Abstract
Internalists about reasons following Bernard Williams claim that an agent’s normative reasons for action are constrained in some interesting way by her desires or motivations. In this paper, I offer a new argument for such a position—although one that resonates, I believe, with certain key elements of Williams’ original view. I initially draw on P.F. Strawson’s famous distinction between the interpersonal and the objective stances that we can take to other people, from the second-person point of view. I suggest that we should accept Strawson’s contention that the activity of reasoning with someone about what she ought to do naturally belongs to the interpersonal mode of interaction. I also suggest that reasons for an agent to perform some action are considerations which would be apt to be cited in favor of that action, within an idealized version of this advisory social practice. I then go on to argue that one would take leave of the interpersonal stance towards someone—thus crossing the line, so to speak—in suggesting that she do something one knows she wouldn’t want to do, even following an exhaustive attempt to hash it out with her. An internalist necessity constraint on reasons is defended on this basis.
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Notes
A few quick pieces of housekeeping: when I talk about reasons for action throughout this paper, I will always mean normative reasons for action—i.e., roughly, considerations which go some way towards justifying an action—rather than so-called motivating reasons—i.e., considerations which might be held to be the contents of the thoughts that dispose an agent to act on a particular occasion. And I will be concerning myself exclusively with reasons for action proper, partly on the grounds that reasons internalists have historically taken their thesis to apply solely to such reasons, rather than (e.g.) putative practical reasons to want certain things or be in certain emotional states. Reasons for action are certainly the focus in Bernard Williams’ original discussion (1981a). But they remain the focus in the careful and state-of-the-art discussion by Stephen Finlay and Mark Schroeder, who characterize ‘schematic internalism’ as the claim that “every reason for action must bear relation R to motivational fact M.” (2012, p. 3)
Note that Williams sometimes adopts the simplifying assumption that reasons are ‘conclusive’ or ‘all-in’ reasons. (See, e.g., 2001, p. 91.) My revision here is intended to allow this assumption to be dropped.
See, e.g., Derek Parfit, who has recently declared Williams’ views here to be “baffling” (2011, vol. 2, p. 435)—with real pain, given Parfit’s evident deep respect for Williams. I’ll call on Parfit to act as a foil for Williams in several places in what follows.
‘Pragmatism’ or ‘humanism’ might be more descriptive labels, but they are also potentially more misleading, given at least some of their respective connotations. Thanks to Nicholas Smyth for useful discussion on this point.
Note that, although internalism about reasons is sometimes billed as a thesis concerning desires specifically, I prefer to put things in terms of motivations to act, in keeping with the spirit of Williams’ original discussion. For, as we have seen, Williams initially formulated his claim in terms of ‘motives’ rather than desires, and went on to characterize the ‘formal’ notion of a desire he was working with in such a liberal way as to rule out very little by way of behavioral dispositions of a broadly conative nature. He included in this category “such things as dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects, as they may be abstractly called, embodying commitments of the agent.” (1981a, p. 105) I want to at least leave room to be similarly inclusive, and some theorists would understandably balk at construing the notion of desire so broadly. Thanks to Amartya Sen for helping me to see this, and also for illuminating discussions of Williams’ views generally.
Why focus on moral reasons and their surrogates here, specifically? The argument I’ll develop for reasons internalism is intended and formulated so as to apply to reasons for action across the board. But I focus on moral reasons throughout this paper because the internalist conclusion seems especially worrisome as applied to them in particular.
This is a metaphor that is once mooted by Parfit, when he writes that, in order to see what various first-order normative theories and principles imply, “we must answer questions about reasons. That is like the way in which, to know about the nature and properties of atoms, we must answer questions about sub-atomic particles.” (2011, vol. 1, p. 149) But since Parfit does not believe in fundamentally different kinds of practical reasons, it might be more accurate to say that they are supposed to be the equivalent of the one true sub-atomic particle. For another relevant metaphor here, see Schroeder’s reference to reasons as being (presumably, discrete) pros and cons on a list in the mind of God (2007, p. 166).
