Prospects for a naturalization of practical reason: Humean instrumentalism and the normative authority of desire

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 235-263

  Audi, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA LINCOLN   (United States)

Author keywords

Desire; Hedonism; Hume; Naturalism; Pleasure; Rationality

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249651107     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09672550210152104     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. The notion of naturalism is not altogether clear, but the use made of it in this paper is broad enough to avoid presuppositions that should not be made here. I have indicated various ways it may be construed in 'Philosophical Naturalism at the Turn of the Century', Journal of Philosophical Research, 95 (2000).
2. Richard Fumerton, Reason and Morality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), esp. chs 4-6
3. and Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (eds) Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
4. For a broad characterization of instrumentalism and responses to it, see the introduction by Cullity and Gaut. The papers by James Dreier - 'Humean Doubts about the Practical Justification of Morality' - and Peter Railton - 'On the Hypothetical and Non-Hypothetical in Reasoning about Belief and Action' - defend certain elements of instrumentalism, and Dreier's brings out the limitations of instrumentalism as a route to providing reasons to be moral (or alternatively, 'justifying morality').
5. Cullity's 'Practical Theory' critically examines Bernard Williams's well-known version tracing to his much-discussed 'Internal and External Reasons', in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
6. and Gaut's "The Structure of Practical Reason' assesses a Kantian constructivist response to instrumentalism (represented in the volume by Christine Korsgaard's paper), and sketches a broadly Aristotelian alternative to both.
7. These five kinds of reasons are introduced and discussed in my 'Acting for Reasons', Philosophical Review, 95 (1986)
8. reprinted in my Action, Intention, and Reason (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993)
9. and, in a different way, in The Architecture of Reason (Oxford and New York: 2001), esp. ch. 5, on which this paper draws significantly. 1 might add that since motivating reasons as here described operate in producing or sustaining action, one might also call them activating reasons; and since subjective reasons may or may not activate behaviour, but are the appropriate kind to motivate it, one could call them motivational as opposed to motivating. We could also distinguish a sixth variety: inclining reasons, those that produce a tendency to act, and are in that sense (causally) operative, but do not yield action itself. But for our purposes there is no need to complicate the terminology in the text.
10. See A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888). The famous claim is on p. 415, the point about strength of mind on p. 418.
11. Two points of clarification will help. First, I assume for the sake of argument that we may speak of combined desire strengths at least in a way that enables us to make comparative determinations of strength. Second, my focus is the rationality of an action for S, not S's acting rationally; I take the latter to be more complex, requiring that the action be based on the reason(s) in virtue of which it is rational. Supporting argument on the latter point is given in my 'Rationalization and Rationality', in my The Structure of Justification (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
12. For a naturalistic defence of a neo-Humean position on practical reason which takes advisability into account, see Donald C. Hubin, 'The Groundless Normativity of Instrumental Rationality', Journal of Philosophy, 98 (9) (2001).
13. For a defence of instrumentalism that stresses the idea of what we intrinsically want as 'dear to our heart', see Christoph Fehige, 'Instrumentalism', forthcoming in Elijah Milligram (ed.) Varieties of Practical Reasoning.
14. For a plausible attempt to present a detailed naturalistic epistemology see Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
15. I have critically appraised the attempt to naturalize epistemology in The Structure of Justification, esp. chs 6, 10, and 12, and in 'An Internalist Theory of Normative Grounds', forthcoming in Philosophical Topics.
16. An important question that arises here is how, if at all, a self-concept must enter into the object of desire. 1 have discussed this in detail in The Architecture of Reason, esp. ch. 4.
17. Questions about how conceptions of the self enter into prepositional attitudes are also treated in detail in the work of John Perry. For a short statement of his position on some of the central issues, see his 'Self-Notions', Logos, 11 (1990).P. 399.
18. There are also hedonistic passages in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. See, e.g., p. 134 of the reprint of the 1777 edition (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1960).
19. I have discussed the possibility of naturalizing moral properties, including those which apparently normative content, such as a belief that one ought (morally) to do something, in 'Ethical Naturalism and the Explanatory Power of Moral Concepts', reprinted in my Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
20. For related discussion of what naturalism requires in the case of mental and physical properties, see, e.g., Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998)
21. and John Perry, Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
22. In ch. 2 of Practical Reasoning I have discussed and clarified Hume's position on rational action, which is subtler than this quotation suggests. It is noteworthy that (as one might expect from the hedonistic elements in his work) he seems to think there are some common-sense grounds for criticizing even logically unobjectionable beliefs that go against experience. He says, e.g., that 'none but a fool or a madman would ever pretend to dispute the authority of experience or to reject that great guide of human life'. See An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1977), p. 23. It appears that Hume has in mind normative authority here, and one might think he might say something similar about experience as a guide to logically and instrumentally unobjectionable intrinsic desires.
