Cognitivism about Instrumental Reason

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 649-673

  Setiya, Kieran ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 35348873961     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/518954     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (82)

1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Ak. 417.
2. Ibid.
3. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 432.
4. John Broome, "Normative Requirements," in Normativity, ed. J. Dancy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 78-99,
5. "Normative Practical Reasoning," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 75 (2001): 175-93,
6. "Practical Reasoning," in Reason and Nature, ed. J. L. Bermúdez and Alan Millar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 85-111,
7. and "Reasons," in Reason and Value: Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R.J. Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28-55;
8. see also Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Broome has since revised, his view, in "Does Rationality Give Us Reasons?" (Philosophical Issues 15 [2005]: 321-37); I comment on this briefly in the notes to come.
9. The idea of a cognitivist account of instrumental reason derives from Gilbert Harman, "Practical Reasoning," reprinted in The Philosophy of Action, ed. Alfred Mele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 149-77.
10. It has recently been pursued by R. J. Wallace ("Normativity, Commitment and Instrumental Reason," Philosophers' Imprint 1 [2001]: 1-26), whose views I address in. Sec. III. The use of "cognitivism" in this context is due to Michael Bratman.
11. See "Cognitivism about Practical Reason," reprinted in his Faces of Intention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 250-64,
12. and "Intention, Belief, Practical, Theoretical," in Spheres of Reason, ed. Jens Timmerman, John Skorupski, and Simon Robertson, forthcoming.
13. As Candace Vogler points out in Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 154, the restriction to necessary means is quite severe. To say that doing M is a necessary means to doing E, for a. particular agent, A, is not to say that, it is physically (let alone metaphysically) impossible for A to do E without doing M. But it does imply that everything she could do that is a means to doing E involves doing M; of the options available to her, doing M is part of all those that are ways of doing E. This will most often be true when time and resources are limited. I gesture toward, the probabilistic generalization of the instrumental principle, briefly, in Sees. III and IV.
14. By contrast, the trait of efficiency - in the sense of being disposed to satisfy the balance of one's desires in the light of one's degrees of belief about the means to doing so-might be proposed as a general conception of practical reason. If we allow for "constitutive" as well as "productive" means, and adopt the broadest possible conception of desire, as anything that belongs to an agent's "subjective motivational set," we then come close to Bernard Williams's theory of "internal reasons," on which reasons to act can always be traced to an agent's prior desires. (See "Internal and External Reasons," reprinted in his Moral Luck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 101-13.)
15. This is one kind of "instrumentalism," but it is not the instrumental principle to be discussed below. On the distinction between the hypothetical imperative and the idea of balancing among desires in general, see Christine Korsgaard, "The Normativity of Instrumental Reason," in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 215-54, and "The Myth of Egoism" (Lindley Lecture, Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1999).
16. For examples of this kind, see Michael Bratman, Intention, Plans and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 23-27;
17. Broome, "Normative Requirements," 89-90, and "Reasons," 29-30;
18. Dancy, Practical Reality, 42-43;
19. Wallace, "Normativity, Commitment and Instrumental Reason," 15-16;
20. and Joseph Raz, "The Myth of Instrumental Rationality, " Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (2005): 2-28. (As I understand him, Raz is not troubled by such examples because he denies that there is any such thing as the instrumental principle, however it is refined: there is no sense in which we should always take the necessary means to our ends. I won't discuss this skeptical view.)
21. This seems to be assumed by Korsgaard, in "The Normativity of Instrumental Reason," 215. Although I am conceding it in this paragraph, I think the assumption is false.
22. Similar arguments are made by Bratman (Intention, Plans and Practical Reason, 24) and Broome ("Normative Requirements," 89).
23. Broome, "Reasons," 29. I use brackets to resolve ambiguities of scope.
24. Thomas Hill, "The Hypothetical Imperative," reprinted in his Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 17-37, 24. But see the derivation earlier in Hill's paper ("The Hypothetical Imperative," 18), which seems to allow for "detaching" in a way that wide-scope "shoulds" do not. I take up "detachment" in the main text, below.
