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The Instrumental Rule

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Properly understood, the instrumental rule says to take means that actually suffice for my end, not, as is nearly universally assumed, to intend means that I believe are necessary for my end. This alternative explains everything the standard interpretation can—and more, including grounding certain correctness conditions for exercises of our will unexplained by the standard interpretation.

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What is the function of morality—what is it all about? What is the basis of morality—what explains our moral agency and patiency? This essay defends a unique Kantian answer to these questions. Morality is about securing our independence from each other by giving each other equal discretion over whether and how we interact. The basis of our moral agency and patiency is practical reason. The first half addresses objections that this account cannot explain the moral patiency of beings who are not also moral agents such as infantile, elderly, and infirm human beings and the other animals. The second half argues that this account is preferable, on grounds of consistency with the basic Kantian account of the function and content of morality, to the familiar account of our moral patiency, popular especially though not exclusively with contemporary Kantians, in terms of the value of humanity.
Article
Practical cognitivism is the view that practical reason is the self-conscious will and that practical cognition is self-conscious volition. This essay addresses two puzzles for practical cognitivism. In akratic action, I act as I understand is illegitimate and not as I understand is legitimate. In permissible action, I act as I understand is legitimate and also do not act as I understand is legitimate. In both types of action, practical cognition seems to come apart from volition. How, then, can practical reason be our will and practical cognition be volition? Practical cognitivists can solve these puzzles because the claims that practical reason is our will and that practical cognition is volition are about the nature of a capacity, and the nature of a capacity establishes standards of correctness for its exercises. Akratic action is a type of erroneous exercise of practical reason as tripping is an erroneous exercise our capacity to walk. Permissible action is a successful exercise of practical reason as stepping first with my right foot rather than my left is a successful exercise of my capacity to walk. The puzzles of akratic and permissible action do not refute practical cognitivism.
Article
Practical cognitivism is the view that practical reason is our will, not an intellectual capacity whose exercises can influence those of our will. If practical reason is our will, thoughts about how I am to act have an essential tie to action. They are intentions. Thoughts about how others are to act, though, lack such a tie to action. They are beliefs, not intentions. How, then, can these thoughts form a unified class? I reject two answers which deny the differences between such thoughts about myself and those about others, one of which says that all such thoughts are intentions, the other that all are beliefs. I then reject a shared assumption which says that a class of those is unified only if all its elements are all of one type of thought. I instead argue that this class is unified even though some elements are intentions, others beliefs, because such beliefs depend on those intentions in various ways.
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A number of metaphysicians of powers have argued that we need to distinguish the actualization of a power from the effects of that actualization. This distinction, I argue, has important consequences for the dispositional theory of belief. In particular, it suggests that dispositionalists have in effect been trying to define belief, not in terms of its actualization, but instead in terms of the effects of its actualization. As a general rule, however, powers are to be defined in terms of their actualizations. I thus argue that belief has just one actualization, and that that actualization is a particular kind of mental act that I call a judgment. I explain the resulting view—that belief is the power to judge—and argue that it has some important advantages, not only over other dispositional theories of belief, but also over categorical theories of belief. Since these options are apparently exhaustive, it thus has important advantages over all other theories of belief.
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According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that an action is a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis so understood is that it explains the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach to action that accepts Aristotle’s thesis so understood Normativism. There are many reasons to doubt Normativism. My focus in this paper is a pair of arguments that purport to show that a normative judgment could not constitute an event in material reality and also the knowledge of such a happening. Both highlight a putative mismatch between the natures of, on the one hand, an agent’s knowledge of her normative judgment and, on the other, her knowledge of her own action. According to these objections, knowledge of action includes (a) perceptual knowledge and (b) knowledge of what one has already done. But knowledge of a normative judgment includes neither. Hence knowledge of action cannot simply be knowledge of a normative judgment. I show why these arguments fail.
