In my dissertation, I examine the question of whether or not there could exist moral obligations that would be impossible to fulfill, or unreasonable to expect someone to fulfill. I consider four different types of possible unfulfillable or infeasible obligations: genuine moral dilemmas; cases where someone acts from a position of ignorance; Frankfurt-type cases; and cases of culpable inability. In the first chapter, I argue that genuine moral dilemmas do not exist, and are therefore not examples of unfulfillable obligations. In the second chapter, I argue for a version of perspectivism where non-culpable ignorance of certain factual information can legitimately affect a person’s moral obligations. In cases where someone’s misleading factual evidence about the appropriate course of action leads to an instance of apparent blameless wrongdoing, I argue that they have not actually acted wrongly. I therefore argue that these are not cases of infeasible obligations. In the third chapter, I argue that in Frankfurt-type cases, where someone intuitively appears to have done something morally wrong, but where they lacked the ability to do what the apparent obligation seemed to require, and lacked awareness of their inability, that unfulfillable obligations are possible. In the fourth chapter, I show how certain cases of people making themselves unable to fulfill an apparent obligation are not examples of unfulfillable obligations, but instead are instances of failing to meet an obligation. There may, however, be certain possible cases of unfulfillable obligations due to culpable inability.
A problem with the existence of unfulfillable moral obligations is that the idea of someone having an obligation to do something that they cannot do appears to be unfair. The types of unfulfillable obligations that I argue for, however, are ones where the moral agent is intuitively culpable, and where avoiding wrongdoing was at some point possible.