25. Broome, "Reasons," 34-35.
26. Ibid., 36-41.
27. In recent, work, Broome has backed away from this assumption; see "Does Rationality Give Us Reasons?"
28. Broome, "Normative Practical Reasoning," 181-82.
29. More generally, means-end transmission supports Patricia Greenspan's principle that if you should make true a conditional and the antecedent obtains "inalterably," you should make true the consequent; see Greenspan, "Conditional Oughts and Hypothetical Imperatives," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 259-76, 265.
30. More stringent interpretations of what an agent "can do" would only help my argument, here and later on, by expanding the range of cases in which something counts as a necessary means. For instance, someone might hold that it is not sufficient for being able to φ that one would φ if one made some appropriate decision; one must also be able to make that decision. I am not sure how to make sense of "freedom of the will" in the sense invoked here, and so I opt for the more modest account in the text. (For related doubts, see Rogers Albritton, "Freedom of Will and Freedom of Action," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 59 [1985]: 239-51.)
31. I have shifted from the belief that one should φ, to the belief that there is some reason to φ, because I doubt that it is always part of good practical thought to act on the former belief (as Broome suggests). For discussion of this point, see Alison MacIntyre, "Is Akratic Action Always Irrational?" in Identity, Character and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and A. O. Rorty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 379-400;
32. and Nomy Arpaly, "On Acting Rationally against One's Better Judgement," Ethics 110 (2000): 488-513.
33. Broome, "Normative Requirements," 94-95. In recent work, Broome rejects the claim discussed, in the text, even to the point of questioning the normativity of "rational requirements"-which presumably correspond to practical rationality or good practical thought. (See Broome, "Does Rationality Give Us Reasons?") According to the argument in the text, Broome's doubts are correct, at least to this extent: there can be a "subjective 'should'" without an "objective" correlate.
34. For more extensive discussion, see my Reasons without Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 9-14.
35. It is perhaps worth stressing that Reasons carries no connotation of "priority" for good practical thought; it is basically symmetric.
36. Williams, "Internal and External Reasons," 102.
37. A natural question to ask at this point is: why not correct for ignorance as well as false belief? But that "correction" would be a mistake. Reasons for action may correspond to practical thought that depends on ignorance of fact. So, for instance, there may be a reason for the gambler to bet on the horse with the best odds, even though it will lose the race - since he does not know that the horse will lose. His reason corresponds to good practical thought that depends essentially on his being in the dark about, that. (For this example, attributed to Frank Jackson, see Dancy, Practical Reality, 65-66.)
38. In "Why Be Rational?" (Mind 114 [2005]: 509-63), Niko Kolodny objects that tills sort of view omits the normativity of "rational requirements." It depicts the standard of normative practical reasoning as being merely "evaluative" (Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 551.-55). This gap can be filled by acknowledging that failure to conform to this standard is typically irrational, in a distinctive sense that "ascribe [s] a certain kind, of blame" (Stephen L. White, "Rationality, Responsibility and Pathological Indifference," in Flanagan and Rorty, eds., Identity, Character and Morality, 401-26, 412).
39. Irrationality in the narrow sense stands to defects of reason as moral culpability stands to moral wrongdoing; it is circumscribed by our capacities. To say that someone is irrational, in this sense, is to ascribe to them a failure of reason they could legitimately have been expected to avoid. (I defend this claim in connection with practical irrationality in "Against Internalism," Noûs 38 [2004]: 266-98, sees. 2 and 3.) Failures of normative practical reasoning tend to be irrational in the narrow sense, because they are failures that the agent herself can always recognize as such; other things being equal, they are failures that she is in a position to avoid. This way of understanding the distinctive normativity of "rational requirements" - i.e., of the accusation that someone is being irrational-has the advantage of generality over the proposal with which Kolodny's paper ends ("Why Be Rational?" 557-60). As he acknowledges, his "Transparency" account only applies to normative practical reasoning, while the charge of irrationality is more widespread.
