Abstract
Most philosophers believe that a person can have an obligation only insofar as she is able to fulfil it, a principle generally referred to as “Ought Implies Can”. Arguably, this principle reflects something basic about the ordinary concept of obligation. However, in a paper published recently in this journal, Wesley Buckwalter and John Turri presented evidence for the conclusion that ordinary people in fact reject that principle. With a series of studies, they claimed to have demonstrated that, in people’s judgements, obligations persist irrespective of whether those who hold them have the ability to fulfil them. We argue in this paper that due to some problems in their design, Buckwalter & Turri’s conclusions may not be warranted. We present the results of a series of studies demonstrating the problems with their design and showing that, with an improved design, people judge that obligation depends on ability after all.
Highlights
The concept of obligation constitutes a fundamental component of social and moral cognition [1,2,3]
In the Original condition, we replicated the results reported in IOMJ: 88% chose “obligated, but not able”, while only 12% chose “not obligated, and not able” (N = 41)
We completely reversed the results of IOMJ using three ordinary expressions that are commonly thought to encode the concept of obligation, suggesting that there is no variation in judgement due to the examined terminological variation in this domain
Summary
The concept of obligation constitutes a fundamental component of social and moral cognition [1,2,3]. There is considerable cultural variability in terms of how people understand the content, source, and ground of obligations, anthropological evidence indicates that all human societies deploy the concept of obligation to organise human action and interaction [4, 5]. Obligations are deemed constraints that motivate social and moral behaviours. They are deployed to understand and evaluate these behaviours. The non-fulfilment of an obligation is thought to constitute wrongdoing and may warrant blame. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of studying the folk concept of obligation
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