Blame, not ability, impacts moral “ought” judgments for impossible actions: Toward an empirical refutation of “ought” implies “can”

Does ought imply can?

“…However, there is another set of results in Chituc et al [19] that apparently goes against our perspective on how ordinary people understand the relation between blame, obligation/wrongdoing, and inability—indeed, these results apparently go even against the aforementioned hypothesis that, even if not analytical, the OIC implication is a core element of the set of inferential relations normally associated with the folk concept of obligation. (This is something that is not explicit in Chituc et al’s discussion: while some of their results, as discussed above, go against the conceptual-entailment account of the OIC implication but not necessarily against other accounts, some of their results, to be discussed next, go against a much broader range of accounts.…”

“…The first issue concerns the type of reasoning involved in participants’ judgments—in particular, the type of implication connecting the concepts of obligation and ability. The second issue concerns the generalizability of our results to different types of contexts—in particular, to contexts involving culpable inability [19, 20]. We discuss these two issues in turn.…”

“…In order to probe whether ordinary people reject the OIC principle in terms of the conceptual-entailment account, Chituc et al [19] presented participants with two types of scenarios of inability. Some scenarios (“low-blame scenarios”) were similar to those of our studies in that their main character did not have control (or had little control) over the source of the inability (e.g., one could not fulfil a promise because one’s car broke down unexpectedly).…”

“…Because of where he is at that time, Adams cannot meet his friend Brown at noon, as he promised. [19]…”

Inability and Obligation in Intellectual Evaluation

“…Recent work in experimental cognitive science has demonstrated that the "ought implies can" principle does not accurately describe judgments in some normative domains, such as moral judgment (for a review, see Buckwalter 2017). Several teams of researchers have identified circumstances in which participants attribute moral responsibilities, obligations, and duties to agents for outcomes that they are unable to produce (Buckwalter and Turri 2015;Mizrahi 2015;Chituc, Henne, Sinnott-Armstrong, and De Brigard 2016;Turri 2017a;Turri 2017b). In one set of studies, for example, researchers presented participants with stimuli describing an employer evaluating an employee's performance (Turri 2017b).…”