Do We Have Reasons To Do What We Cannot Do?

Sammanfattning: Bart Streumer utilizes the principle “R: We do not have reasons to do what we cannot do” in order to justify that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. This thesis questions Streumer’s assumption and instead argues that we have reasons to do what is psychologically-, physically and maybe even metaphysically impossible but not conceptually or logically impossible. As is shown in the thesis we do not have reasons to do the latter, due to it being the case that we cannot even try to do what is conceptually or logically impossible. It is further argued that there will always be stronger contradicting reasons against doing what we cannot do, due to every reason in favor of doing what we cannot do being outweighed by the reason given by the fact that we cannot do it. This will in turn justify that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. By allowing reasons to do what we cannot do, we will be able to accommodate for the moral residue in genuine moral dilemmas and other hard cases without attributing irrationality to agents who feel for instances guilt and regret after a genuine moral dilemma. It is also possible that we could generalize the results in this paper and have it replace Jonathan Dancy’s notion of “enabler”; albeit the thesis points to further research being required to strengthen the last two claims.