Abstract
This paper aims to contribute to the current debate about the status of the “Ought Implies Can” (OIC) 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 the Duhem-Quine thesis, talk of an “empirical refutation” of OIC is empirically and methodologically unwarranted. What the empirical fact that people attribute moral obligations to unable agents shows is that OIC is not intuitive, not that OIC has been refuted.
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Notes
Even before experimental philosophers started testing OIC empirically, it should have been quite clear that OIC can no longer be “treated as an axiom” (Howard-Snyder 2013). This is because there are at least three candidates for the supposed relation between ‘ought’ and ‘can’ (see Howard-Snyder 2013; Mizrahi, 2009, 2015a). The first candidate is logical implication, i.e., entailment. The fact that “‘ought’ entails ‘can’” is open to counterexamples (see, e.g., Mizrahi 2009 and King, 2014), however, has led many to abandon it as the relation between ‘ought’ and ‘can’ and propose two other candidates: presupposition (Hare 1951) and conversational implicature (Sinnott-Armstrong 1984). These two candidates for the relation between ‘ought’ and ‘can’ are also open to counterexamples (see, e.g., Mizrahi 2009 and King forthcoming), however, and so it is far from clear how ‘ought’ is supposed to imply ‘can’. As an anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed out, there are also systems of deontic logic that do not treat OIC as an axiom. See Saka (2000) for modal arguments against OIC. See also Martin (2009). For more on deontic logic and OIC, see Part I of Tessman (2015).
See Knapp (1990) for an overview of the controversy about treating ordinal data as interval data.
We have chosen not to dichotomize the data into agree/disagree because we are interested in the strength of agreement as well as the polarity. The strength itself will also tell us which classification judgments would be in. So if the judgment is left as a 7 and not a binary choice, we know it is a strong “ought” judgment and we still know it was agreement with “ought.” But if we dichotomize, all we could know is that it was agreement with “ought.” For more on the problems with dichotomization, see MacCallum et al. (2002).
We mention all of this in detail in order to explain our statistical choices, which throughout this paper will include less common but more specialized testing. We want to make sure that readers are able to reproduce or replicate our results.
As common as ANOVA and other interval/ratio tests are in testing Likert data, it is not an appropriate choice and will often lead to erroneous results. For a detailed explanation of ART procedures, see Wobbrock et al. (2011). We performed the statistical analysis in R using the ARTool package provided by Wobbrock et al. An overview of the tool and package can be accessed at https://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/art/.
For additional arguments to the effect that intuitive judgments are unreliable sources of evidence, see Mizrahi (2015c).
As an anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed out, it is important to note here that, like Mizrahi (2015a) and Chituc et al. (2016), we did not ask participants about their native language, whereas Buckwalter and Turri (2015) did ask participants about their native language In all of their experiments, more than 90% of participants have reported that English is their first language. Even though the “official language” of morality is not English, presumably, this is important to note because our survey materials, like those of Mizrahi (2015a, b), Buckwalter and Turri (2015), and Chituc et al. (2016), use English modals for the concepts of moral obligation and ability. We think that it would be interesting to conduct further research in order to find out whether participants’ judgments would vary across different languages.
For arguments to the effect that J is problematic, too, see Mizrahi (2015d).
On intuitions as intellectual appearances or seemings, see Brogaard (2014).
On the OIC problem in deontic logic, see Carmo and Jones (2002).
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We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer of Philosophia for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Kissinger-Knox, A., Aragon, P. & Mizrahi, M. “Ought Implies Can,” Framing Effects, and “Empirical Refutations”. Philosophia 46, 165–182 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9907-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9907-z