2007: 175–82). I summarize that defense in a note;23 here I bol23. My defense has two components: (1) I give two arguments against the competing claim that you lose the obligation at 4pm, and (2) I reply to objections
against my claim that you lose the obligation at noon. (1a) It is implausible
to claim that right before 4pm you still have the obligation to be in Boston at
4pm: one nanosecond before 4pm, it is logically possible for you to move faster
than light so as to be in Boston at 4pm, but such exotic possibilities are irrelevant to whether you have the obligation. (1b) The above competing claim
presumably relies on the view that, putting cases of revocation (e.g., being
released from a promise) aside (see note 20), you never lose an obligation
before it becomes satisied or violated. But this view is false, as one can see
by considering examples in which you acquire a compensatory obligation before the original obligation becomes satisied or violated: if at 1pm someone
destroys a rare book that you have promised to return to me by 4pm and at
2pm you become able to buy the only other existing copy of the book, then
shortly after 2pm you have the obligation to buy the other copy and give
it to me by 4pm, so you do not also have the obligation to return my copy
21. Some obligations are such that it is impossible for them to ever become satisied (even if they are satisied). An example is your obligation to never torture. Indeed, it is impossible for the proposition that you never torture to
ever become settled: necessarily, for any time t, the history of the world up
to and including t does not logically entail that you never torture (because it
does not logically entail that you never torture after t; even if you are dead at
t, it is logically possible that you rise from the dead and you torture after t).
Nevertheless, you can satisfy this obligation: you can actualize the proposition that you never torture, assuming that you can refrain from ever torturing.
22. Moreover, the view under consideration does not explain why you no longer have this obligation after you die. OICS, by contrast, explains why dead
people have no obligations: because dead people cannot actualize the satisfaction proposition of any obligation.
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ster that defense by addressing an objection to my claim that at noon
you become unable to attend my wedding.
Here is the objection: it is false that at noon you become unable to
attend my wedding, because it is possible that, at 1pm (after you miss
your light at noon), you are unexpectedly ofered a ride to Boston
in a military plane specially equipped to ly in a snowstorm. I reply
that mere possibility is not enough for ability: although it is possible
that tomorrow you will win ten million dollars in the lottery, the fact
remains that today you cannot donate ten million dollars to charity
next week. In response, one might ask: what if at 1pm you are in fact
ofered — and you accept — a ride to Boston in a military plane, so that
you in fact attend my wedding? How can you be unable to attend if you
in fact attend? In reply, I can grant (though see Southwood & Wiens
2016) that, if you do something at a given time, then at some earlier
time you can do it. It does not follow, however, that at every earlier
time you can do it: in some cases you become able to do things. (For
example, today you are not in a position to — i.e., you cannot — donate
ten million dollars to charity next week, but tomorrow you become
able to do so because you win the lottery.) If you attend my wedding
at 4pm, then at some earlier time (shortly after 1pm) you can attend;
but this is compatible with my claim that at some even earlier time
(shortly after noon) you cannot attend.
If at 1pm you are in fact ofered a ride to Boston in a military plane
and as a result you become again able to attend my wedding, then it is
plausible that at 1pm you acquire again an obligation to attend, since
the impediment to your having such an obligation (namely your inability to attend) is removed. (I do not need to take a stand in this paper on whether at 1pm you reacquire the same obligation to attend that
you lost at noon or you acquire instead a diferent obligation to attend;
in Vranas 2017b, I defend the former view.) But why exactly do you
acquire again at 1pm an obligation to attend? Because your promise to
attend my wedding is still in efect. Compare: if you are a soldier and at
9am your commanding oicer orders you to run in tomorrow’s marathon but you cannot do so because you are paralyzed, then at 9am
you acquire no obligation to run; but if at 1pm you suddenly recover
from your paralysis and thus you become able to run in tomorrow’s
marathon, then at 1pm you acquire an obligation to run because the
oicer’s order is still in efect.24
2.5. The “ought-implies-possible-violation” principle (OIPV)
It turns out that OICS does not always explain why agents lose unconditional obligations. To see this, suppose that I am too squeamish
to euthanize my terminally ill dog, so I ask you to do it. At 9am, you
promise me that the dog will be dead by midnight, and as a result you
acquire a corresponding obligation.25 At noon, you administer to the
dog a quick-acting and invariably fatal poison to which there is no
of the book by 4pm. (2a) It seems implausible to claim that you can get rid
of unwanted obligations by making yourself unable to satisfy them; e.g., by
missing your light on purpose. I reply that, if you kill your teacher, then you
get rid of the obligation to turn in a paper to your teacher; so it is deinitely
possible to get rid of unwanted obligations. (When you do so, however, usually you acquire compensatory obligations, so my view does not let people of
the hook. For example, it is plausible that at noon you acquire an obligation
to try to become again able to attend my wedding.) (2b) If at 4pm you no
longer have the obligation to attend my wedding, then failing to attend my
wedding is not impermissible for you at 4pm, so why is it natural to say that
(assuming you missed your light on purpose) you are blameworthy for failing
to attend my wedding? Because, I reply, failing to attend my wedding is a bad
consequence of missing your light (which is blameworthy because right before you miss it you have an obligation not to miss it), and it is natural to hold
people blameworthy for the bad consequences of their blameworthy actions.
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24. One might argue that this explanation of why at 1pm you acquire an obligation to run (or to attend my wedding) is incomplete: a complete explanation
(one might continue) must also appeal to the fact that at 9am you acquire a
conditional obligation to run if, at some time before the marathon starts, you
become able to run. I reply that it is more plausible to claim instead that at
9am you acquire a conditional obligation to run if, at some time before the
marathon starts, you become able to run and you keep being able to run until the
marathon starts. But the fact — if it is a fact — that you acquire such a conditional obligation (and you still have it at 1pm) does not help explain why at
1pm you acquire an obligation to run. See also note 59.
25. I assume that, right before you make the promise, it is all-things-considered
permissible for you to make and keep the promise, so the promise is not
“wicked” (Altham 1985; cf. Smith 1997). I also assume that the promise is not
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antidote, with the result that the dog will inevitably be dead within
a few minutes (and thus by midnight). Then you lose the obligation
at noon: you are done with it (i.e., there is nothing more you need
to do — or to refrain from doing — to ensure that it becomes satisied).
Indeed, if you do not lose the obligation at noon, when do you lose
it? One might argue that you lose it when the dog dies, presumably
because right before the dog dies it is still possible — but right after the
dog dies it is no longer possible — that the dog miraculously recovers
from the poisoning. I reply that such exotic possibilities are irrelevant
to whether you have the obligation (see Vranas 2007: 177–8).26 Now,
given that you lose the obligation at noon, OICS does not explain why
you lose it, since you do not become unable to satisfy it: after you administer the poison but before the poison acts, you can kill the dog
by shooting it, so you can still satisfy the obligation (i.e., you can still
make it the case that the dog is dead by midnight).27
One might propose that you lose the obligation in the above example because, when you administer the poison to the dog, you become unable to violate the obligation: you become unable to make it the
case that the obligation is violated, namely that the dog is not dead by
midnight. So one might propose the ought-implies-can-violate principle:
(OICV) If an agent at a given time has an unconditional obligation, then the agent at that time can violate
the obligation.
I reply that OICV is false. To see this, suppose your teenage daughter is
considering whether to participate in a psychological study at school,
and you can make it the case that she does not participate, because
you can withhold your consent: participation requires both your consent and her own (and this requirement is strictly enforced). Then, if
you promise your mother that your daughter will not participate in the
study, right after you promise you have a corresponding obligation (as
evidenced by the fact that, right after you promise, you have a reason
to withhold your consent). You can satisfy this obligation by withholding your consent, but you cannot violate the obligation: you cannot
make it the case that your daughter participates in the study, assuming
that you have no inluence over whether she decides to give her own
consent. So OICV is false.28
obtained by coercion or deception (cf. Owens 2007). I make similar assumptions concerning promises throughout this paper.
26. See also note 23. In response, one might ask: if such possibilities are “exotic”,
then why do you acquire at noon an obligation to wait and make sure that
the dog dies by midnight? I reply that, if (as I may assume, since I am talking about objective obligations) you know that the poison is quick-acting and
invariably fatal and that there is no antidote to it, then you acquire no obligation to wait and make sure that the dog dies by midnight.
27. Here is also a second example: Suppose that the safe in your home can be
opened only by both turning a key and dialing a combination. At 11:30am,
you are at home, and your spouse calls you and tells you that a thief has obtained the combination; your spouse’s key is secure, but the thief is now driving to your home to get your key and open the safe. Your spouse has called
the police, but they will arrive only shortly before noon. You promise your
spouse that either the thief will not get your key until noon or you will change the
combination before noon (or both), and as a result you acquire a corresponding
obligation. As soon as you hang up, you destroy your key by dissolving it in a
very potent acid. When you destroy your key, you lose the above obligation:
you are done with it (i.e., there is nothing more you need to do — or to refrain
from doing — to ensure that it becomes satisied). But OICS does not explain
why you lose the obligation, since you do not become unable to satisfy it:
after you destroy your key but before noon (and before the thief arrives),
you can still satisfy the obligation by changing the combination. (Suppose
that, whenever the combination is changed, it cannot be changed again for
the next 24 hours. If you destroy your key and then change the combination
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before noon, your obligation becomes satisied when you change the combination, not when you destroy your key: when you change the combination, it
becomes settled that you change the combination before noon, but when you
destroy your key, it does not become settled that the thief will not get your
key until noon, since it is logically possible that the constituent parts of your
key will spontaneously reassemble.)
28. To my knowledge, this is a novel counterexample to OICV. On variants of
OICV, see al-Hibri 1978: 14–6; Anderson 1956/1967: 181–3, 196–9; Åqvist
1984: 616–7, 1987: 19–20; Bailhache 1991: 17–9, 23–4; Brown 1977: 211–2;
Bykvist 2007: 113–4; Copp 1997: 455 n. 8; Dahl 1974: 488–9, 499, 510 n. 18; Feis
2014; Feldman 1988a: 241–2; Føllesdal & Hilpinen 1971: 13; Haji 1994: 120–1,
2002: 28–31, 2012: 53–68; Henderson 1966: 111; Kekes 1984: 459; Loewer &
Belzer 1983: 306; Narveson 1978: 44; Nelkin 2011: 102–3; Oppenheim 1987:
376; Prior 1958: 138, 1962: 221–2; Stenius 1963: 253; Stocker 1971: 304–5;
Taylor 1967: 89; Tranøy 1972: 121; van Rijen 1993: 265–6; von Wright 1951:
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I propose instead that you lose the obligation in the dog example
because, when you administer the poison, it becomes inevitable for you
that the dog will be dead by midnight. More precisely, say that a proposition is inevitable for an agent at time t exactly if it is ability-necessary
for the agent at t: it would be true no matter what the agent were to
do, among the things that at t the agent can do.29 I propose, then, that
you lose the obligation because its satisfaction proposition — namely
the proposition that the dog is dead by midnight — becomes abilitynecessary for you; equivalently, its violation proposition becomes
ability-impossible for you. So I propose the ought-implies-possibleviolation principle:
(OIPV) If an agent at a given time has an obligation, then
the violation proposition of the obligation is ability-possible for the agent at that time (i.e., it might be true if the
agent were to do something that at the given time the
agent can do).30
I explain in §3.1 why I formulate OIPV (in contrast to OICS) in terms
of all obligations that agents have, including conditional obligations.
