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SundayReview 

The Data Against KantGray Matter

By VLAD CHITUC and PAUL HENNE FEB. 19, 2016

THE history of moral philosophy is a history of disagreement, but on one point

there has been virtual unanimity: It would be absurd to suggest that we should

do what we couldn’t possibly do.

This principle — that “ought” implies “can,” that our moral obligations

can’t exceed our abilities — played a central role in the work of Immanuel Kant

and has been widely accepted since. Indeed, the idea seems self-evidently true,much as “bachelor” implies “man.”

But is it actually true? In 1984, the philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

outlined a series of thought experiments that, he contended, demonstrated

that “ought” does not always imply “can.” Though his argument found some

adherents, most philosophers were not convinced. We think that the

consensus view that “ought” implies “can” is mistaken. In a psychological

study  to be published in the May issue of the journal Cognition, we offer

empirical evidence suggesting that Professor Sinnott-Armstrong was right.

His thought experiments go something like this: Suppose that you and a

friend are both up for the same job in another city. She interviewed last

 weekend, and your flight for the interview is this evening. Your car is in the

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shop, though, so your friend promises to drive you to the airport. But on the

 way, her car breaks down — the gas tank is leaking — so you miss your flight

and don’t get the job.

 Would it make any sense to tell your friend, stranded at the side of theroad, that she ought to drive you to the airport? The answer seems to be an

obvious no (after all, she can’t  drive you), and most philosophers treat this as

all the confirmation they need for the principle.

Suppose, however, that the situation is slightly different. What if your

friend intentionally punctures her own gas tank to make sure that you miss the

flight and she gets the job? In this case, it makes perfect sense to insist that

 your friend still has an obligation to drive you to the airport. In other words, we might indeed say that someone ought to do what she can’t — if we’re

blaming her.

Three decades after Professor Sinnott-Armstrong made this argument, we

decided to run his thought experiments as scientific ones. (We partnered with

Professor Sinnott-Armstrong himself, along with the philosopher Felipe De

Brigard.) In our study, we presented hundreds of participants with stories like

the one above and asked them questions about obligation, ability and blame.

Did they think someone should keep a promise she made but couldn’t keep?

 Was she even capable of keeping her promise? And how much was she to

 blame for what happened?

 We found a consistent pattern, but not what most philosophers would

expect. “Ought” judgments depended largely on concerns about blame, not

ability. With stories like the one above, in which a friend intentionally 

sabotages you, 60 percent of our participants said that the obligation still held

— your friend still ought to drive you to the airport. But with stories in which

the inability to help was accidental, the obligation all but disappeared. Now,

only 31 percent of our participants said your friend still ought to drive you.

Professor Sinnott-Armstrong’s unorthodox intuition turns out to be

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shared by hundreds of nonphilosophers. So who is right? The vast majority of 

philosophers, or our participants?

One possibility is that our participants were wrong, perhaps because their

urge to blame impaired the accuracy of their moral judgments. To test thispossibility, we stacked the deck in the favor of philosophical orthodoxy: We

had the participants look at cases in which the urge to assign blame would be

lowest — that is, only the cases in which the car accidentally broke down. Even

still, we found no relationship between “ought” and “can.” The only significant

relationship was between “ought” and “blame.”

This finding has an important implication: Even when we say that

someone has no obligation to keep a promise (as with your friend whose caraccidentally breaks down), it seems we’re saying it not  because she’s unable to

do it, but because we don’t want to unfairly blame her for not keeping it.

 Again, concerns about blame, not about ability, dictate how we understand

obligation.

So here we face the other possibility, one less flattering to most moral

philosophers: It’s their moral judgments that are distorted.

 While this one study alone doesn’t refute Kant, our research joins a recent

salvo of experimental  work  targeting the principle that “ought” implies “can.”

 At the very least, philosophers can no longer treat this principle as obviously 

true.

In the last decade or so, the “experimental philosophy” movement has

argued for greater use of empirical science to inform and shape the discussion

of philosophical problems. We agree: Philosophers ought to pay more

attention to their colleagues in the psychology department (even if they can’t).

 Vlad Chituc is an associate in research at the Social Science Research Institute at

Duke, where Paul Henne is a graduate student in the department of philosophy.

 A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 21, 2016, on page SR9 of the New York edition

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with the headline: The Data Against Kant.

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