Exploring Connections: Actualism and Possibilism in Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Imagine that you are a university professor and one of your colleagues asks you to write a critical review of his recently published book. You know that you can do the review better than anyone else. However, you also know that because you are lazy you will never complete the work. This raises a fundamental moral question, namely: should you accept your colleague’s proposal? The most common answer is that you should do it. In the specialized literature, this view is normally named as “possibilism”. Contrary to this account, this article argues for “actualism”. According to this conception, when it comes to working out an agent’s moral duties, we must not take into account what s/he is able to do as a matter of capacity, but rather what the agent will most probably do in view of the information available to us.