G. A. Cohen famously argued that fundamental normative principles (for example,concerning justice) are “fact-free” in such a way thattheir truth is independent of non-normative facts. For our purposes here, wetake Cohen’s claim as given. Our focus is on what might be thought ofas the “other side” of this issue — on whetherthe non-normative facts that determine what might be feasible for us toaccomplish are value-independent. We argue that they are not, that people havereason to think that the normative properties of different possible options canand 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.”