40. Here I employ the modest interpretation of "something I could, do" that figured in the earlier objection to Broome: what I can do is what I would do if I made some appropriate decision. As I said in the note attached to that discussion, adopting a more stringent interpretation of what an agent "can do" (for instance, one on which I must be able to make the relevant decision) would only make it easier to find a case in which I cannot do anything about the antecedent of Broome's conditionals, so that making true the consequents is a necessary means to making the whole conditionals true.
41. Compare Broome ("Does Rationality Give Us Reasons?" 322) on the "rational requirement" of means-end reason, which replaces the "objective 'should'" of his earlier account.
42. A final proposal: we "should" conform to the instrumental principle in that an ideal practical thinker would conform to it, so that a failure to do so always indicates a defect of practical reason. (Compare the "ideal-world" interpretation of "should" or "ought" familiar to deontic logicians.) The problem with this interpretation is that it does not follow from the fact that an ideal thinker would do something that I should do it, in the circumstance in which I find myself. We need to capture the force of the instrumental principle as it applies to agents in nonideal conditions; and when we do so, we fall into the problems described above.
43. In particular, it can be hard, to see how the instrumental principle could fail to count as part of practical reason, since, however we formulate the principle, it must be concerned with what we should intend. I return to this objection, and to the corresponding picture of practical reason, in Sec. IV.
44. Harman, "Practical Reasoning," 152-53; Wallace, "Normativity, Commitment and Instrumental Reason," sec. 4.
45. In pt. 1 of Reasons without Rationalism.
46. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 1. For the doctrine that intending to φ involves the belief that one is going to φ,
47. see, esp., Stuart Hampshire and H. L. A. Hart, "Decision, Intention and Uncertainty," Mind 67 (1958): 1-12;
48. Harman, "Practical Reasoning"; and J. David Velleman, Practical Reflection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989),
49. chap. 4. Critics of the doctrine include Donald Davidson, "Intending," reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 83-102, 91-94;
50. Michael Bratman, "Intention and Means-End Reasoning," Philosophical Review 90 (1981): 252-65;
51. and Alfred Mele, Springs of Action (Oxford: Oxford. University Press, 1992), chap. 8.
52. In "The Humean Theory of Motivation" (Mind 96 [1987]: 36-61, 54-56), Michael Smith argues that an attitude cannot be both belief-like and desire-like with respect to the same proposition. I dispute his argument in Reasons without Rationalism, 49-51.
53. For versions of this claim, see Harman, "Practical Reasoning," sec. II, and Change in View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 85-86;
54. John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 83-90;
55. and Velleman, Practical Reflection, 88-90, 94-97, 140-41.
56. Harman ("Practical Reasoning," sec. 2, and. Change in View, 80-81) distinguishes "positive" and "negative" intentions, only the former of which present themselves as causes of action. But his "negative" intentions are causes, too. It is just that the action they cause is overdetermined: it would happen without them. So long as we reject, or qualify, the counterfactual test for causation, we can claim that intentions always satisfy the formula given in the text.
57. See Reasons without Rationalism, 41-45.
58. Anscombe, Intention, 15.
59. Why only the "paradigm case"? Because it is possible to act intentionally without knowledge, as when one tries to do something without being sure one can - and one happens to succeed. For cases of this kind, see Davidson, "Intending," 91-94. In Reasons without Rationalism, 24-26, I show how Anscombe's claim can be revised so as to avoid the problem.
60. This question animates the exploration of intentional action in pt. 1 of Reasons without Rationalism.
61. I have tried to address it in "Practical Knowledge" (unpublished manuscript, University of Pittsburgh, 2007).
62. White, "Rationality, Responsibility and Pathological Indifference," 412; Setiya, "Against Internalism," secs. 2 and 3.
63. Here I agree with Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 84;
64. and David Christensen, Putting Rationality in Its Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 150-52.
65. It follows that arguments about the difficulty of conforming to certain epistemic standards-as, for instance, in Harman's Change in View-are relevant only to what counts as irrational, in the narrow sense, not to ideal rationality. They are less significant, than they might appear.