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This paper is a response to 'Why Be Rational?' by Niko Kolodny. Kolodny argues that we have no reason to satisfy the requirements of rationality. His argument assumes that these requirements have a logically narrow scope. To see what the question of scope turns on, this comment provides a semantics for 'requirement'. It shows that requirements of rationality have a wide scope, at least under one sense of 'requirement'. Consequently Kolodny's conclusion cannot be derived.
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During a career spanning over thirty years Philip Pettit has made seminal contributions in moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of mind and action, and metaphysics. His many contributions would be remarkable enough in themselves, but they are made all the more remarkable by the ways in which Pettit connects them with each other. Pettit holds that the lessons learned when thinking about problems in one area of philosophy often constitute ready-made solutions to problems we faced in completely different areas. His body of work taken as a whole provides a vivid example of what philosophy looks like when done with that conviction. Common Minds presents specially written papers by some of the most eminent philosophers alive today, grappling with some of the themes derived from the larger programme that Pettit has inspired. How are we to do the best we can, whether in the domain of morality or politics, given that we are non-ideal agents acting in non-ideal circumstances? What is the normative significance of the capacity we have to engage in rational deliberation, both individually and collectively, about what to do? How are we to square our conception of ourselves as rational deliberators with the more mechanistic conception of ourselves and the world we inhabit that we get from the natural sciences? The volume concludes with a substantial piece by Pettit in which he gives an overview of his work, draws out the connections between its key themes, and provides a rich commentary on the preceding essays.
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Normativity and the Will collects fourteen important _ papers on moral psychology and practical reason by R. Jay _ Wallace, one of the leading philosophers currently working_ in these areas. The papers explore the interpenetration of normative and _ psychological issues in a series of debates that lie at the heart of moral philosophy. Part I, Reason, Desire, and the_ Will, discusses the nexus linking normativity to motivation, including the relations between desire and reasons, the role of normative considerations in explanations of action, and_ the normative commitments involved in willing an end (such_ as the requirement to adopt the necessary means). Part II,_ Responsibility, Identification, and Emotion, looks at _ questions about the rational capacities presupposed by accountable agency and the psychic factors that both inhibit and enable identification with what we do. It includes an interpretation of the Nietzschean claim that ressentiment is among the sources of modern moral consciousness. Part III,_ Morality and Other Normative Domains, addresses the _ structure of moral reasons and moral motivation, and the _ relations between moral demands and other normative domains (including especially the requirements of living a _ meaningful human life). _ _Wallace’s treatments of these topics are at once _ sophisticated and engaging. Taken together, they constitute an advertisement for a distinctive way of pursuing issues in moral psychology and the theory of practical reason. The _ book articulates and defends a unified framework for _ thinking about those issues, while offering sustained _ critical discussions of other influential approaches (by _ philosophers such as Korsgaard, McDowell, Nietzsche, Raz, Scanlon, and Williams). It should be of interest to every _ serious student of moral philosophy.
Article
Over the last two decades, Kant’s name has become closely associated with the “constitutivist” program within metaethics.¹1 The association of Kant and constitutivism is due above all to the work of Korsgaard – see for example Korsgaard (1996 Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2008 Korsgaard, Christine. 2008. The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2009 Korsgaard, Christine. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). A close second in significance in this regard is Velleman (2000 Velleman, David. 2000. The Possibility of Practical Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Google Scholar], 2009 Velleman, David. 2009. How We Get Along. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). For some of the other (Kantian and anti-Kantian) variants on the constitutivist idea, see Foot (2003 Foot, Philippa. 2003. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]), O'Neill (1989 O’Neill, Onora. 1989. Constructions of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]), Thomson (2008 Thomson, J. J. 2008. Normativity. New York: Open Court. [Google Scholar]), Thompson (2008 Thompson, Michael. 