My objection to OICV leaves OIPV unscathed: although (now) you
cannot make it the case that your daughter participates in the study,
the proposition that your daughter will participate is ability-possible
for you (since it might be true if you were to do something that you
can do, namely give your consent), so OIPV (in contrast to OICV) does
not conlict with the claim that, if you have promised that she will
not participate, then you have a corresponding obligation.31 Note that
10–1, 1981a: 8, 1981b: 402, 1988: 60; Zimmerman 1993: 52–3, 1996: 81–2,
89–90.
29. (1) In the deinition of ability-necessity, the clause ‘among the things that at
t the agent can do’ is not redundant. To see this, suppose that your parents
would die in the next minute no matter what you were to do, among the
things that now you can do: they are about to be crushed by a boulder which
is too heavy for you to delect. Then the proposition that your parents will die
in the next minute — call this proposition P — is ability-necessary for you now,
although it is false that, no matter what you were to do, P would be true: P
might be false if you were to do something that now you cannot do, namely
delect the boulder. (2) Ability-necessity (in contrast to what I call “practical
necessity”: see Vranas 2016: 1743) does not entail truth. To see this, suppose
that the only thing you do is something that now you cannot do, and as a
result P is false (e.g., the only thing you do is delect the boulder: you suddenly acquire superhuman strength, you delect the boulder, and then you
die). This supposition (and thus the claim that P is false) is compatible with
the claim that, if you were to do anything that now you can do, P would be
true (and thus is compatible with the claim that P is ability-necessary for you
now). (3) Ability-necessity is relative to agents. To see this, suppose that now
I can delect the boulder, so that P is not ability-necessary for me now. Still, P
may be ability-necessary for you now, because I would not delect the boulder
no matter what you were to do (for example, because delecting the boulder
would kill my children), among the things that now you can do. (4) Abilitynecessity is also relative to times. To see this, suppose that a second from
now you will suddenly acquire superhuman strength and will become able
to delect the boulder. Then P, which is ability-necessary for you now, will not
be ability-necessary for you a second from now. If something like this happens
in the dog example (e.g., if someone miraculously synthesizes an antidote
and gives it to the dog), I think that you reacquire the obligation, as in the last
paragraph of §2.4.
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30. If there is nothing that at time t an agent can do (for example, because at t
the agent is in a persistent vegetative state, or because at t the agent is not
yet born or is already dead), then (according to my deinitions in the text)
every proposition is ability-necessary but no proposition is ability-possible
for the agent at t; this is counterintuitive, and also has the consequence that
ability-necessity does not entail ability-possibility. To avoid these problems,
I propose the following oicial deinitions: (1) A proposition P is ability-necessary for an agent at time t exactly if both (a) there is something that at t
the agent can do and (b) P would be true no matter what the agent were to
do, among the things that at t the agent can do. (2) A proposition P is abilitypossible for an agent at time t exactly if either (a) there is nothing that at t the
agent can do or (b) P might be true if the agent were to do something that
at t the agent can do. According to these deinitions, ability-necessity entails
ability-possibility, and if there is nothing that at t an agent can do, then every
proposition is ability-possible but no proposition is ability-necessary for the
agent at t. In the text, I stick with the simpler deinitions, since I examine
only cases in which there is something that at a given time an agent can do.
If the negation of a “would” counterfactual is a “might” counterfactual with
the same antecedent and negated consequent (Lewis 1973/1986: 8, 1973: 21),
then ability-necessity and ability-possibility are interdeinable in the usual
way (this also holds for the simpler deinitions in the text).
31. One might object to OIPV as follows: Suppose that at 9am you are in a room
that has no windows, and you promise that you will not leave the room until noon, acquiring as a result a corresponding obligation. At 11:55 am, you
are still in the room, but someone welds the only door of the room to the
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OIPV does not render OICS redundant: OICS explains why you have
no obligation to win the lottery (since you cannot make it the case that
you win, assuming that you have no inluence over the outcome of the
lottery), but OIPV does not explain this (since the proposition that you
do not win the lottery is ability-possible for you).32
Here is an objection both to OIPV and to OICS: Suppose that at
9am you promise me to attend my wedding at noon, and as a result
you acquire a corresponding obligation (which is satisied exactly if
you attend — i.e., you are present at — my wedding at noon, even if
you do not make it the case that you attend). Suppose further that at
11am it becomes inevitable for you both that you attend my wedding at
noon and that you do not make it the case that you attend: you are kidnapped, knocked unconscious, brought to my wedding, and woken up
at noon. Since you do attend my wedding at noon, your obligation to
attend becomes satisied at noon; so, according to the objection, you
frame of the door. Then, one might argue, at 11:56am it is inevitable for you
that you will not leave the room until noon, but you still have the obligation
not to leave the room until noon, so OIPV is false. In reply, I claim that you
lose the obligation at 11:55am: there is nothing more you need to do — or to
refrain from doing — to ensure that it becomes satisied (e.g., you no longer
need to restrain any urge to leave the room). In support of my claim, note the
implausibility of the competing claim that you lose the obligation at noon:
this competing claim presumably relies on the observation that before noon
it is logically possible that (for example) you suddenly acquire superhuman
strength and force the door open, but such exotic possibilities are irrelevant to
whether you have the obligation (cf. note 23).
have this obligation until noon. But you lose the obligation at 11am according to OIPV: its satisfaction proposition (namely the proposition
that you attend my wedding at noon) becomes inevitable for you. And
you also lose the obligation at 11am according to OICS: you become
unable to satisfy it (i.e., to make it the case that you attend my wedding
at noon). I reply that indeed you lose the obligation at 11am: it is fallacious to infer from the premise that the obligation becomes satisied
at noon the conclusion that you have the obligation until noon. To see
the fallacy, suppose that at 10am I release you from your promise to attend my wedding at noon, and as a result you lose the corresponding
obligation. Then you do not have the obligation until noon (assuming
that you do not reacquire it before noon), even if you attend my wedding at noon and thus the obligation becomes satisied at noon (i.e.,
its satisfaction proposition becomes settled at noon).33
One might modify the example in the previous paragraph so as to
propose a “Frankfurt-type” objection to OIPV (similar to an objection
to OIC I examined in Vranas 2007: 195–6). Suppose again that at 9am
you promise me to attend my wedding at noon, and as a result you
acquire a corresponding obligation. Suppose further that at 11am it becomes inevitable for you that you attend my wedding at noon: a “counterfactual intervener” starts monitoring your activities, and would kidnap you and bring you to my wedding at noon were you not to come
on your own initiative. According to OIPV, you lose your promissory
obligation at 11am. But this is implausible if (as one may also suppose)
32. Here is another objection to OIPV: Suppose you promise me that (P) either
you will exercise today or you will not run faster than light tomorrow. OIPV entails
that you do not acquire a corresponding obligation, since the proposition that
you will not run faster than light tomorrow — and thus also P — is inevitable
for you. One might object that, since you can actualize P (because you can
exercise today) and you promise to do so, you do acquire an obligation to actualize it — an obligation that you can satisfy by exercising today. I reply that,
if your promise is to actualize P (an agential promise), OIPV does not entail
that, as a result of that promise, you do not acquire a corresponding obligation (since it is not inevitable for you that you actualize P: it is not inevitable
for you that you exercise today). But if your promise is instead (as supposed
above) that P is true (a non-agential promise), then it is correct that (as OIPV
entails) you do not acquire a corresponding obligation, since your promise
will become satisied no matter what you do.
33. (1) One might claim that, if you do not have the obligation until noon, it is
misleading to say that the obligation becomes satisied at noon. I reply that, if
by saying that the obligation becomes satisied at noon one presupposes that
you have the obligation until noon, then it is question-begging to propose
the above objection to OIPV and to OICS: proponents of the objection infer
from the premise that you attend my wedding at noon the conclusion that
the obligation becomes satisied at noon, and thus presuppose that you have
the obligation until noon. (2) A variant of the above objection to OIPV and
to OICS supposes that at 9am, when you promise me to attend my wedding
at noon, it is already inevitable for you both that you attend my wedding at
noon and that you do not make it the case that you attend. But then, I reply,
by promising to attend, you do not acquire an obligation to attend: it is like
promising that the sun will rise tomorrow.
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you in fact attend my wedding at noon on your own initiative, without
any interference from the counterfactual intervener — or so the objection goes. I reply irst that the information that the intervener does not
actually intervene is a red herring: as the possibility of being released
from your promise shows (see my explanation in the previous paragraph), from the claim that in fact you attend my wedding at noon on
your own initiative it does not follow that you have the promissory
obligation until noon. Moreover, I suspect that the apparent implausibility of the claim that you lose the promissory obligation at 11am
is largely due to the implicit assumption that you are unaware of the
presence of the intervener. But the question is whether you lose an
objective obligation (§2.1), so I may assume instead that you know that
the intervener arrives on the scene at 11am. Then it should be clear
that indeed you lose the promissory obligation at 11am: you are done
with it (i.e., there is nothing more you need to do — or to refrain from
doing — to ensure that it becomes satisied), since it is inevitable for
you that it will become satisied (even if you do not make it the case that
you attend).
If OICS and OIPV are both true, then obligations are lost at the
latest shortly before they become satisied or violated. To see this, suppose that at 9am you have an obligation to demolish building A by
noon, and you also have an obligation not to demolish building B
until noon. (1) Suppose further that you demolish both buildings by
pushing at 11am a button that detonates explosives placed inside the
buildings. After you push the button but before the buildings are demolished (and thus before your obligations become satisied or violated), it is inevitable for you that you demolish both buildings by noon
(assuming that you cannot stop the signal that is traveling from the
button to the explosives). So, according to OIPV, you no longer have
the obligation to demolish building A by noon (since the satisfaction
proposition of this obligation is inevitable for you). Moreover, according to OICS, you no longer have the obligation not to demolish building B until noon (since you can no longer satisfy this obligation). (2)
Suppose alternatively that you demolish neither building until noon.
A few nanoseconds before noon (and thus before your obligations become satisied or violated), it is inevitable for you that you demolish
neither building until noon (assuming that pushing the button now
would only demolish the buildings shortly after noon). So, according
to OIPV, you no longer have the obligation not to demolish building
B until noon (since the satisfaction proposition of this obligation is
inevitable for you). Moreover, according to OICS, you no longer have
the obligation to demolish building A by noon (since you can no longer satisfy this obligation). I think that the reasoning in this example
generalizes: as far as I can see, if OICS and OIPV are both true, there is
no case in which an agent loses an obligation at the same time at which
the obligation becomes satisied or violated.
