Reasons and evidence one ought

Ethics

Volumn 119, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 538-545

  Brunero, John ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 69249108800     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/597594     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star, "Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?" Ethics 118(2008):31-56
2. and "Reasons as Evidence", forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 4, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 215-42.
3. Kearns and Star, "Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?" 37
4. and "Reasons as Evidence", 216.
5. Kearns and Star, "Reasons as Evidence", 222-24.
6. See, e.g., T. M. Scanlon, who writes: "I will take the idea of a reason as primitive. Any attempt to explain what it is to be a reason for something seems to me to lead back to the same idea: a consideration that counts in favor of it. 'Counts in favor how?' one might ask. 'By providing a reason for it' seems to be the only answer" (What We Owe to Each Other [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998], 17). Similarly, Derek Parfit writes: "If we were asked what it means to claim that we have some reason, it would be hard to give a helpful answer. Facts give us reasons, we might say, when they count in favour of our having some belief, or desire, or our acting in some way. But 'counting in favour of' means, roughly, 'giving a reason for.' Like some other groups of fundamental concepts... the concept of a reason is indefinable in the sense that it cannot be helpfully explained in other terms" ("Climbing the Mountain" [unpublished manuscript, 2008], 21).
7. John Broome also attempts to provide an informative explanation of reasons as facts which play a "for-Φ" role in what he calls "weighing explanations." See his "Reasons" in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28-55. Broome's view, which I will not discuss here, is carefully criticized in detail in Kearns and Star, "Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?
8. See Kearns and Star, "Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?" 44-45
9. and "Reasons as Evidence", 230-32. Peter Achinstein has presented some counterexamples which purport to show that e's raising the probability of h is neither necessary nor sufficient for e's being evidence for h.
10. See, especially, chap. 4 of Achinstein's The Book of Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
11. See also Sherrilyn Roush, "Discussion: Positive Relevance Defended", Philosophy of Science 71(2004):110-16
12. and Peter Achinstein, "A Challenge to Positive Relevance Theorists: Reply to Roush", Philosophy of Science 71(2004):521-24, for further discussion of Achinstein's counterexamples to probability-raising being a necessary condition for something's being evidence.
13. Unlike R above, this formulation is not explicitly presented by Kearns and Star. But I do not suspect that they would object to it since it simply combines R with their understanding of evidence as probability-raising.
14. Kearns and Star, "Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?" 45.
15. See also Kearns and Star, "Reasons as Evidence", 232.
16. Kearns and Star, "Reasons as Evidence", 232 n. 10.
17. Below I'll refer to this specific gift from the Sears Catalog as "the gift.
18. I am not committing myself here to the controversial thesis that the fact that my father would be made happy by my Φ-ing is, in every case, a reason for me to Φ. As moral particularists often point out, were Φ-ing something cruel or sadistic, the fact that he would be made happy by my Φ-ing is no reason at all for me to Φ. But I do not think that it's controversial, in the specific example I've given, to claim that the fact that my father would be made happy by my buying that gift would be a reason (of some weight, perhaps not that much) for me to buy that gift.
19. 1 would indeed raise the probability that I ought to buy the gift. But since they are not already part of my body of evidence in the example I give, the addition of e1 lowers the probability that I ought to buy the gift.
20. The possibility of this line of reply is suggested by some remarks made by Kearns and Star in response to a similar line of objection in Kearns and Star, "Reasons as Evidence", 237-38.
21. 1 counts as evidence against the claim that I ought to buy the gift.
22. For further defense of this claim, see Joseph Raz's discussion of the Facilitative Principle in "The Myth of Instrumental Rationality", Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1(2005):1-28.
23. *-SS.
24. 3. So I'm here focusing only on part of his example. See Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 38.
25. Assuming, of course, that I didn't make the promise under duress and that there are no other such "disablers" for this reason. See Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 38-44.
26. Assuming, of course, that I didn't make the promise under duress and that there are no other such "disablers" for this reason. See Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 38-40.