ABSTRACT
When the question arises whether someone has acted rightly or wrongly, and perhaps whether he is to be commended or blamed for acting as he did, the further question may always arise: could he have acted otherwise? Could he have done anything other than the thing that he did in fact do? (This question of course could be raised in any case at all, but seems particularly interesting and pertinent where an agent’s credit is in some way involved.1) No doubt we all ordinarily assume an affirmative answer to that question, at any rate in a very large number of cases. The burglar, instead of culpably breaking into my house and stealing the silver, could have stayed innocently at home watching television; I could have worked in the garden yesterday afternoon instead of playing golf-and perhaps it does not greatly matter which I actually did; and so on. What is commonly taken to constitute a problem here is that, notwithstanding this completely natural propensity to suppose that people could, of course, very often have done something other than what they actually did, it is urged by some philosophers (and others) that there are grounds for holding, quite in general, that nothing ever could occur except what actually does occur, and therefore, among other things, that human agents can never act except as they actually do, and could not, in any case at all, have acted except as they actually did. Austin’s ‘Ifs and cans’ takes its start from some remarks of G.E.Moore’s, in Chapter VI of his Ethics,2 on this time-hallowed topic.