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2.6. Comparing OICS with OIPV
The two principles I have defended, namely OICS and OIPV, provide
two necessary conditions for an agent to have an unconditional obligation at time t: (1) at t the agent must be able to actualize the satisfaction proposition of the obligation (OICS), and (2) the satisfaction
proposition of the obligation must not be ability-necessary (equivalently, the violation proposition of the obligation must be ability-possible) for the agent at t (OIPV). Neither condition entails the other.
First, (1) does not entail (2): even if at t an agent can actualize a proposition, the proposition may be ability-necessary for the agent at t (e.g.,
you can shoot the dog and thus cause its death by midnight, but you
have already poisoned the dog and thus its death by midnight is inevitable for you). Second, (2) does not entail (1): even if a proposition is
not ability-necessary for an agent at t, at t the agent may be unable to
actualize the proposition (e.g., the proposition that you win the lottery
is not inevitable for you, but you cannot actualize it). I propose that
both conditions (and both principles) are needed to explain why (or
to correctly predict when) agents lose or fail to have unconditional obligations: OIPV explains but OICS does not explain why you lose the
obligation in the dog example, and OICS explains but OIPV does not
explain why you have no obligation to win the lottery (§2.5).
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In some cases, OICS and OIPV provide diferent explanations of
why an agent loses an unconditional obligation. Suppose that you
promise your daughter’s high school principal that your daughter will
not enter the school premises tomorrow (because she has been suspended), and as a result you acquire a corresponding obligation. If
your daughter dies today, then you immediately lose that obligation.
Why do you lose it? Not because the obligation becomes satisied today, since it does not: it is logically possible that your daughter will rise
from the dead and will enter the school premises tomorrow, so the satisfaction proposition of the obligation — namely the proposition that
your daughter will not enter the school premises tomorrow — is not yet
settled. OICS provides one explanation of why you lose the obligation:
because you become unable to actualize its satisfaction proposition.
OIPV provides a diferent explanation of why you lose the obligation:
because its satisfaction proposition becomes ability-necessary for you.
I propose that both explanations are correct: this is a case of explanatory overdetermination. If so, then this kind of case does not reveal any
conlict between OICS and OIPV.
One might be worried by the asymmetry between satisfaction and
violation exhibited by the OICS/OIPV pair: OICS combines satisfaction with ability, but OIPV combines violation with ability-possibility.
It will not do to remove the asymmetry by rejecting OIPV and adopting instead (in addition to OICS) OICV: as I argued, OICV is false.
But one might propose to remove the asymmetry by rejecting OICS
and adopting instead (in addition to OIPV) the ought-implies-possiblesatisfaction principle:
at that time (as per OIPS): S might (indeed, would) be true if the agent
were to do something that at the given time the agent can do, namely
actualize S. So OIPS is true if (as I believe) OICS is true. Nevertheless,
it will not do to reject OICS and adopt instead OIPS, because in some
cases OICS explains but OIPS does not explain (and neither does
OIPV) why an agent fails to have an obligation. For example, OICS explains (as I said) why you have no obligation to win the lottery (since
you cannot make it the case that you win the lottery), but OIPS does
not explain this (since the proposition that you win the lottery is ability-possible for you: it might be true if you were to do something that
you can do, namely buy a lottery ticket).34 To conclude, I see no way to
remove the asymmetry between satisfaction and violation exhibited
by the OICS/OIPV pair. Later on, however, I argue that the asymmetry
is unproblematic (§3.3).
To complete my discussion of unconditional obligations in this section, I address two objections to OICS: one objection in §2.7, and another one in §2.8.
34. In response, one might note that the proposition (P) that you make it the case
that you win the lottery (as opposed to the proposition that you win the lottery) is not ability-possible for you: there is nothing you can do such that, if
you were to do it, P might be true (because, even if you win, it is by chance,
so you do not make it the case that you win). So an explanation of why you
have no obligation to win the lottery is provided by the following principle:
(OIPS*) If an agent at a given time has an unconditional obligation, then
it is ability-possible for the agent at that time to make it the case that the
obligation is satisied. In reply, note irst that OICS entails OIPS* (and OIPS*
entails OIPS; I omit the proofs); so OIPS* is true if (as I believe) OICS is true.
Nevertheless, in some cases OICS explains but OIPS* does not explain (and
neither does OIPV) why an agent fails to have an obligation. For example,
suppose that today you cannot donate ten million dollars to charity next
week. Then today you have no obligation to do so, and OICS explains why.
OIPS*, by contrast, provides no explanation, because the proposition that
you make it the case that you donate ten million dollars to charity next week
is ability-possible for you today: it might be true if you were to do something
that today you can do, namely buy a lottery ticket (because you might win ten
million dollars tomorrow and donate them to charity next week).
(OIPS) If an agent at a given time has an unconditional
obligation, then the satisfaction proposition of the obligation is ability-possible for the agent at that time.
In reply, note irst that OICS entails OIPS. This is because, if an agent
at a given time can satisfy an obligation (as per OICS), then the satisfaction proposition S of the obligation is ability-possible for the agent
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2.7. OICS and obligations partly about the past
One might object to OICS (and to OIC) as follows: Suppose that at
9am a law is enacted that indeinitely forbids gambling starting at
11am, and as a result at 9am you acquire an obligation to never gamble starting at 11am. Suppose further that at 1pm you gamble (for the
irst time); then your obligation becomes violated (i.e., its violation
proposition becomes settled) at 1pm, and as a result at 3pm you can no
longer satisfy it. Contrary to OICS, however, at 3pm you still have the
obligation, since the law remains in efect — or so the objection goes.
In reply, I deny that (1) at 3pm you still have the obligation to never
gamble starting at 11am. I maintain instead that (2) at 3pm you have
an obligation to never gamble starting at 1pm; you acquire this obligation shortly before (see §2.5) 1pm, when you become unable to satisfy
(and thus you lose) the obligation to never gamble starting at 11am.35
To defend (2), suppose that at 5pm you gamble again (for the second
time). Then the law that forbids gambling is broken twice: once at 1pm,
when you irst gamble, and once at 5pm, when you gamble again. Appealing to (2), I propose the following explanation of why the law is
broken twice: a law is broken whenever an obligation that arises from
the law becomes violated, so the law that forbids gambling is broken
both at 1pm, when your obligation to never gamble starting at 11am
becomes violated, and at 5pm, when your obligation to never gamble
starting at 1pm becomes violated. Proponents of (1), by contrast, have
no explanation of why the law is broken twice, since your obligation
to never gamble starting at 11am becomes violated only once (namely
at 1pm, when its violation proposition becomes settled).36 My explana-
tion works only if it is possible for multiple obligations to arise from a
single law, but this is indeed possible: when the law that forbids gambling is enacted, both you and I acquire an obligation to never gamble
starting at 11am, and our obligations are distinct because they have
distinct satisfaction propositions (your obligation is satisied exactly
if you never gamble starting at 11am, and my obligation is satisied
exactly if I never gamble starting at 11am).
To further defend my view, consider a diferent example. Suppose
that in December you take out a loan repayable in ten equal monthly
installments, due at 5pm on the ifth day of each month starting in
January, and as a result you acquire an obligation to pay all ten installments on time. Suppose further that you pay the irst but not the
second installment on time; then your obligation becomes violated on
February 5 (at 5pm, when the second installment was due), and as a
result on February 6 you can no longer satisfy it. By analogy with the
gambling example, opponents of OICS might argue that (1’) on February 6 you still have the obligation to pay all ten installments on time
(since the terms of your loan have not changed). I maintain instead
that (2’) on February 6 you have an obligation to pay the second installment together with a penalty as soon as possible (assuming that this
is what the terms of your loan specify), as well as an obligation to pay
the remaining eight installments on time; you acquire these obligations
on February 5, when you become unable to satisfy (and thus you lose)
the obligation to pay all ten installments on time.37 To argue against
becomes settled again. In response, proponents of (1) might reject my deinition, and might propose instead that an obligation becomes violated at time t
exactly if (a) what the obligation requires about t is false, but (b) what the obligation requires about times right before t is true. On this alternative deinition, your obligation to never gamble starting at 11am does become violated
again at 5pm: what it requires about 5pm (namely that you fail to gamble at
5pm) is false, but what it requires about times right before 5pm (namely that
you fail to gamble at those times) is true. I reply that this alternative deinition
does not work for obligations that do not require anything about particular
times — for example, a student’s obligation to turn in a paper to a professor by
5pm. By contrast, my deinition of becoming violated (or satisied) at a given
time is fully general.
35. An alternative view is that you acquire this obligation at 9am, when the law
is enacted: for any time t not earlier than 11am, at 9am you acquire an obligation to never gamble starting at t. I believe that this view results in an undesirable proliferation of obligations, but for my purposes in this paper I do not
need to insist on this: this view is compatible with my denial of (1) in the text,
and thus also provides a response to the objection to OICS.
36. More generally, on my deinition of becoming violated at a given time (§2.4),
it is impossible for an obligation to become violated more than once: necessarily, once the violation proposition of an obligation — or indeed any
proposition — becomes settled, it remains settled forever, and thus it never
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37. Alternatively, on February 5 you may acquire a single obligation to both (a)
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(1’), I ask: if on February 5 you do not lose the obligation to pay all ten
installments on time, when do you lose it? It will not do to answer that
you lose it whenever you fully repay the loan (together with any penalties): if you fully repay the loan on March 4, your obligation to pay all
ten installments on time does not become satisied on March 4 (since
you did not pay the second installment on time), so why would you
lose it on March 4?38 It seems then that proponents of (1’) have no satisfactory answer to the question of when you lose the obligation to pay
all ten installments on time. OICS, by contrast, provides a satisfactory
answer: you lose the obligation when you become unable to satisfy it,
namely on February 5.
One might object that the above answer is not satisfactory, because,
if (on February 5 you lose and thus) on February 4 you still have the
obligation to pay all ten installments on time, then on February 4 you
have an obligation to pay the January installment on time — an obligation about the past! In reply, go back for a moment to the gambling example. The view that (1) at 3pm you still have the obligation to never
gamble starting at 11am and the view that (2) at 3pm you have instead
an obligation to never gamble starting at 1pm agree on this much: at
3pm you have an obligation which is partly about the past (more precisely, an obligation whose satisfaction proposition is partly about the
past of 3pm). To see that it is indeed possible to have obligations partly
about the past, suppose that at 8am you promise your spouse that you
will never smoke again, starting immediately. It is then plausible that at
8am you acquire an obligation to never smoke starting at 8am. But if
it is impossible to have obligations partly about the past, then at any
time t after 8am — e.g., one nanosecond after 8am — you have no obligation to never smoke starting at 8am, since such an obligation would
be partly about the past of t. But then, although in efect you promise
to never smoke starting at 8am, you have for at most a single time instant
(namely at most at 8am) an obligation to never smoke starting at 8am.
