ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a twofold strategy for the Ought Implies Can (OIC) denier. First, the OIC denier can offer a partially deflationary theory of blameworthiness and moral responsibility to capture many intuitions that seem to favor OIC. Second, the OIC denier can offer a plausible restriction on unfulfillable oughts without denying their possibility wholesale. The chapter argues that many considerations that seem to support OIC instead support a principle about blameworthiness. Action-guidingness motivates Standard OIC by holding that morality must guide action. The rest of the worries cut more deeply against the pointlessness motivation, regardless of which incarnation of OIC it is used to motivate. Action-guidingness is a close cousin of pointlessness. The thought is that morality must guide action, and OIC is necessary for morality to guide action. If morality must guide all actions in order to count as action-guiding, then action-guidingness faces problems from another quarter of moral thought.
