Abstract
This paper offers a defense against the primary objection to the view that goodness and other value properties give normative reasons, which is T. M. Scanlon’s influential redundancy argument. Scanlon reasons that value properties cannot add anything over and above what non-evaluative properties contribute. I suggest this line of reasoning is analogous to Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument against non-reductive physicalism, and adapt Ned Block’s objection to exclusion—a generalization and regress argument—into a reason for rejecting Scanlon’s argument. Differences between reasons and causes make Scanlon’s task more difficult than Kim’s.
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Notes
I will understand value in most general way possible—that is, independently of any particular way of carving up the evaluative world with distinctions (final/instrumental, intrinsic/extrinsic, attributive/predicative, personal/impersonal, etc.). Those interested only excluding the reason-giving powers of certain kinds of values may substitute their own preferred taxonomies. I keep the discussion general because the line of argument developed here could be used to cast doubt on the efficacy of any kind of value. There is also a parallel controversy about whether deontic properties of rightness and wrongness would be redundant in the same way as goodness (see e.g. Stratton-Lake (2003); Darwall (2010); and Johnson King, (2019)). What I say here is compatible with defending the reason-giving powers of deontic properties, but doing so is not my primary aim.
There are many exclusion-based arguments, with differing conclusions. For example, Merricks (2001), (ch. 3) uses causal exclusion to argue that composite objects don’t exist. For present purposes, we’ll limit our focus to just Kim’s applications of the idea.
In other words, I won’t re-litigate the dispute between Kim and his critics. Indeed, we can allow that Kim successfully avoids causal drainage while maintaining that rational drainage is much harder to stop.
Conceptions of realization and supervenience vary significantly, so for present purposes we’ll stick with the language of vertical determination.
See a related point in Darwall (2010) pp. 136–137.
This is not to argue against Scanlon’s positive buck-passing thesis that values are higher-order formal properties. To be clear, Scanlon offers two reasons for believing the positive thesis: the redundancy argument, and his claim that there is no “single, reason-providing property” that all valuable things have in common (1998, p. 98). But the second reason is dependent on the first—if values did give reasons, then the property of being valuable would be the reason-giving property that all valuable things had in common. So, if the redundancy argument fails, it doesn’t imply that the positive thesis is false, but it does leave the positive thesis un-argued for.
Or at least say pleasantness gives more fundamental reasons—Schroeder (2009) suggests buck-passers should take value properties to give derivative reasons. For present purposes I take no stand on whether the reasons vs. no reasons or the fundamental vs. derivative version of the argument is better. For ease of expression, I’ll speak primarily of reasons full-stop. Translate as necessary.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.
See note 7.
He gives two different versions of the argument—I’ve presented the simpler one. In Kim’s presentation, causal parsimony is called “exclusion.”
In the next section I’ll give reasons for thinking that facts featuring different properties give distinct reasons. One might wonder how to square this with the double-counting problem—wouldn’t this non-extensional picture of reasons mean that goodness and pleasantness generate two independent reasons to visit the resort? Yet when facts fall in a metaphysical hierarchy, differences in intensional content need not generate independent reasons, any more than separate links in a causal chain provide independent causal explanations. It’s precisely because goodness and pleasantness are in a relation of vertical determination that they wouldn’t give independent reasons—the fact of its goodness and the fact of its pleasantness are parts of the same normatively relevant phenomenon, although they may be different facts.
Where this paper’s strategy of rejecting value-maker completeness is an analogue of Block’s approach to exclusion, Johnson King’s share the weight view is closer to Jerry Fodor’s (1989) approach, where there is no causal competition because higher-level properties implement the causal powers of their realizers.
One might worry that if high-level value-makers like pleasantness give partial explanations or derivative reasons, they will end up in competition with the properties underlying them, and thus be susceptible to the generalization and regress problems described below. I don’t think this would be a problem for this version of a value-first view for two reasons. First, derivative reasons that depend on the same fundamental reason don’t strike me as competing with one another. Second, while the argument outlined here shares Scanlon’s commitment to parsimony, it rejects the exclusion-type principle that resolves competitions in favor of the underlying property—so even if derivative reasons do compete, this argument suggests that the higher-level property wins. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
Compare Fodor’s account of the mental causation debate (1989, p. 62).
