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“Actual” does not imply “feasible”

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Abstract

The familiar complaint that some ambitious proposal is infeasible naturally invites the following response: Once upon a time, the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women seemed infeasible, yet these things were actually achieved. Presumably, then, many of those things that seem infeasible in our own time may well be achieved too and, thus, turn out to have been perfectly feasible after all. The Appeal to History, as we call it, is a bad argument. It is not true that if some desirable state of affairs was actually achieved, then it was feasible that it was achieved. “Actual” does not imply “feasible,” as we put it. Here is our objection. “Feasible” implies “not counterfactually fluky.” But “actual” does not imply “not counterfactually fluky.” So, “actual” does not imply “feasible.” While something like the Flukiness Objection is sometimes hinted at in the context of the related literature on abilities, it has not been developed in any detail, and both premises are inadequately motivated. We offer a novel articulation of the Flukiness Objection that is both more precise and better motivated. Our conclusions have important implications, not only for the admissible use of history in normative argument, but also by potentially circumscribing the normative claims that are applicable to us.

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Notes

  1. For the purposes of this paper, we shall assume that by “can” Pogge simply means “is feasible.”

  2. See also: Gilabert (2012, p. 241) and Ypi (2012, p. 152); cf.

  3. Again, we shall assume that by “possible” Hague simply means “feasible” (rather than, say, “logically, metaphysically, or nomologically possible”).

  4. Stronger and weaker versions of (4) (and hence of 5) are also possible. For example, Pogge seems to be saying not merely that it may be feasible but that it is feasible to overhaul unfair trade practices. But (4) might also be weakened so that it merely amounts to the negative claim that a presumption of infeasibility is defeated. Given that we will target premise (2), these complications do not matter for our purposes.

  5. An anonymous referee has suggested an alternative rendering of the Appeal to History. We address this alternative in the final section of the paper.

  6. Two preliminary remarks about the notion of feasibility. First, we shall assume that the notion of feasibility only applies to the “realization” of states of affairs in the sense in which the states of affairs are or could be realized by agents intentionally acting to bring about the states of affairs. Thus, for example, we are not interested in the “realization” of states of affairs by way of the occurrence of certain “natural events,” such as the rising of the sun in the east. That’s because it makes no sense to ask whether the rising of the sun in the east is “feasible” or “infeasible.” The notion of feasibility simply isn’t applicable to the occurrence of such natural events. For further discussion, see below, Sect. 4. Second, we are only interested here in the binary sense of “feasible”—that is, the sense in which we may describe the realization of a state of affairs as either “feasible” or “infeasible.” There is also, arguably, a scalar sense of “feasible” that is being deployed, for example, when we describe the realization of one state of affairs as “more feasible” than the realization of another state of affairs. (For discussion, see Lawford-Smith 2013 and Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012) While the scalar sense of “feasible” is potentially important, it is clearly the binary notion of feasibility that is at play in the Appeal to History.

  7. This suggestion is sometimes made in the context of the related literature on abilities. For example, David Estlund (2011) offers a version of the “conditional” analysis of ability according to which “A person is able to (can) do something if and only if, were she to try and not give up, she would tend to succeed” and then immediately notes that it follows straightforwardly from this analysis that “The mere fact that it is possible that I do something doesn’t establish that I am able. It is possible that I draw a jack of hearts from a shuffled deck in a single draw, but I don’t have the ability to do so. Actuality proves possibility, but not ability” (Estlund 2011, p. 212).

  8. There is now a substantial literature addressing the question of how to understand the notion of feasibility and its relation to notions such as probability, possibility, ability, volitional capacity, demandingness and human nature. (See e.g. Raikka 1998; Brennan and Southwood 2007; Southwood 2015b, 2016; ms; Gilabert 2011, 2012; Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012; Lawford-Smith 2012, 2013; Estlund 2011; Miller 2013; Gheaus 2013; Wiens 2015, 2016).

  9. This suggestion is also sometimes made in the context of the literature on abilities. For example, John, Maier notes that there is “a sense in which fluky success … is not sufficient for ability” (Maier 2014; see also Vihvelin 2014, p. 182).

