Prudence and the reasons of rational persons

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 79, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 346-365

  MacIntosh, Duncan ^a  

^a DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 61449440127     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ajp/79.3.346     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, second edition, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. 413-18, 455-9.
2. The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).
3. Ibid., pp. 29-30.
4. Ibid., p. 39.
5. Ibid., pp. 39-40.
6. On this aspect of Nagel, see Nicholas Sturgeon, 'Altruism, Solipsism, and the Objectivity of Reasons', The Philosophical Review LXXXIII (1974), pp. 374-102,
7. See David Gauthier, Morals By Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), Ch. II. These requirements are contested. E.g., see John Broome, 'Can a Humean Be Moderate', in R.G. Frey and C. W. Morris, eds., Value, Welfare, and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 57-73. To avoid controversy, I specify them not as conditions on rational values, but on values being things in whose service acts are assessable for instrumental rationality. Even should these conditions be wrong, the right ones may yet limit possible conflicts between a rational agent's current and future values. Also, as a referee notes, maybe no one meets such strict conditions. So, lest we deny that agents ever make rational choices, we might say an agent's choices can be assessed for instrumental rationality not iff her values meet the conditions, but in so far as her values meet them.
8. See my 'Categorically Rational Preferences and the Structure of Morality', in Peter Danielson, ed., Modeling Rationality, Morality and Evolution; Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, Volume 7 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 282-301; my 'Persons and the Satisfaction of Preferences: Problems in the Rational Kinematics of Values', The Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993), pp. 163-180; and my 'Preference-Revision and the Paradoxes of Instrumental Rationality', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992), pp. 503-30. See also David Schmidtz, 'Choosing Ends', Ethics 104 (1994), pp. 226-51.
9. See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). My views on these situations are more influenced by Gauthier (Morals, Ch. 3). He used Decision Theory to study when it is rational to alter one's dispositions to make choices given one's preferences; I use it to study when it is rational to alter one's preferences. This approach lets us be precise on which conditions make it obligatory given one's values to revise the values, and on which revisions are required.
10. The example is from David Schmidtz, Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). I see it as illustrating a different point than Schmidtz thinks.
11. This point, and the example which follows, are from Schmidtz, Rational Choice.
12. I assume boredom and carelessness are evaluable for rationality, and are not, as tori McGeer suggested to me, non-rational states, like exhaustion. I don't mean one irrationally chooses to be bored or careless (thanks to a referee for the issue); only that it's rationally unintelligible (as in an inappropriate emotion) to be like this in an activity one most ardently prefers to be doing. What decides which states are rationally evaluable in these ways is too big an issue to deal with here.
13. Here, perhaps I really had two desires, a strong one for the original end, and a weaker desire not to take the means to it.
14. See note 22, below. Let me acknowledge that Schmidtz is nicely portraying rationality for people as they really are, with irrational and non-rational tendencies.
15. I owe these cases to a referee.
16. See my 'Persons'; and my 'Preference-Revision'; also Schmidtz, Rational Choice ; and Eric M. Cave, Preferring Justice : Rationality, Self-Transformation and the Sense of Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), Ch. 9.
17. Thanks to a referee for this issue.
18. Thanks to tori McGeer for discussion.
19. Permissible just in this sense: forming the current value was not anti-maximising on any immediately prior values one had.
20. There is another possibility, g): one's earlier and later values were for things objectively valuable; but what had value changed; so rationally one's values had to change. But this is no part of Humeanism, where nothing has objective value. On g), see my 'Moral Paradox and the Mutability of the Good' (unpublished MS, Dalhousie University, June, 2000); and my 'The Prudence Problem' (unpublished MS, Dalhousie University, October, 2000).
21. See my papers, above, for more on value-change here.
22. *, I should reinforce. (See Schmidtz, Rational Choice.) But on my view, I'm irrational should I need reinforcing. If it maximises on V for me to keep V, rationally I should automatically keep V. (See note 14, above, and the associated main text.)
23. * isn't acting rationally tout court, only relative to irrational values. In the text, I portray rational action as maximising on present values, just as the desire or present-aim theory is standardly thought to require. But since I think the theory can criticise desires, maybe it wouldn't always say to maximise on present values; one should act on past ones if altering them wasn't rational. (One is still never bound now by both current desires and ones held earlier or later.) See my 'The Prudence Problem'. Yet what of desires by which one is normally beset as one matures? Is acting on them rational, since they are one's new present desires, or irrational, since forming them didn't maximise on one's old values? A big issue.
24. Thanks to Schmidtz for the example, and for help explicating what it illustrates.
25. Provided forming them was permissible given prior values, at least depending on how we resolve the issue of note 23, above.
