What practical reasoning must be if we act for our own reasons

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 77, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 399-421

  Buss, Sarah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

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EID: 61249530435     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048409912349181     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. See, for example, Robert Audi, 'Intending', The Journal of Philosophy 70 (July 1973), pp. 387-403;
2. Michael Bratman, Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987);
3. Carl Ginet, On Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
4. Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978);
5. Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hali, 1970);
6. Gilbert Harman, 'Willing and Intending', in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, ed. Richard Grandy and Richard Warner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 363-380;
7. and George Wilson, The Intentionality of Human Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989).
8. See, for example, John Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994);
9. Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
10. Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983);
11. Gary Watson, Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968);
12. and Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
13. One notable exception is David Velleman's 'What Happens When Someone Acts', in Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, ed. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 188-210).
14. Velleman commends champions of so-called 'agent-causation' for taking this aspect of intentional action seriously. For a defence of agent-causation, see Richard Taylor, Action and Purpose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966)
15. and Roderick Chisholm, 'Reflections on Human Agency', Idealistic Studies 1 (January 1971), pp. 33-46.
16. In 'Autonomy Reconsidered' and 'Autonomy: Self-expression in the Passive Mode' I argue that the failure to take the self-directed character of intentional action seriously has encouraged people to mistake the conditions of intentional action for the conditions of autonomous action. ('Autonomy Reconsidered', Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994), pp. 95-121
17. and 'Autonomy: Self-expression in the Passive Mode', unpublished manuscript.)
18. Among those who press this point is Stephen Darwall. According to Darwall, an agent who pursues the means necessary to satisfying her desires exhibits relative rationality only: she is rational insofar, and only insofar, as the goals intrinsic to her desires are themselves rational. (Darwall,Impartial Reason, pp. 15-16.) Mark Platts goes even further, rejecting the view 'that even any prima facie reason for doing something will make reference, in the antecedent of a conditional, to the potential agent's actual or possible desires "if you desire that..., then, prima facie, you have a reason to make it the case that ... .'" (Mark Platts, 'Moral Reality And The End Of Desire', in Reference, Truth, and Reality, ed. Mark Platts (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp.69-82.)
19. Warren Quinn makes the same point on the grounds that practical reasoning is the faculty that applies evaluative concepts. (Warren Quinn, Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 233.) 'How', Quinn asks, 'can the fact that we are set up to go in a certain direction make it (even prima facie) rational to decide to go in that direction? How can it even contribute to its rationality?' (p. 236) In Quinn's view, the answer to this question is obvious: 'that I am psychologically set up to head in a certain way, cannot by itself rationalize my Will's going along with the setup. For that I need the thought that the direction in which I am psychologically pointed leads to something good (either in act or result) or takes me away from something bad.' (p. 242)
20. Another important challenge to the Humean conception of practical rationality to which I will refer later is Christine Korsgaard's 'Skepticism About Practical Reason', The Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 1 (January 1986), pp. 5-25.
21. For a helpful review of the debate over motivating reasons, see Jay Wallace, 'How To Argue About Practical Reason', Mind 99 (April 1990), pp. 267-295. Wallace rightly devotes considerable space to evaluating Thomas Nagel's ground-breaking critique of the Humean conception of practical rationality. Unlike the other critics mentioned above, Nagel goes after the Humean's claim that having a desire is a necessary condition for having a reason.
22. (See Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).)
23. See 'Weakness of Will', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78, no. 1 (March 1997), pp. 13-44. In 'Weakness of Will' I defend an account of acting freely against one's own best judgment which is compatible with the intuition that it is not possible to do something freely if, all things considered, one believes it would be better to do something else.