2008. Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Smith (2012 Smith, Michael. 2012. “Agents and Patients, or: What We Learn About Reasons for Action by Reflecting on Our Choices in Process-of-Thought Cases.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (3): 309–331. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2012.00337.x[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2013 Smith, Michael. 2013. “A Constitutivist Theory of Reasons: Its Promise and Parts.” LEAP: Law, Ethics, and Philosophy 1: 9–30. [Google Scholar]), James (2012 James, Aaron. 2012. “Constructing Protagorean Objectivity.” In Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, edited by J. Lenman, and Y. Shemmer, 60–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Walden (2012 Walden, Kenny. 2012. “Laws of Nature, Laws of Freedom, and the Social Construction of Normativity.” Oxford Studies in Metaethics 7: 37–79. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653492.003.0002[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Katsafanas (2013 Katsafanas, Paul. 2013. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Setiya (2013 Setiya, Kieran. 2013. Knowing Right from Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]), and Lavin (forthcoming Lavin, Doug. forthcoming. “Pluralism about Agency”. [Google Scholar]). But is Kant best read as pursuing a constitutivist approach to meta-normative questions? And if so, in what sense?²2 I’ve discussed this question previously (with a contemporary focus) in Schafer (2015a Schafer, Karl. 2015a. “Realism and Constructivism in Kantian Metaethics 1.” Philosophy Compass 10: 690–701. doi: 10.1111/phc3.12253[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2015b Schafer, Karl. 2015b. “Realism and Constructivism in Kantian Metaethics 2.” Philosophy Compass 10: 702–713. doi: 10.1111/phc3.12252[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2018a Schafer, Karl. 2018a. “Constitutivism About Reasons: Autonomy and Understanding.” In The Many Moral Rationalisms, edited by K. Jones, and F. Schroeter, 70–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). See also the discussion of Sensen (2013 Sensen, Oliver. 2013. “Kant’s Constructisivm.” In Constructivism in Ethics, edited by Carla Bagnoli, 63–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), which arrives at a somewhat similar conclusion, albeit in a different systematic context. In this essay, I argue that we can best answer these questions by considering them in the context of how Kant understands the proper methodology for philosophy in general. The result of this investigation will be that, while Kant can indeed be read as a sort of constitutivist, his constitutivism is ultimately one instance of a more general approach to philosophy, which treats as fundamental our basic, self-conscious rational capacities. Thus, to truly understand why and how Kant is a constitutivist, we need to consider this question within the context of his more fundamental commitment to “capacities-first philosophy”.
Book
Philippa Foot sets out a naturalistic theory of ethics, which she calls ‘natural normativity’ and which is radically opposed to the subjectivist, non‐naturalism tradition deriving from David Hume and to be found in G. E. Moore and modern theories of ethics influenced by Moore, such as emotivism and prescriptivism. Natural normativity involves a special form of evaluation that predicates goodness and defect to living things qua living things, and Foot argues that this is the form of evaluation in moral judgements. Moral evaluations thus share a conceptual structure with evaluations of the characteristics and operations of living things, and can only be understood in these terms. The thesis of the book, then, is that vice is a natural defect, and virtue goodness of will; therefore propositions to do with goodness or badness in human character and action are not to be understood in psychological terms. In Ch. 1, Foot discusses and criticizes the subjectivism and non‐cognitivism that has dominated the past 60 years of analytical moral philosophy. Ch. 2 provides a sketch of an account of natural normativity in plants and animals, while Ch. 3 applies this to human beings, including a discussion of Elizabeth Anscombe's discussion of promising. Ch. 4 exhibits the constraint that this account of natural normativity imparts to any adequate view of practical rationality. Ch. 5 attempts to dissolve any meaningful distinction between the domain of practical rationality and the domain of morality. Ch. 6 deals with the connection between goodness and happiness, while Ch. 7 discusses Nietzsche's immoralism.
Article
The possibility of error conditions the possibility of normative principles. I argue that extant interpretations of this condition undermine the possibility of normative principles for our action because they implicitly treat error as a perfection of an action. I then explain how a constitutivist metaphysics of capacities explains why error is an imperfection of an action. Finally, I describe and defend the interpretation of the error condition which follows.