26. Or at least a desire isn't decisively motivated-qua justified-if it is inconsistent with what timeless reasons require.
27. Gregory Kavka, 'Some Paradoxes of Deterrence', The Journal of Philosophy LXXV (1978), pp. 285-302.
28. So if one learns description P fits the same state as a description one now prefers to be true, one should prefer P's truth, too.
29. Unless the other parts needed to make that good state won't obtain and it would be bad if only part of it obtained.
30. Assuming it isn't worse for the state to come about by such means than not to come about, or to come about by less bad means.
31. A referee put the idea this way: surely a theory of reasons (e.g., reasons are desires for good states) telling us to accept another theory (reasons are the desires whose adoption would advance the former desires) can yet be the truth.
32. Or for states identical to, part of, or means to them.
33. Even if forming a desire isn't an act, there are acts that would result in one's forming desires (taking a pill, seeing a hypnotist, hanging with a different crowd); and Nagel's theory violates monotonicity on the rationality of these acts.
34. Even Nagel may be reluctant to reify desires as causes of actions, and so to think rational acts are ones justified by motivated desires. True, he thinks all action induced by desire. But he sometimes talks as if to say a behaviour was desire-induced is just a way of saying it was an act-trivially, all action is induced by desire (and so all rational action, by a motivated desire). On this reading, see Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 7-9.
35. Or it is to have a pro-attitude practical reasoning from which justifies pro-attitudes to doing x, to causing y.
36. In Humean instrumental rationality, by contrast, it is rationally obligatory to cause G only if one desires G as an end or means. Still, if one's behaviour, B, causes G, B is the act of causing G iff justified and induced by a desire one has for G.
37. See note 44, below.
38. I say if it advances rational desires to replace them with ones for opposite states, the new ones are rational to have, motivated. But most philosophers would think these aren't rational-forming them is rationally motivated irrationality. And one might object that my view leaves no room for such irrationality. But it does. Say I'll certainly frustrate your current rational desires (ones for good states), unless you take a pill that may make you act against them. Taking it maximises on your desires, for it saves a chance that they will be satisfied. Say you take it and unluckily it makes you act against your desires: since, on my view, rational acting should advance one's desires, this is irrational acting; but it is rationally motivated, for it was rational for you (since maximising on your desires) to take the pill with this as a possible result. And say the pill may make you act to form desires whose formation would retard those you will have just after taking it. If it does, then since, on my view, a desire is rational iff forming it advances the desires one had when forming it, this is irrational desire formation; but it is rationally motivated because it was rational for you (since maximising on your desires) to take the pill with this as a possible result. So rationally motivated irrationality is possible, but in a non-traditional form: rationally motivated irrational action is not action later against desires you have now, but against ones you rationally will have then. And rationally motivated irrational desire formation is not forming a desire for a state incompatible with states currently desired; it is forming a desire whose formation retards desires one holds when forming it.
39. It would be interesting to connect this with Peter Railton, 'Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality', Philosophy and Public Affairs 13 (1984), pp. 134-71.
40. Thanks to a referee for this suggestion.
41. Or at least any new ones should be for states part of or means to the ends one should always desire.
42. This also argues for the relativity of reasons-motivated desires-to persons and situations. Say timeless reasons dictate certain desires to all persons; but then say one person faces an SES for the desires, another, not. Then the first person will be justified in forming different desires; so the two persons should have different motivated desires, and so different reasons.
43. I defined complete preferences in Part I, Section 3, above.
44. For more on this result's generality, see my 'The Prudence Problem'. I said no monotonic theory of rational acts or attitudes can hold that necessarily one rationally must always have the same attitudes. Instead, one must have ones whose formation best serves those one was previously obliged to have; and for any attitudes once rationally obligatory due to their targets' goodness, there can be SESs where one rationally should drop the attitudes, even though they target states good pre-SES-attitude rationality is relative to time, agent, situation. So no state can be necessarily timelessly rationally obligatory to value. For argument that, on plausible meta-ethical assumptions, this means the goodness of states is relative, see my 'Moral Paradox'.
45. My thanks to audiences at the 1999 Alabama Philosophical Society meeting (for which this was the plenary address), and at Dalhousie University, the University of British Columbia and the 1991 Canadian Philosophical Association meeting. For discussion, I'm grateftil to Nathan Brett, Bob Bright, Richmond Campbell, Sue Campbell, trish Leadbeater, Carolyn McLeod, Bob Martin, tori McGeer, Peter Schotch, Rob Shaver, Susan Sherwin, Heidi Tiedke, Tom Vinci, Mark Vorobej and Russ Weninger. For written comments, my thanks to David Schmidtz, the editors of AJP, and referees of various versions. My work was aided by a Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.