Against All Reason? Scepticism about the Instrumental Norm

In Charles R. Pigden (ed.), Hume on Motivation and Virtue. Palgrave-Macmillan (2009)
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Abstract

Some of the opponents of desire-based views of normativity seek to undermine them by arguing that even the existence of instrumental normativity (reasons to pursue the means to your ends) entails the existence of a desire-independent rational norm, the instrumental norm. Once we grant the existence of one such norm, there seems to be no principled reason for not allowing others. I clarify this alleged norm, identifying two criteria that any satisfactory candidate must meet: reasonable expectation and possible violation. Some interpretations meet the first criterion and others meet the second, but there are no interpretations that meet both. After surveying the interpretations of Sidgwick, Hampton, and Korsgaard, I suggest that there is no instrumental norm of reason. The final section offers an alternative, desire-based account of instrumental normativity, on which individual normative requirements to pursue means derives from each individual desire for an end.

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Stephen Finlay
Australian Catholic University

Citations of this work

The Normativity of Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
What is (In)coherence?Alex Worsnip - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 13:184-206.
The Real Myth of Coherence.Wooram Lee - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1211-1230.
Explaining the Instrumental Principle.Jonathan Way - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3):487-506.
Reasons and Rationality.Jonathan Way - forthcoming - In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. Oxford University Press.

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References found in this work

A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1969 - Harmondsworth,: Penguin Books. Edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner.
The sources of normativity.Christine M. Korsgaard - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Onora O'Neill.
Critique of practical reason.Immanuel Kant - 1788 - New York,: Liberal Arts Press. Edited by Mary J. Gregor.
The possibility of altruism.Thomas Nagel - 1970 - Oxford,: Clarendon P..

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