I take this to be a reductio of the view that (3) it is impossible to have
obligations partly about the past. Return now to the loan example and
to my claim that (4) on February 4 you still have the obligation to pay
all ten installments on time. The fact that (4) contradicts (3) is no problem for (4), since (3) is false. But what about the point that (4) entails
the false claim that (5) on February 4 you have an obligation to pay
the January installment on time? I agree that (5) is false: OICS entails
that it is impossible to have unconditional obligations wholly about
the past (setting the possibility of backwards causation aside, as I do
throughout this paper). But I deny that (4) entails (5); more generally,
I deny that, (6) necessarily, if at time t you have an unconditional obligation whose satisfaction proposition is P and P entails P’, then at t you
have an unconditional obligation whose satisfaction proposition is P’.
Indeed, (6) is false: possibly, you currently have an obligation to help
me but no obligation to help or kill me.39
One might argue that there is another problem with my claim that
(4) on February 4 you still have the obligation to pay all ten installments on time: if OICS is true, (4) entails that (7) on February 4 you
pay the second installment together with a penalty as soon as possible and
(b) pay the remaining eight installments on time. For my purposes in this
paper, it does not matter whether this alternative or what I say in the text is
the case.
39. On the other hand, if you currently have an obligation to help me, then it is
currently obligatory for you to help or kill me (and this may account for the
intuitive appeal of (6) in the text): in my view, (unconditional pro tanto) obligatoriness corresponds to necessary conditions (subject to ability) for the
satisfaction of (unconditional pro tanto) obligations (although there is also
another kind of obligatoriness — which I call safe obligatoriness — that corresponds to conditions which are both necessary and suicient for the satisfaction
of obligations). Defending my view about obligatoriness requires an excursion into deontic logic, and thus lies beyond the scope of this paper. For references to “Ross’s paradox” (concerning the move from ‘help me’ to ‘help or kill
me’), see Vranas 2011: 412 n. 52.
38. One might answer: because on March 4, since you fully repay the loan, you
lose all obligations that arise from the loan agreement (and that you still have
right before you fully repay the loan). I reply that this is false. Suppose the
loan agreement speciies that, if you fail to pay an installment by the due
date, then within two months of the due date you must send your name to a
company that publishes lists of “bad payers”. Then on March 4, although you
fully repay the loan, you do not lose the obligation to send your name to that
company by April 5 (assuming you have not already done so).
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can actualize the proposition that you pay all ten installments on time,
and (7) in turn entails that (8) on February 4 you can actualize the
proposition that you pay the January installment on time — which is
clearly false. In reply, I agree that (8) is false, but I deny that (7) entails
(8); more generally, I deny that, (9) necessarily, if at time t you can
actualize a proposition P and P entails P’, then at t you can actualize
P’. Indeed, (9) is false: possibly, today you can actualize the proposition that you help me, but today you cannot actualize the proposition
that either you help me or the sun rose yesterday (since this disjunction is
already settled). The falsity of (9) defuses the above objection to (7)
(and to (4)),40 but I can also argue for (7) by appealing to the following
principle (cf. Ginet 1990: 102–3): (10) necessarily, if a proposition Q is
settled at time t and at t you can actualize a proposition R, then at t you
can actualize the conjunction of Q with R. By (10), since the proposition Q that you pay the January installment on time is settled on February 4 and on February 4 (I assume) you can actualize the proposition
R that you pay the remaining nine installments on time, on February 4
you can actualize the conjunction of Q with R, namely the proposition
that you pay all ten installments on time (i.e., (7) is true). One might
object that (10) has the counterintuitive consequence that today you
can actualize the proposition that the sun rose yesterday and you help
me. I reply that this consequence is not counterintuitive, because (as I
understand it) the claim that you can actualize that conjunction does
not entail that you can be the only cause of the fact that the conjunction is true; the claim is instead true because you can (by helping me)
bring to completion a causal process resulting in the conjunction becoming settled. Compare: if you are the last runner of your team in a 4 ×
100m relay race and you can run fast enough, then you can make it the
case that your team wins (although you cannot be the only cause of
the fact that your team wins), because you can bring to completion a
causal process resulting in your team’s victory.41
40. In response, one might grant that (9) is false, but might argue that (7) entails
(8) by appealing instead to the following principle: (9′) necessarily, if at time
t you can actualize the conjunction of two logically independent propositions
(i.e., propositions Q and R such that Q entails neither R nor the negation of
R, and neither of these entails Q), then at t you can actualize both propositions. This principle avoids my counterexample to (9) because the propositions that you help me and that either you help me or the sun rose yesterday
are not logically independent. By (9′), (7) entails (8) because the proposition
that you pay all ten installments on time is the conjunction of the logically
independent propositions that you pay the January installment on time and
that you pay the remaining nine installments on time. I reply that (9′) is false.
To see this, suppose that today you can help me. Consider the logically independent propositions that (i) either you help me or the sun rose yesterday and that
(ii) either you help me or the sun neither rose nor set yesterday; their conjunction is
logically equivalent to the proposition that you help me, so today you can actualize this conjunction. But today you cannot actualize (i), since (i) is already
settled. (Similar remarks apply if one grants that (6) is false but argues that
(4) entails (5) by appealing instead to the following principle: (6′) necessarily,
if at t you have an unconditional obligation whose satisfaction proposition is
the conjunction of two logically independent propositions, then at t you have
two unconditional obligations whose satisfaction propositions are those two
propositions.) My counterexample to (9′) works because (i) is already settled,
so to avoid the counterexample one might propose instead the following
principle: (9′′) necessarily, if at t you can actualize the conjunction of two
logically independent propositions Q and R, and Q is not settled at t, then at
t you can actualize Q. In reply, I agree that (9′′) is true, but (9′′) cannot be
used to argue that (7) entails (8): the proposition Q that you pay the January
installment on time is settled on February 4.
philosophers’ imprint
2.8. OICS and epistemic obligations
Here is the inal objection to OICS that I will address: agents sometimes have epistemic obligations to form certain beliefs, but normally
they cannot satisfy these obligations, because normally the formation
of one’s beliefs is not under one’s direct voluntary control (e.g., one
cannot simply decide to form a belief in order to collect a reward42).
41. The above considerations suggest that my use of ‘can actualize’ (that vindicates (10)) is reasonable, but I am not saying it is the only reasonable use (see
the end of note 3). I am not committed to claims analogous to (10) concerning
making true (cf. Rodriguez-Pereyra 2006, 2009) or bringing about the truth of
(cf. Guigon 2009: 454) a conjunction: I can grant that you cannot make true
(although you can actualize), and you cannot bring about the truth of, the
proposition that the sun rose yesterday and you help me.
42. See Alston 1988: 263, 2005: 62–3; Bennett 1990: 89–90; Bondy 2015: 758–9,
764–7; Chrisman 2008: 346; Chuard & Southwood 2009: 605–6; Feldman
2008: 341; Heller 2000: 131; McHugh 2012: 68–9; Plantinga 1993: 24;
Reynolds 2011: 23; Ryan 2003: 63; Weatherson 2008: 544, 547.
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In reply, note irst that, if (1) you have an epistemic obligation to start
believing a proposition P,43 then (2) you are in a situation in which you
have evidence for P.44 But then OICS and (1) jointly entail that (3) in that
situation you can start believing P; they do not entail that (4) you can
start believing P even in a situation in which you have no evidence for
P, and thus they do not entail that (5) you can start believing P at will
(so whether or not you have evidence for P). So OICS (in conjunction
with (1)) does not conlict with the claim that (6) the formation of your
beliefs is not under your direct voluntary control.45 In response, one
might grant that OICS and (1) jointly entail (3) instead of (5), but might
claim that this is still a problem for OICS because (3) is false: in some
situations, you have evidence for P but you cannot start believing P. I
examine next an (alleged) example of such a situation.
Suppose that you are presented with overwhelming evidence for
the proposition G that your spouse is guilty of murder (Mizrahi 2012),
but you are “psychologically unable” to start believing G: believing G
“would just be too painful and damaging for you” (Ryan 2003: 59; cf.
Feldman 2008: 350). Then, one might argue, you have an epistemic
obligation to start believing G, but you cannot start believing G. I reply
that I ind this objection to OICS no more convincing than the following common objection to OIC: a kleptomaniac has a moral obligation to refrain from stealing, but is psychologically unable to refrain
from stealing and thus cannot refrain from stealing. Addressing this
objection to OIC, in previous work (Vranas 2007: 182–6) I noted that
I understand the claim that you can do something as compatible with
the claim that you are psychologically “unable” to do it: even if you are
psychologically unable to stick your arm into a cesspool to retrieve
your wallet (Stocker 1971: 311), strictly speaking you can stick your arm
in (cf. Bykvist & Hattiangadi 2007: 279). Similarly, even if it is extremely hard for kleptomaniacs to resist their urges to steal, strictly speaking
they can resist them, as evidenced by the fact that they “will generally
avoid stealing when immediate arrest is probable (e.g., in full view
43. Strictly speaking, I am talking about an epistemic obligation to start believing
P (within a reasonable amount of time) in response to appropriate evidence for P
(and to keep believing P until the evidence charges): if you start believing P
not because you are convinced by your evidence for P but rather because you
take a pill that makes you start believing P, then your epistemic obligation is
not satisied. So the satisfaction proposition of the epistemic obligation that
I am talking about is not the proposition that you believe P over a time interval
(that starts within a reasonable amount of time and ends when your evidence
appropriately charges). It is also deinitely not the proposition that you believe
P at a particular time (or at some time or other): I doubt that there is any epistemic obligation which is satisied if an agent has a belief at just a single time
instant (cf. note 49).
44. One might object as follows: if you have negligently failed to acquire strong
evidence for P that you could have easily acquired, then you may have an
epistemic obligation to start believing P even if you have no evidence for
P (cf. Kornblith 1983: 35–6). In reply, I ask: do you know that there is strong
evidence for P that you have failed to acquire? If you do, then you do have evidence for P; but if you do not (and you have no evidence for P), then you do
not have an (objective) epistemic obligation to start believing P. (Cf. Feldman
2000: 687–8; Feldman & Conee 1985: 21–2. On the dependence of objective
epistemic — unlike objective moral [though see note 2] — obligations on the
agent’s “perspective”, see Feldman 1988b: 408–11; Russell 2001: 40–1.)
control). Like me, Chuard and Southwood (2009: 614–9), as well as McHugh
(2012: 86–8), respond to the alleged conlict by arguing in efect that OICS
and (1) do not jointly entail the negation of (6); however, these authors do
not provide my explanation of why the entailment fails. (Ryan [2003: 63–6]
makes a distinction similar to my distinction between (3) and (4), but does
not use her distinction to argue that the above entailment fails.) Other responses to the alleged conlict include: (i) rejecting epistemic ought-impliescan principles (Feldman 1988a: 240–3, 2000: 676, 2001: 87–8; Kornblith
2001: 237–8; Ryan 2003: 59–60; cf. Qu 2017); (ii) rejecting epistemic deontology (Alston 1988, 2005: chap. 4); (iii) rejecting doxastic involuntarism (Bondy
2015; Heller 2000; Russell 2001: 42–3; Ryan 2003: 62–75; Shafer 2013; Shah
2002; Steup 2000; Weatherson 2008; cf. Chisholm 1968: 224–5; Ginet 2001;
Goldstick 2010; Steup 2008, 2012); and (iv) arguing that epistemic oughtclaims are not obligation claims (Chrisman 2008: 358–66; cf. Plantinga 1993:
24). See also Côté-Bouchard 2017; Engel 2009; Peels 2017.
