The Notion of " Can" and Moore's Conditional Analysis

What it means to say that “agents have the ability to do otherwise”? There has been much debate in recent moral philosophy about the meaning of this notion. G. E. Moore argued that one could do otherwise, only if one had chosen to do otherwise. For the first time, Austin rejected the conditional analysis, and provided a decisive refutation of it. He argued that some "if-then" sentences, such as "I could have done otherwise if I had wanted to”, are not genuinely conditional propositions. Later, Chisholm and Lehrer attempted to refute any analysis of ‘S can do X’ in terms of a conditional. They have argued that "If C, then S Xs" cannot mean "s can X." Bruce Aune objected to Lehrer’s argument. He argued that the above equivalence is true, and their argument is question-begging. In this paper, I present an overview of the debate and try to show that Aune’s objections are unsatisfactory.