Online research in philosophy

When performing an action of a certain kind, an agent typically has se- veral reasons for doing so. I shall borrow Davidson’s term and call these rationalising reasons (Davidson 1963, 3). These are reasons that allow us to understand what the agent regarded as favourable features of such an action. (There will also be reasons against acting, expressing unfavour- able features of such an action, from the agent’s point of view.) I shall say that R is a rationalising reason of agent X’s for K-ing iff R consists of (i) a desire of X’s to L and (ii) a belief of X’s that K-ing promotes L-ing (to be discussed shortly). It is frequently said that when an agent X is K-ing and has several rationalising reasons for K-ing, not all of those reasons are reasons for which X is K-ing, that motivate X’s K-ing, or that explain X’s K-ing. In this paper I challenge this view.

Reasons are facts, i.e., they are constituted by facts. Given a popular view that conceives of facts as thin abstract rather than thick concrete entities, the dichotomy between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons is not particularly problematic. It is argued that it would be preferable if we could understand the dichotomy even if we had a thick noton of fact in mind. It would be preferable because it is better if our notion of a reason is consistent with a wider rather than narrower set of plausible metaphysical views. But, more importantly, it would also be preferable because the thin approach trivializes an interesting issue among practical philosophers. Moreover, as an additional drawback, the thin account is in one respect less appealing than its thick cousin. The latter is not flawless, though. Some major objections to the thick notion is discussed.

According to Thomas Nagel, morality's authority is determined by the extent to which its way of balancing agent-neutral and agent-relative values resembles reason's. He himself would like to think that the resemblance is close enough to ensure that it will always be reasonable to act as morality demands. But his attempts to establish this never really get off the ground, in large part because he never makes it very clear how these two perspectives on value are to be characterized. My goal in this paper is to show how we might flesh out Nagel's conception of these matters by construing reason as a kind of self-governance and morality as involving a certain kind of cooperation. The challenge will therefore be to determine what self-governance and cooperation require of people given the assumption that there are objective values and that they take both the agentneutral and the agent-relative forms. What we shall find is that their requirements differ rather more than Nagel allows, but perhaps not enough to prevent morality from being in some significant sense inescapable.

Reasons of intimacy, i.e. reasons to care for friends and other intimates, resist categorization as either subjective Humean reasons or as objective consequentialist reasons. Reasons of intimacy are grounded in the friendship relation itself, not in the psychological attitudes of the agent or in the objective intrinsic value of the friend or the friendship. So reasons of intimacy are objective and agent-relative and can be understood by analogy with reasons of fidelity and reasons of prudence. Such an analogy can help us to understand which objective agent-relative reasons we have and which, such as deontological constraints, we do not have.

The agent-relative/agent-neutral distintion is widely and rightly regarded as a philosophically important one. Unfortunately, the distinction is often drawn in different and mutually incompatible ways. The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction has historically been drawn three main ways: the ‘principle-based distinction’, the ‘reason-statement-based distinction’ and the ‘perspective-based distinction’. Each of these approaches has its own distinctive vices (Sections 1-3). However, a slightly modified version of the historically influential principle-based approach seems to avoid most if not all of these vices (Section 4). The distinction so understood differs from numerous other distinctions with which it might easily be confused (Section 5). Finally, the distinction so drawn is important to normative theorizing for a variety of reasons (Section 6).

Christine Korsgaard has argued recently that the thesis that reasons are "essentially public" undermines the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons, thus refuting egoism by rejecting its commitment to the universal availability of agent-relative reasons. I conclude that Korsgaard's invocation of the essential publicity of reasons trades on ambiguities concerning the "sharing" of reasons and so does not refute egoism and does not ground moral normativity. Her account of the publicity of reasons shows that solipsism is incoherent, but the egoist need not be a solipsist, nor is she an incompetent user of moral language or the language of reasons.

The distinction between the agent-relative and the agent-neutral plays a prominent role in recent attempts to taxonomize normative theories. Its importance extends to most areas in practical philosophy, though. Despite its popularity, the distinction remains difficult to get a good grip on. In part this has to do with the fact that there is no consensus concerning the sort of objects to which we should apply the distinction. Thomas Nagel distinguishes between agent-neutral and agent-relative values, reasons, and principles; Derek Parfit focuses on normative theories (and the aims they provide to agents), David McNaughton and Piers Rawling focus on rules and reasons, Skorupski on predicates, and there are other suggestions too. Some writers suspect that we fundamentally talk about one and the same distinction. This work is about practical reasons for action rather than theoretical reasons for belief. Moreover, focus is on whether reasons do or do not essentially refer to particular agents. A challenge that undermines the dichotomy in this sense is posed. After having rejected different attempts to defend the distinction, it is argued that there is a possible defence that sets out from Jonathan Dancy’s recent distinction between enablers and favourers.

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard presents and defends a neo-Kantian theory of normativity. Her initial account of reasons seems to make them dependent upon the practical identity of the agent, and upon the value the agent must place on her own humanity. This seems to make all reasons agent-relative. But Korsgaard claims that arguments similar to Wittgenstein's private-language argument can show that reasons are in fact essentially agent-neutral. This paper explains both of Korsgaard's Wittgensteinian arguments, and shows why neither of them work. The paper also provides a brief sketch of a different Wittgensteinian account of reasons that distinguishes the normative role of justification from that of requirement. On this account, the real agent-neutrality of reasons applies to their justificatory role, but not to their requiring role.

In this paper I offer two arguments designed to defend the existence of categorical reasons, which I define as those justifying considerations that obtain independently of their relation to an agent's commitments. The first argument is based on certain paradigm cases meant to reveal difficulties for practical instrumentalism—the view, as I define it here, that categorical reasons do not exist, because all reasons must serve the commitments of the agents to whom they apply. The second argument relies on considerations of responsibility and blame to establish the existence of categorical reasons.

In his recent book Slaves of the Passions , Mark Schroeder defends a Humean account of practical reasons ( hypotheticalism ). He argues that it is compatible with 'genuinely agent-neutral reasons'. These are reasons that any agent whatsoever has. According to Schroeder, they may well include moral reasons. Furthermore, he proposes a novel account of a reason's weight, which is supposed to vindicate the claim that agent-neutral reasons ( if they exist), would be weighty irrespective of anyone's desires. If the argument is successful, it could help avoid an error-theory of moral language. I argue that it isn't, and that we should reject a Humean approach to reasons.