Vindicating the normativity of rationality

Ethics

Volumn 119, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 9-30

  Southwood, Nicholas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 58749088936     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/592586     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (67)

1. This is what Niko Kolodny calls "objective rationality" ("Why Be Rational?" Mind 114 [2005]: 509-63, 510).
2. See John Broome, "Normative Requirements," Ratio 12 (1999): 398-412,
3. and "Reasons," in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. Jay Wallace, Michael Smith, Samuel Schefiler, and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28-55;
4. Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?"; T. M. Scanlon, "Structural Irrationality," in Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, ed. Geoffrey Brennan, Robert E. Goodin, Frank Jackson, and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 84-103.
5. To say that rational requirements are requirements of internal coherence is not necessarily to say that they are merely requirements for internal coherence. The latter implies a certain view about the logical form of rational requirements on which I intend to remain neutral here. See n. 5 below.
6. Candidates include (i) the requirement not to believe that p if you believe that not-p (belief consistency), (ii) the requirement to believe that q if you believe that p and that if p then q (belief closure), (iii) the requirement to intend to Y if you intend to X and believe that your Xing requires that you Y (instrumental rationality), (iv) the requirement not to intend to X if you intend not to X (intention coherence), and (v) the requirement to intend to X if you believe you ought to X (enkrasia).
7. One important issue of formulation that has recently received a lot of attention concerns how to understand the logical form, of rational requirements. As Broome has pointed out, there are two importantly different ways that rational requirements might be formulated. Take what Broome calls "enkrasia": the requirement to intend to X if you believe you ought to X. According to what Broome calls the "narrow scope" interpretation of enkrasia, the requirement is conditional in the sense of requiring one to intend to X conditional on believing that you ought to X. In other words, it is to be interpreted as follows: if you believe that you ought to X, then you are rationally required to intend to X. By contrast, according to what Broome calls the "wide scope" interpretation, the requirement is a conditional, since it ranges over the whole conditional proposition. So, the correct interpretation of enkrasia is this: you are rationally required (if you believe you ought to X, to intend to X). I shall remain neutral here about whether rational requirements have narrow or wide scope.
8. This issue has also recendy begun to receive a fair bit of critical attention. See John Broome, "Does Rationality Give Us Reasons?" Philosophical Issues 15 (2005): 321-37,
9. and "Is Rationality Normative?" Disputatio 23 (2007) : 161-78;
10. Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?"; Scanlon, "Structural Irrationality"; Nadeem Hussain, "The Requirements of Rationality" (unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, 2007), available at http://www.stan.ford.edu/~hussain.n/StanfordPersonal/Online-Papers-files/ HussainRequirementsv24.pdf.
11. Broome, "Normative Requirements."
12. Broome, "Does Rationality Give Us Reasons?" and "Is Rationality Normative?"
13. Broome, "Is Rationality Normative?" 178.
14. Ibid., 165, 177.
15. There are three main kinds of skeptical strategies that have been deployed widiin the literature: (i) trying to show that the apparent normativity of rationality cannot be vindicated, (ii) trying to show that the apparent normativity of rationality can be explained away, and (iii) trying to show that the thesis that rationality is normative results in a kind of objectionable bootstrapping. All three strategies are pursued by Kolodny in "Why Be Rational?" I shall focus here only on i.
16. Broome, "Is Rationality Normative?" 171-72.
17. Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 545-46.
18. This is somewhat, obscured, by the fact that Kolodny sometimes uses the phrase "the normativity of rationality" when he really means the apparent normativity of rationality. See Sec. U.C.
19. See Joseph Raz, Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 67;
20. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 1.
21. Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 542-43.
22. See Broome, "Is Rationality Normative?" 172;
23. Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 543;
24. Hussain, "The Requirements of Rationality," 13-16.
25. Of course, this already concedes that we are able to dispose ourselves in a way that makes it impossible to fail to conform with rational requirements, which is questionable to say the least.
26. Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 544-47.
27. Ibid., 544.
28. Ibid., 545.
29. Something like this view appears to have been endorsed by Michael H. Robins, Promising, Intending and Moral Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
30. It is also hinted at in Bruno Verbeek, "Rational Self-Commitment," in Rationality and Commitment, ed. Fabienne Peter and Hans Bernhard Schmid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
31. Broome, "Is Rationality Normative?" 1.77.
32. H. A. Prichard, "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" Mind 21 (1912): 21-37.
33. Since writing the current essay, I have learned that Nadeem Hussain has independently made a suggestion much along the same lines in his excellent unpublished essay "The Requirements of Rationality."
34. See Stephen Darwall, "Autonomist Internalism and the Justification of Morals," Noûs 24 (1990): 257-67;
35. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970);
36. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, chap. 4.
