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Darwall's Kantian Argument
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
In Impartial Reason, Stephen Darwall presents an account of rational agency in which reasons to act are both motivational and normative in nature. On the one hand, they are facts about an action reflective awareness of which can genuinely influence preference and conduct. On the other hand, they are also capable of justifying action, of showing in an all-things-considered sense that a particular action is at least as choiceworthy as are alternatives to it. Furthermore, these two aspects of reasons to act are intimately related, since, ideally, at any rate, an agent's conduct is motivated by his awareness of himself as a particular subject of a given set of norms.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1988
References
1 Darwall, Stephen L. Impartial Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1983)Google Scholar. All page references in parentheses are to this work.
2 In developing his argument, Darwall tries to incorporate the views of a large number of moral philosophers, including Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Gauthier, Rawls, and Nagel. This approach may have its advantages; but I believe that it will frustrate, rather than further, the reader's attempt to get an overall perspective on Darwall's difficult argument. For this reason, I have tried, in explaining the argument, to keep its extensive philosophical sources to a minimum.
3 Darwall is not the only recent writer on the foundations of morality to suggest this strategy. See also Nagel, Thomas The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1970)Google Scholar, ch. 8.
4 A little too hastily, it would seem. But later I discuss how these arguments support a normative standpoint that is at odds with the one that Darwall wishes to defend. Thus, for the sake of that discussion, let us agree with Darwall that these arguments are sound.
5 See also Chapter 6 of Impartial Reason where Darwall tries to defend against this same worry. There his strategy is to show that the decision theorist's assumption that intransitive preferences are irrational is intelligible only if those preferences are criticizable in terms of reasons.
6 Darwall uses the phrase ‘internally self-identified subject’ to refer to an agent who is motivated by an awareness of himself as an individual subject of the system of norms (213).
7 Gauthier, David ‘Reason and Maximization,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1975) 411–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Ibid., 431
9 Ibid., 429
10 Ibid., 431
11 Ibid., 429
12 Ibid., 429-30
13 Ibid., 430
14 In trying to establish the truth of this philosophical claim, Darwall equates his own conception of impartial choice with the Rawlsian conception of choice from behind a veil of ignorance (230). But surely it is unwise for Darwall to do so at this crucial stage in his argument. For unless he first shows that his own conception is of itself strong enough to allow him to reject the principle of individual utility, the reader may suspect that he can reject it only because he has unjustifiably assimilated at least a part of the Rawlsian conception.
15 Darwall follows James Wallace in giving the following definition of ‘Hobbes’ situation’:
Everyone is apt to benefit if all or most people in the situation conform to B, but this benefit is not realized unless most conform.
Conforming to B generally involves some sacrifice, so that, other things being equal, it is apt to be maximally advantageous for an individual not to conform when most conform.
As a rule, the sacrifice involved for an individual in conforming to B is small in comparison with the benefits to him of the conformity of most people to B.
It is apt to be maximally disadvantageous to an individual to conform to B when not enough others conform to realize the benefit. (176-7)
16 In a strict sense, of course, Hume obviously held no such position. On this point, however, I simply follow Darwall's re-interpretation of Hume in terms of the contemporary notion of a reason to act. My criticism, then, is that, once we accept this re-interpretation, Hume's view quickly brings to mind the idea of a normative standpoint that is a competitor to Darwall's Kantian standpoint.
17 In his recent review of Impartial Reason, Hill, Thomas E. raises these doubts from a somewhat different perspective. See his ‘Darwall on Practical Reason,’ Ethics 96 (1986) 604–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But for a different kind of criticism, cf. Postow, B.C. ‘Darwall and the Impartial Standpoint,’ Philosophical Studies 49 (1986) 125–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Postow, a central failure of Impartial Reason is that it fails to show why impersonal considerations ought (rationally) to prevail over personal ones.
18 Gauthier, 429-30