animist wrote:the principle is not what you say it is here - it means what it says
OK, I've read up on this now, as I should have done (and could have done) before, and I'm much clearer about this now. It does seem that, as a principle, "ought implies can" is not as straightforward as "it means what it says" suggests. (See, for example, Robert Stern's essay, "Does 'ought' imply ‘can’? And did Kant think it does?",
Utilitas, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 42[--][/--]61, March 2004 (
pdf file), and Julian Baggini's much shorter article,
"Ought without can" in Butterflies and Wheels.) But the principle does make sense to me, in a way that seems to fit with how it is fairly widely interpreted.
Given that we all have limited information about the world in general, and about the abilities of other people in particular, we don't ever really know for certain what other people
can do. Nevertheless, we make assumptions all the time on the basis of what seems to be logically and physically possible for a particular person to do. So when we say that someone "could have" done something, we're not saying anything about free will; we're not claiming that we have detailed knowledge about that person's life and the state of his or her brain at the time in question; we're simply saying that a particular action seems to have been logically and physically possible. I'll come back to this.
animist wrote:I don't think blame can be other than backward-looking, but that does not mean it cannot be part of something which is constructive and forward-looking.
Yes, that's pretty much what I meant and what I should have said. Constructive blame can only be partly forward-looking, but its purpose, I think, is wholly forward-looking. Like constructive criticism.
animist wrote:It seems to me that blame is the essence of moral responsibility, that they are logically equivalent inasmuch as a failure to do the morally right thing does and should result in blame. BUT that is all it should result in automatically; often there will also be anger, which may be justified (and ultimately helpful in reinforcing the blame) as well as understandable, but OTOH, a lot of anger will not be helpful, and certainly shunning and "chastising" do not sound helpful.
Good. Maybe we can find common ground here, then. I am happy to define the unqualified verb "to blame" as something like, "to assign responsibility for a fault or wrong", and to say that, if one is (wholly or partly) "to blame" for some undesirable event, that means simply that one is (wholly or partly) responsible for the action that caused it, or the inaction that allowed it to happen. But only if responsibility for an action or inaction is a simple matter of identification (X was the person who struck the first blow; Y was the person who started the rumour, Z was the person who deliberately looked away at the crucial moment, etc.), and if there is sufficient evidence to prove a causal link between action/inaction and undesirable event. I do think the word "blame" is normally laden with much more than that, but I've been focusing on the wrong things. For you, presumably, what is crucial is that not only was X the person who acted in a way that caused the harm, but that X
should have done otherwise, and because of the "ought implies can" principle, that implies that X
could have done otherwise. I hope I'm on the right track so far.
animist wrote:To go back to my previous post, I distinguished between prescribing an action ("you ought to do") and blaming/recriminating about failure to have done it ("you should have done"), and I said I thought that the latter type of judgment was impossible for you. Prescribing does seem OK for you, accepting that ought implies can. If you say to me "you should see your mother more often while you can" this entails that you know I have an ageing mother whom I am capable of visiting. But let's say that I don't actively respond to your advice, and soon afterwards my mother dies. Someone else would be able to say to me "well, you should have visited your mum when you had the chance" (I am not saying that they should say this, but that they could), but you could not say this. So you were able to tell me to do something at one point yet later on be unable to say that I should have done the same thing.
So what you're saying is that I can't (or rather shouldn't) ever say that someone "should have" done something because I can't (or rather shouldn't) ever say that they "could have" done something, so for the moment I'll focus on "could have". Well, clearly I do say that people "could have" done things. It is standard English; I have been saying things like that for nearly fifty years, and even if saying those things were logically inconsistent with my beliefs, I'd find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stop saying them.
However, I do think I can say "could have" in a logically meaningful way. On the face of it, the statement "Jim could have driven to Halifax on Tuesday morning" makes sense in a way that "Jim could have taken off his arms and legs and packed them away in a box" doesn't. The first sounds logically and physically possible, even though there's a lot of information missing; the second doesn't. We could pad the first statement out a bit, to give us more confidence about its reasonableness: "Jim, an adult with a full driving licence and a car in working order, could have, on Tuesday morning, driven that car to Halifax, West Yorkshire, which is just a couple of miles away from his home in Illingworth, along the A629; there were no traffic jams, roadworks, floods, landslides or other physical impediments to his making that particular journey at that time, and Jim was not drunk or ill or otherwise mentally or physically impaired." It's a little unwieldy, though, and there are details in there that we probably can't be certain of. How would we know that Jim wasn't in any way mentally or physically impaired? Do we really have access to traffic information for the A629 on that morning? It is more likely that we'd make the simpler statement, "Jim could have driven to Halifax on Tuesday morning", and be willing to revise it if necessary, if someone points out that an overturned tanker carrying agricultural chemicals had blocked the A629 from early Tuesday morning to mid-afternoon, or that Jim had been violently ill on Monday night after eating German bean sprouts. What we're not interested in is whether Jim actually wanted to drive to Halifax on Tuesday. We're just making a fairly weak claim about the logical and physical possibility of his doing so.
This is the kind of "could have", it seems to me, that we're dealing with in the principle "ought implies can", or rather "ought to have implies could have". In your example, that horrible person who says to you, "You should have visited your mum while you had the chance," knows or is making assumptions about a lot more than your ability to have visited her. The words "while you had the chance" also suggest that they know, or are assuming, that you regret not visiting her. If we're talking about a moral "should", that suggests that they're also assuming that she wanted you to visit her, and that not visiting her caused her to suffer in some way. I think that in this particular case there are too many big unknowns to warrant the comment, but in theory I might well say "You should have done this or that" to someone. And yes, that would imply that that person could have done it. But only in a rather weak sense, because there would always be lots of little unknowns about what the person was able to do, not to mention the finer details about that person's state of mind at the time. Saying that a person "could have" done something does not imply that they had the kind of free will that implies the kind of moral responsibility that I don't believe in. So I can say it quite easily.
animist wrote:Maybe this is just an academic point but it seems worth making.
Yes, it was.
animist wrote:Your thought does not accord with normal usage - though you will probably not be bothered about that.
I
was bothered about it, and that prompted me to explore the issue further. I understand things much more clearly now, thanks to you!
Emma