37. I shall therefore set aside expressivist theories of rationality of the kind endorsed by Allan Gibbard in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
38. Broome, "Normative Requirements."
39. Hussain, "The Requirements of Rationality," 7, 46 (emphasis added).
40. Ibid., 2. Hussain does not say exactly what he takes being "committed" to a principle to involve but presumably it is meant to be an amalgam of various psychological attitudes such as taking the principle to be a valid rational requirement, being disposed to transition in accordance with it, being disposed, to disapprove of known violations of it, and taking the aforementioned, attitudes to be justified.
41. Ibid., 46.
42. Ibid., 7.
43. Notice that it is possible to deny Hussain's claim, here and yet hold that it is a necessary condition for something's counting as a rational requirement that we be able to satisfy it by engaging in reasoning. The latter is, in effect, Kolodny's "reasoning test" on rational requirements (Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 520).
44. It might be thought that this implicitly assumes a wide-scope conception of rationality. But that would be a mistake. One might instead hold a narrow-scope conception of rationality and yet still deny that rational requirements apply only to reasoning. A narrow-scope version of the requirement of instrumental rationality is as follows: if you intend to X and believe your Xing requires your intending to Y, then you are rationally required, to intend to Y. This requirement, applies to you if and. when you have the intention of Xing. It does not fail to apply to you if you happen not to be engaging in any reasoning.
45. This echoes Andrew Reisner's argument against the version, of the distinctive object account that Broome used to endorse in Reisner, "Why Rational Requirements Are Not Normative Requirements" (unpublished manuscript, University of McGill, 2006), available at http://www.mcgill.ca/ files/philosophy/RationalRequirementsandNormative Requirementswebpageversion. pdf.
46. This objection will apply to any version of the distinctive object account.
47. David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000),
48. and "What Good Is a Will?" in Action in Context, ed. Anton Leist and Holger Baumann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 193-215.
49. Michael Bratman, Intentions, Plans and Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1.986),
50. "Intention, Belief and Instrumental Rationality," in Reasons for Action, ed. David. Sobel and Steven Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), manuscript available at http://www-philosophy. stanford.edu/fss/pa.pers/BratmanIBIR.pdf,
51. and "Intention, Belief, Practical, Theoretical," in Spheres of Reason, ed. Jens Timmerman, John Skorupski, and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), manuscript, available at http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/fss/papers/BratmanIBPT.pdf.
52. Bratman, "Intention, Belief and Instrumental Rationality," 5.
53. Scanlon, "Structural Irrationality," 86-87.
54. Scanlon, "Structural Irrationality"; Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 557-60.
55. Scanlon, "Structural Irrationality," 87-88.
56. Ibid., 94.
57. Ibid., 92-93.
58. Ibid., 97.
59. Kolodny, "Why Be Rational?" 558.
60. I think it is also possible to see that the subject reasons account fails in the task of explaining away the normativity of rationality for reasons presented extremely eloquently by Nadeem Hussain. Hussain writes: "If I say to [my friends], 'You are irrational', then, naturally enough, they take me to be making a criticism of them ... a normative claim, that they ought to change their attitudes, and they immediately, you can rest assured, feel the pressure to what they perceive as a. challenge. Now imagine that in the face of the initial, heated response, I say, 'Calm down, I'm just making a descriptive psychological claim and one that you already agree with. Look, after all, you granted that you don't have sufficient reason to have A, and that, you have A. . . .' I am sure we can imagine the look of utter perplexity that would cross their faces" (Hussain, "The Requirements of Rationality," 29).
61. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),
62. and Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
63. We do not have infallible access to the content of our first-personal standpoint. So, for example, I might, think that, a certain kind of activity is important, to me, whereas in fact it isn't.
64. There are a number of answers that will obviously not do. Thus, it will not do to say that they are norms that describe the proper functioning of our agential systems. Such norms fail to capture the distinctively first-personal character of standpoint-relative demands. Nor will it do to say that they are prudential norms, norms that are grounded in what is good for us. What is good for us and what our standpoints require may diverge.
65. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
66. I take this to be neutral in respect to whether rational requirements have wide or narrow scope. See n. 5.
67. One question that might be thought to arise for the first-personal audiority account concerns the relation between the perspective-relative demands of rationality and other kinds of demands, in particular how to weigh them up if they conflict. It. may be thought, that it will be hard, to escape some kind of normative incommensurability. This is a fascinating issue that I cannot hope to address properly here. But let me just note that, even if the first-personal authority account did generate normative incommensurability, it is not obvious to me that this would be such, a serious problem. There are a number of other instances where normative incommensurability seems to be something that, we must live with. Consider, for example, cases where we epistemically ought to believe propositions that we prudentially ought not to believe. To ask what, we "really ought" to believe in such contexts seems simply wrongheaded.