Results for 'ought'

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Bibliography: Thought and Thinking in Philosophy of Mind
Bibliography: The Role of Language in Thought in Philosophy of Language
Bibliography: The Is/Ought Gap in Meta-Ethics
Bibliography: Ought Implies Can in Meta-Ethics
Bibliography: Thought Experiments in Metaphilosophy
Bibliography: Conscious Thought in Philosophy of Mind
Bibliography: The Language of Thought in Philosophy of Mind
Bibliography: Perception and Thought in Philosophy of Mind
Bibliography: Freedom of Thought in Social and Political Philosophy
Bibliography: Reasons and Oughts in Philosophy of Action
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  1. Ought” and Intensionality.Junhyo Lee - 2021 - Synthese 199:4621-4643.
    The syntactic structure of the deontic “ought” has been much debated in philosophy and linguistics. Schroeder argues that the deontic “ought” is syntactically ambiguous in the sense that it can be associated with either a control or raising construction. He distinguishes between deliberative and evaluative “ought”s and argues that the deliberative “ought” is control while the evaluative “ought” is raising. However, if there is a control sense of “ought,” it implies that there is a (...)
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  2. Oughts and thoughts: rule-following and the normativity of content.Anandi Hattiangadi - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    In Oughts and Thoughts, Anandi Hattiangadi provides an innovative response to the argument for meaning skepticism set out by Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on ...
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  3.  76
    Does ought imply can?Miklos Kurthy - 2017 - PLoS ONE 12 (4):e0175206.
    Most philosophers believe that a person can have an obligation only insofar as she is able to fulfil it, a principle generally referred to as “Ought Implies Can”. Arguably, this principle reflects something basic about the ordinary concept of obligation. However, in a paper published recently in this journal, Wesley Buckwalter and John Turri presented evidence for the conclusion that ordinary people in fact reject that principle. With a series of studies, they claimed to have demonstrated that, in people’s (...)
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  4. Ought’ Does Not Imply ‘Can’.Moti Mizrahi - 2009 - Philosophical Frontiers 4 (1):19-35.
    According to the Ought-Implies-Can principle (OIC), an agent ought to perform a certain action only if the agent can perform that action. Proponents of OIC interpret this supposed implication in several ways. Some argue that the implication in question is a logical one, namely, entailment. Some think that the relation between ‘ought’ and ‘can’ is a relation of presupposition. Still others argue that ‘ought’ conversationally implicates ‘can’. Opponents of OIC offer a variety of counterexamples in an (...)
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  5. Ought, Can, and Presupposition: An Experimental Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Methode 4 (6):232-243.
    In this paper, I present the results of an experimental study on intuitions about moral obligation (ought) and ability (can). Many philosophers accept as an axiom the principle known as “Ought Implies Can” (OIC). If the truth of OIC is intuitive, such that it is accepted by many philosophers as an axiom, then we would expect people to judge that agents who are unable to perform an action are not morally obligated to perform that action. The results of (...)
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  6. Kant, Ought Implies Can, the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, and Happiness.Samuel Kahn - 2018 - Lexington Books.
    This book examines three issues: the principle of ought implies can ; the principle of alternate possibilities ; and Kant’s views on the duty to promote one’s own happiness. It argues that although Kant was wrong to deny such a duty, the part of his denial that rests on a conception of duty incorporating both OIC and PAP is sound.
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  7. Ought, Can, and Presupposition: A Reply to Kurthy and Lawford-Smith.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Methode 4 (6):250-256.
    I report the results of a follow-up study, designed to address concerns raised by Kurthy and Lawford-Smith in response to my original study on intuitions about moral obligation (ought) and ability (can). Like the results of the original study, the results of the follow-up study do not support the hypothesis that OIC is intuitive. The results of both studies suggest that OIC is probably not a principle of ordinary moral cognition. As I have argued in my paper, I take (...)
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  8. Ought’-contextualism beyond the parochial.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):3099-3119.
    Despite increasing prominence, ‘ought’-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As I’ll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between “parochial” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe to—and “aspirational” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither (...)
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  9. Skepticism about Ought Simpliciter.Derek Clayton Baker - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 13.