  10. Austin famously presented the case of a golfer who sinks a challenging putt and of whom it seems correct to say that “it follows merely from the premise that he does it, that he has the ability to do it, according to ordinary English” (Austin 1956, 218). Similarly, someone might argue that, a fortiori, “it follows merely from the premise that he does it, that it is feasible that he does it, according to ordinary English.”

  11. As is “ability” talk for that matter. Perhaps the most frequent occurrence of the term “able” in ordinary English occurs when we describe as things that we are “unable” to do things that we are simply reluctant to do because they are somewhat inconvenient, thereby conveying our reluctance to our interlocutors in a somewhat disguised and hence more palatable form. Yet it’s not clear that we are being exactly insincere, since there is a sense in which we intend (and it is common knowledge that we intend) our interlocutors to understand what is really going on.

  12. Among the accounts that satisfy the two conditions (at least given additional plausible assumptions) are: The Undue Costliness Account, which says that it is feasible for an agent A to realize a state of affairs s given circumstances C iff: given C, A is able to realize s without undue cost (Räikkä 1998, pp. 33–38; cf. Gilabert 2011, pp. 59–63; Miller 2013, ch. 1); the Conditional Account, which says that it is feasible for an agent A to realize a state of affairs s given circumstances C iff: given C, A has a “reasonable probability of success [of realizing s] conditional on trying” to realize s (Brennan and Southwood 2007, pp. 9–10; see also Lawford-Smith 2012; Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012); and the Restricted Possibility Account, which says that it is feasible for an agent A to realize a state of affairs s given circumstances C only if: given C, there is an attainable stock of all-purpose resources that enables A to realize s (Wiens 2015).

  13. Estlund (2011) concedes for the sake of argument a stronger version of the feasibility requirement according to which “ought to X” implies “has the ability to X.”

  14. One might wonder why we don’t give a probabilistic characterization of the notion of a fluke. The quick answer is that none of the standard interpretations of probability—the subjective or the objective interpretations—will do. The standard subjective interpretations make the occurrence of flukes depend on facts about agents’ mental states. The standard objective interpretations have difficulty handling rare events; and some flukes are surely rare events. Also, if determinism is true, the objective interpretations imply that there are no flukes but only the appearance of flukes. Lyon’s (2011) notion of “counterfactual probability” can facilitate a probabilistic characterization. Notice, though, that Lyon presents counterfactual probability as a measure of modal robustness, which is the dual of our notion of modal fragility.

  15. Notice here and throughout the paper that when we talk of the “realization” of a state of affairs—e.g. the realization of a state of affairs being “feasible” or “not “feasible”, “counterfactually fluky” or “not counterfactually fluky”—this should not be taken to imply that the state of affairs is realized at the actual world. We are careful to specify “actual realization” when we mean to convey the latter.

  16. In saying this, we stress that our objection does not license just any description of the relevant circumstances. In determining whether a state of affairs s that has been actually realized was counterfactually fluky prior to its actual realization, we defer to historians’ attempts to converge on something like a “canonical” description of the relevant circumstances and ask whether the actual realization of s was fluky relative to this canonical description at some salient time prior to its realization. In determining whether a state of affairs s’ that has yet to be actually realized is a counterfactual fluke, we defer to the relevant scientists’ attempts to converge on a canonical description of status quo and ask whether the actual realization of s’ would be fluky given this canonical description. In short, our argument requires that the realization of the state of affairs in question qualifies as counterfactually fluky relative to some salient description of the case, where “salience” is settled by the relevant sciences.

  17. Lawford-Smith (2013) would presumably be happy to embrace this conclusion since her primary aim is to argue for the claim that most of the interesting action for political philosophy concerns the scalar notion of feasibility. However, if this is her view, then her position is dialectically problematic. The Appeal to History is concerned with the binary notion of feasibility, not the scalar notion. If Lawford-Smith accepts that the binary notion of feasibility is normatively unimportant on the grounds that virtually any normative claim will trivially satisfy it, she should respond to the charge that such and such a normative claim makes infeasible demands, not by trying to address the charge (as she seems to do; see 2013, p. 243), but by dismissing it.

