Avoiding the conditional fallacy

Philosophical Quarterly 52 (206):88-95 (2002)
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Abstract

Over-simple internalist accounts of practical reasons imply that we cannot have reasons to become more rational, because they claim that we have a reason to φ only if we would have some desire to φ if we were fully rational. But if we were fully rational, we would have no desire to become more rational. Robert Johnson has recently argued that in their attempts to avoid this problem, existing versions of internalism yield reasons which do not have an appropriate connection with potential explanations of action. I suggest that the problem is partly a result of failure to see that action-tokens are usually tokens of a wide variety of action-types, and that the internalist conditional need only be true of one of these types in order to justify a reason claim about the token

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Joshua Gert
College of William and Mary

Citations of this work

Reasons for action: Internal vs. external.Stephen Finlay & Mark Schroeder - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Recent Work on Internal and External Reasons.John Brunero - 2017 - American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2):99-118.

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Moral Luck.B. A. O. Williams & T. Nagel - 1976 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 50:115 - 151.
Internal reasons.Michael Smith - 1995 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1):109-131.
War and massacre.Thomas Nagel - 1972 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (2):123-144.
The conditional fallacy in contemporary philosophy.Robert K. Shope - 1978 - Journal of Philosophy 75 (8):397-413.
``The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy".Robert K. Shope - 1978 - Journal of Philosophy 75 (8):397--413.

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