45. Here is the reasoning more explicitly: since the objection to OICS relies on
(6), I charitably understand (6) weakly, namely so that its negation is strong
enough to entail (5); so if one supposes for reductio that OICS & (1) conlicts
with — i.e., entails the negation of — (6), then OICS & (1) entails (5), contradicting the claim that — because (5) entails (4) but OICS & (1) does not entail
(4) — OICS & (1) does not entail (5). To my knowledge, this is a novel (although to some extent anticipated in Reynolds 2011: 26–7) response to the alleged conlict between OICS, (1), and (6) — or to the alleged conlict between
(a) epistemic ought-implies-can principles, (b) epistemic deontology (deined in
Chrisman 2008: 347 as the claim that beliefs are proper subjects of epistemic
oughts), and (c) doxastic involuntarism (deined in Chrisman 2008: 346 as the
claim that the formation of one’s beliefs is not within one’s direct voluntary
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of a police oicer)” (American Psychiatric Association 2013: 478; cf.
Pickard 2015). But if kleptomaniacs (who have a recognized mental
disorder) are able to resist their urges to steal, why aren’t you (who, I
assume, have no mental disorder) able to accept the implications of
the evidence for G? Mizrahi (2012: 835, 839) argues in efect that you
cannot start believing G because you have reasons to doubt G: you have
evidence that your spouse has a good moral character. I reply that having reasons to doubt a proposition need not render one unable to start
believing the proposition: some people who have reasons to doubt
creationism (because they know that the vast majority of biologists
believe in evolution) nevertheless become creationists.
One might argue that, since I understand the claim that you can
start believing a proposition P as the claim that you can make it the case
that you start believing P, there is a general reason why, even if you
have evidence for P, you cannot start believing P: if you start believing
P in response to the evidence for P, what makes it the case that you
start believing P is the evidence, not you. As Alston puts it, “the belief
follows automatically, without intervention from the will, from the
way things seem at the moment to the subject” (1988: 266; cf. 2005:
65). This objection relies on something like what Williams calls “the
picture ofered by Hume of belief as a passive phenomenon, something that happens to us” (1970/1973: 148; cf. Pojman 1993: 528–32). I
reply that this picture is inaccurate: in many cases, you do make it the
case that you start believing P. To see this, suppose (to adapt an example from Shah & Velleman 2005: 512–3) that you add a long column
of numbers, and you arrive at the total 987. You suspect that the sum is
987, but you suspend belief until you check the addition. You add the
numbers again, and you arrive at the same total. Although you could
decide to go through one more iteration, you decide instead to stop
checking, and as a result you start believing that the sum is 987. In this
example, by means of your decision to stop checking, you make it the
case that you start believing that the sum is 987. This is not to say that
you are the only cause of the fact that you start believing that the sum
is 987: your evidence also played a signiicant causal role.46 Still, the ultimate causal responsibility was yours: you could have decided instead
to keep suspending belief. The example generalizes: in many cases in
which you have evidence for a proposition P, you decide to suspend
belief in P and start deliberating, but after some time you decide to
stop deliberating, and as a result you start believing P. And in many
cases in which you do not go through this process, you can go through
it, so you can start believing P. It may be worth repeating that I am not
saying you can start believing P at will, since I am not saying you can
(decide to stop deliberating and) start believing P even if you have no
(convincing) evidence for P.
One might respond by considering cases in which there is no room
for deliberation. Suppose that you glance at my shirt and it looks red to
you, and as a result you start believing the proposition R that my shirt
is red. One might argue that your belief is “evidentially compelled”:
there is no way you can prevent its formation47 and start deliberating
instead (just as there is no way you can prevent your pupils from contracting when they are suddenly exposed to bright light), so my argument in the previous paragraph does not apply. Moreover (one might
continue), if you cannot make it the case that you do not start believing
R, then you cannot make it the case that you start believing R either:
the claim that you can (make it the case that you) start believing R
presupposes that you have a choice on whether you start believing R.48
philosophers’ imprint
46. Recall from note 7 that I take causes and efects to be facts, not agents or
propositions (or pieces of evidence). Strictly speaking, then, I claim that in
the above example the fact that you decide to stop checking causes (but is not the
only cause of) the fact that you start believing that the sum is 987.
47. See Alston 1985: 64–5, 1988: 264, 270, 2005: 63–4, 68; Feldman 1988a: 238,
242; Peels 2017: 55; Plantinga 1993: 24; Pojman 1993: 529; Reynolds 2011: 20;
Ryan 2003: 62–3, 73; Scott-Kakures 1994: 79; Steup 2000: 28, 45–6, 2012: 149;
Weatherson 2008: 556–61.
48. Actually, there are counterexamples to the claim that, if you cannot make it
the case that the negation of a proposition is true, then you cannot make it the
case that the proposition is true either. A irst counterexample is provided by
my objection to OICV (§2.5): you cannot make it the case that your daughter
participates in the study, but you can make it the case that she does not participate. For a second counterexample, consider a “Frankfurt-type” example (cf.
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I reply that, regardless of whether you can start believing R, this objection to OICS is unconvincing because it is not clear that there is any
time at which you have an epistemic obligation to start believing R.
Here is why: (1) Before you glance at my shirt, you have (I assume) no
evidence for R, so you have no epistemic obligation to start believing
R. (2) After (or when) you start believing R, the proposition that you
start believing R is already settled, so you have no obligation (epistemic or not) to start believing R.49 So, (3) if at a given time you have
an epistemic obligation to start believing R, then at that time you have
already glanced at my shirt but you have not yet started believing R.
But (4) it is not clear that there is any such time: arguably, you start believing R as soon as you glance at my shirt. (Compare: if a irst billiard
ball strikes a second and as a result the second ball starts to move, is
there any time at which the irst ball has already struck the second but
the second ball has not yet started to move?50) In response, one might
try to come up with a modiied example in which it is clear that you
start believing R shortly after you glance at my shirt; e.g., suppose that
you hesitate for a few seconds to believe that my shirt is red because
you entertain the possibility that there is a source of red light in the
room. I reply that, in this modiied example, it is not clear that your
belief is evidentially compelled: arguably, during those few seconds of
hesitation, you can (deliberate and) prevent its formation.51 But then
the objection to OICS does not get of the ground.
which the irst ball strikes the second, because at any later time the second
ball is moving. Similarly, one might argue that there is exactly one time at
which you have an epistemic obligation to start believing R, namely the time
at which you glance at my shirt. I reply that there is no unique such time.
Contrary to the way that (for simplicity) I talk in the text, glancing at my shirt
(and perceiving it as red) occurs during a short time interval. At any time in
the interior of that interval, you have not yet fully processed the perceptual
information, so you have no evidence for R and thus no epistemic obligation to start believing R. The objection to OICS is tenuous if it relies on the
assumptions that the interval has a last time and that at that time you do not
start believing R.
§2.5). Suppose that, without any outside interference, you decide to stand up,
and as a result you stand up. Unbeknownst to you, however, a “counterfactual
intervener” was monitoring your brain and would have made you decide to
stand up (and then stand up) if your brain waves had not shown that you
were going to decide on your own to stand up. In this example, you cannot
make it the case that you do not stand up, but you can (and you do) make it
the case that you stand up. Cf. Chuard & Southwood 2009: 604–5, 627 n. 17.
49. Here I am appealing to the principle that, if an agent at a given time has an
unconditional obligation, then neither the satisfaction nor the violation proposition of the obligation is settled at that time. This principle follows from
OICS, but appealing to the principle in the course of addressing an objection
to OICS is not circular, because the principle is independently plausible: you
do not now have an obligation to call me yesterday, since either it is now
settled that you called me yesterday or it is now settled that you did not call
me yesterday. This principle entails that an agent at a given time has no epistemic obligation to believe P at that time (as opposed to an epistemic obligation
to start believing P at a later time; on this distinction, see Alston 1988: 261–2,
2005: 61; McHugh 2012: 78–82; Weatherson 2008: 544–5). For example, you
do not now have an epistemic obligation to believe that you are reading this
paper right now (contrast Chrisman 2008: 347) — although you may be now
justiied in believing that you are reading this paper right now. On the other
hand, the above principle (like OICS) is compatible with the claim that an
agent at a given time has an epistemic obligation to believe P at a later time
(or to keep believing P in the near future).
51. In response, one might try to come up with an example in which it is clear
that at time t you acquire evidence that compels you to (sooner or later) start
believing a proposition P, but it is also clear that you start believing P only
shortly after t. I reply that, if at t your belief is evidentially compelled, then at t
it is inevitable (i.e., ability-necessary) for you that you (sooner or later) start
believing P. But then — as OIPV entails — at t you have no obligation to start
believing P, so no such example is a counterexample to OICS (regardless
of whether at t you can start believing P). One might object that OIPV fails
for epistemic obligations (Feldman 1988a: 242). I reply that considerations
similar to those I adduced in §2.5 support OIPV for epistemic obligations.
Suppose that, before you glance at my shirt, you have an epistemic obligation
to start believing that it is red (because I have told you that it is red, and you
know that I never lie), but you are deliberating on whether to start believing
that it is red (because you know that I have never worn a red shirt before).
When you glance at my shirt, even if you do not immediately start believing
that it is red, it is plausible that you lose the obligation: you are done with
it, since the compelling perceptual evidence settles the matter for you. OIPV
explains why you lose the obligation.
50. One might argue that there is exactly one such time, namely the time at
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is unconditional exactly if its satisfaction proposition is (equivalent to)
the negation of its violation proposition, and an obligation is conditional exactly if it is not unconditional.
Given this understanding of conditional obligations, I can now explain why in §2.3 I formulated OICS only in terms of unconditional
obligations. The reason is that the following analog of OICS for conditional obligations fails: (OICS*) If an agent at a given time has a conditional obligation, then the agent at that time can satisfy the obligation.
To see that OICS* fails, suppose that you promise your mother to take
shelter in the basement if a tornado hits the town (within the next
few hours). Then you have a conditional obligation to take shelter in
the basement if a tornado hits the town. But you cannot satisfy this
obligation: you cannot actualize its satisfaction proposition, namely
the proposition that both a tornado hits the town and you take shelter
in the basement, since you have no inluence over whether a tornado
hits the town.53
Although the example in the previous paragraph falsiies OICS*,
it does not falsify OIPV (which, to repeat, is the principle that, if an
3. Conditional obligations
3.1. Why a new principle is needed
Suppose you promise me that, if you drink, you will let me drive, and
as a result you acquire a conditional obligation to let me drive if you
drink. This obligation is violated exactly if you drink but you do not
let me drive. Under what conditions is the obligation satisied? One
might propose that it is satisied exactly if it is not violated; equivalently, exactly if either you do not drink or you let me drive. I see two
problems with this proposal (cf. Vranas 2008: 534–5, 555–7). First, on
this proposal, the obligation is satisied if you do not drink and yet you
let me drive, and I ind this counterintuitive: intuitively, the obligation is “inoperative” (rather than satisied) if you do not drink. Second
(and more important), on this proposal, your conditional obligation
to let me drive if you drink is satisied (or violated) exactly if so is an
unconditional obligation to either not drink or let me drive; similarly,
on a generalization of this proposal, every conditional obligation is
indistinguishable in terms of satisfaction and violation from an unconditional obligation, so the distinction between unconditional and
conditional obligations collapses. (I take it for granted that there is
such a distinction; defending this lies beyond the scope of this paper.)