    There are many different oughts. There is a moral ought, a prudential ought, an epistemic ought, the legal ought, the ought of etiquette, and so on. These oughts can prescribe incompatible actions. What I morally ought to do may be different from what I self-interestedly ought to do. Philosophers have claimed that these conflicts are resolved by an authoritative ought, or by facts about what one ought to do simpliciter or all-things-considered. (...)
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  10. Ought, Agents, and Actions.Mark Schroeder - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (1):1-41.
    According to a naïve view sometimes apparent in the writings of moral philosophers, ‘ought’ often expresses a relation between agents and actions – the relation that obtains between an agent and an action when that action is what that agent ought to do. It is not part of this naïve view that ‘ought’ always expresses this relation – on the contrary, adherents of the naïve view are happy to allow that ‘ought’ also has an epistemic sense, (...)
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  11. Ought to Believe.Matthew Chrisman - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (7):346-370.
    My primary purpose in this paper is to sketch a theory of doxastic oughts that achieves a satisfying middle ground between the extremes of rejecting epistemic deontology because one thinks beliefs are not within our direct voluntary control and rejecting doxastic involuntarism because one thinks that some doxastic oughts must be true. The key will be appreciating the obvious fact that not all true oughts require direct voluntary control. I will construct my account as an attempt to surpass other accounts (...)
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  12. You ought to ϕ only if you may believe that you ought to ϕ.Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (265):760-82.
    In this paper I present an argument for the claim that you ought to do something only if you may believe that you ought to do it. More exactly, I defend the following principle about normative reasons: An agent A has decisive reason to φ only if she also has sufficient reason to believe that she has decisive reason to φ. I argue that this principle follows from the plausible assumption that it must be possible for an agent (...)
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  13. Ought Implies Can’: Not So Pragmatic After All.Alex King - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (3):637-661.
    Those who want to deny the ‘ought implies can’ principle often turn to weakened views to explain ‘ought implies can’ phenomena. The two most common versions of such views are that ‘ought’ presupposes ‘can’, and that ‘ought’ conversationally implicates ‘can’. This paper will reject both views, and in doing so, present a case against any pragmatic view of ‘ought implies can’. Unlike much of the literature, I won't rely on counterexamples, but instead will argue that (...)
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  14. The Meaning of 'Ought': Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics.Matthew Chrisman - 2016 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA.
    The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. In this book Matthew Chrisman develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator, and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. This is a metanormative account that agrees with traditional descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth-conditions of normative sentences is a central part of (...)
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  15. "Ought" and the Perspective of the Agent.Benjamin Kiesewitter - 2011 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 5 (3):1-24.
    Objectivists and perspectivists disagree about the question of whether what an agent ought to do depends on the totality of facts or on the agent’s limited epistemic perspective. While objectivism fails to account for normative guidance, perspectivism faces the challenge of explaining phenomena (occurring most notably in advice, but also in first-personal deliberation) in which the use of “ought” is geared to evidence that is better than the evidence currently available to the agent. This paper aims to defend (...)
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  16. Why 'Ought' Detaches: Or, Why You Ought to Get with My Friends (If You Want to Be My Lover).Alex Silk - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    This paper argues that a standard analysis of modals from formal semantics suggests a solution to the detaching problem — the problem of whether un-embedded 'ought'-claims can "detach" (be derived) from hypothetical imperatives and their antecedent conditions. On a broadly Kratzerian analysis, modals have a skeletal conventional meaning and receive a particular reading (e.g., deontic, epistemic, teleological) only relative to certain forms of contextual supplementation. I argue that 'ought'-claims can detach — subject to an important qualification — but (...)
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  17. Oughts and ends.Stephen Finlay - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 143 (3):315 - 340.
    This paper advances a reductive semantics for ‘ought’ and a naturalistic theory of normativity. It gives a unified analysis of predictive, instrumental, and categorical uses of ‘ought’: the predictive ‘ought’ is basic, and is interpreted in terms of probability. Instrumental ‘oughts’ are analyzed as predictive ‘oughts’ occurring under an ‘in order that’ modifer (the end-relational theory). The theory is then extended to categorical uses of ‘ought’: it is argued that they are special rhetorical uses of the (...)