24. In a recent article Rosalind Hursthouse argues that people sometimes do things intentionally for no reason at all. ('Arational Actions', The Journal of Philosophy 88, no. 2 (February 1994), pp. 57-68) The argument relies on an appeal to examples; and I do not share Hursthouse's interpretation of these examples.In identifying intentional action with action for a reason, I do not distinguish between the judgment that 'it is desirable (or good) to do X' and the judgment that 'considerations count in favour of doing X'. In a very interesting article, David Velleman takes issue with this identification. He argues that 'practical reason should not be conceived as a faculty for pursuing value', and so acting for a reason should not be conceived as acting 'under the guise of the good.'
25. (See 'The Guise of the Good', Nous 26 (1991), pp. 3-26.) Velleman's challenge is taken up in a more recent article by Peter Railton. See Appendix 1
26. There are, of course, some philosophers sympathetic to the Humean position who conceive of desires themselves as judgments of desirability. (See, for example, Donald Davidson, 'How Is Weakness of Will Possible?'in Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 21-42
27. and Davidson, 'Intending', Essays on Actions and Events, pp.83-102.
28. For a very interesting discussion of Davidson's conception of the relationship between desiring and judging desirable see David Velleman, 'The Guise of the Good', pp. 6-8.) If we were to use the term 'desire' to refer to judgments of what is worth doing, then 'mere desires' would not really be desires at all. Perhaps we would call them 'inclinations'.
29. See 'Autonomy Reconsidered'
30. In a much-discussed article Bernard Williams argues that there are no reasons for action that are independent of ('external to') the motives an agent already has ('the elements in his motivational set').(Williams,'Internal And ExternalReasons',in Moral Luck (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 101-13.)
31. According to John McDowell, the significance that Williams attributes to the 'elements in one's subjective motivational set is not that one has reason to do only what is conducive to, or constitutes, their satisfaction, but that they "control" the thinking by which one determines what one has reason to do ....' ('Might There Be External Reasons?' in World,Mind, and Ethics, ed. J.E.J. Altham and Ross Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 70.) It seems to me, however, that Williams is committed to something stronger,viz., that the constituents of the agent's motivational set must be among the constituents of the agent's practical reasoning that they must not simply 'control' the outcome of this reasoning but be that from which he reasons.
32. For a defence of the view that Hume did not himself subscribe to the theory of motivation that bears his name, see Elijah Millgram, 'Was Hume A Humean?' Hume Studies 21 (April 1995), pp.75-93.
33. J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
34. For a classic discussion of the problem of 'wayward causal chains', see Donald Davidson,'Agency', Essays on Actions and Events, pp. 3-25.
35. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being And Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1956),pp. 69-73. Sartre's claim is even stronger than the claim I have attributed to him here: not only does he think that as a fact about his past, the gambler's resolution cannot determine him to act intentionally, he also believes that it is powerless to compel him to do anything.
36. In 'Internal and External Reasons', Williams claims that, according to the sophisticated Humean, an agent's 'motivational set' includes more than her desires. It can contain 'such things as dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects, as they may be abstractly called, embodying commitments of the agent'. (Williams, 'Internal And External Reasons', p. 105) As my reference to Sartre indicates, my argument does not discriminate between more and less sophisticated Humeans. For reasons of simplicity, however, I for the most part identify the elements of an agent's motivational set with her desires. The reader is encouraged to interpret 'desire' in the very broad sense now customary in philosophical discussions. But no matter how broadly or narrowly she inteiprets the term, the inadequacy of desires to play the role the Humean assigns them is an inadequacy shared by all the dispositional states and 'patterns of reaction' that constitute the elements of the agent's motivational set. Insofar as these states are merely inputs into the agent's reasoning, the fact that they both cause and rationalise her behaviour is not enough to render this behaviour an intentional action.
37. Michael Smith, 'The Humean Theory of Motivating Reasons', Mind 96 (January 1987), p. 38
38. Some philosophers have argued that someone acts of her own free will as long as she is moved by her highest-order desires. (See, e.g., Frankfurt, 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person'.) Many others have pointed out, however, that there is no reason to think that a desire reflects the point of view of the agent herself just because it is of an especially high order, and that to get the agent herself into the picture, we need to get her application of norms into the picture.
