Doing the Best We Can't: Evaluative Conflict and the 'Ought' Implies 'Can' Principle

The aim of this thesis is to defend global consequentialism from its main objection, specifically the objection that it allows evaluative conflict. Global consequentialism differs from traditional forms of consequentialism in that it does not only focus on one type of thing, like acts or rules. Act consequentialism focuses on the right acts directly, and evaluates rules indirectly according to whether they lead to the right acts or not. Rule consequentialism focuses on what the right rules are, and evaluates acts indirectly by appealing to whether they conform to the right rules. Global consequentialism will rather evaluate any evaluand directly in terms of its consequences, whether it is an act, a set of rules, a law, a character trait, etc. But what should we say if having the best motives implies that you cannot do the best act. That is, if your motives are so strong they make it causally impossible for you to do the otherwise best act? This would amount to evaluative conflict, and it can supposedly happen between any set of evaluands. To put it colloquially, evaluative conflict means you are “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t”. I argue that evaluative conflict cannot occur since the principle ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ includes evaluands that are pragmatically impossible in conjunction with each other. If you cannot have the best motives and do the best action, then it will not be the case that you ought to have the best motives and do the best action. Derek Parfit argues that this defense would render wrongness obsolete. If determinism is true then all acts are determined by motives, and so no acts would be wrong. I argue that his solution also fails via a distinction between objective and subjective rightness. For subjective rightness his argument results in the counter-intuitive claim that we ought to do something we know that we cannot do. For objective rightness his argument leads to wrongness becoming obsolete for other theories as well, or it merely shifts wrongness to the level of motives as opposed to acts. I think that the best way of escaping these problems is to reject objective rightness. This in no way means we have to give up on a robust a notion of right and wrong, since subjective and objective rightness relates to our epistemic situation in relation to an objectively true morality, not a rejection of objectively true morality itself