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  18.  98
    Ought Does Not Imply Can.Paul Saka - 2000 - American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (2):93 - 105.
    Moral philosophers widely believe that it is a part of the MEANING of 'ought' statements that they imply 'can' statements. To this thesis I offer three challenges, and then I conclude on a broader methodological note. (1) Epistemological Modal Argument: for all we know, determinism is true; determinism contradicts “ought implies can”; therefore we don’t know that 'ought' implies 'can'. (2) Metaphysical Modal Argument: determinism is conceptually possible; determinism contradicts “ought implies can”; therefore “ought implies (...)
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  19. Subtracting “ought” from “is”: Descriptivism versus normativism in the study of human thinking.Shira Elqayam & Jonathan St B. T. Evans - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5):251-252.
    We propose a critique of normativism, defined as the idea that human thinking reflects a normative system against which it should be measured and judged. We analyze the methodological problems associated with normativism, proposing that it invites the controversial “is-ought” inference, much contested in the philosophical literature. This problem is triggered when there are competing normative accounts (the arbitration problem), as empirical evidence can help arbitrate between descriptive theories, but not between normative systems. Drawing on linguistics as a model, (...)
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  20. On Scepticism About Ought Simpliciter.James L. D. Brown - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative (...) judgments bring with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)
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  21. 'Must', 'Ought' and the Structure of Standards.Gunnar Björnsson & Robert Shanklin - 2014 - In Fabrizio Cariani, Davide Grossi, Joke Meheus & Xavier Parent (eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems. Springer. pp. 33–48.
    This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak neces-sity modals. First we identify a number of explananda: their well-known in-tuitive difference in strength between ‘must’ and ‘ought’ as well as differ-ences in connections to probabilistic considerations and acts of requiring and recommending. Here we argue that important extant analyses of the se-mantic differences, though tailored to account for some of these aspects, fail to account for all. We proceed to suggest that the difference between ’ought’ and (...)
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  22.  66
    Reasons, oughts, and requirements.Justin Snedegar - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 11:155-181.
    This paper raises a challenge for the recently popular reasons first approach to normativity, according to which all normative notions can be explained in terms of reasons. The reasons first theorist owes us an account of how these explanations go for all other normative notions. I focus here on requirement, and to a lesser extent, permission. There is a very plausible, widely accepted account of the relationship between your reasons and what you ought to do|roughly, what you ought (...)
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  23. Subjective Ought.Jennifer Rose Carr - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2.
    The subjective deontic "ought" generates counterexamples to classical inference rules like modus ponens. It also conflicts with the orthodox view about modals and conditionals in natural language semantics. Most accounts of the subjective ought build substantive and unattractive normative assumptions into the semantics of the modal. I sketch a general semantic account, along with a metasemantic story about the context sensitivity of information-sensitive operators.
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  24. Ought We to Forget What We Cannot Forget? A Reply to Sybille Schmidt.Attila Tanyi - 2015 - In Giovanni Galizia & David Shulman (eds.), Forgetting: An Interdisciplinary Conversation. Magnes Press of the Hebrew University. pp. 258-262.
    This is a short response to Sybille Schmidt's paper (in the same volume) "Is There an Ethics of Forgetting?". The response starts out by admitting that forgetting is an essential function of human existence, that it serves, as it were, an important evolutionary function: that it is good, since it contributes to our well-being, to have the ability to forget. But this does not give us as answer, affirmative or not, to Schmidt’s title question: “Is There an Ethics of Forgetting?” (...)
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  25. Ought’, ‘Can’, and Practical Reasons.Clayton Littlejohn - 2009 - American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (4):363-73.
    Some recent defenses of the 'ought' implies 'can' (OIC) principle try to derive that principle from uncontroversial claims about reasons for action. Reasons for action, it's said, are reasons only for 'potential' actions, which are actions that an agent can perform. Given that 'ought' implies 'reasons', it seems we have our proof of OIC. In this paper, I argue that this latest strategy for defending OIC fails.
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  26. One Ought Too Many.Stephen Finlay & Justin Snedegar - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1):102-124.