To avoid these problems, I propose instead that your conditional obligation to let me drive if you drink is satisied exactly if you both drink
and let me drive. On my proposal, the satisfaction proposition of your
conditional obligation is not the negation of the violation proposition:
your obligation is neither satisied nor violated — say, equivalently, that it
is avoided — exactly if you do not drink.52 More generally, an obligation
in efect proposes) that in both kinds of cases your promissory obligation is
satisied, then one can distinguish two kinds of satisfaction, satisfaction1 and
satisfaction2, corresponding to the two kinds of cases. If one does this, then
the distinction between unconditional and conditional obligations does not
collapse: although every conditional obligation is indistinguishable, in terms
of satisfaction and violation, from an unconditional obligation, the two obligations are distinct because satisfaction1 is possible for the conditional but not
for the unconditional obligation. But then, I note, my proposal — which is to
talk of avoidance in place of satisfaction1 and of satisfaction in place of satisfaction2 — is a terminological variant of what the objection in efect proposes.
53. This inference relies on the following consequence of principle (9’’) in note
40: if you can actualize the conjunction of the logically independent propositions that (Q) a tornado hits the town and that (R) you take shelter in the
basement, and Q is not yet settled, then you can actualize Q. Note that, if Q is
already settled (i.e., a tornado has already hit the town) and you can actualize
R (i.e., you can take shelter in the basement), then you can actualize the conjunction of Q with R (see principle (10) in the last paragraph of §2.7). (I take
the satisfaction proposition of your conditional obligation — to take shelter in
the basement if a tornado hits the town — to be the conjunction of Q with R:
for the purpose of keeping your promise, it does not matter whether you take
shelter in the basement before or after a tornado hits the town.)
52. One might object that, if you do not drink in order to keep your promise (for
example, because you do not want to let me drive), then you keep your promise and thus your promissory obligation (to let me drive if you drink) is satisied rather than avoided. In reply, note irst that no similar move is available
if you promise to let me drive if it snows: there is no plausible case in which it
does not snow because you do not want to let me drive. Moreover, there are
two kinds of cases in which you keep (i.e., you do not break) your promise
to let me drive if you drink: cases in which you do not drink, and cases in
which you both drink and let me drive. If one wants to say (as the objection
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agent at a given time has an obligation, then the violation proposition
of the obligation is ability-possible for the agent at that time). Indeed,
the violation proposition of your conditional obligation in the above
example — namely the proposition that a tornado hits the town but
you do not take shelter in the basement — is ability-possible for you: it
might be true if you were to do something that you can do, namely refrain from taking shelter in the basement. I believe that no example of
a conditional (or unconditional) obligation falsiies OIPV; this is why
in §2.5 I formulated OIPV (in contrast to OICS) in terms of all obligations that agents have, including conditional obligations. Nevertheless, OIPV is not the whole story concerning conditional obligations:
in some cases, OIPV does not explain why an agent loses or fails to
have a conditional obligation. To see this, consider two examples. (1)
Suppose that in the morning you have a conditional obligation (because you have promised) to run in tomorrow’s marathon if it does not
snow tonight. If you have an accident at noon that leaves you paralyzed and thus unable to run in tomorrow’s marathon, then you lose
this conditional obligation at noon. But OIPV does not explain why
you lose it: right after the accident, the violation proposition of the
obligation — namely the proposition that it does not snow tonight but
you do not run in tomorrow’s marathon — is still ability-possible for
you.54 (2) If you (now) have no inluence over the outcome of the lottery, then you have no conditional obligation to win the lottery if I do
not win. But OIPV does not explain why not: the violation proposition of such an obligation — namely the proposition that neither of us
wins the lottery — is ability-possible for you. (The observation that you
cannot satisfy such an obligation provides no explanation either: as I
argued, OICS* is false.) To explain why in these examples you lose or
you fail to have a conditional obligation, a new principle is needed. I
propose next such a new principle, which also generalizes (and thus
supersedes) OICS.
3.2. The “ought-implies-can-obey” principle (OICO)
Before I formulate the new principle, I introduce some concepts. Say
that an obligation is obeyed exactly if it is not violated (i.e., it is either satisied or avoided). Let the obedience proposition of an obligation be the negation of its violation proposition (Vranas 2011: 374).
For example, the obedience proposition of your conditional obligation to confess if you repent is the negation of the proposition that
you both repent and do not confess; equivalently, it is the proposition
that either you do not repent or you confess (i.e., the proposition that,
if you repent, then you confess). By contrast, the obedience proposition of your unconditional obligation to confess is the negation of the
proposition that you do not confess (i.e., it is the proposition that you
confess), and thus is the same as the satisfaction proposition of your
unconditional obligation. More generally, for unconditional obligations, avoidance (i.e., neither-satisfaction-nor-violation) is impossible,
so obedience (i.e., satisfaction-or-avoidance) amounts to satisfaction.
Given these concepts, here is my proposed new principle, namely the
ought-implies-can-obey principle:
(OICO) If an agent at a given time has an obligation, then
the agent at that time can obey the obligation (i.e., can actualize its obedience proposition).
OICO entails OICS: if OICO is true, then any agent who (at a given
time) has an unconditional obligation can obey the obligation, and then
OICS is also true because the agent can satisfy the obligation (since,
for unconditional obligations, obedience amounts to satisfaction).
Since OICO entails OICS, OICO yields correct results concerning the
loss of — and the failure to have — unconditional obligations (if my arguments in §2 succeed). Concerning conditional obligations, note irst
54. One might argue that you do not lose the obligation at noon: the violation
proposition of the obligation is still impermissible (because your promise is
still in force) after the accident, so you still have the obligation after the accident. I reply that, even if the violation proposition of the obligation is impersonally impermissible after the accident, it is not impermissible for you after
the accident; so, even if the obligation is still in force after the accident, you no
longer have it after the accident (cf. Vranas 2017b).
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that my counterexample to OICS* (§3.1) leaves OICO unscathed: if
you have a conditional obligation to take shelter in the basement if a
tornado hits the town, then you can actualize the obedience proposition of this obligation (namely the proposition that either no tornado
hits the town or you take shelter in the basement), since you can take
shelter in the basement. Consider also again the two examples I examined in the last paragraph of §3.1. (1) Suppose that in the morning you
have a conditional obligation to run in tomorrow’s marathon if it does
not snow tonight, but you have an accident at noon that leaves you
paralyzed. In contrast to OIPV, OICO does explain why you lose this
conditional obligation at noon: because at noon you become unable
to actualize its obedience proposition, namely the proposition that either it snows tonight or you run in tomorrow’s marathon. (2) Suppose
that you (now) have no inluence over the outcome of the lottery. In
contrast to OIPV, OICO does explain why you have no conditional obligation to win the lottery if I do not win: because you cannot actualize
the obedience proposition of such an obligation, namely the proposition that either I win the lottery or you win.
To make some further remarks on OICO, I introduce a deinition.
Let an unconditional counterpart of a conditional obligation be an unconditional obligation with the same violation proposition (and thus
the same obedience proposition) as the conditional obligation. For example, an unconditional obligation for you to either drive or ly is an
unconditional counterpart of a conditional obligation for you to ly if
you do not drive. An unconditional counterpart of a conditional obligation is satisied exactly if the conditional obligation is obeyed. Therefore, according to OICO, if an agent at a given time has a conditional
obligation, then the agent at that time can satisfy any unconditional
counterpart of the conditional obligation. One might then ask: is it
plausible to propose (as OICO does) the same condition as necessary
both for having a conditional obligation and for having an unconditional counterpart of the conditional obligation? I reply that it is plausible: if you cannot make it the case that either you drive or you ly, then
you have neither a conditional obligation to ly if you do not drive nor
an unconditional obligation to either drive or ly. To propose the same
condition as necessary for having either obligation is not to confuse
the two obligations (cf. note 16).
Here is an objection to OICO: Suppose you have contracted a virus
that has made you unable to walk for the foreseeable future, and you
have no inluence over whether or when you will be cured. Nevertheless, if on Monday you promise me that you will walk on Friday if you
are cured by Wednesday, then on Monday you acquire a corresponding conditional obligation. One might argue, however, that according
to OICO you do not acquire such an obligation, because on Monday
you cannot actualize the obedience proposition of such an obligation,
namely the proposition that either (1) you are not cured by Wednesday or (2) you will walk on Friday: on Monday you cannot actualize
(1) because you have no inluence over whether or when you will be
cured, and on Monday you cannot actualize (2) because the virus has
made you unable to walk for the foreseeable future. I reply irst that
this reasoning is invalid: in some cases, one can actualize a disjunction although one cannot actualize any of the disjuncts. For example,
although you can neither actualize the proposition that you will buy
an umbrella and it will rain nor actualize the proposition that you will
buy an umbrella and it will not rain (since you have no inluence over
whether it will rain), you can actualize the disjunction of these two
propositions, which is logically equivalent to the proposition that you
will buy an umbrella.55 Similarly, I argue next that on Monday you can
actualize the disjunction of (1) with (2) (equivalently, the conditional
‘if you are cured by Wednesday, you will walk on Friday’).
My argument appeals to the principle that you are currently able to
actualize a proposition P if there is a future time t such that, if P were
not settled by t, then by t you would be able to actualize P.56 In support
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55. For another example, although you can neither cause the coin to come up
heads nor cause the coin to come up tails, you can cause the coin to come up
heads or tails: you can toss the coin.
56. The principle in the text does not entail the claim that, if there is a future
time at which you will be able to actualize P, then you are currently able to
actualize P. That claim is false: even if tomorrow you will win the lottery and
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of this principle, suppose that you are currently competing against me
in a ive-kilometer race, and I have taken a drug such that, if it did not
kill me within a minute (if it did, you would win the race by default), it
would signiicantly weaken me within a minute (and in that case you
would become able to run faster than me and thus to win the race). In
this example, there is a future time t (namely one minute from now)
such that, if the proposition P that you win the race were not settled by
t, then the drug would not kill me but would signiicantly weaken me
by t, and then by t you would be able (to run faster than me and thus)
to actualize P; so the above principle yields the intuitively correct consequence that you are currently able to (actualize the proposition P
that you) win the race. Go back now to the disjunction of (1) with (2)
in the previous paragraph. There is a future time t (namely the end of
the day Wednesday) such that, if the disjunction were not settled by t,
then you would be cured by t, and then by t you would be able (to walk
on Friday and thus) to actualize the disjunction; so the above principle
yields the consequence that on Monday you are already able to actualize the disjunction. One might respond that this consequence cannot
be correct, because, if you are not cured by Wednesday, then you do
not actualize the disjunction (since it becomes settled without your
involvement), and subsequently you are unable to actualize it (since it
is already settled). I reply that the claim that you are currently able to
actualize a proposition is compatible both with the claim that you will
not in fact actualize it and with the claim that in the future you will no
longer be able to actualize it. I conclude that the objection to OICO in
the previous paragraph fails.
