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ANALYSISThe difficulty with this, however, is that it is subject to exactly the objection that Westphal raised against the second of Armstrong's suggestions given above, namely, that it is completely unexplanatory. The theory can no longer be claimed to show why two distinct colours are incompatible, but merely incorporates exactly the same mysterious notion of incompatibility at the 'lower level'. We have simply replaced the problem of colour incompatibility with the problem of absorption profile incompatibility. Not only that, but the new problem promises to be, if anything, even more recalcitrant than the old one. For it is not intuitively clear that an object couldn't have a combination of absorption profiles. Why, for instance, couldn't a black object count as having the absorption profile of a yellow, and of a blue, and of a green, and of a red object? And why, in that case, couldn't a black object be correctly described as yellow, blue, green, and red, at the same time? It seems clear to me that we cannot possibly expect to get answers to these questions at the physical level of Westphal's theory. Indeed, the only possible answer seems to me to be one that appeals to the incompatibility of ordinary colour terms: It is because we don't describe black objects as yellow, blue, green, and red that we don't describe the absorption profile of a black object as a combination of the absorption profiles of all the other colours.
IN his article 'WhatWe are Morally Responsible For' [1], Harry Frankfurt argues that the rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) A person is morally responsible for what he has done, only if he could have done otherwise, FRANKFURT ON 'OUGHT IMPLIES CAN' 223 does not require renouncing the Kantian thesis that 'ought' implies 'can', i.e. (K) An agent S has a moral obligation to perform (not to perform) an act A only if S has it within his power to perform (not to perform) A. ... the relation between Kant's doctrine and PAP is not as close as it seems to be. With respect to any action Kant's doctrine has to do with the agent's ability to perform that action. PAP, on the other hand, concerns his ability to do something else. Moreover, the Kantian view leaves open the possibility that a person for whom only one course of action is available fulfills an obligation when he pursues that course of action and is morally praiseworthy for doing so. On the other hand, PAP implies that such a person cannot earn moral credit for what he does. This makes it clear that renouncing PAP does not require den...