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Reasons and impossibility

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Streumer (2007).

  2. I shall explain the distinction between derivative and non-derivative reasons in greater detail below.

  3. Unless reasons for learning (for acquiring a new ability) are independent of reasons for doing what one is about to learn, which seems unlikely. Michael Ridge suggested to me to regard reasons for learning as ‘teleological reasons’ meaning, I take it, that one has a reason to acquire an ability because reaching the telos (having the ability) is worthwhile. But that suggestion seems to evade the question that I am concerned with: Having the ability is worthwhile because exercising it is (in the piano case, at least). So the reason for having the ability derives from the reason for exercising the ability. But is that a reason that a person can have who (as yet) cannot exercise the ability? If so, the reason for acquiring the ability derives from a reason for doing something that one cannot do: from the reason for exercising it.

  4. 2007, p. 368.

  5. The argument seems misguided to me anyway, because at any given time a person has a great number of reasons to act. If that would in itself pose a problem for deliberation, it would be an inevitable problem for any account of reasons.

  6. In an influential discussion of Grice’s view, Harman (1986) suggests that trying is (or often is) intending without the belief that one will act as intended. The belief that one will act as intended is, however, constitutive, at least in normal cases, of intending, says Harman. I am not convinced that intending requires the belief that one will act as intended. But even if it does, trying isn’t just intending minus the belief, or at any rate, I will limit my discussion of trying to a more specific notion that I explain below.

  7. Harman (1986) provides examples of trying which are not done with the intention of doing what one tries to do (this is why, according to him, trying is only normally intending without the belief that one will succeed): “…one can try as a test to defeat the atomic power plant’s security system […] without it being true that one intends to defeat the plant’s security system.” (p. 370) I am not convinced that the example shows what it is meant to show: We may as well say that the person who tries to break in also intends to break in, but hopes that she won’t succeed. While this is of course an unusual combination of attitudes, it is a possible one.

  8. It may be possible to relax the definition by requiring only the likelihood of success, rather than actual success.

  9. The definition is modeled on to Mackie’s INUS condition (“insufficient but non-redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition”, 1974, p. 62, et passim).

  10. It follows from this definition that Johann Bessler (say) did not try to design a perpetual motion machine, since nothing that he (or others who embarked on the same enterprise) got him closer to succeeding. However, he believed that he was trying to build such a machine, and—given the knowledge of his time—the belief was not unreasonable. I am not sure whether this goes against our ordinary understanding of trying. If it did, I would have to modify the definition accordingly perhaps adding to the final sentence “… ϕ-ing … is a necessary part of a plan that if completed achieves the intended result, or is reasonably believed to do so.” But I am not convinced that the amendment is necessary. As mentioned, the alternative in cases like Bessler’s is to say that he believed that he tried to build such a machine. And it seems to me that this is good enough to capture our ordinary understanding of trying. I am grateful to Jason Alexander for pressing me on this point.

  11. Efficient steps may in that regard be similar to ‘facilitating actions’, as Raz (2005a) understands them in his article ‘The Myth of Instrumental Rationality’.

  12. This is not true of basic actions: The reason to move my finger is not normally a reason to try to move my finger, because (normally) actions of this kind do not break down into a sequence of auxiliary actions. What would ‘trying to move my finger’ consist in independently of moving my finger?