I take it that internalists need not endorse the converse claim, and very well may not. Williams wrote that “the internalist view of reasons for action is that this formulation provides at least a necessary condition of its being true that A has a reason to φ… It is a further question whether the formulation provides a sufficient condition of an agent’s having a reason to φ.” (1995a, pp. 35–36) He went on to say that he did think it was probably a sufficient condition as well, but that this was a separate issue, and one he wouldn’t take up in the context of discussing reasons internalism. And he never defended this claim at any length, at least to the best of my knowledge. I’ll adduce my own reasons for positively doubting it later on.
It should not be overlooked that Williams’ original discussion of reasons internalism ends with an application to the issue of public goods and free riders, which is held to lie “very close to the present subject.” (1981a, p. 111) For, as we will go on to see, Williams’ internalist thesis effectively suggests that there may be a gap—perhaps even a vast gap—between what it is good or desirable that people might do collectively, or what it is otherwise good or desirable to have happen, versus what individual people can actually be expected to do insofar as they are behaving reasonably.
However, some theorists would want to resist the idea that Harry could lack a motivation to do the morally right thing, at least under conditions of full procedural rationality. See Julia Markovits (2014) for a defense of such a view, and also for an interesting and novel argument for internalism about reasons quite different from my own here. Schroeder has defended a somewhat similar, broadly ‘Kantian’ view, albeit via a very different route. Schroeder suggests that moral reasons may be massively over-determined, such that more or less any desire on the part of an agent would be promoted by doing what it is morally right to do. (2007, §6.3) I discuss Schroeder’s ‘Hypotheticalist’ version of the Humean Theory of Reasons in detail in work in progress.
The idea that reasons are normatively ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ has been becoming increasingly popular, and manifests itself theoretically in a variety of claims. Particularly relevant for my purposes here is Parfit’s claim that the concept of a reason is fundamental in the sense that something matters only if we have reasons to care about it (2011, vol. 1, p. 148), and also that someone who is cognizant of the relevant ‘reason-providing facts’ can be criticized for acting in some way only if they have reasons to conduct themselves differently (2011, vol. 2, p. 442). Parfit holds, more generally, that normativity always “involves reasons or apparent reasons.” (2011, vol. 1, p. 144) Note too that the idea that reasons are normatively basic cuts across naturalist/non-naturalist and reductionist/non-reductionist party lines. Schroeder, a card-carrying reductive naturalist, endorses ‘Reason Basicness:’ the claim that “what it is to be normative is to be analyzed in terms of reasons,” (2007, p. 81) while also thinking that the property of being a reason for an agent can be reduced to the property of being desired by her.
Or indeed the myth of atoms as indivisible, or there being just one kind of sub-atomic particle which in turn comprise atoms.
Maybe I should just say: they haven’t satisfied me. For one thing, I’m not convinced that we gain much of an explanatory advantage by starting our story about practical normativity with the concept of a reason—insofar as that is indeed the hope, which may be a partly question-begging assumption. In any case, the worry here would be that our grip on the Parfit–Scanlon concept of a reason may be no more or less secure than our grip on the concept of practical normativity itself, the former being essentially the stipulated minimal unit of the latter.
I hesitate to use the expression ‘out of their mind,’ but there are few completely inoffensive ways of getting quickly at what Strawson is envisaging here. (“An idiot, or a moral idiot,” is how he himself puts it; 1962/2008, p. 13) It may also be inappropriate to adopt the interpersonal stance when we are dealing with people who have certain serious intellectual or emotional incapacities. It might be responded that the interpersonal mode is more flexible than that, and can be adjusted to different levels of cognitive and emotional well-functioning. For my purposes here, I can afford to leave these potentially delicate and politically contentious issues open.
Although one wonders if taking the objective stance to someone who we could take the interpersonal stance towards is part of what some Kantians think that we should never do. And one wonders just how difficult that might turn out to be. Moreover, there will clearly be different (and more and less humane) ways of viewing and treating people in the objective mode. What should we say about how, as well as when, to take the objective stance, then? How are we to take the objective stance towards someone without objectifying her unduly? And is the objective mode just one mode or rather many? It is not as if we view inebriated adults as being children—let alone vice versa. These are important questions to discuss on another day though.
