Actions, Reasons and Reason 9783110346305, 9783110346015

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Desirer’s Reason
Explaining Actions by Reasons
How to Improve On Bittner’s Proposal
Reasons, Reason-Giving and Explanation
How Much Can We Say about Practical Judgement?
A Modest Defense of Regret
Of Ducks and Men
Reasons for Bare Respect
Pacifism and Moral Judgment
The Metaphysical Need and the Utopian Impulse
Reasonable Movies for Reasonable Agents
Performing on the Media Stage
Index

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Actions, Reasons and Reason

Actions, Reasons and Reason Edited by Marco Iorio and Ralf Stoecker

ISBN 978-3-11-034601-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034630-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038454-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston cover illustration: Voyagerix/istock/thinkstock Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

To Rüdiger

Table of Contents Introduction

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Rüdiger Bittner A Desirer’s Reason

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Ansgar Beckermann Explaining Actions by Reasons

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Jens Kulenkampff How to Improve On Bittner’s Proposal Marco Iorio Reasons, Reason-Giving and Explanation

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Onora O’Neill How Much Can We Say about Practical Judgement? R. Jay Wallace A Modest Defense of Regret Ralf Stoecker Of Ducks and Men

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Martina Herrmann Reasons for Bare Respect Kirsten Meyer Pacifism and Moral Judgment

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Raymond Geuss The Metaphysical Need and the Utopian Impulse Susanne Kaul Reasonable Movies for Reasonable Agents

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Hajo Kurzenberger Performing on the Media Stage Index

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Introduction This book is about actions, reasons and reason. Evidently, these concepts are related, but how? It is tempting to take recourse to spatial metaphors. The three concepts, one might say, are nested like concentric circles, reason being the all-embracing faculty, including reasons as part, some of which evolve into actions. Or one might see reason as the background for having reasons from which occasional actions surface. Or again the concepts are placed at varying distances from the outer world, so to say: actions as the materialization of reasons which in turn form the bridge between reason and world. Still, what exactly is it that we try to capture in these models? It is a joint feature of the contributions to this book that they provide partial answers to this question, yet (to employ the first metaphor) on different paths between the concentric circles. Moreover, another common feature of the contributions is their explicit or implicit dedication to Rüdiger Bittner who in his work has paved his own, special ways back and forth through the circles. Bittner also starts off the book with an article on “A Desirer’s Reason”. He addresses one of the classical questions of modern action theory, that about the specific explanatory relationship between reasons and actions. This question has already been a central topic in his book Doing Things for Reasons ¹, where he has argued for a radical externalist understanding of the reasons we act upon. In his new paper he provides a slightly modified version of this account that ascribes desires a special role as background conditions for enabling facts of the outer world to function as reasons for actions. The two articles to follow, Ansgar Beckermann’s “Explaining Actions by Reasons” and Jens Kulenkampff’s “How to Improve on Bittner’s Proposal”, also discuss the position that Bittner developed in Doing Things for Reasons. Both authors express sympathy for its core element that reason explanations refer to facts in the world. They emphasize, however, that these explanations may need amending, either by psychological details of the decision-making process (Beckermann) or by additional information about the circumstances under which the agent acts (Kulenkampff). For reason to become active, the three papers might be summarised, it takes more than reasons. This view gets further support from Marco Iorio’s paper on “Practical Reasons, Reason-Giving and Explanation”, in which he distinguishes two concepts of reasons, a narrow one where reasons are advantages of possible

 Rüdiger Bittner: Doing things for reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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actions and a broad one that embraces a multitude of elements of potential action explanations, e. g. desires and beliefs. While these contributions mainly address the question how reasons and actions are related to each other, from the perspective of the explanation of an already performed action, the next author, Onora O’Neill, approaches it from the opposite end, from the perspective of the agent about to act. In “How Much Can We Say about Practical Judgement?” O’Neill emphasizes the character of practical judgement not as a faculty of applying practical rules and principles but as the ability to enact these principles, i. e. to work out how to satisfy a plurality of potentially conflicting demands and principles. The agent can also look back to actions already performed. This backward looking perspective was at the center of an article Bittner published in 1992 on the question “Is It Reasonable to Regret Things One Did?”.² Bittner’s answer was markedly negative: it is no use to cry over spilt milk. In his contribution “A Modest Defense of Regret” Jay Wallace responds that regret is important because it arises from our capacity of valuing things and thereby helps shaping our identity and constituting our specific perspective on the world. There is no individual identity without emotional vulnerability. Reason is not only in the background of other faculties like being able to think, value and act, it is also widely regarded as the foundation of our special moral status. Here two related ideas are usually employed: human dignity and the obligation of mutual respect. Bittner has expressed doubts about both ideas in his publications, in the concluding chapter of Doing Things for Reasons and in a recent journal article.³ Ralf Stoecker and Martina Herrmann take up the challenge to defend these ideas against Bittner’s skepticism. In his paper “Of Ducks and Men” Stoecker argues that human dignity refers to the essentially social nature of human beings that sets them apart from all other creatures. Hence, there is a basis for treating humans differently from, say, ducks. This is particularly conspicuous when people are deeply humiliated and disgraced. As Herrmann tries to show in her contribution “Reasons for Bare Respect”, interpersonal attitudes like racism, sexism and anti-Semitism provide strong reasons for the assumption that there is a basic obligation for mutual respect regardless of any personal desert or merit (i. e. bare respect). Sceptical with regard to these presumed foundations of the moral status of human beings, Bittner has no less defended straight pacifism in the debate on  Rüdiger Bittner: “Is it reasonable to regret things one did?”. In: Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992), 262– 273.  Rüdiger Bittner: “Achtung und ihre moralische Bedeutung”. In: Analyse & Kritik 31 (2009), 339 – 350.