  13. Non-success-related reasons raise a difficulty that I cannot fully explore here. Just to sketch the problem: Assume that intending to ϕ requires absence of the belief that one will not ϕ. Call this absence-of-belief-in-failure condition for intending. (It is considerably weaker than Harman’s condition, mentioned above, that intending requires the belief in success.) Now, there may be cases of non-success-related reasons for trying where a person knows that she will not succeed. Take: someone offers me a considerable sum of money if I try to do a hundred push-ups. I know that I won’t succeed, but surely I can try, and thereby earn the money? But above, the definition of efficient steps had it that a person tries to ϕ, only if she intends to ϕ. Intending to ϕ is at least a necessary condition for trying. But if I can try to do something which I know I will not do, and this presupposes intending to do it, the absence-of-belief-in-failure condition for intending is violated. What to do? Schematically there are three solutions to the problem: (1) Drop the absence-of-belief-in-failure condition for intending; (2) retain the absence-of-belief-in-failure condition for intending, and deny that one can try to something if one knows that one will not succeed (i.e. I can’t earn the money); (3) drop the claim that intending to ϕ is a necessary condition for trying to ϕ. I will not consider the first and the second of these; the first because it is a whole other discussion that lies outside of the purview of this paper, and the second because it strikes me as prima facie implausible. Leaves (3). The problem with (3) is, that once we drop the claim that trying to ϕ presupposes intending to ϕ, it becomes unclear why trying to ϕ is trying to ϕ, rather than trying to perform a completely different action. The most plausible response seems to me that even in cases where the absence-of-belief-in-failure condition for intending is violated, trying to ϕ is still very closely related to intending to ϕ. It is conceived of as part of a plan that, if completed, would accomplish a certain end. And even if we cannot, strictly speaking, say that the agent intends to realize the end in cases where she knows that she will fail, the trying to ϕ is trying to ϕ because of its place in a plan which would accomplish ϕ-ing if successfully carried out. The agent has to at least welcome the realization of the end, or have some other attitude, weaker than intending, towards it. This way one could hold on to an only slightly weakened condition on trying than the condition that trying to ϕ presupposes intending to ϕ—something like: Trying to ϕ either presupposes the intention to ϕ, or some slightly weaker attitude towards the end of ϕ-ing (and—as in the definition of efficient steps above—it has to be part of a plan that if completed would realize the end, or is reasonably believed to do so).

  14. Instrumental rationality is often discussed as dealing with a requirement to take the necessary means to one’s end (Korsgaard 1997; Broome 1999; Wallace 2001). I find this surprising for two reasons: (1) Means are rarely necessary. Usually an end can be achieved in a number of different ways. Each of them is sufficient for realizing the end, but none is necessary. It seems surprising that these cases should be excluded from the discussion of instrumental rationality. (2) Even if there is a means which is necessary for achieving a result, this seems irrelevant to me as long as it is not sufficient as well. Raz (2005b, p. 9) seems one of the few writers who acknowledges that it is sufficiency which is crucial here, not necessity. My suggestion about reasons for taking efficient steps is a close relative of Raz’s ‘Facilitative principle’: “When we have an undefeated reason to take an action, we have reason to perform any one (but only one) of the possible (for us) alternative plans that facilitate its performance.” (2005a, p. 6).

  15. I formulated the argument in terms of what a person ought to do. It could easily be rephrased as an argument concerning what a person has (or does not have) most reason to do. Having most reason is a special kind of ought: A person has most reason to do something, if there is an action that she uniquely ought to perform.

  16. Cf. Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2004), Parfit (forthcoming), Raz (forthcoming).

  17. They are not similar in all respects because so-called ‘wrong reasons’ for intending, or desiring are reasons that an agent cannot follow directly. I am not sure whether reasons for taking efficient steps are like that. Can a person try to do something if she knows that she won’t be able to do it, in order to (say) win a bet or avoid punishment? I assume in this paper that she can, and that she can follow those reasons directly, without resorting to indirect means like undergoing hypnosis, etc.

References

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Daniel Elstein, Gerald Lang, Rob Lawlor and Georgia Testa for their very helpful discussions of an earlier draft. This essay was at some point part of a longer paper, which I had an opportunity to discuss at 2007 SPAWN conference at Syracuse and at the LSE Popper seminar. I am grateful to both of these audiences for all their helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank Joseph Raz for numerous discussions and comments on earlier versions.

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Heuer, U. Reasons and impossibility. Philos Stud 147, 235–246 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9285-2

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