Compare a similar point about wrongness from (Johnson King, 2019, p. 172).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
The reasoning would be structurally the same if we understood value-making as simple ontological dependence instead.
An anonymous referee suggests that this account actually commits him to the extensional picture, but I find no textual evidence of this.
There’s also a tension between the redundancy argument, the extensional picture, and Scanlon’s positive buck-passing view. The positive view says the fact that there are reasons in favor of something is identical to the fact that that something is good. But as Schroeder (2009) shows with the well-known surprise party example, the fact that there are reasons in favor of doing something can itself be a reason. If buck-passers also adopted the extensional picture, then it would seem goodness actually does give reasons (though perhaps just in a derivative way). Compare a similar point about wrongness in Johnson King (2019, p. 179).
It might therefore be appropriate to say reasons contexts are hyper-intensional in the sense of Cresswell (1975), i.e. contexts where truth depends on the person under discussion, such as reports of propositional attitudes (see also Falk (2004, p. 139); Suikkanen (2012, p. 603). Although reasons attributions don’t directly report propositional attitudes, they are dependent on individuals in a similar way because any normative reason a person has should be capable, in some sense, of serving as their motivating reason. This is because normative reasons, and normativity more broadly, aim at guiding actions and attitudes. We’ll return to this point in Sect. 5.
A related (though not strictly analogous) question arises for some views of mental causation: mental and physical events might be identical, but have causal powers only in virtue of their physical properties (Honderich, 1982).
Some might object that a normative theory like Scanlon’s buck-passing view need not take on stand on metaphysical concerns like identifying the lowest reason-giving level. In general, I think this is true. But when competition to give reasons is an essential part of the motivation for that theory, and it’s not obvious that it ends after the first instance, then it does seem like the theory should have a principled way of identifying where such competition ends.
On Kim’s earlier 1988 picture, we must distinguish orders from levels: the relevant properties in a causal exclusion argument are micro- and macro-properties of the same objects (levels)— that is, brains and baseballs, rather than molecules and atoms—and so the powers of higher-order properties aren’t in danger of being superseded by lower-level properties, just lower-order properties of the same level. But as Marras (2000) observes, the generalization problem simply re-emerges between levels.
A different approach attacks causal parsimony by tying it to a problematic counterfactual: if physical underliers had occurred without the correlated mental event, its effects would still have occurred. You might think this is either vacuous or false—vacuous because mental events are necessitated by their underliers, so that any such world is metaphysically impossible; false because any such world would be so different that we would have no reason to think the effect would occur. Yablo (1992, pp. 266–268) pursues the vacuity strategy, while Bennett (2003, pp. 489–490) presses a dilemma between vacuity and falsity. I take no stand on whether this would succeed against Kim. But I do think an analogous approach would be less effective against rational parsimony, because the buck-passer already thinks the counterfactual is vacuous—according to the positive thesis, it’s metaphysically impossible to have reason-giving properties without value.
Someone will object that if this were true, fundamental physics wouldn’t be possible—physicists cognize and act on the most basic properties all the time! But this is to misunderstand the point. It’s not that we are universally unable to appreciate properties like the mass and charge of quarks in isolation, it’s that we cannot appreciate the full constellation of such properties that are at work underlying a resort’s pleasantness, and so on.
See for example Nagel (1970, pp. 3 and 27); Bond (1983, p. 7); Williams (1995, p. 39); and many others. Note that this restriction is weaker than reasons internalism, because the possibility of motivation need not be grounded in an agent’s desires, beliefs, or rationality—for present purposes we might think it as nomological possibility.
Markovits (2011) may reject it, although she argues against a stronger, internalist version of the principle which says that reasons motivate when the agent is fully rational.
This is similar to concerns about vagueness. But because of the potential non-extensionality of reasons and the threat of alienation, a normative theory should not admit vagueness in reason-giving.
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Thanks to Eric Sampson, Reid Blackman, and several anonymous referees for their helpful comments.
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Wolf, A. Do reasons drain away?. Synthese 199, 6785–6802 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03093-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03093-9