Online research in philosophy

At the outset of The Possibility of Altruism Thomas Nagel charts two paths out of the fundamental dilemma confronting metaethics. The first path rejects the claim that a persuasive account of the motivational backing of ethical judgments must involve an agent’s desires. But it is the second path, a path that Nagel charts but does not himself take, that is the focus of this essay. This path retains the standard account, upon which all motivation involves desire, but denies that desires are given prior to reason. Instead, these attitudes that motivate are themselves open to rational assessment. One reason for this focus is that many philosophers, including Quinn, Raz, and Scanlon, have come to reject the claim Nagel takes to block this path – that desires are somehow given prior to reason, hence are not in the relevant way proper objects of rational assessment. A second reason is that unlike the first path, this second does not require the rejection of the belief-desire theory, only the rejection of one assumption about the nature of conative attitudes. Unlike Nagel’s chosen path, then, the second holds out the prospect of reconciling ethical objectivity, internalism, and the belief-desire theory within a unified account. I argue that the account of desire found in Quinn, Raz, and Scanlon, augmented by aspects of Davidson’s account of propositional attitudes, yields a coherent account of the involvement of reason even in basic desires, an account that is well suited to Nagel’s intriguing path not taken.

In The Felt Meanings of the World, Quentin Smith lays the groundwork for a metaphysical worldview that is meant to stand as an alternative to nihilism. Smith finds fault with nihilism inasmuch as it fails to account for the possibility that faculties other than reason, namely feelings or intuition, may be the source of important metaphysical insight. From this observation, Smith builds his “metaphysics of feeling,” which is not concemed with rational explanations of the world’s existence, but rather with the relationship between the world and our own feelings. This information, Smith says, can satisfy our metaphysical longings inasmuch as we can become more aware of “what” the world is, even if we can never know “why” it exists. Smith’s metaphysic is a viable one, but it is not without its problems. Most notable of these is Smith’s conclusion that “joy” is the proper affective response to the pure existence of the world, or Being simpliciter. It is my intent to show not only that joy cannot be an affective response to Being simpliciter; but also that the metaphysics of feeling renders incoherent any notion of affective response to Being simpliciter.

In this paper we present an account of practical rationality and weakness of will in terms of rational capacities. We show how our account rectifies various shortcomings in Michael Smith’s related theory. In particular, our account is capable of accommodating cases of weak-willed behaviour that are not ‘akratic’, or otherwise contrary to the agent’s better judgement. Our account differs from Smith’s primarily by incorporating resolve: a third rational capacity for resolute maintenance of one’s intentions. We discuss further two ways to explain the importance of resolve to practical rationality: one based on Richard Holton’s recent work, and an alternative, non-consequentialist account.

Smith has defended the rationalist's conceptual claim that moral requirements are categorical requirements of reason, arguing that no status short of this would make sense of our taking these requirements as seriously as we do. Against this I argue that Smith has failed to show either that our moral commitments would be undermined by possessing only an internal, contextual justification or that they need presuppose any expectation that rational agents must converge on their acceptance. His claim that this rationalistic understanding of metaethics is required for the intelligibility of moral disagreement is also found to be inadequately supported. It is further proposed that the rationalist's substantive claims - that there are such categorical requirements of reason and that our actual moral commitments are a case in point - are liable to disappointment; and that the conceptual claim is fatally undermined by reflection on how we might best respond to such disappointment.

This paper defends a model of the internalism requirement against Michael Smith's recent criticisms of it. On this "example model", what we have reason to do is what we would be motivated to do were we rational. After criticizing the example model, Smith argues that his "advice model", that what we have reason to do is what we would advise ourselves to do were we rational, is obviously preferable. The author argues that Smith's criticisms can quite easily be accommodated by the example model. Moreover, to the extent that his model connects reasons to advice, it is not a model of the internalism requirement at all. Yet, to the extent that it connects reasons to motivation, his model collapses into the example model. The author ends by arguing that Smith's view simply proposes an unambitious conception of practical rationality, not an alternative construal of the internalism requirement.

Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem gives an admirably straightforward condition for moral rightness: an act is morally right in circumstance C only if under conditions of full rationality we would all want to perform that act. I will assume that this condition, if met, would make acts objectively right and therefore vindicate a robust form of metaethical realism. There remains the question, however, of whether this condition can be met. Smith considers several arguments that it cannot, and this paper will argue that his response to one of them— Gilbert Harman’s “successful criminal” argument—is inadequate. Clear and straightforward as it is, Smith’s condition for moral rightness is deceptively strong for it requires a full convergence of desires. It appears that moral facts can exist only if there is unanimous agreement about how we would want to behave if we were fully rational. The unanimity requirement leaves Smith vulnerable to sensible knave style objections. If someone can be fully rational yet not desire to perform acts in accordance with morality, then according to Smith’s account, we should be skeptical about the existence of moral facts. Harman presents such an objection in the form of a successful criminal who does not observe the alleged requirement not to harm or injure people outside of his criminal organization. Most importantly, the criminal’s disregard of outsiders is not due to inattention, failure to consider or appreciate certain arguments, ignorance of relevant evidence, errors in reasoning, irrationality, unreasonableness, or weakness of will. If this criminal is truly rational and still desires to steal..

This paper launches a new criticism of Michael Smith's advice model of internalism. Whereas Robert Neal Johnson argues that Smith's advice model collapses into the example model of internalism, the author contends that taking advice seriously pushes us instead toward some version of externalism. The advice model of internalism misportrays the logic of accepting advice. Agents do not have epistemic access to what their fully rational selves would advise them to do, and so it is necessary for a model of practical reason based upon advice to reflect the fact that agents take advice only from other people. This fact may or may not support internalism. Whether it does depends upon the content of the good adviser's advice, something we cannot know unless we ourselves are fully rational. We see in a new way, then, how the internalism/externalism debate depends upon the content of practical reason.

Although it goes against a widespread significant misunderstanding of his view, Michael Smith is one of the very few moral philosophers who explicitly wants to allow for the commonsense claim that, while morally required action is always favored by some reason, selfish and immoral action can also be rationally permissible. One point of this paper is to make it clear that this is indeed Smith’s view. It is a further point to show that his way of accommodating this claim is inconsistent with his well-known “practicality requirement” on moral judgments: the thesis that any rational person will always have at least some motivation to do what she judges to be right. The general conclusion is that no view that, like Smith’s, associates the normative strength of a reason with the motivational strength of an ideal desire will allow for the wide range of rational permissibility that Smith wants to capture.

Holton, we acknowledge, has given a good counter-example to a theory, and that theory is interesting and worth refuting. The theory we have in mind is like Smith's, but is more reductionist in spirit. It is a theory that ties value to Reason and to processes of reasoning, or inference - not to the recognition of reasons and acting on reasons. Such a theory overestimates the importance of logic, truth, inference, and thinking things through for yourself independently of any ideas about where you might end up. Now it might well be thought that any Kantian theory of value would need to be tied to just such a conception of Reason. But while the theory behind The Moral Problem is Kantian in some very salient respects, the survival of Smith's analysis of value in the face of Holton's argument is very instructive. It teaches us a memorable moral: that a Kantian theory like Smith' s does not need to be tied - even loosely - to an overly intellectualised, logocentric conception of Reason.

Michael Smith has argued that to value an action is to believe that if one were fully rational one would desire that one perform it. I offer the Muggletonians as a counter-example. The Muggletonians, a 17th century English sect, believed that reason was the path of the Devil. They believed that their fully rational selves - rational in just Smith's sense - would have blasphemed against God; and that their rational selves would have wanted their actual selves to do likewise. But blaspheming against God was not what they valued.