Moreover, I will tend to speak for simplicity as if the interpersonal and the objective modes are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, with regards to particular issues on which we try to engage with people, morally. This is doubtless too simple, as Strawson clearly recognized. Most of human life is lived in the complicated middle, and also in epistemically uncertain relational territory, in which we have to ‘feel our way.’ I’ll flag various other complexities that crop up as we continue.
I am using all of these various expressions to gesture as best I can towards the social practice I have in mind here. But there is no perfect term for it, so feel free to pick and substitute your favorite. And you should also feel free to hear these expressions slightly differently, or use them to mark distinctions internal to this domain. But their fairly close relationship is evinced by the possibility of very similar sorts of parodies—as in the menacing turns of phrase: “Let me give you a friendly piece of advice” and (says the gangster) “We had a little conversation” or (intoned ominously) “I can be quite persuasive.”
Again, I am trying to remain neutral on the question of whether this switch is a normative or conceptual mandate, a point on which Strawson (as I read him) is not entirely clear. But it makes little difference to my argument, I believe, whether we cannot take the interpersonal stance to those who we recognize as being indisposed in some way, or whether it is merely that we would be making a mistake in doing so. Either way, the relevant practices, roles, and stances plausibly involve a form of normativity which is internal to them, and is something like the normativity of rule-following writ large. Thus, the resulting practice-based approach to normativity might well be naturalistic but in a certain sense non-reductive. I explore these issues in work in progress.
It is important to remember throughout that we are talking about reasons for action here (see n. 1). For, on a practice-based approach, the nature of reasons for belief and desire (in particular) will be very much an open question, whose answers will depend upon the contours of the relevant critical practices. I want to remain neutral on these issues in this context, but thanks to Tyler Doggett and Miriam Schoenfield for helping me to think about them further.
The figure of the ideal advisor plays an important role in Peter Railton’s discussion of the agent’s own good (1986), Michael Smith’s ‘advice model’ of internalism (1994), and also picks up on various remarks of Williams’ (of which more shortly). But I take it that my approach is more explicitly social in its emphasis than approaches like Railton’s and Smith’s, in particular, which bill the ideal advisor as being an idealized version of the deliberating agent herself. Although I think it is possible that some people are their own best advisors (if they are particularly resistant to taking an outsider’s advice on board), I see no general reason to restrict things in this way. And Smith seems to be thinking of the advisor as merely a metaphorical device, whereas I want to be considerably more literal-minded about it.
There are various complications here which I am setting aside for the sake of simplicity, since I do not need to settle them for the purposes of the discussion. For example, some agents might be more responsive to advisors who are or at least represent themselves as being fellow sinners. And whether or not the advisor must be entirely truthful with the advisee seems to me a substantive normative question about the standards of best practice here. Moreover, as well as the intended implication that the ideal advisors for A and B might be very different people, there is also the possibility that different people can get through to A maximally well regarding different particular matters.
One can undertake this activity alone, of course, but I’m inclined to think of individual deliberation as a kind of conversation with yourself, in which you are playing the dual role of advisor and advisee. Thus, the individual activity is in my view parasitic on the relevant interpersonal practice. For a discussion of the possibility of taking the analogue of the interpersonal and the objective stances towards oneself—as Strawson assumes is possible—see my (2014). Thanks to Alex Guerrero for prompting me to be clearer about this.