3.3. Why OIPV is still needed
Despite its successes, OICO does not always explain why agents lose
conditional obligations. To see this, consider a modiication of the example I used in §2.5 to argue that OICS does not always explain why
agents lose unconditional obligations. Suppose I ask you to euthanize
my terminally ill dog. At 9am, you promise me that the dog will be
dead by midnight if it is alive at 1pm, and as a result you acquire a
corresponding conditional obligation. At noon, you administer to the
dog a quick-acting and invariably fatal poison to which there is no
antidote, with the result that the dog will inevitably be dead within
a few minutes (and thus by midnight). Then you lose the conditional
obligation at noon: you are done with it. But OICO does not explain
why you lose it, since you do not become unable to obey it: after you
administer the poison but before the poison acts, you can kill the dog
by shooting it, so you can still actualize the obedience proposition of
the obligation, namely the proposition that the dog is (not alive at 1pm
or) dead by midnight. By contrast, when you administer the poison,
the obedience proposition of the obligation becomes ability-necessary
for you; equivalently, the violation proposition of the obligation becomes ability-impossible for you, so OIPV does explain why you lose
the obligation.57
thus you will be able to donate ten million dollars to charity tomorrow, today
you are unable to donate ten million dollars to charity tomorrow (§2.4). By
contrast, if tomorrow (is your payday, so) you will receive your paycheck and
thus you will be able to pay your bills tomorrow, today you are already able
to pay your bills tomorrow (even if you are unable to pay them today). To explain the contrast between the two cases, note that today there is no reasonable expectation (even if it is true) that you will win the lottery tomorrow, but
today there is a reasonable expectation that you will receive your paycheck
tomorrow. Similarly, the principle in the text is informative about cases in
which by some future time you would be able — and thus there is a reasonable
expectation that you will be able — to actualize P if P is not settled by that time.
57. I can now explain why in §2.5 I formulated OIPV in terms of violation instead of satisfaction. Consider the “ought-implies-not-necessary-satisfaction”
principle: (OINNS) If an agent at a given time has an obligation, then the
satisfaction proposition of the obligation is not ability-necessary for the agent
at that time. OIPV entails OINNS, and the restrictions of the two principles
to unconditional obligations are equivalent. Nevertheless, OINNS does not
explain why you lose the obligation in the above example. This is because,
when you administer the poison, the satisfaction proposition of your conditional obligation — namely the proposition that the dog is alive at 1pm and
dead by midnight — does not become ability-necessary for you: it might be
false if you were to do something that you can do, namely shoot the dog before the poison acts.
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Moreover, in some cases OIPV explains but OICO does not explain
why agents fail to have a conditional obligation. For example, just as
OIPV explains why you (now) have no unconditional obligation to
not run faster than light tomorrow (since running faster than light tomorrow is ability-impossible for you), OIPV explains why you have
no conditional obligation to not run faster than light tomorrow if you
fail to exercise today: the violation proposition of such an obligation,
namely the proposition that both you fail to exercise today and you
run faster than light tomorrow, is ability-impossible for you. But OICO
does not explain why you have no such conditional obligation: you
can actualize the obedience proposition of such an obligation, namely
the proposition that either you exercise today or you do not run faster
than light tomorrow, since you can exercise today.58 I propose then
(taking also into account some results from §3.2) that both OICO and
OIPV are needed to explain why (or to correctly predict when) agents
lose or fail to have conditional obligations.59
One might be worried by the asymmetry between obedience and
violation exhibited by the OICO/OIPV pair: OICO combines obedience with ability, but OIPV combines violation with ability-possibility.
In reply, I ask: what would count as a symmetric pair of principles? In a
irst sense, two principles are symmetric exactly if they propose necessary conditions (for having an obligation) that ascribe the same property (e.g., being ability-possible) to diferent propositions (e.g., to the satisfaction and the violation proposition of an obligation). OIPS (§2.6)
and OIPV are symmetric in this sense, but clearly OICO and OIPV are
not. In a second sense, two principles are symmetric exactly if they
propose necessary conditions that ascribe diferent properties (e.g., being ability-possible and not being ability-necessary) to the same proposition (e.g., to the obedience proposition of an obligation). It turns out
that OICO and OIPV are symmetric in this sense, as one can see by
noting that OIPV can be equivalently reformulated in terms of obedience as follows:
58. One can similarly see that OIPV explains but OICO does not explain why
you (now) have no conditional obligation to exercise today if you run faster
than light tomorrow. More generally, it is a consequence of OIPV (but not of
OICO) that, if a proposition P (like the proposition that you run faster than
light tomorrow) is ability-impossible for an agent at time t, then, for any proposition Q, the agent at t has no conditional obligation to the efect that Q is true
if P is true (or to the efect that P is false if Q is false): the violation proposition
of such an obligation, namely the conjunction of P with the negation of Q,
is also ability-impossible for the agent at t. On the other hand, it is a consequence of OICO (but not of OIPV) that, if (1) a proposition P (like the proposition that you do not run faster than light tomorrow) is ability-necessary for
an agent at time t, then, for any proposition Q, if (2) the agent at t has a conditional obligation to the efect that Q is true if P is true (or to the efect that
P is false if Q is false), then (3) the agent at t can actualize Q. Proof. By OICO,
(2) entails that (4) the agent at t can actualize the disjunction Q’ of Q with the
negation of P. By (1), however, (5) Q and Q’ are ability-equivalent for the agent
at t, in the sense that it is ability-necessary for the agent at t that Q and Q’ are
materially equivalent (i.e., that Q is true exactly if Q’ is true). Finally, (4) and
(5) jointly entail (3) by the ability-equivalence-implies-can-equivalence principle:
(AEICE) If propositions Q and Q’ are ability-equivalent for an agent at time
t, then the agent at t can actualize Q exactly if the agent at t can actualize Q’.
This principle is of more general interest: it has as a corollary principle (10) in
the last paragraph of §2.7.
(OIPV) If an agent at a given time has an obligation, then
the obedience proposition of the obligation is not inevitable (i.e., is not ability-necessary) for the agent at that time.
you ever become able to levitate, you will do so (as soon as you become
able). According to OIPV, you do not acquire a corresponding conditional
obligation at noon: the violation proposition of such an obligation, namely
the proposition that at some time you become able to levitate but you do
not do so, is not ability-possible for you right after you promise, assuming
that right after you promise it is ability-necessary for you that you will never
become able to levitate. Now recall that ability-necessity does not entail truth
(see (2) in note 29), so suppose further that (1) at 3pm you suddenly become
able to levitate. Then (2) at 3pm you become obligated to levitate, and one
might argue that this is because, contrary to OIPV, (3) until 3pm you do have
a conditional obligation to levitate if you ever become able to do so. In reply,
note irst that the argument from (1) and (3) to (2) is invalid: the conjunction
of its premises is compatible with the possibility that at 3pm you lose the conditional obligation (for example, because you are released from your promise) and so at 3pm you do not become obligated to levitate. This suggests that,
to explain (2), one needs to appeal instead to the premise that (3’) right after
3pm you have a conditional obligation to levitate if you ever become able to
do so. But (3’) does not conlict with OIPV: (3’) is compatible with the possibility that (because your promise is still in efect: see the end of §2.4) you
acquire such a conditional obligation at 3pm.
59. One might object to OIPV as follows: Suppose you promise at noon that, if
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Since OICO and OIPV are symmetric in the second sense, I see no
reason to be worried by the fact that they are not symmetric in the
irst sense: it is impossible for two principles to be symmetric in both
senses.60
can do, namely refrain from exercising today). I reply that it is possible
for you to have such a conditional obligation. To see this, suppose that
you are a soldier and your commanding oicer gives you the following
order at noon: “If you fail to exercise today, run faster than light tomorrow.” It will not do for you to protest that you cannot run faster than
light tomorrow, since the oicer could respond: “I did not order you
to run faster than light tomorrow, something that indeed you cannot
do. I ordered you instead to run faster than light tomorrow if you fail to
exercise today. You can obey this order: you can exercise today.” And if
you ask the oicer why she did not just order you instead to exercise
today, the oicer could respond: “I wanted you to use your brain to
igure out what you need to do to obey my order.”61 But since what you
need to do to obey the order is exercise today, one might argue that
the oicer just ordered you in a roundabout way to exercise today;
as a result, at noon you acquired only an unconditional obligation to
exercise today, not a conditional obligation to run faster than light tomorrow if you fail to exercise today. Before I reply to this argument, I
examine a second example.
Second example. Suppose that in the morning you have a conditional
obligation (because you have promised) to run in tomorrow’s marathon if you do not withdraw from the marathon today, but you have
an accident at noon that leaves you paralyzed and thus unable to run
in tomorrow’s marathon (but still able to withdraw). Then, one might
argue, you lose the conditional obligation at noon, but neither OICO
nor OIPV explains why you lose it: you can still actualize the obedience proposition of the obligation, namely the proposition that either
you withdraw from the marathon today or you run in the marathon
tomorrow (since you can still withdraw from the marathon today), and
that proposition is still not inevitable for you (since it would be false
if you were to do something that you still can do, namely refrain from
3.4. Are OICO and OIPV the whole story?
In some cases in which an obligation is revoked, neither OICO nor
OIPV explains why an agent loses the obligation. For example, suppose that in the morning you promise me (and you never promise
anyone else) to call me in the evening, and as a result you acquire a
corresponding obligation, but at noon I release you from your promise.
Then at noon you lose the obligation to call me in the evening (cf. Ross
1939: 110), but neither OICO nor OIPV explains why you lose it: you
can still actualize the obedience proposition of the obligation, namely
the proposition that you call me in the evening, and that proposition is
still not inevitable for you. But apart from cases of revocation, are there
any cases in which neither OICO nor OIPV explains why an agent
loses or fails to have an obligation? To conclude my discussion of conditional obligations, I will examine three alleged — but, as I will argue,
ultimately unsuccessful — examples of such cases.
First example. One might argue that neither OICO nor OIPV explains why you (now) have no conditional obligation to run faster
than light tomorrow if you fail to exercise today: you can actualize the
obedience proposition of such an obligation, namely the proposition
that either you exercise today or you run faster than light tomorrow
(since you can exercise today), and that proposition is not inevitable
for you (since it would be false if you were to do something that you
60. Similar remarks apply to the special case of unconditional obligations (§2.6):
although OICS and OIPV are not symmetric in the second sense (because
OIPV cannot be equivalently reformulated in terms of satisfaction), OICS and
the restriction of OIPV to unconditional obligations (namely the principle that,
if an agent at a given time has an unconditional obligation, then the obedience proposition of the obligation is not ability-necessary for the agent at
that time) are symmetric in the second sense (because the restriction of OIPV
can be equivalently reformulated in terms of satisfaction: for unconditional
obligations, obedience amounts to satisfaction).
