Mat Basford

I am a PhD candidate at Nottingham University working on what sense of 'ability' is necessary for normative rightness.

My wider career has involved qualitative research and public engagement work in the fields of participatory democracy, open data, and digital inclusion. I have a strong interest in public engagement in Philosophy.

My research focus:

It is widely believed that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ – that there is some sense in which an agent must be able to perform an action for this action to be the kind of thing that might be normatively right for them to do. My research seeks to answer what sense of ‘ability’ is necessary for normative rightness. I’m particularly interested in whether the agent’s epistemic position is relevant to the sense of ‘ability’ required.

In the process, my work seeks to challenge what I call (drawing on Portmore, 2019) the ‘Options Assumption’ - that agents always have a non-empty set of ethically relevant alternatives characterised by:

a) The membership of this set being determined by whether or not the agent is able to perform these actions in the sense of ‘ability’ necessary for normative rightness.

b) The best of these alternatives (given some form of evaluation) being normatively right to perform.

I believe this topic is vital to making sense of what is normatively right to do. In the process it may also bring clarity to a wide range of related debates, warning against the risks involved in some common starting assumptions.

This research takes me across the literature on reasons, rightness, ability, rational deliberation, free will, moral responsibility, and consequentialist ethics.