And he went on to argue that “internalism in some form is the only view that plausibly represents a statement about A’s reasons as a distinctive kind of statement about, distinctively, A.” (1995b, p. 194)
But lest it be suspected that obligations or rights for Williams are supposed to be matters of mere convention, it is worth noting that Williams spoke in the same breath of some rights violations as ‘monstrous.’ As in: “…some of the most monstrous proceedings, which lie beyond ordinary blame, involve violations of basic human rights.” (1985, p. 192) Williams goes on to oppose blame (which “seems to have something special to do with the idea that the agent had a reason to act otherwise”) to other “ethically negative or hostile reactions to people’s doings (it [being] vital to remember how many [of these] there are).” (1985, p. 193)
Compare Williams’ telling remark that, when reasons are not relativized to the deliberating agent’s motivations, these ‘external’ reasons-claims: “…mean something that could be expressed by a different kind of sentence, for instance to the effect that it is desirable that A should do the thing in question, or that we have reason to desire that A should do it. Only the internal interpretation represents the statement as distinctively a statement about A’s reasons. Relatedly, if a statement of this kind is true, and A declines to do the thing in question, what is called into question is A’s capacity in this connection to act rationally or reasonably.” (1996, p. 109, my emphasis) But Williams later conceded to Scanlon that his opponent need not hold that someone who flouts a supposedly valid external reasons-claim should be described as being irrational per se, as opposed to merely unreasonable (2001, p. 93).
He also goes on to clarify that “…an adviser may say that A ought to do X and, at least if the adviser speaks in the mode of relative practical advice, he surely says the same thing as A would say if A said ‘I ought to do X,’ and something that would be contrary to A’s saying ‘I ought not to do X.’” (1981c, p. 128) Later on, he reiterated that “The stance towards the agent that is implied by the internalist account can be usefully compared to that of an imaginative and informed advisor, who takes seriously the formula ‘If I were you…’” (2001, p. 94) See also 1981b, p. 120, 1985, p. 193, and 1995a, pp. 40–42. But note the unfortunate exception of the original 1981a piece here, save for a passing reference therein to the “persuasions of others.” (1981a, p. 105)
Although Williams did distinguish, in a broadly Strawsonian vein, “between two possibilities in people’s relations. One is that of shared deliberative practices, where to a considerable extent people have the same dispositions and are helping each other to arrive at practical conclusions. The other is that in which one group applies force or threats to constrain another.” (1985, p. 193) Congenially, he implies that reasons-talk belongs within the first of these relational possibilities.
Moreover, while I am inclined to think of the individual activity as parasitic on the social one (see n. 22), Williams does not seem clearly committed one way or the other.
Parfit and Scanlon would want to say, admittedly, that a reason for an agent A to φ is a consideration which A could be expected to be responsive to if she was fully substantively rational. But, as will become clearer in the next section, this is a far weaker constraint on an agent’s reasons than the condition I intend here—if it should even be understood as being a constraint at all. It should plausibly be read as going the other way, i.e., as representing a constraint on one’s account of substantive rationality. Thanks to Reid Blackman and Daniel Star for discussion on this point.
Thanks to Julia Markovits, Sarah Stroud, and Ted Sider for pressing me to be clearer about my own commitments here.
Although it is plausible to think that it will be highly sensitive to such issues. One might think, for example, that reasoning with a person aims to get her to do something which is at least acceptable or ‘good enough.’ However, a crucial complication is that, for very bad agents, we as their advisors should arguably try to persuade them to do things which are still quite bad, but less so. And yet it does not seem right to say that we should try to get the agent to do things that are the best of a bad bunch of options which she might be persuaded to take. If the best of these options is not only bad but terrible, the ideal advisor might be called upon to simply walk away from the whole sordid business. I do not have to take a stand on these issues in this paper. But suffice it to say, I think that the relationship between the advisability and the desirability of some arbitrary action will tend to be quite complicated. And I think of the agent’s good character as the glue that will often serve to hold the two together.
Compare J. David Velleman (ms) for a similar sort of view.
Pace Parfit, who writes that, when we ignore the facts which give us reasons, “we are not responding to them, just as ignoring someone’s cry for help is not responding to this cry.” (2011, vol. 1, p. 32)
In offering a Strawson-inspired argument for reasons internalism, I am admittedly distancing myself from Williams’ official argument for the view, which has to do with possible explanations of an agent’s actions. (See Williams 1981a, in particular.) Like many others, I find this argument quite opaque, and am not convinced that it captures the best way of motivating the position. There is plausibly some connection to be found, which will crop up when I talk about the activity of reasoning with someone as an attempt to get her to act out of her recognition of the reasons we cite in favor of a certain action—and by means of which her subsequent action might be thus explained. But this connection is not straightforward, owing partly to the possibility of considerations aptly adduced in advice which the agent might be duly motivated to act upon but which would never actually result in action, due to this motivation being accompanied by a contrary and overriding motivation whenever it occurs.