39. (See, e.g., Gary Watson, 'Free Agency'
40. and David Velleman, 'What Happens When Someone Acts?')
41. As Robert Audi points out, 'If all that autonomy does is direct conduct toward the satisfaction of one or another desire taken as a brute given that is beyond rational criticism, [it] falls short of a capacity for self-government.' (Audi, 'Autonomy, Reason, and Desire', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991), p. 268.)
42. In his book, Wilson tries to answer a famous challenge raised by Donald Davidson in 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes': 'A person can have a reason for an action, and perform the action, and yet this reason not be the reason why he did it. Central to the relation between a reason and an action it explains is the idea that the agent performed the action because he had the reason.' (Davidson, 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes', in Essays on Acts and Events, p. 9.)
43. Michael Smith, written correspondence, September 19, 1995. In effect, I am challenging Smith's claim that one can explain an action from the 'intentional perspective' without explaining it from the 'deliberative perspective'. With Philip Petit, Smith reminds us that 'the conclusion that a certain action is or appears more desirable than alternatives may or may not go hand in hand with an agent's desiring it.' (Philip Petit and Michael Smith, 'Practical Unreason', Mind 102 (January 1993), p. 56). But he mistakenly concludes from this that 'the intentional and deliberative dimensions of decision-making may indeed come apart', i.e., that we can make up our own minds about what to do (and so act intentionally) even if our intentions do not reflect our evaluative beliefs.
44. Darwall offers an example that is supposed to show that a person's prior desires are sometimes irrelevant to explaining her decisions. He tells the story of Roberta, who 'sees no relation between [poverty and suffering] and her own life.' After watching a film 'that vividly portrays the plight of textile workers in the southern United States', Roberta 'decides to donate a few hours a week to distributing leaflets at local stores.' (Impartial Reason, pp. 39-40) Darwall argues that 'whatever desire she does have after the film seems itself to be the result of her becoming aware, in a particularly vivid way, of considerations that motivate her desire and that she takes as reasons for her decision: the unjustifiable suffering of the workers' (p. 40). But the friend of desires will surely insist that to say that Roberta became aware in a particularly vivid way is simply to note that she acquires desires that 'colour' her awareness; and to say that she 'takes' certain considerations 'as reasons' is not yet to explain why she so takes them. Of course, Roberta would not have acquired the desires that motivate her decision if she had not witnessed the suffering of the workers. But, for all Darwall says, the difference between Roberta and someone else who is unmoved by the film reflects their different desire profiles their different attitudes before watching the film. It may well be that when some Humeans insist that an agent's reasons for action are a function of her 'motivational set' that her Reason is the slave of her Passions they are thinking of the fact that an agent's deliberations depend on her antecedent motives, and on her desires, in particular. Unfortunately, however, the view that our evaluative conclusions depend on our desires is often identified with the distinct view that our justification for these conclusions depends on our desires. It is worth stressing again that my own argument against the Humean is not an argument against the view that 'any justification must appeal to an inclination in the individual to whom it is offered.' (The Possibility of Altruism, p. 10, emphasis added.) Rather, I have tried to show that an agent cannot act intentionally unless she believes that her action is justified, and that appeals to her inclinations are insufficient to establish that she does, in fact, believe this.
45. Gottfried W. Leibniz, 'Leibniz' Fifth Paper', in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H.G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), p. 57.
