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There is an obvious class of exceptions to this rule-logical truths. Since they follow from nothing at all, surely they follow from any set of imperatives. After all, the (imperative) premises can’t be true without the (indicative) logically true conclusions being true too! However, there are ways of dealing with this degenerate case, the most obvious being to stipulate that the rule does not apply to logically true indicatives.
A similar antinomy between Ought-Implies-Can (or more properly Not-Can-Implies-Not-Ought) and No-Ought-From-Is is noted (and defused) by J. Brown (1977).
See Strawson (1950) “On Referring”.
A point noted by Sinnott-Armstrong (1984) p. 254–5.
This is perhaps unkind. Hare tends to speak of logical ‘intuitions’ rather than sentiments. See Hare (1981) ch. 1 and pp. 80–81.
Diatribe seu collatio de libero arbitrio. Of course,diatribe means discussion.
Pelagius did indeed use Erasmus’ argument. See Passmore (1970) p. 94.
Anyone who thinks this sentence is vacuously true because the antecendent is necessarily false, merely demonstrates the inadequacy of his philosophical semantics.
If Feyerabend ever reads this, I hope he will forgive my ignorance of 17th century astrology.
What Marx calls fetishism seems to be an instance of ‘Butler’s fallacy’—i.e. mistaking extrinsic powers conferred by social relations for intrinsic powers conferred by nature.
Compare the theory sketched here with that of Cassian, orginator of semi-Pelagianism. (Passmore (1970) p. 98).
Obviously this theory entails the rejection of the necessity of Divine Foreknowledge.
According to this theory Free Will does not preclude causality. Decisions are made on the basis of pre-existing desires and preferences. Where they conflict, the relative strength of the desires corresponds to the objective probability that the agent will act on them. Whatever desire the agent acts on is the one that indeterministicallycaused his choice. Thus we have a brand of Free Will which guarantees an intelligible connection between the agent’s decisions and his psychological states. There will be no out-of-the-blue moral choices. Moreover it explains why human beings are moderately predictable (allegedly a problem for libertarian theories). We can often get a rough idea of someone’s desires and estimate their relative strengths. Finally it allows for the possibility that some people are less free than others—a desideratum since some people resemble vicious (or virtuous) automata. A person is more or less free according to how closely the objective probability that they will act on some desire approaches. 1. However, this is not the place to enlarge on the merits of the theory (based on the ideas of Graham Oddie). I merely wish to suggest that this analysis of Free Will is plausiblein itself and can be run with or without the postulate of original sin, biasing our choices towards the bad.
I would like to thank Graham Priest, Graham Oddie, Andre Gallois, Greg Currie, David Lewis and Derek Browne for useful comments.
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Pigden, C.R. Ought-implies-can: Erasmus Luther and R.M. Hare. SOPH 29, 2–30 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02782712
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02782712