  18. The only context in which we will be able to negate some putative normative claim on the basis of the principle that “Ought” Implies “Feasible” is when the normative claim makes impossible demands. It’s not the case that this will never happen. It might happen, for example, when the normative claim involves certain sub claims that are internally inconsistent of the kind that can be brought out by an impossibility theorem. But such cases are nonetheless extremely rare. We are grateful to Pablo Gilabert for discussion of this point.

  19. Lyon (2011) characterizes his notion of counterfactual probability—which is a measure of our notion of modal fragility—as a kind of objective probability. So, here, we are considering an analysis of flukiness in terms of the classical objective probabilities.

  20. Although it’s unclear that non-flukiness given this highly precise specification of the circumstances signals great description-sensitivity; there might remain a great many specifications of the relevant circumstances such that our examples continue to involve fluky states of affairs.

  21. We are grateful to Bob Goodin for pressing this objection.

  22. Familiar examples of structural requirements of rationality include: the Modus Ponens Requirement (that one is required to believe that Q if one believes that P and one believes that if P then Q); the Instrumental Requirement (that one is required to intend to Y if one intends to X and believes that one can only X by Y-ing). For discussion of such structural requirements of rationality, see e.g. Broome (2013), Kolodny (2005), Southwood (2008).

  23. The idea that there are intentional states that fall short of intentions is a familiar one. For example, there are what Hugh McCann calls “settled objectives” (McCann 1991; see also Bratman 2009).

  24. Notice, moreover, that this conclusion is further supported by the following linguistic data. In the examples of Ann Hodges and Randy Johnson, it is clearly infelicitous to ask whether the realization of the relevant state of affairs was feasible given the relevant circumstances. By contrast, in our examples, the question, “Was the realization of the relevant state of affairs feasible given the relevant circumstances?” does not seem infelicitous. The answer to the question, we take it, is that it was not feasible in either case.

  25. We owe this suggestion to an anonymous referee.

  26. For an example of a pertinent discussion of the history of the development of the human rights practice, see Beitz (2009); for a critique see Barry and Southwood (2011).

  27. Perhaps proponents use the simplistic Appeal to History as shorthand for the more sophisticated kind of analysis we sketch here. This may be so, but it doesn’t avoid our objection. Notice that the simplistic Appeal to History can be construed as arguing by analogy as follows: (a) Consider a historical state of affairs, s, that represents radical social change. (b) We know s was feasible because it was actually realized. (c) The proposed state of affairs, s′, is relevantly similar to s. (d) Therefore, by analogy, we cannot rule out the realization of s′ on feasibility grounds. Our objection undermines (b). But, as suggested, (b) might be shorthand for (b′): We know s was feasible in light of our analysis of the historical conditions in place at the time and the mechanisms by which s was realized. Given this, we should read (c) as (c′): The conditions that obtain and mechanisms that are operative at the actual world here and now are relevantly similar to those that we find in the historical case and s′ can be realized by these mechanisms given these conditions. From (b′) and (c′), we can infer something like (d). We have no problem with the more sophisticated argument. Our objection denies that (b) presents an appropriate shorthand for (b′)—the fact that some historical state of affairs was actually realized is simply irrelevant for assessing whether its actual realization was feasible.

  28. Brennan (2013) discusses some of the relevant considerations.

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Acknowledgments

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Australian National University, the University of California San Diego, the Association for Political Theory annual conference and the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference. We are very grateful to many friends and colleagues for their valuable feedback. We would particularly like to thank Christian Barry, Jesse Driscoll, Pablo Gilabert, Bob Goodin, Benjamin Kiesewetter, Colleen Murphy, Seth Lazar and an anonymous referee for this journal for detailed written comments. Research for the paper was supported by DP120101507 and DP140102468.

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Southwood, N., Wiens, D. “Actual” does not imply “feasible”. Philos Stud 173, 3037–3060 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0649-8

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