66. For discussion of this idea, see Harman, Change in View, 12-15, 55.
67. This path is pursued in detail by Christensen, in Putting Logic in Its Place.
68. On automatic means, see Harman, Change in View, 110-11.
69. For Harman, this case would involve a "negative" intention ("Practical Reasoning," sec. 2, and. Change in View, 80-81).
70. For formulations of the instrumental principle that accommodate this point, see Harman, "Practical Reasoning"; Wallace, "Normativity, Commitment and Instrumental Reason"; and Bratman, "Intention, Belief, Practical, Theoretical." It does not follow from the fact that one regards one's intention as itself a necessary means that forming the intention is an intentional action performed as a means to an end - as though one had an instrumental relation to one's own will. (Here I disagree with Harman ["Practical Reasoning," 155-58].) An obvious regress shows that forming an intention cannot always be something one does on the basis of a prior intention. And Gregory Kavka's "toxin puzzle" arguably shows that it never is ("The Toxin Puzzle," Analysis 43 [1983]: 33-36).
71. Bratman, "Intention and Means-End Reasoning," 256 n. 4.
72. The development appears in Bratman, "Intention, Belief, Practical, Theoretical"; here I cite an earlier and briefer discussion, from "Intention and Means-End Reasoning."
73. Bratman, "Intention and Means-End Reasoning," 256 n. 4.
74. Wallace, "Normativity, Commitment and Instrumental Reasoning," 22.
75. Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 75.
76. Here I move from dynamic to static epistemology: since it is epistemically permissible to form the belief that one intends to φ only by forming that intention, it is an epistemic failing to have that belief when one does not intend to φ. This is not to say that it is always irrational to believe that I intend to φ when I do not. I can be forgiven for mistaking or misremembering my plans, or for being misled by the evidence about my own intentions. The point is about incoherence and the epistemic "should," not about culpability.
77. Since it relies solely on the cognitive conditions of intending, this account implies that, whenever you believe you are going to do E, and believe that you will do E only if you do-M-because-you-now-intend-to-do- M, you are in same position as when you intend to do E This may be surprising, but it is quite correct. In the circumstance described, you must conclude that you are not going to do E, after all-unless you form the intention to do M or revise one of the connecting beliefs.
78. How would such a derivation go? It would have to take us from a case in which I should believe that I am going-to-do-M-because-I-now-intend-to-do-it, by way of the principle (from the end of Sec. III), that I should [believe that I intend to do M only if I have that intention], to the conclusion that I should intend to do M, in the epistemic sense. This argument has the following invalid form.: I should believe that I φ;; I should [believe that I φ only if I φ]; so, I should φ. This must be invalid because the final "should" will not make sense, as epistemic, when doing or being φ is not a matter of my cognitive state. That this condition fails in the present case is masked by the fact that intending to do M partly consists in the belief that one is going to do M. But it also consists in a motivational condition that theoretical reason cannot govern. So. it won't make sense to claim that I should intend to do M, in the epistemic sense of "should."
79. In defending versions of cognitivism about the instrumental principle, Harman ("Practical Reasoning") and Wallace ("Normativity, Commitment and Instrumental Reason") do not deny that their topic is practical reason.
80. This is arguably so even for beliefs about practical reason itself. Reasoning about practical. rationality, and about what one should do, is theoretical, reasoning; its standards are epistemic. But the connections here are complicated.
81. It does not leave room for the global cognitivism apparently found in Velleman's Practical Reflection. On this view, practical reason can be identified with theoretical reason, applied to our intentions. (For this reading of Velleman, see Bratman, "Cognitivism about Practical. Reason.") If the instrumental principle is theoretical, but not practical, this identification must be false.
82. The conditional here is not rhetorical: I have only dealt with the special case. In doing so, I appealed to Closure as a standard for full belief. Despite Broome's skepticism ("Practical Reasoning," 109), my hope is that we can begin to explain the aspects of instrumental reason that govern nonnecessary means by turning to the probabilistic replacement for Closure that we most likely need in any case.