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Often our reason for doing something is an "instrumental reason": that doing that is a means to doing something else that we have reason to do. What principles govern this "instrumental transmission" of reasons from ends to means? Negatively, I argue against principles often invoked in the literature, which focus on necessary or sufficient means. Positively, I propose a principle, "General Transmission," which answers to two intuitive desiderata: that reason transmits to means that are "probabilizing" and "nonsuperfluous" with respect to the relevant end. I then apply General Transmission to the debate over "detachment": whether "wide-scope" reason for a material conditional or disjunction implies "narrow-scope" reason for the consequent or disjuncts.
Article
Intellectualism is the widespread view that practical reason is a species of theoretical reason, distinguished from others by its objects: reasons to act. I argue that if practical reason is a species of theoretical reason, practical judgments by nature have nothing to do with action. If they have nothing to do with action, I cannot act from my representation of reasons for me to act. If I cannot act from those representations, those reasons cannot exist. If they cannot exist, neither can a species of theoretical reason about them. Intellectualism is thus self-undermining.
Article
This paper explores the sense in which rational requirements govern our attitudes like belief and intention. I argue that there is a tension between the idea that rational requirements govern attitudes understood as standing states and the attractive idea that we can directly satisfy the requirements by performing reasoning. I identify the tension by (a) illustrating how a dispositional conception of belief can cause trouble for the idea that we can directly revise our attitudes through reasoning by considering John Broome's view, and (b) advancing a general argument that a standing state cannot be directly affected by reasoning. I then propose a solution: by recognizing the proper targets of rational requirements as occurrent, rather than dispositional attitudes, we can preserve the idea that we can directly satisfy rational requirements through reasoning.
Article
A measure of good and bad is internal to something falling under it when that thing falls under the measure in virtue of what it is . The concept of an internal standard has broad application. Compare the external breed standards arbitrarily imposed at a dog show with the internal standards of health at work in the veterinarian's office. This paper is about practical standards, measures of acting well and badly, and so measures deployed in deliberation and choice. More specifically, it is about the attempt to explain the unconditional validity of certain norms (say, of justice and prudence) by showing them to be internal to our agency and the causality it involves. This is constitutivism . Its most prominent incarnations share a set of assumptions about the nature of agency and our knowledge of it: conceptualism , formalism and absolutism . This essay investigates the merits and viability of rejecting all of them while still seeking the ground of practical normativity in what we are, in our fundamental activity.
Article
The conclusion of practical reasoning is commonly said to rest upon a diverse pair of representations-A "major" and a "minor" premise-The first of which concerns the end and the second, the means. Modern and contemporary philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning tend to portray the minor premise as a "means-end belief"-A belief about, as Michael Smith puts it, "the ways in which one thing leads to another," or, as John McDowell puts it, "what can be relied on to bring about what." On this point there is little difference between followers of Davidson and followers of Anscombe, or between those who invoke Hume's legacy and those who invoke Aristotle's. But Aristotle himself held a very different position. According to him, the minor premise concerns particulars, a sphere controlled by perception. The perception of particulars-That is, of the really-existing people and things confronted in the field of action-plays no essential role in the modern account of rational agency. Because it does not, the modern account fails to explain how one could act for a reason, or how practical reasoning could deliver any conclusion.
Article
The paper concerns two familiar lines of inquiry. One, stemming from a neo-Aristotelian naturalism associated with Foot and others, asks whether we can derive human excellences from what humans need in order to be some way. The second asks whether (as Plato said) virtue is a kind of health, and vice a kind of illness. The first is often seen as a failure to the extent that the list of characteristics derived by this approach does not include familiar moral virtues. However, it is argued that the concept of human excellence is many-layered, so the fact that the approach may not succeed for moral virtues does not show that it is no good for anything. Moreover, the kinds of psychological characteristic derived by a liberalized version of Foot’s approach may also help to give non-trivial answers to the second, Platonic, line of inquiry.
