Postgraduates work in progress

Speaker: Simon Rosenqvist (Ph.D. student, Uppsala University)

Title: Utilitarianism and Ought-Implies-Can

Abstract: You can't defeat grandmaster Judit Polgár in a game of chess. And because ought implies can, you are not obliged to, even if defeating her would save millions of people from starving, or stop animal factory farming.

Francis Howard-Snyder has argued in similar ways against utilitarianism. For just as you cannot defeat a chess grandmaster, so you cannot produce the most pleasure minus pain - because you don't know how to. And, once more, since ought implies can, you are not obliged to. But this contradicts utilitarianism, who says that you ought to produce the most pleasure minus pain.

In this paper, I revisit this problem for utilitarianism, and argue that we can solve it by distinguishing between two senses of ought and can: a subjective and objective sense of ought, and an intentional and physical sense of can. Utilitarianism is, I claim, only a theory about what we objectively ought to do. In the final part, I say something about the problem of deciding which is the central or primary concept of ought.

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Ni Yu