Abstract:
The structure and content of feasibility constraints are often considered crucial for assessing normative proposals for institutional innovation and for stringent requirements of distributive justice. This article critically examines a recent development in the philosophical analysis of feasibility: functionalism. Defended most elaborately by Nicholas Southwood, functionalism holds that feasibility should be defined by reference to its functional role in our practices of practical deployment. Taking up this suggestion, I offer a functional analysis of feasibility that departs from functionalists’ general optimism about feasibility’s usefulness for normative theorising. To this end, I highlight two pernicious functions of feasibility discourse. First, I argue that feasibility performs a distortive function by obscuring important features of moral obligations. Second, I argue that feasibility performs a dismissive function by misrepresenting substantive normative issues as technical in nature. Finally, I argue that the concept of feasibility’s most important role in normative theory – to adjudicate between candidates for moral obligation – can be performed by other concepts, especially the concept of social power. My somewhat provocative suggestion will thus be that a functionalist analysis of feasibility discourse provides grounds for endorsing an eliminativist view of feasibility.