23. The term occurs in G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), but the idea is at least as old as Aquinas's (Aristotelian) view that we want things under the aspect of the good.
24. Thomas Aquinas comes to mind here. His overall view is ramified and complex, but it includes many far-reaching points in the vicinity of the view cited in the text; e.g. that 'the object of the appetitive power is the appetible good, which varies in kind according to its various relations to reason' (Summa Theologiae, Q. 60, Art. 1, Reply Obj. 1);
25. 'nothing stands firm with regard to the practical reason, unless it is directed to the last end which is the common good' (Q. 90, Art. 3, Reply Obj. 3);
26. Treatise, p. 414.
27. I argue for this in 'The Concept of Wanting', in my Action, Intention, and Reason, cited above.
28. I am here allowing that an intrinsic good might 'provide' a reason without constituting one. Suppose, e.g., that we adopt T. M. Scanlon's 'buck-passing' view of goodness and value (hence presumably of basic reasons for action as well), on which reasons are constituted by the specific things in virtue of which something is good - say, being enjoyable - not by its goodness as such. See What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 95-100.
29. Hume appears to do this, for reasons I have indicated in ch. 2 of Practical Reasoning. Certainly R. B. Brandt does it in A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
30. A more recent statement of his view is 'Reasons and Motivation', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 71 (1997).
31. I have defended this kind of view of normative belief in relation to action in, e.g., 'Weakness of Will and Rational Action', in my Action, Intention, and Reason (originally published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1990), pp. 270-81).
32. Granted there are cases in which we apparently know something from memory even when we have forgotten our grounds; but 1 believe that knowledge and justification are different in this respect, as I argue in 'Memorial Justification', Philosophical Topics, 23 (1995), pp. 31-45. Thus, even if a memory belief meets the defeating condition described in the text, it may still constitute knowledge; but 1 take this to be compatible with failure to be rational or confer rationality on any belief based on it.
33. As Kant put it in one place, 'we should be able to show at the same time [i.e., in a critique of practical reason] the unity of practical and theoretical reason in a common principle, since in the end there can be only one and the same reason, which must be differentiated solely in its application'. See Groundwork of the Metophysic of Morals, sect. 391, trans. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 59.
34. For a good survey of views on the nature of pleasure see William P. Alston's article on pleasure in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
35. This point will not seem plausible if one does not distinguish dispositional propositional attitudes from dispositions to form them. For a theory of the difference and a case for positing fewer of the former and more of the latter, see my 'Dispositional Beliefs and Dispositions to Believe', Nous, 28 (1994).
36. I say 'normally' because a belief can be induced by, say, brain manipulation. 1 should add that the relevant experience includes belief formation or contemplation of one's beliefs or their propositional objects: this can be crucial for inferential, as opposed to experiential, belief formation. The suggested discriminative-response theory of belief formation (which I merely sketch here) is introduced and defended in 'Dispositional Beliefs and Dispositions to Believe'.
37. For a discussion bearing on this problem (but not, I think, solving it), see Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 133-51.
38. For a well-developed pragmatic naturalism with much attention to practical reason, see, e.g., Gilbert Harman, Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. the essays in Part I.
39. It is important to note that the failure of naturalization in the domain of practical reason would not entail its failure with respect to the mental, even in the strong sense in which that entails a strong version of physicalism about phenomenal properties. For instance, John Perry's 'antecedent' physicalism might still be maintained. For a recent statement see his Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness, esp. ch. 8.
40. Moreover, moral properties need not be natu-ralizable in order for moral explanations to be. For an account of how the latter is possible despite the apparent impossibility of the former, see my 'Ethical Naturalism and the Explanatory Power of Moral Properties', in Moral Knowledge.
41. A widely discussed difficulty is the Frege-Geach problem, concerning the (apparently propositional) behaviour of normative sentences in conditionals. For a sophisticated contemporary statement of noncognitivism see Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
42. For criticism of Gibbard's position, see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 'Some Problems for Gibbard's Norm-Expressivism', Philosophical Studies, 69 (1993);
43. Mark van Roojen, 'Expressivism and Irrationality', Philosophical Review, 105 (1996), pp. 311-33 (a critique of Simon Blackburn's noncognitivism more than of Gibbard's);
44. and James Dreier, 'Transforming Expressivism', Nous, 33 (4) (1999), pp. 558-72.
45. This paper was originally written for a conference on practical reason at the University of Munich. A later draft was delivered at the annual meeting of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy in 2000, and various versions were read at the following universities: Brown, Georgia State, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Rome, St Andrews, St Louis, and Washington. I am grateful to colleagues and students in these audiences for helpful reactions, and for a number of critical comments 1 thank Roger Crisp, Jamie Dreier, Brad Hooker, and Ernest Sosa.