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A naturalistic project descended from Hume seeks to explain ‘ought’ and normativity as a product of motivational states such as desires and aversions.1 Following Kant, rationalists reject this thesis, holding that ‘ought’ rather expresses a command of reason or intellect independent of desires. On Hume’s view the only genuine form of practical reason is theoretical reason operating in the service of desire, as in calculation of means to ends. Reason at most discovers normative requirements, which exist through the interrelation of subjective desires and objective world. The Humean desiredependence view of the source of normativity is commonly associated with instrumentalism, an influential theory of normative content according to which agents ought always and only to act so as to optimise satisfaction of their own desires. But rationalists (including Thomas Nagel, Jean Hampton, and Christine Korsgaard) have recently argued that proponents of desiredependence are not entitled even to this instrumentalist ‘ought’ (see also Wallace, 2003). Instrumentalism holds that all normativity derives from the instrumental norm: approximately, the principle that one ought to take the means to one’s ends, or The normativity of the instrumental norm, rationalists observe, cannot itself be dependent on any particular desires. Whatever I desire, I ought to acknowledge its normative authority and take the means to my ends.3
Article
Widespread conceptions of practical reasoning confront us with a choice between its practicality and its objectivity: between its efficacious, world-changing character and its accountability to objective rational standards. This choice becomes unnecessary, I argue, on an alternative view embodied by the thesis that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action. I lay bare and challenge the assumptions underlying the rejection of that thesis and outline a defense of its picture of practical reasoning against common objections. On such a picture, practical reasoning provides a principle not externally imposed upon an action but rather constitutive of it.
Article
When an agent intentionally changes something separate from herself-when, say, she opens a bottle-what is the relation between what the agent does and what the patient suffers? This paper defends the Aristotelian thesis that action is to passion as the road from Thebes to Athens is to the road from Athens to Thebes: they are two aspects of a single material reality. Philosophers of action tend to think otherwise. It is generally taken for granted that intentional transactions must be analyzed in terms of a causal relation. Controversy surrounds the question what the causal relata are: event-causalists claim that both of the relata are events; agent-causalists claim that the first relatum is an agent, and they dispute among themselves whether the second is an event or a terminal state of the patient. But the entire controversy assumes the necessity of some causal analysis of transactions. This paper argues that, far from being necessary, no such analysis is even possible.
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This paper addresses some connections between conceptions of the will and the theory of practical reason. The first two sections argue against the idea that volitional commitments should be understood along the lines of endorsement of normative principles. A normative account of volition cannot make sense of akrasia, and it obscures an important difference between belief and intention. Sections three and four draw on the non-normative conception of the will in an account of instrumental rationality. The central problem is to explain the grip of instrumental requirements even in cases in which agents do not fully endorse the ends they are pursuing. The solution I propose appeals to coherence constraints on the beliefs that condition the distinctive volitional stance of intention.
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TWO APPROACHES TO INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY. Suppose I intend end E, believe that a necessary means to E is M, and believe that M requires that I intend M. My attitudes concerning E and M engage a basic requirement of practical rationality, a requirement that, barring a change in my cited beliefs, I either intend M or give up intending E. Call this the Instrumental Rationality requirement – for short, the IR requirement. Suppose now that I believe that E, and I also believe that E will only occur if M. My beliefs engage a basic demand of theoretical rationality, a demand that, roughly, either there be a change in at least one of these two beliefs or I believe M. Call this the Belief-Closure requirement – for short, the BC requirement. BC, note, is not a consistency demand on my beliefs: failure to add the further belief that M need not involve inconsistency in the way that adding a belief that not-M would. Nevertheless, something like BC seems a basic rationality constraint on belief. Both IR and BC express constraints on the coherence of the agent's relevant attitudes; and these constraints are aspects of the normal rational functioning, in the psychic economy of believing-and-intending agents, of the cited attitudes. The intentions and beliefs of such agents will tend to be responsive to these constraints. But the requirements differ in important ways.