Remember that we are supposed to be imagining ourselves playing the part of the ideal advisor here, who may be presumed to know where this is going (i.e., nowhere). But an important complication is whether and how we can determine in practice that the person we are dealing with really can’t be reasoned with. Perhaps they are absorbing more than they are letting on, or perhaps they will remember our advice and be receptive to it later. (As Alex Guerrero rightly pointed out in his BSPC commentary, “The arc of the moral universe is long.”) I agree that it’s hard to know in practice whether the person who we’re dealing with is genuinely non-responsive. I also believe that we are often obliged to assume—on analogy with the principle of charitable interpretation—that our interlocutor is capable of being reasoned with until we have something approaching knowledge that this is not the case. But we can imagine in cases like the above our having reached such a point, at least if we were to know the callous husband ‘inside out.’ Thanks to Larisa Svirsky and Alex Guerrero for helping me to think through these issues.
It is natural (disturbingly natural) to describe and imagine this interaction as a conversation “man to man”—especially since the perspective of the wife never enters into it in Williams’ original discussion, and is similarly elided in much of the ensuing literature. That she does not seem to have a voice here is well worth reflecting upon, on a number of different levels. I’ll leave these reflections for another day though.
David Sobel makes a similar move at this point in a similar dialectic, in his helpful paper on reasons internalism (2001, p. 223).
I believe the metaphor of alienation in the context of broadly internalist views is originally due to Railton (1986).
Following Williams, I see no pressing need to deny the possibility of a certain amount of indeterminacy about what the outcome of such a conversation would be, which would subsequently be inherited by the notion of a reason (1981a, p. 110).
In particular, we need to be very careful about how we individuate conversations, in order to prevent some of the well-known conditional fallacy worries which afflict ‘ideal agent’ models from afflicting this account too. For, we need to simultaneously do justice to Williams’ thought that a man about to drink a glass of petrol doesn’t have a reason to do so—because he could be quite easily talked out of it, simply by pointing out that it is not quite the gin and tonic he hoped for—while also doing justice to the thought that the man has a prior reason to inquire into the contents of the glass. The second reason is tricky because it is so transient (or, as Sobel calls it, ‘fragile;’ 2001); the better informed man clearly lacks it. I would be inclined to try to deal with these issues by proposing that conversations should be individuated in a more fine-grained way. We would then say that the ignorant man has a reason to acquire more information, on the proviso that he would be interested in doing so. (“Do you want to know what’s really in that glass?” we might ask. “Yes,” he would then reply.) But, time is pressing, and we very reasonably presume that he does have this reason. So we tend to cut out the middle man, and simply offer him the information (by saying “That’s petrol!”). The informed man has a reason to refrain from drinking the contents of the glass, insofar as he has been successfully persuaded on this point and is hence motivated to refrain. And he always had such a reason, because there was always a conversational path which he could be persuaded to take which would persuade him not to drink up. Whereas the reason to acquire more information is duly transient, because the willingness to acquire it only survives the first ‘sub-conversation’ in the overall exchange just described. Of course, this is only the briefest sketch of how one might deal with a delicate and important issue.
Things evidently become more complicated when we consider that reasons come in different strengths. And we might think that the advisor’s voice should get softer in response to a proportionally weak motivation, as well as falling completely silent in its absence. Thus, I think it is natural to say that, just as a person’s ultimate lack of motivation to do as we recommend defeats the (pro tanto) recommendation which we would otherwise have made to her, so a proportionally weak motivation to φ diminishes the strength of the relevant recommendation, and hence the corresponding reason, pro rata. But I will not try to settle this issue here. Thanks to Geoff Sayre-McCord for helping me in thinking about it.