    Some philosophers hold that „ought‟ is ambiguous between a sense expressing a propositional operator and a sense expressing a relation between an agent and an action. We defend the opposing view that „ought‟ always expresses a propositional operator against Mark Schroeder‟s recent objections that it cannot adequately accommodate an ambiguity in „ought‟ sentences between evaluative and deliberative readings, predicting readings of sentences that are not actually available. We show how adopting an independently well-motivated contrastivist semantics for „ (...)‟, according to which „ought‟ is always relativized to a contrast set of relevant alternatives, enables us to explain the evaluative-deliberative ambiguity and why the availability of these readings depends on sentential grammar. (shrink)
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  27. Demandingness, "Ought", and Self-Shaping.Cullity Garrett - 2016 - In Marcel van Ackeren Michael Kuhler (ed.), The Limits of Moral Obligation: Moral Demandingness and Ought Implies Can. London: Routledge. pp. 147-62.
    Morality, it is commonly argued, cannot be extreme in the demands it makes of us, because “ought” implies “can”, and normal human psychology places limits on the extent to which most of us are capable of devoting our lives to the service of others. To evaluate this argument, we need to distinguish different uses of “ought” and “can”. Having distinguished these uses, we find that there is more than one defensible version of the principle that “ought” implies (...)
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  28. What ought probably means, and why you can’t detach it.Stephen Finlay - 2009 - Synthese 177 (1):67 - 89.
    Some intuitive normative principles raise vexing 'detaching problems' by their failure to license modus ponens. I examine three such principles (a self-reliance principle and two different instrumental principles) and recent stategies employed to resolve their detaching problems. I show that solving these problems necessitates postulating an indefinitely large number of senses for 'ought'. The semantics for 'ought' that is standard in linguistics offers a unifying strategy for solving these problems, but I argue that an alternative approach combining an (...)
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  29. Does “Ought” Imply “Feasible”?Nicholas Southwood - 2016 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 44 (1):7-45.
    Many of us feel internally conflicted in the face of certain normative claims that make infeasible demands: say, normative claims that demand that agents do what, given deeply entrenched objectionable character traits, they cannot bring themselves to do. On the one hand, such claims may seem false on account of demanding the infeasible, and insisting otherwise may seem to amount to objectionable unworldliness – to chasing “pies in the sky.” On the other hand, such claims may seem true in spite (...)
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    "Ought" Judgments and Motivation.Michael Pendlebury - 2002 - American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2):183 - 196.
    Competing metaethical theories are sometimes cast as alternative ways of responding to an inconsistency between two apparent features of moral judgments, viz., that they are truth-apt expressions of belief and that they have motivational force. I argue that this is an oversimplification that fails to address some important data that can be accommodated on the basis of a straightforward “good reasons” account of “ought” judgments that explains why certain of these judgments have motivational force will others do not. This (...)
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    What ought I to do?: morality in Kant and Levinas.Catherine Chalier - 2002 - Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
    Is it possible to apply a theoretical approach to ethics? The French philosopher Catherine Chalier addresses this question with an unusual combination of traditional ethics and continental philosophy. In a powerful argument for the necessity of moral reflection, Chalier counters the notion that morality can be derived from theoretical knowledge. Chalier analyzes the positions of two great moral philosophers, Kant and Levinas. While both are critical of an ethics founded on knowledge, their criticisms spring from distinctly different points of view. (...)
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  32. "Ought Implies Can,” Framing Effects, and "Empirical Refutations".Alicia Kissinger-Knox, Patrick Aragon & Moti Mizrahi - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (1):165-182.
    This paper aims to contribute to the current debate about the status of the “Ought Implies Can” principle and the growing body of empirical evidence that undermines it. We report the results of an experimental study which show that people judge that agents ought to perform an action even when they also judge that those agents cannot do it and that such “ought” judgments exhibit an actor-observer effect. Because of this actor-observer effect on “ought” judgments and (...)
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  33. Ought’ and Resolution Semantics.Fabrizio Cariani - 2011 - Noûs 47 (3):534-558.
    I motivate and characterize an intensional semantics for ‘ought’ on which it does not behave as a universal quantifier over possibilities. My motivational argument centers on taking at face value some standard challenges to the quantificational semantics, especially to the idea that ‘ought’-sentences satisfy the principle of Inheritance. I argue that standard pragmatic approaches to these puzzles are either not sufficiently detailed or unconvincing.
