No abstract

Many moral theories incorporate the idea that when an action is wrong, it is wrong because there was something else that the agent could and should have done instead. Most notable among these are consequentialist theories. Relatively little attention has been given to the question of how to understand the meaning of 'could have' in this specific context. However, without an answer to this question, consequentialist theories fail to yield determinate verdicts about the deontic status of actions in real scenarios. It is here argued that a conditional analysis provides the required answer and gives us the most plausible version of consequentialism. Such a conditional analysis has been universally rejected as an analysis of the general meaning of 'could have,' but we show that in the specific context of specifying the meaning of 'could have' in a criterion of right and wrong action, all the standard objections to it fail.

In an outline of a paper found amongst his philosophical papers and correspondence after his untimely death in 2001—“Nihil Obstat: An Analysis of Ability,” reproduced in this volume—David Lewis sketched a new compatibilist account of abilities, according to which someone is able to A if and only if there is no obstacle to their A-ing, where an obstacle is a ‘robust preventer’ of their A-ing. In this paper, we provide some background context for Lewis’s outline, a section-by-section commentary, and a general discussion of the account’s main features.