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61. Could one similarly argue that (contrary to what I claimed in §3.3) it is possible for you to have a conditional obligation to not run faster than light tomorrow if you fail to exercise today? No: if your commanding oicer gives
you a corresponding order, then (by OIPV) you do not acquire any obligation,
since there is nothing you need to do to obey the order.
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withdrawing from the marathon today). I reply that you do not lose the
conditional obligation at noon. To see this, note irst that at noon you
become obligated to withdraw from the marathon today. Now suppose that at 3pm, not having yet withdrawn from the marathon, you
suddenly recover from your paralysis and thus you become again able
to run in the marathon tomorrow. Then at 3pm you stop being obligated to withdraw from the marathon today. But your ability to withdraw
remains unimpaired, so why do you stop being obligated to withdraw?
The only plausible explanation that I see is this: until 3pm, you are
obligated to withdraw only because both (1) you have the conditional
obligation to run if you do not withdraw and (2) you are unable to run,
so when you stop (at 3pm) being unable to run you also stop being
obligated to withdraw. But this explanation entails that you have the
conditional obligation until 3pm,62 and thus that (as I claimed) you do
not lose it at noon.63 Similarly, going back to the example in the previous paragraph, suppose that at 3pm, not having yet exercised today,
you suddenly become able to run faster than light tomorrow (this is
logically possible). Then at 3pm you stop being obligated to exercise
today, and the only plausible explanation that I see is this: until 3pm,
you are obligated to exercise today only because both (1’) you have the
conditional obligation to run faster than light tomorrow if you fail to
exercise today and (2’) you are unable to run faster than light tomorrow, so when you stop being unable to run faster than light tomorrow
you also stop being obligated to exercise today.64 But this explanation
entails that you have the conditional obligation until 3pm.65
Third example. One might argue that neither OICO nor OIPV explains why you (now) have no conditional obligation to run in tomorrow’s marathon if you are struck with total paralysis tonight: you can
actualize (or so one might argue) the obedience proposition of such
an obligation, namely the proposition that either (1) you are not struck
with total paralysis tonight or (2) you run in tomorrow’s marathon
(assuming that now you can run in tomorrow’s marathon), and that
proposition is not inevitable for you (since it might be false if you were
to do something that you can do, namely pray to be struck with total
paralysis tonight). I reply that OICO does explain why you have no
such conditional obligation: you cannot actualize the obedience proposition of such an obligation, namely the disjunction of (1) with (2)
62. One might propose the following alternative explanation: until 3pm, you are
obligated to withdraw only because both (1*) you have an unconditional obligation to either withdraw or run — this is an unconditional counterpart (see
§3.2) of the conditional obligation in (1) in the text — and (2) you are unable
to run, so when you stop being unable to run you also stop being obligated to
withdraw. In reply, I ask: why do you have such an unconditional obligation?
If one answers by claiming that whenever you have a conditional obligation
to do B if you do not do A you also have an unconditional obligation to do
either A or B, I reply that this answer in efect grants that you have the conditional obligation until 3pm. But if one alternatively answers by claiming that
whenever, for example, you promise to do B if you do not do A you acquire
an unconditional obligation to do either A or B but you do not acquire a
conditional obligation to do B if you do not do A, I reply that it is implausible
to deny (as this answer in efect does) that people ever acquire conditional
obligations by making conditional promises.
64. I say that until 3pm you are (unconditionally) obligated to exercise today (or,
in the second example, to withdraw from the marathon today) because I do
not wish to take a stand on whether until 3pm you also have an unconditional
obligation to exercise today (see note 39). I do not need to take a stand on this,
because, if until 3pm you also have such an unconditional obligation, I can
still claim that until 3pm you are obligated to exercise today only because
both (1’) and (2’) hold (since I can claim that until 3pm you have such an
unconditional obligation only because both (1’) and (2’) hold).
63. Could one similarly argue that (contrary to what I claimed in §3.1 and §3.2), if
you become paralyzed at noon, you do not lose the conditional obligation to
run in tomorrow’s marathon if it does not snow tonight? No. My argument in
the text starts with the premise that, if you become paralyzed at noon, it becomes obligatory for you (i.e., you become obligated) to withdraw from the
marathon today. But a similar argument concerning the example in §3.1 and
§3.2 does not get of the ground: if you become paralyzed at noon, it does not
become obligatory for you that it snows tonight, since you cannot make it the
case that it snows tonight.
65. This argument relies on the assumption that running faster than light is logically possible, so the argument does not show that it is possible for you to
have a conditional obligation with a logically impossible satisfaction proposition — for example, a conditional obligation to fail to torture if you torture.
Nevertheless, my argument about the possibility of being given a corresponding order by your commanding oicer provides a reason for thinking
that it is possible for you to have such a conditional obligation. Note that
OICS (and thus also OICO) entails that no agent ever has an unconditional
obligation with a logically impossible satisfaction proposition.
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above, even if you can actualize (2). To see this, note irst that it is fallacious to infer the conclusion that you can actualize a disjunction from
the premise that you can actualize one of the disjuncts. For example,
even if you can run in tomorrow’s marathon, you cannot actualize the
proposition that either the sun sets tonight or you run in tomorrow’s
marathon, because it is inevitable for you that you will not actualize
it: it is inevitable for you that it will become settled tonight (when the
sun sets) without your involvement. Similarly, you cannot actualize
the disjunction of (1) with (2), because it is inevitable for you that you
will not actualize it:66 (a) if you were not struck with total paralysis
tonight, then the disjunction would become settled tonight without
your involvement (so you would not actualize it),67 but (b) if you were
struck with total paralysis tonight, then you would not run in tomorrow’s marathon, and then the disjunction would be false (so again you
would not actualize it).68
4. Conclusion
Say that a proposition is feasible — in other words, is an option — for an
agent at a given time exactly if the agent at that time can actualize the
proposition. Say also that a proposition is a live option for an agent at
a given time exactly if the proposition is feasible but not inevitable for
the agent at that time.69 The main conclusion of this paper, namely the
conjunction of OICO with OIPV, can be equivalently reformulated as
the ought-implies-live-option principle:
(OILO) If an agent at a given time has an obligation, then
the obedience proposition of the obligation is a live option (i.e., is feasible but not inevitable) for the agent at
that time.
This is my preferred ought-implies-can principle. This principle is formulated in terms of all obligations that agents have — including conditional obligations, which have been neglected in the literature on
ought-implies-can principles. I defended OILO (via defending OICO
and OIPV) against several objections, and I argued that, in many
66. I am not relying on the fallacious inference from the premise that you will
not actualize a proposition to the conclusion that you cannot actualize it; I
am relying instead on the valid inference from the premise that it is inevitable
(i.e., ability-necessary) for you that you will not actualize a proposition to
the conclusion that you cannot actualize it. To see that the latter inference is
valid, note that its contrapositive inference is valid: the premise that you can
actualize a proposition P entails the conclusion that the proposition Q that
you actualize P is ability-possible for you (since Q might — indeed, would — be
true if you were to do something that you can do, namely actualize P).
67. I assume that you cannot make it the case that you are not struck with total
paralysis tonight; if you can, then it is possible for you to have a conditional
obligation to run in tomorrow’s marathon if you are struck with total paralysis
tonight (see my argument in the text concerning the irst example, on running faster than light tomorrow if you fail to exercise today).
with (2′): if you did not have a stroke tonight, then the disjunction would become settled tonight without your involvement (so you would not actualize
it), but if you did have a stroke tonight, then you would become unable to beat
me at chess tomorrow (so you would be unable to actualize the disjunction).
My claim that you cannot actualize the above disjunction is compatible with
my claim that you can actualize the disjunction of (1) with (2) in the penultimate paragraph of §3.2.
68. One might propose a variant of the third example: one might argue that neither OICO nor OIPV explains why you (now) have no conditional obligation
to beat me at chess tomorrow if you have a mild stroke tonight that leaves you
able to play chess at an elementary level but unable to beat an experienced
player like me. I grant that my reply in the text to the third example does not
work here: it is not inevitable for you that you will not actualize the obedience proposition of such an obligation — namely the proposition that either
(1′) you do not have such a stroke tonight or (2′) you beat me at chess tomorrow — because, if you had such a stroke tonight, you might still beat me tomorrow (if I were to — have a similar stroke and thus — play unusually poorly).
Nevertheless, it seems clear that you cannot actualize the disjunction of (1′)
69. Cf. Greenspan 1975: 264, 265 n. 7. A live option can be contrasted with a dead
option, namely a feasible but inevitable proposition (for example, the proposition that either you raise your arm today or the sun rises tomorrow: you can
actualize this proposition, since you can raise your arm today, but if you do
not, the proposition will become settled anyway). A live option need not be a
controllable proposition, namely a feasible proposition whose negation is also
feasible. For example, the proposition that Smith does not win the election
is a live option for you (it is not inevitable for you, and you can actualize it
because you can kill Smith, who would otherwise win), but is not controllable
by you (you cannot actualize its negation, namely the proposition that Smith
wins the election). See also note 48.
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(non-revocation) cases, OILO explains why an agent loses or fails to
have an obligation.
Perhaps more important than the particular principle that I defended (namely OILO) is the methodology that I introduced in this
paper for formulating and assessing ought-implies-can principles. In
the literature, ought-implies-can principles are typically formulated in
terms of what an agent ought or is obligated to do (at a given time). By
contrast, I formulated ought-implies-can principles in terms of what
obligations an agent has (at a given time). One might argue — and I can
grant (though see note 39) — that there is no substantive diference between these two kinds of formulations: an agent is obligated to φ exactly if the agent has an obligation to φ. Nevertheless, I reply, because
obligations — as opposed to being obligated — can be satisied, violated,
or obeyed, formulating ought-implies-can principles in terms of obligations has a major advantage: it enables one to view such principles as
providing conditions on the satisfaction, violation, or obedience proposition of
an obligation that are necessary for an agent to have the obligation at a
given time.70 And, as I hope this paper demonstrates, this way of viewing ought-implies-can principles is fruitful: it enables one to ask questions that the literature does not address. (For example: for an agent to
have an obligation at a given time, must the satisfaction or the obedience
proposition of the obligation be feasible for the agent at that time?)
Concerning inally the assessment of ought-implies-can principles, the
main methodological innovation of this paper consists in assessing
such principles in terms of their explanatory power — more speciically,
their power to explain why agents lose or fail to have obligations. To
my knowledge, the question of whether an ought-implies-can principle explains why agents lose (i.e., stop having) obligations has not
been raised in the literature. I hope that this paper demonstrates the
fruitfulness of raising it.71
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