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  34.  73
    'Ought' Implies 'Can' and the Argument from Self-Imposed Impossibility: a Critical Examination.Mostofa N. Mansur - 2013 - Copula 30:12.
    Defenders of the Kantian maxim, i.e. ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, defend the maxim taking the term “implication” in the sense of ‘entailment’. But if it is granted that “implication” means entailment, then it can be shown that the Kantian maxim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ is false. Sinnott-Armstrong attempts to prove the falsity of the maxim by his argument from Self-Imposed Impossibility in which he offers his famous example of Adams. But Sinnott-Armstrong’s example of Adams appears to be not strong (...)
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  35. The “Ought” Implies “Can” Principle: A Challenge to Collective Intentionality.Guglielmo Feis - 2012 - Phenomenology and Mind 2:114-121.
    I investigate collective intentionality (CI) through the “Ought” implies “Can” (OIC) principle. My leading question is does OIC impose any further requirement on CI? In answering the challenge inside a Searlean framework, I realize that we need to clarify what CI's structure is and what kind of role the agents joining a CI-act have. In the last part of the paper, I put forward an (inverted) Hartian framework to allow the Searlean CI theory to be agent sensitive and cope (...)
     
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  36. Ought Implies Can Or Could Have.Andrew Dennis Bassford - 2022 - Review of Metaphysics 75 (4):779-807.
    The moral principle that Ought Implies Can (“OIC”) is often assumed without argument in normative discourse. Is this assumption defensible? Some would argue that it is not, as there are many purported counterexamples against it in the literature. However, OIC is not so much a single principle as rather a family of them. In this paper, I will argue that, while not every OIC-type principle is defensible, at least one of them may be. I defend the cognate moral principle (...)
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  37. Is ‘ought’ an object? Meinong’s and Veber’s answers.Venanzio Raspa - 2012 - In T. Pirc (ed.), Object, Person, and Reality: An Introduction to France Veber. JSKD. pp. 53-65.
    Focusing mainly on Meinong’s "Über emotionale Präsentation" and Veber’s "Die Natur des Sollens", I examine their respective conceptions of ought. Meinong has not written a specific work on the ought, he deals with it as a part of his value theory. In "Über emotionale Präsentation" the ought is a property of being, which cannot be viewed as separated from a desiring subject. The ought is an ideal object of higher order; it concerns neither factuality nor non-factuality, (...)
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  38. Ought.Stephen Finlay - 2013 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Wiley-Blackwell.
    Encyclopedia article on the meaning of 'ought'.
     
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  39.  99
    Ought Implies Kant: A Reply to the Consequentialist Critique.Joel Marks - 2009 - Lexington Books.
    Ought Implies Kant defends Kantianism via a critical examination of consequentialism. The latter is shown to be untenable on epistemic grounds; meanwhile, the charge that Kantianism is really consequentialism in disguise is refuted. The book also presents a novel interpretation of Kantianism as according direct duties owed to other animals.
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  40. The meaning of 'ought'.Ralph Wedgwood - 2006 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 1. Clarendon Press. pp. 127-160.
    In this paper, I apply the "conceptual role semantics" approach that I have proposed elsewhere (according to which the meaning of normative terms is given by their role in practical reasoning or deliberation) to the meaning of the term 'ought'. I argue that this approach can do three things: It can give an adequate explanation of the special connection that normative judgments have to practical reasoning and motivation for action. It can give an adequate account of why the central (...)
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  41. 'Ought': OUT OF ORDER.Stephen Finlay - 2016 - In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality. Oxford University Press.
    This paper argues that the innovation of an ordering source parameter in the standard Lewis-Kratzer semantics for modals was a mistake, at least for English auxiliaries like ‘ought’, and that a simpler dyadic semantics (as proposed in my earlier work) provides a superior account of normative uses of modals. I programmatically investigate problems arising from (i) instrumental conditionals, (ii) gradability and “weak necessity”, (iii) information-sensitivity, and (iv) conflicts, and show how the simpler semantics provides intuitive solutions given three basic (...)
