G. A. Cohen famously argued that fundamental normative principles (for example,
concerning justice) are “fact-free” in such a way that
their truth is independent of non-normative facts. For our purposes here, we
take Cohen’s claim as given. Our focus is on what might be thought of
as the “other side” of this issue — on whether
the non-normative facts that determine what might be feasible for us to
accomplish are value-independent. We argue that they are not, that people have
reason to think that the normative properties of different possible options can
and sometimes do have a crucial impact on their feasibility. In other words:
facts about feasibility are partially dependent on Cohen’s
“fact-free moral principles.”