Online research in philosophy

In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible.

Many contemporary accounts of normative reasons for action accord a single strength value to normative reasons. This paper first uses some examples to argue against such views by showing that they seem to commit us to intransitive or counterintuitive claims about the rough equivalence of the strengths of certain reasons. The paper then explains and defends an alternate account according to which normative reasons for action have two separable dimensions of strength: requiring strength, and justifying strength. Such an account explains our intuitions in the cases that make trouble for single-value views. The justifying/requiring account is compared with two other solutions that have been offered to justify and explain our intuitions about these sorts of cases. These other solutions appeal to the notions of incommensurability of reasons, and to second-order normative entities called `exclusionary permissions'. It is argued that the justifying/requiring distinction provides a superior solution.

People act for reasons. That is how we understand ourselves. But what is it to act for a reason? This is what Fred Schueler investigates. He rejects the dominant view that the beliefs and desires that constitute our reasons for acting simply cause us to act as we do, and argues instead for a view centred on practical deliberation--our ability to evaluate the reasons we accept. Schueler's account of 'reasons explanations' emphasizes the relation between reasons and purposes, and the fact that the reasons for an action are not always good reasons.

There is a surprising disconnect between formal rational choice theory and philosophical work on reasons. The one is silent on the role of reasons in rational choices, the other rarely engages with the formal models of decision problems used by social scientists. To bridge this gap, we propose a new, reason-based theory of rational choice. At its core is an account of preference formation, according to which an agent’s preferences are determined by his or her motivating reasons, together with a ‘weighing relation’ between different combinations of reasons. By explaining how someone’s preferences may vary with changes in his or her motivating reasons, our theory illuminates the relationship between deliberation about reasons and rational choices. Although primarily positive, the theory can also help us think about how those preferences and choices ought to respond to normative reasons.

This paper poses a puzzle concerning a broadly held view about normative reasons for belief: evidentialism. Evidentialism is the highly intuitive view that the only normative reasons for belief are evidential reasons. I shall argue that in certain circumstances, evidentialism is unable to generate the correct reasons for belief; these reasons can only be provided by other kinds of epistemic reasons apart from evidential ones. I am not arguing that reasons in ordinary cases for belief are non-evidential, but that evidentialism is too narrow an account of normative reasons for belief to serve as a complete theory of epistemic reasons.

It is through our actions that we affect the way the world goes. Whenever we face a choice of what to do, we also face a choice of which of various possible worlds to actualize. Moreover, whenever we act intentionally, we act with the aim of making the world go a certain way. It is only natural, then, to suppose that an agent’s reasons for action are a function of her reasons for preferring some of these possible worlds to others, such that what she has most reason to do is to bring about the possible world which, of all those available to her, is the one that she has most reason to want to obtain. This is what is known as the ‘teleological conception of practical reasons’. Whether this is the correct conception of practical reasons is important not only in its own right, but also in virtue of its potential implications for what sort of moral theory we should accept. Below, I argue that the teleological conception is indeed the correct conception of practical reasons.

This is Chapter 3 of my Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality. In this chapter, I defend the teleological conception of practical reasons, which holds that the reasons there are for and against performing a given act are wholly determined by the reasons there are for and against preferring its outcome to those of its available alternatives, such that, if S has most reason to perform x, all things considered, then, of all the outcomes that S could bring about, S has most reason to desire that Ox (i.e., x’s outcome) obtains, all things considered.

Indeed, these are the sorts of reasons that Act Consequentialism recognises. But we can think of act-based reasons as a limiting kind of pattern-based reason, in which the pattern P is identical to the action A. Thus the idea of pattern-based reasons is more general than the idea of act-based reasons, and we can properly understand Act Consequentialism as a theory of pattern-based reasons. If pattern-based reasons exist, they are reasons for individual agents to act. They are not supposed to be reasons for group agents to act. It is controversial whether their existence depends on the existence of group agents.3 But even if it does, they are supposed to be reasons for individuals to act. It is very important not to think of them as reasons for groups to act. To help keep track of the individual agent whose reasons we are interested in, I will call her ‘the actor’.

The notion of an imperfect obligation or duty, which contemporary moral philosophy takes from Kantian ethics, affords a way of mitigating morality’s demands while recognizing moral obligation as “binding” or inescapable, in Kant’s terms: something an agent cannot get out of just by appealing to ends or priorities of her own. A perfect duty, as Kant puts it, allows no exception in the interest of inclination.1 It tells us precisely what we must do, with no option of putting it off until some other occasion. By contrast, an imperfect duty leaves open crucial features of the required act. Understood in this way, as duties of indeterminate content, imperfect duties such as the charitable duty to aid those in need leave leeway for personal choice. We get to choose whom to aid and when and how much. We may be obligated to meet a certain threshold, but we will be exceeding what is required of us if we go beyond that. Imperfect duties therefore allow us authority to shape our own lives, balancing concern for others with our own particular projects and concerns. But imperfect duties interest me, in the first instance, in connection with practical reasons. The term “practical” here just means “having to do with action.” Reasons are understood as facts, not as mental states, and practical reasons are facts that count for or against action, in contrast to theoretical reasons, which concern belief. Similarly, “practical rationality” entails action in accordance with one’s overall structure of practical reasons, as distinct from believing what one has reason to believe. The term “practical rationality” can be used for a property of agents, in which case it implies awareness of the relevant reasons, but it also sometimes refers to a system of norms for assessing action in light of reasons, analogous to morality but also including logical and instrumental considerations. On this latter..

The notion of an “imperfect” obligation or duty, which most of us associate with Kantian ethics, affords a way of mitigating morality’s demands, while recognizing moral obligation as “binding” or inescapable, in Kant’s terms – something an agent cannot get out of just by appealing to ends or priorities of her own.2 Understood as duties of indeterminate content, imperfect duties such as the charitable duty to aid those in need leave leeway for personal choice – of whom to aid and when and how much, at any rate past a certain threshold. They therefore allow us authority to shape our own lives, balancing concern for others with our own nonmoral projects and concerns. But they interest me in the first instance in connection with practical reasons, taken as the basis of moral “ought.” On what I take to be the common account of practical reasons, they are essentially prima facie act-requirements, able to be overridden or undermined by opposing reasons, but otherwise constraining rational choice.3 If we have a reason to aid a particular famine victim, say, it is only the fact that we have just as weighty reasons to aid others instead, or to do something else with the same resources, that keeps us from being required to aid him in particular. A moral reason counts as binding on this account insofar as it outweighs competitors – the result being a moral obligation, “imperfect” where its content leaves significant room for choice. However, in a case where there happens to be some best or most effective way of fulfilling an imperfect obligation, and our reason for a certain option counts as our strongest 1 reason, what happens to our leeway for choice? I mean to be working from an objective notion of obligation and of reasons, as independent of what the agent knows or has reason to know, but in that case, when we supplement morality with rationality, there might seem to be particular victims we are required to aid, whether or not we can tell who they are. For surely we have a moral reason to aid any given victim, not just victims generally..