I don’t think Williams would have agreed with this. He is explicit about his assumption that agents are virtually always interested in getting straight on the facts (1995a, p. 37), which seems to me too optimistic. This helps explain why he slid back and forth between talking about reasons as constrained by motivations which the agent himself could reach (see, e.g., 1995a, p. 35), and talking about reasons as constrained by motivations to which there merely exists a path, via a sound deliberative route from the agent’s existing motivations (see, e.g., 1995a, p. 36; 2001, p. 91). However, Williams did once suggest that, when it comes to understanding the somewhat opaque notion of a ‘sound deliberative route,’ we might “reverse the order of explanation, and, in some part, place the constraints on the procedures that are to count as deliberative assistance in contrast to these other interventions [such as manipulation]. What someone has reason to do will be what he can arrive at by a sound deliberative route; and he can arrive at a conclusion or resolution by a sound deliberative route, perhaps, only if he could be led to it by deliberative assistance that operated within those constraints.” (1996, p. 115) This is very close to the kind of idealizing I’m proposing we go in for here. I would just add that this idealized process may require not foisting information on the agent, or otherwise questioning her judgment, if she simply doesn’t want to hear it.
Relatedly, I think that my version of reasons internalism lends little credence to the idea that an agent’s motivations are the source of all of her reasons, in either of the two ways that the ‘source’ metaphor is commonly understood. The sorts of considerations that provide reasons (or potential reasons, subject to being enabled) could be anything whatsoever, even if these reasons would effectively be defeated or ‘vetoed’ by the agent’s lacking the relevant motivational propensity. Moreover, when it comes to explaining why these sorts of considerations are fit to provide reasons—i.e., why they at least have the potential to have genuine normative force—part of the explanation here would presumably be that they are potentially apt to be cited in the relevant critical practice.
Compare Williams, who wrote—in a vague but arguably similar vein—that “we still need the notion of the decision being an expression… of motivations that the agent had in the first place… unless those motivations themselves are expressions of what was there before.” (1996, p. 116)
Hence, my hunch is that, while inspiration may arguably have a place here, bona fide conversion is out—a conversation involving conversion being no conversation at all. This is pace John McDowell (1998), who argues that a consideration could be a reason insofar as the agent would be motivated by it, if he were to come to see the matter aright, having undergone a ‘conversion’ to reasoning correctly (rather than the transition having to be effected by correct reasoning from pre-existing motivations, which is how McDowell reads Williams). So I am friendly to what may in effect be an intermediate position here.
Thanks to Julia Driver for raising it in her insightful commentary at BSPC.
I say "might" though because, on my view, we would need to believe that the fact that good husbands do such-and-such is an independent, non-derivative reason to do the thing in question. I am sympathetic to this view in the case of social roles (see my 2013). But I am much less sympathetic to the view that there are independent, non-derivative reasons to be rational, or to act in accordance with the balance of one's reasons. So the de dicto desire to do so does not seem to me to threaten to trivialize reasons internalism (even supposing that such a desire is universal, which I would also move to deny). For, such a desire cannot enable considerations which are not eligible to provide (further, independent) reasons for action in the first place.
Although elsewhere, I defend a suitable version of motivational internalism such as would bolster (P4) from an (again) Strawsonian perspective (Manne 2014).
Thanks to Japa Pallikkathayil and Michael Kessler for helping me to improve this point, which I had formerly expressed in terms of ‘autonomy.’ But it is a crucial part of my argument that we should group people like the callous husband—who are plausibly autonomous in the standard sense but morally or socially ‘out of it’—with people like the ‘crazy’ or intoxicated person—whose autonomy is compromised—in certain of our moral-cum-social interactions with them.
Note that the suspension of the interpersonal stance towards someone can be quite local. Someone may be impossible where women but not men are concerned, for example. This is one form or symptom of a misogynistic moral ‘blind spot.’
Thanks to Alan Kim and Timothy Rosenkoetter for pressing me about this—and also to Dennis Whitcomb for trying to lift my mood here.