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just war. Kirsten Meyer in her contribution “Pacifism and Moral Judgement” wonders how the moral claim of pacifism can be reconciled with Bittner’s overall reservations against moral judgments. According to Meyer it cannot be reconciled and she opts to side with Bittner’s deeply human pacifism against his own moral scepticism. The last three contributions of the book take us to the outskirts of reason. In “The Metaphysical Need and the Utopian Impulse” Raymond Geuss takes up a question that has bothered philosophy particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, viz. why humans are inclined to go beyond the world as they see it and engage in metaphysical or religious speculation about the beyond, and also how to evaluate this urge. As he sees it, metaphysics has been an essentially conservative, irenic enterprise that we should leave behind lightheartedly, in stark contrast to another impulse to cross these boundaries, namely future oriented utopian ideas that play an indispensable role in our lives. Philosophy is not the only activity that might aim at leading us beyond the actual world. Two domains where this is done almost by definition are cinema and theatre. It is therefore not surprising, as Susanne Kaul demonstrates in her contribution about “Reasonable Movies for Reasonable Agents” with a multitude of examples that there is plenty to be learned from movies for philosophers. In particular since, as Hajo Kurzenberger argues in “Performing on the Media Stage”, our whole life is inevitably intertwined with theatre anyway: “Theatre is now a game without borders, a game that can take place almost anywhere.” Many of the chapters in this book are based on lectures held at a conference in Bielefeld that was devoted to Rüdiger Bittner’s work. We wish to thank the Philosophy Department of Bielefeld for its generous support, Sophie Hermanns and Paul Lauer for very helpful linguistic advice, Gertrud Grünkorn for facilitating the book project and all authors for their contributions.

Rüdiger Bittner

A Desirer’s Reason 1. It is widely held both in traditional and in contemporary philosophy of action that through reason and desire we come to act as we do. However, the nature of the two cooperators and the terms of their cooperation are not clear. The argument that follows is to give an account of reason’s and desire’s contributions to action. It starts out from action explanations, arguing that they should not be understood as referring either to the agent’s beliefs and desires or to the agent’s seeing reasons for doing the thing in question. They should be understood more broadly as referring to some feature or other of the action which in the case at hand helps to make it intelligible. Accordingly, then, reason turns out to be what makes us cognizant of such features, instead of guiding or even requiring action. Desire, finally, is to be understood as receptivity for the attractions of courses of action thus envisaged by reason. 2. Question. Ben, checking e-mails in his study, is suddenly caught by a desire to swim. Then and there, however, he cannot swim. What he knows he could do is go to the pool 2 km away. Everything else being fine, the entrance affordable, no other commitments standing in the way etc., Ben considers how to go. To walk is boring, to take the car is no good either, because parking near the pool is hard to find, to go by bike seems best. Having reached this conclusion, Ben gets out his bike and goes to the pool. Question now, why does he get out his bike and go to the pool? which is to say, what is the reason for which he does this? The point of asking this is to understand, in one mundane and simple case, how we explain, and so come to understand, what people do. There is no doubt that we often succeed in explaining what they do. It is not so clear how we do it. Clarifying how we do in a case as ordinary as can be should offer a basis for clarifying how we do in more complicated cases as well, so that eventually the whole range of our understanding what people do could be illuminated. Such illumination would be helpful. The enterprise is broadly Rylean in spirit: we understand reasonably well what people do, but with respect to that understanding itself we are in the dark (Ryle 1949, introduction). Ryle, it is true, described his undertaking as an attempt “to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge which we already possess” (1949, 7), and this use of the word ‘logical’ is hard to make sense of, not because of the metaphor ‘logical geography’, but because of the suggestion that to understand our understanding of what people do would be to recognize the logic of such understanding, since it is not clear what is meant by ‘logic’ in

