Devoting ourselves to the manifestly unattainable

Abstract

It is tempting to think (1) that we may sometimes have what we call hopelessly utopian duties and yet (2) that “ought” implies “can.” How might we square these apparently conflicting claims? A simple solution is to interpret hopelessly utopian duties as duties to pursue the achievement of manifestly unattainable outcomes (as opposed to duties to achieve the outcomes), thereby promising to vindicate the possibility of such duties in a way that is compatible with “ought” implies “can.” The main challenge for this simple solution is to say what the relevant “duties to pursue” are supposed to involve. We survey several existing candidates and argue that none of them succeeds in delivering on the promise of the simple solution. We then propose a previously untheorized class of duties that we call duties to devote ourselves to achieving an outcome, and argue that such duties provide us with an interpretation of hopelessly utopian duties that is up to the task.