And this continuity is meant to matter here. Parfit: “It matters greatly, I believe, whether Hitler had reasons to do what he did.” (2011, vol. 1, p. 99) And compare Gilbert Harman’s well-known remark that “It sounds odd to say that Hitler should not have ordered the extermination of the Jews, that it was wrong of him to have done so. That sounds somehow “too weak” a thing to say. Instead we want to say that Hitler was an evil man.” (1975, p. 7) I mean to be saying that there is something similarly off-key about reasons-talk as applied to even the little Hitlers of the world.
Compare the line taken by Scanlon in his insightful discussion of reasons internalism (1998, Appendix). And thanks to Alex Guerrero for pushing me on this point.
Strawson leaves off talking about blame specifically, following his general opening remarks in “Freedom and Resentment” about our practices of punishing and blaming. But I take it he would have agreed here. Williams might not have. In his well-known paper on the subject of blame, Williams distinguishes briefly between the sort of ‘focused’ blame that tracks an agent’s reasons and “hopes to achieve recognition,” and a less committal form of blame which merely represents “a rejection (perhaps an entirely justified rejection) of what [the agent] has done.” (1995a, p. 44) But elsewhere Williams construes our ordinary notion of blame as belonging with reasons-talk; see n. 24. And the sort of putative blame that involves mere hostility and rejection might be better termed condemnation.
Tapping into people's existing motivations in such ways may but need not involve our taking leave of the interpersonal stance towards them. We often aim to influence people’s behavior by making certain requests of them, or having them make us promises, rather than by reasoning with them. Someone might ask his spouse to promise to look after herself properly while he is away travelling, thereby giving her a moral reason to do things she doesn’t care about doing for her own sake, such as eating regular meals. But she might care about being true to her word—hence the point of extracting a promise of this kind from her.
Parfit: “When cruel people make others suffer, we can call these people vicious, odious, and callous. But on subjective desire-based theories, some of these people have no reason not to make others suffer. These other criticisms become much weaker if we must admit that, on our view, these people have no reason to act differently.” (2011, vol. 2, pp. 456–457)
Compare Williams’ remarks about the “deficiency or fault” of a man who does not recognize certain moral considerations. Williams agrees that “certainly he cannot head off the criticism by saying that the reasons do not apply to him because he does not have that kind of [subjective motivational set].” But “none of this implies that these considerations are already the defective agent’s reasons; indeed, the problem is precisely that they are not.” (2001, p. 96)
Thanks to my own wonderful husband, Daniel Manne, a legal academic whose research centers on domestic violence, for helping me not to lose sight of the complicated realities here, which affect the lives of so many women (in particular).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a colloquium at the University of Pittsburgh, a class at Dartmouth College, a meeting of WOGAP at MIT, and the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference (BSPC) in 2013. Section 3 contains material originally presented at Washington University in St. Louis and Cornell University in 2011, and also in the Young Philosophers’ Lecture Series held at SUNY Fredonia in 2012, thanks to Andrew Cullison. I’m grateful to all of these audiences for their helpful questions and comments on my developing ideas here. And I’m grateful to the BSPC organizers—Julia Markovits, Miriam Schoenfield, and Ned Markosian—for all of their hard work in organizing this fabulous occasion. In terms of the substance of this paper, I’d also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee at MIT—Richard Holton, Sally Haslanger, Julia Markovits, and Rae Langton—for their invaluable feedback on Chapter 2 of my dissertation, which this paper essentially grew out of. Further thanks to Kenneth Walden and Kieran Setiya for recent fruitful discussions, and also to Tyler Doggett and Hille Paakkunainen for very generous and valuable sets of written comments which they were kind enough to send me. Finally, I’m indebted to Julia Driver and Alex Guerrero for their terrific commentaries on this paper at BSPC, both of which helped me a great deal. I’ve had occasion to thank several others along the way who have helped me in thinking through various specific issues here. But I am sure I am forgetting people who were also kind enough to share in my sadness—or, alternatively, try to cheer me up a bit.
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Manne, K. Internalism about reasons: sad but true?. Philos Stud 167, 89–117 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0234-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0234-3