Article
This book presents an account of the foundation of practical reason and moral obligation. Moral philosophy aspires to understand the fact that human actions, unlike the actions of the other animals, can be morally good or bad. Few moral philosophers, however, have exploited the idea that actions might be morally good or bad in virtue of being good or bad of their kind - good or bad as actions. Just as we need to know that it is the function of the heart to pump blood to know that a good heart is one that pumps blood successfully, so we need to know what the function of action is in order to know what counts as a good or bad action. Drawing on the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, the book proposes that the function of an action is to constitute the agency and therefore the identity of the person who does it. A good action is one that constitutes its agent as the autonomous and efficacious cause of her own movements. These properties correspond, respectively, to Kant's two imperatives of practical reason. Conformity to the categorical imperative renders us autonomous, and conformity to the hypothetical imperative renders us efficacious. And in determining what effects we will have in the world, we are at the same time determining our own identities. The principles of practical reason, especially the categorical imperative, are therefore the laws of self-constitution.
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The chapter is a defense of the thesis that rational agents must desire and act sub specie boni or under the guise of the good. Our thought is that what underlies the guise of the good thesis is a more general point about the explanation of any self-movement, a point that applies, in different forms, to the explanation of behavior in nonrational animals, and even to the explanation of the nutrition, growth, and reproduction of nonsentient living things. What these various kinds of explanation have in common, we suggest, is that they all have a teleological structure; and we argue that, in general, this sort of explanation works by connecting what a creature is doing with what is good for creatures of its kind. The special feature of the application of this explanatory structure to rational creatures is that such creatures belong to a kind in which this connection between action and goodness becomes self-conscious: They are creatures whose action is expressive of and explained by their conception of their own good. This, we argue, is why rational self movers must act under the guise of the good.
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If you ought to perform a certain act, and some other action is a necessary means for you to perform that act, then you ought to perform that other action as well—or so it seems plausible to say. This transmission principle is of both practical and theoretical significance. The aim of this essay is to defend this principle against a number of recent objections, which (as I show) are all based on core assumptions of the view called actualism. I reject actualism, provide an alternative explanation of its plausible features, and present an independent argument for the transmission principle.
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There is a puzzle about how to understand the conclusion of a successful instance of practical reasoning. Do the considerations adduced in reasoning rationalize the particular doing of an action, as Aristotle is sometimes interpreted as claiming? Or does reasoning conclude in the formation of an attitude - an intention, say - that has an action-type as its content? This paper attempts to clarify what is at stake in that debate and defends the latter view against some of its critics.
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Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually-given reasons for belief and desire-based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our believing-on-the-basis-of-perception and our acting-on-the-basis-of-desire. I show that a number of recent discussions of human rationality are committed to an additive approach, and I raise two difficulties for this approach, each analogous to a classic problem for Cartesian dualism. The interaction problem concerns how capacities conceived as intrinsically independent of the power of reason can interact with this power in what is intuitively the right way. The unity problem concerns how an additive theorist can explain a rational subject's entitlement to conceive of the animal whose perceptual and desiderative life he or she oversees as ‘I’ rather than ‘it’. I argue that these difficulties motivate a general skepticism about the additive approach, and I sketch an alternative, ‘transformative’ framework in which to think about the cognitive and practical capacities of a rational animal.
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Dependence, mediacy, and complexity are abstract concepts, as are their complementary opposites, independence, immediacy, and simplicity. The determinate conception we have to do with here is of an instrumentally or teleologically basic action: very roughly, an action is basic in this sense when no means are taken in its execution, or equally, when it is not the end of any other action. The concept figures in the description of the structure of getting something done, specifically of getting something done on purpose or intentionally, and thus also in the description of the agent's point of view on the structure of his own efficacy. The agent so depicted understands himself as doing whatever he does through the performance of basic actions, with all the rest derived from these. Means-end rationality expands our sphere of influence and massively extends our reach—there are flags on the moon and at the bottom of the sea!—but it is precisely at the inner limit of this teleological order that a rational agent's power to make a dent in things is genuinely displayed. Where means-end rationality comes to a close, efficacy genuinely begins: this is where the conceptual rubber is supposed to hit the material road, in the things one does without thought about how they get done. Sometimes it is said there is a spark of the divine in this. My own view is the opposite, that there is at best only a shadow of the brute.2
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According to current orthodoxy in the philosophy of action, intentional actions consist in intrinsically mindless bodily movements that stand in causal relations to appropriate mental states. This paper challenges this approach to intentional action, by arguing that there are not enough appropriate mental states around to ‘animate’ all of the bodily movements we intuitively count as intentional actions. In the alternative picture I suggest, the bodily movements that constitute our intentional actions are themselves to be thought of as cognitive events, embodying our grasp of ways of acting.
