Ought Implies Can Assumption
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An Ought Implies Can Assumption is an ethical assumption which claims that a moral agent who is morally obliged to perform a certain action must logically be able to perform the agent action.
- Example(s):
- a person with a flat time cannot drive someone a hospital.
- a person who slashed their tires is morally obliged to have driven someone to a hospital.
- See: David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Categorical_imperative, Sinnott-Armstrong, Experimental Ethics.
References
2016
- (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ http://wikipedia.org/wiki/ought_implies_can Retrieved:2016-2-22.
- Ought implies can is an ethical formula ascribed to Immanuel Kant that claims an agent, if morally obliged to perform a certain action, must logically be able to perform it:
Kant believed this principle was a categorical freedom, bound only by the free will, as opposed to the Humean hypothetical freedom ("Free to do otherwise if I had so chosen"). [1] There are several ways of deriving the formula, for example, the argument that it is wrong to blame people for things that they cannot control (essentially phrasing the formula as the contrapositive "'cannot' implies 'has no duty to'").
- Ought implies can is an ethical formula ascribed to Immanuel Kant that claims an agent, if morally obliged to perform a certain action, must logically be able to perform it:
- ↑ "Ought implies can." The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. BUNNIN, NICHOLAS and JIYUAN YU (eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Blackwell Reference Online. 4 December 2011
1781
- (Kant, 1781) ⇒ Immanuel Kant. (1781). “Critique of Pure Reason."
- QUOTE: (A807/B835) Pure reason, then, contains, not indeed in its speculative employment, but in that practical employment which is also moral, principles of the possibility of experience, namely, of such actions as, in accordance with moral precepts, might be met with in the history of mankind. For since reason commands that such actions should take place, it must be possible for them to take place.
1797
- (Kant, 1797) ⇒ Immanuel Kant. (1797). “The Metaphysics of Morals."
- QUOTE: (6: 380) Impulses of nature, accordingly, involve obstacles within the human being’s mind to his fulfilment of duty and (sometimes powerful) forces opposing it, which he must judge that he is capable of resisting and conquering by reason not at some time in the future but at once (the moment he thinks of duty): he must judge that he can do what the law tells him unconditionally that he ought to do.19