Event Detail

Political Theory Workshop

Many of us are tempted by the idea that there is a Feasibility Requirement on the correctness or validity of certain normative claims about politics: claims about the laws and policies states ought to implement, the obligations we have regarding the organisation of social and political life, the institutional arrangements that justice requires us to bring about, and so on. But how exactly should we interpret this idea of a Feasibility Requirement? The standard interpretation treats it as a particular instance of the principle that “Ought” Implies “Can.” I argue that this is a mistake. The problem with the standard interpretation is that it cannot make sense of certain central feasibility-involving inferences. I propose a non-standard interpretation according to which the Feasibility Requirement is instead a specific instance of a stronger principle that I call the Feasible Demands Thesis. This holds that claims about what we ought to do, in order to be correct or valid, must not make infeasible explicit or implicit demands. Interpreting the Feasibility Requirement in terms of the Feasible Demands Thesis helps to undermine the primary motivation for embracing a kind of Revisionary Realism, according to which feasibility’s primary normative significance is not adequately captured by the idea of a Feasibility Requirement. We do not need to go beyond a Feasibility Requirement so long as it is correctly interpreted, or so I argue.