Article
Instrumental rationality prohibits one from being in the following state: intending to pass a test, not intending to study, and believing one must intend to study if one is to pass. One could escape from this incoherent state in three ways: by intending to study, by not intending to pass, or by giving up one’s instrumental belief. However, not all of these ways of proceeding seem equally rational: giving up one’s instrumental belief seems less rational than giving up an end, which itself seems less rational than intending the means. I consider whether, as some philosophers allege, these “asymmetries” pose a problem for the wide-scope formulation of instrumental rationality. I argue that they do not. I also present an argument in favor of the wide-scope formulation. The arguments employed here in defense of the wide-scope formulation of instrumental rationality can also be employed in defense of the wide-scope formulations of other rational requirements.
Article
Despite Kant's insistence that the hypothetical imperative "requires no special discussion" since "as regards the volition, [it is] analytic", instrumental reason has come to seem problematic. On the one hand, it seems right to say that one should take the necessary means to one'sends. On the other hand, there are circumstances in which one should not take the means, and even ones in which there is no reason to do so at all.
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The Wide-Scope view of instrumental reason holds that you should not intend an end without also intending what you believe to be the necessary means. This, the Wide-Scoper claims, provides the best account of why failing to intend the believed means to your end is a rational failing. But Wide-Scopers have struggled to meet a simple Explanatory Challenge: why shouldn't you intend an end without intending the necessary means? What reason is there not to do so? In the first half of this paper, I argue that the Wide-Scope view struggles to meet this challenge because it takes the principles of instrumental reason to have unlimited application—to apply to all agents, in all circumstances. I then go on to offer a new account of these principles. The new account is very much in the spirit of the Wide-Scope view, and shares its central advantages, but lacks its unlimited application. This view should, therefore, find the Explanatory Challenge more tractable. In the second half of the paper, I argue that this prediction is confirmed. If the requirements of instrumental reason apply only when a means is, or is believed to be, necessary for your end, then plausible independent claims, about reasons, rationality, and intentions, explain why failing to intend the necessary means to your ends is a rational failing.
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Department of Philosophy, 314 Moses Hall #2390, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720–2390, USA kolodny@berkeley.edu
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Normative requirements are often overlooked, but they are central features of the normative world. Rationality is often thought to consist in acting for reasons, but following normative requirements is also a major part of rationality. In particular, correct reasoning – both theoretical and practical – is governed by normative requirements rather than by reasons. This article explains the nature of normative requirements, and gives examples of their importance. It also describes mistakes that philosophers have made as a result of confusing normative requirements with reasons.
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The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, one of his three major treatises on moral theory, and a seminal text in the history of moral philosophy. Originally published three years after his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique provides further elaboration of the basic themes of Kant's moral theory, gives the most complete statement of his highly original theory of freedom of the will, and develops his practical metaphysics. This new edition of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason – prepared by an acclaimed translator and scholar of Kant's practical philosophy – presents the first new translation of this work to appear for some years. A substantial and lucid introduction by Andrews Reath places the main themes of the Critique in the context of Kant's moral theory and his critical system.
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Starting from the debate over whether practical reasons are mental states or the facts to which those mental states are a response, this chapter argues that being motivated by a practical reason must be a reflexive form of motivation, that is, a response to a certain content that at the same time involves consciousness of the appropriateness of responding to that content in just that way. This feature of practical reasons is captured only by Kant and Aristotle's accounts of action. For both, the object of choice and the locus of moral value is an act done for the sake of an end. The adoption of a Kantian maxim or an Aristotelian logos is a form of motivation that expresses the agent's endorsement of doing a certain act for a certain end, and so expresses her endorsement of the appropriateness of her own motivation. Philosophy
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Philosophy Author's Original
Article
Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have.