When Donald Davidson published ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ in 1963 what was most striking in his article was the claim that an agent’s beliefs and desires could be the causes of, and not merely the reasons for, his actions. In more recent years, however, what has become more controversial is whether one can properly take an agent’s propositional attitudes to be reasons for his actions. There
... [Show full abstract] has been a growing trend amongst philosophers of action to recognise that a reason for action is something that favours or makes valuable an action of the relevant kind, and that an action is not made valuable by the agent’s desire to do it or belief that it would be good to do it. One’s belief may be false and one’s desire unmotivated, and in such cases there may be nothing to be said for the action they lead to. For ease of labelling, let us say that an account of reasons such as Davidson’s is psychologistic and that the opposing account is rationalist. Now, an obvious way to contrast psychologism and rationalism is to say that whilst the former takes reasons to be psychological states of agents, the rationalist rather takes them to be facts. For the psychologist my reason for writing to the Vice Chancellor will be something like my belief that he needs telling, or my desire to tell him what he most needs to hear, or some suitable combination of beliefs and desires, whilst for the rationalist the reason will rather be the fact that he needs to be told. Although I think that rationalism is correct, I do not intend to provide support for it here. My interest is rather in taking up the question of what kind of thing we should take reasons to be if rationalism is true. For whilst commitment to psychologism does settle that question — reasons, on this view, are psychological states of agents — rationalists may yet disagree about what kind of things are reasons for action.