46. In other words, the fact that intentional action requires norms of action that are not a function of the agent's motivational set sheds light on a phenomenon which D.M. MacKay has called to our attention in several articles. MacKay argues that the question 'How will A act?' has no determinate answer for A until she decides how to act, and that this is true regardless of whether the question has a determinate answer for everyone else. What is a simple fact from the perspective of a third-person observer is not a fact, MacKay argues, from the perspective of the agent herself. True, an agent can take a third-person perspective on her own motives. But this is not the perspective she takes in 'making up her mind.' In order to make up her mind, an agent must make something of the motives she attributes to herself. She must evaluate them. And in order to do this, she must apply norms that are independent of these motives. In contrast, someone who is merely interested in predicting another person's action does not have to do anything to bring this action about, and so has no need to make her own assessment of the relative desirability of the agent's options. (See D.M. MacKay, 'On The Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice', Mind 69 (1960), pp. 31-40
47. 'Choice in a Mechanistic Universe: A Reply to Some Critics', The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 22 (August 1971), pp. 275-85
48. and 'The Logical Indeterminateness of Human Choices', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24 (December 1973), pp. 405-8).
49. This seems to be Hume's position. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 520.
50. Smith thus grossly underestimates the epistemological difficulties posed for his view by a dispositional conception of desires. Not only does this conception entail that 'the epistemology of desire ... allows that subjects may be fallible about the desires they have' (Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), p. 107), but it entails that people have no basis for attributing desires to themselves until they have already performed many intentional actions.
51. Since, as Platts notes, the Humean is committed to a conception of practical rationality according to which the reasoner 'must make reference to [her own] desires' (Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 256, cited in The Moral Problem, p. 109), it thus seems that combining the Humean conception of practical rationality with the dispositional conception of desires yields the unfortunate result that intentional action is possible only if it is possible for agents to act for a reason when they act to satisfy desires which they themselves believe they have no reason to attribute to themselves!
52. There is at least one philosopher who has argued that reasoning about what to do requires theoretical, rather than practical, norms. In a very interesting book, David Velleman suggests that our goal as 'practical' reasoners is to gain self-knowledge, and in particular, to make accurate predictions about what we will do. Qua theoretical reasoners, we take ourselves to have good reason to act in a way that confirms these predictions, and good reason to make predictions we are likely to confirm. The best way to make such predictions is to pay close attention to our desires: forming intentions is simply forming self-fulfilling beliefs about how we will act, given our desires and our beliefs about how best to satisfy them. (David Velleman, Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.)) I am not convinced by this account. But it does seem to me that the Humean picture of practical reasoning as reasoning from one's desires encourages us to picture the practical deliberator as occupying a spectator's perspective on her own behavioural dispositions. In other words, to my mind, Velleman's account exposes another problem with the Humean conception of intentional action: this conception fails to capture the extent to which qua deliberators, we experience the goals of our desires as our own. More particularly, even as the Humean fails to appreciate the distinction between the goals of our desires and the goals we set for ourselves in forming our intentions, Velleman mistakenly suggests that deliberating about what to do requires detaching oneself from one's own deepest concerns. (Note that this problem is closely related to the problem of self-identifying desires I discuss on page 415, and in the preceding note.)
53. Jean Hampton makes essentially the same point in challenging the dogma that all practical imperatives are hypothetical. In 'Rethinking Reason' she writes: 'when you say that he ought to do y to achieve his desired end x, then you believe, given that he wants x, and y is the means to x, that it follows logically that he has a reason to do y. But this means that you are judging him and criticising him using a norm that you are assuming to be objectively valid, in just the way moral theorists take their moral norms to be valid.' (Jean Hampton, 'Rethinking Reason', American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (July 1992), p. 233.)
54. Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork Of The Metaphysics Of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
55. This phrase is from Robert B. Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 33. It is surely no less reasonable to construe most of the agent's evaluative beliefs as explicit attitudes toward propositions than it is to construe her non-evaluative beliefs as explicit attitudes toward propositions. My point is simply that some of her beliefs will have to be implicit in the inferences she draws from these propositions.
56. See pages 65-67 in Peter Railton, 'On the Hypothetical and the Non-Hypothetical in Reasoning about Belief and Action', in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 53-79.
57. Christine Korsgaard, 'The Normativity of Instrumental Reason', in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 221