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  42. 'Ought' and Ability.P. A. Graham & Peter Graham - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (3):337-382.
    A principle that many have found attractive is one that goes by the name “'Ought' Implies 'Can'.” According to this principle, one morally ought to do something only if one can do it. This essay has two goals: to show that the principle is false and to undermine the motivations that have been offered for it. Toward the end, a proposal about moral obligation according to which something like a restricted version of 'Ought' Implies 'Can' is true (...)
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  43. On the Meaning of 'Ought'.Matthew Chrisman - 2012 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 7. Oxford University Press. pp. 304.
    Discussions about the meaning of the word “ought” are pulled in two apparently competing directions. First, in ethical theory this word is used in the paradigmatic statement of ethical principles and conclusions about what some agent is obligated to do. This leads some ethical theorists to claim that the word “ought” describes a real relation, roughly, of being obligated to (realism) or expresses some non-cognitive attitude toward agents acting in certain ways (expressivism). Second, in theoretical linguistics this word (...)
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  44. Is/Ought Fallacy.Mark T. Nelson - 2018 - In Robert Arp, Steven Barbone & Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad Arguments. Chichester, UK: Wiley. pp. 360–363.
    This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called the 'is/ought fallacy (IOF)'. Some philosophers conclude that the IOF is not a logical problem but an epistemological one, meaning that even if inferences like this one are logically valid, they cannot be used epistemologically to warrant anyone's real‐life moral beliefs. Arguments do not warrant their conclusions unless the premises of those arguments are themselves warranted, and in the real world, they say, no one would ever (...)
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  45. I Ought, Therefore I Can Obey.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2018 - Philosophers' Imprint 18.
    According to typical ought-implies-can principles, if you have an obligation to vaccinate me tomorrow, then you can vaccinate me tomorrow. Such principles are uninformative about conditional obligations: what if you only have an obligation to vaccinate me tomorrow if you synthesize a vaccine today? Then maybe you cannot vaccinate me tomorrow ; what you can do instead, I propose, is make it the case that the conditional obligation is not violated. More generally, I propose the ought-implies-can-obey principle: an (...)
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  46. Ought’ implies ‘can’ against epistemic deontologism: beyond doxastic involuntarism.Charles Côté-Bouchard - 2019 - Synthese 196 (4):1641-1656.
    According to epistemic deontologism, attributions of epistemic justification are deontic claims about what we ought to believe. One of the most prominent objections to this conception, due mainly to William P. Alston, is that the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ rules out deontologism because our beliefs are not under our voluntary control. In this paper, I offer a partial defense of Alston’s critique of deontologism. While Alston is right that OIC rules out epistemic deontologism, appealing to doxastic involuntarism (...)
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  47. I Ought, Therefore I Can.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (2):167-216.
    I defend the following version of the ought-implies-can principle: (OIC) by virtue of conceptual necessity, an agent at a given time has an (objective, pro tanto) obligation to do only what the agent at that time has the ability and opportunity to do. In short, obligations correspond to ability plus opportunity. My argument has three premises: (1) obligations correspond to reasons for action; (2) reasons for action correspond to potential actions; (3) potential actions correspond to ability plus opportunity. In (...)
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  48. Ought implies can, asymmetrical freedom, and the practical irrelevance of transcendental freedom.Matthé Scholten - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):25-42.
    In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and moral blameworthiness.
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  49.  94
    Ought-implies-can, the original position, and reflective equilibrium.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    Are John Rawls’s most noticeable methodological contributions, reflective equilibrium and the original position, consistent with each other? I draw attention to a worry that they stand in inconsistent relationships to the claim that ought implies can: it can only be the case that we ought to do something if we can do it.
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  50. How “ought” exceeds but implies “can”: Description and encouragement in moral judgment.John Turri - 2017 - Cognition 168 (C):267-275.
    This paper tests a theory about the relationship between two important topics in moral philosophy and psychology. One topic is the function of normative language, specifically claims that one “ought” to do something. Do these claims function to describe moral responsibilities, encourage specific behavior, or both? The other topic is the relationship between saying that one “ought” to do something and one’s ability to do it. In what respect, if any, does what one “ought” to do exceed (...)
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