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such a context. In fact, Ryle‘s aim can be described more simply: clarity about the terms in which we understand what people do. Which is the present aim as well. Therefore, the above example is intended to be simple not just in the sense of being easy to understand, but also in the sense of not relying on controversial assumptions. Ben’s story should be unremarkable, as doctors use this word; it should be philosophically uninfectious. For instance, there are those who think that talk of one way of going to the pool being better than another needs to be accounted for in terms of the agent’s desires, or enlightened desires. However, it is controversial whether this is so or not. Ben’s story at any rate is fully intelligible without a reformulation on these lines, and so for simplicity’s sake it should not be subjected to it. It should be accepted right as it comes from the street, no dressing up required. 3. Desire and belief. Donald Davidson, on one reading, gives the following answer: Ben goes by bike to the pool because he desires to swim and believes that taking the bike is the best way for him to come to be swimming. For Davidson holds that to know someone’s primary reason for doing something is necessary and sufficient for understanding why the person does the thing in question (1963, 686), where a primary reason “consists of a belief and an attitude” (1963, 688), desires being exemplary for the attitudes intended here. However, it is doubtful whether Davidson’s answer as stated in fact gives a reason for which Ben could be understood to be riding to the pool on his bike. As regards Ben’s desire, it is for swimming, and the bike ride is nothing to him, the desirer. His thinking that going by bike is the best way to go to the pool does not make him a desirer of going by bike. Thus there is no desire of his that could be a reason for him to take a bike ride. As regards his belief that taking the bike is the best way for him to come to be swimming, that is just a belief, one more representation of how things are, thus something to be stored in his collection together with the other beliefs so far acquired, but not a reason for him to do anything. As regards finally Ben’s desire plus his belief, it is hard to see why these two things combined should be a reason for him to go to the pool by bike, each of which by itself is no such reason. To be sure, combinations have properties which none of the things combined by itself has. So it might be that the combination of belief and desire has the property of being a reason, a property absent from belief alone and from desire alone. Yet while this might be so, it is hard to see why it should be so. It is hard to see why combining these two non-reasons, belief and desire, should yield a reason. Michael Smith is probably responding to this difficulty when he insists that “in order for a desire and belief to constitute a motivating reason the agent must,

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as it were, put the relevant desire and belief together” (1994, 92), the idea being, presumably, that it does not suffice just to have a belief and a desire side by side, even with their contents fitting together as in Ben’s case. There has to be a union of the two, or as Smith puts it in a more recent paper, it takes “amalgams of belief and desire” (2011, 86 f.) for there to be a reason. However, this is obscure. How would one go about amalgamating belief and desire? They do not mix well. 4. Mere desire. Davidson, second reading; for it could be argued that the reading just considered, while it has a basis in the text,¹ does not capture his point. He does not want to say in fact that Ben’s desire to swim plus his belief that going to the pool by bike is the best way to come to be swimming is his reason for going to the pool by bike. He wants to say that Ben’s desire for doing something that gets him to be swimming is his reason, with going to the pool by bike just appearing to be one such doing, indeed the best of them.² On this reading it is strictly false to say that Ben’s reason consists of a pair of attitudes, for his desire is now doing all the reason work. On this reading, his desire is for doing something that will lead to his swimming, and that is what in riding to the pool he does, and for the reason that he desires it. It is not only long-winded to add that he considers riding to the pool to be conducive to his swimming, it is, as regards his reason, superfluous. He does something that leads to his swimming, because he desires to do something that leads to his swimming – that suffices as an account of why he does it. Sure enough, were he not to believe that taking the bike will get him to be swimming, he would not do it, but that is because he would no longer desire to do it, his desire being for something that leads to his swimming and the bike-ride no longer appearing to be such a thing. When you take an apple from the bowl, that may be because you desire to eat it, or because you should eat more fruit, but it is not even part of your reason that the thing is, or you believe it to be, an apple. That is settled before your reasons come on stage. On this reading, then, Davidson‘s story is not a desire/belief account as advertised, but a plain desire account. Beyond this divergence between package and content, however, it suffers from a substantive problem. For who told Davidson that Ben desires to do something that gets him to be swimming? I didn’t. I only told him that Ben desires to swim, which is different. So where does Davidson get that other desire of Ben’s from, the desire for doing something that leads  It is in particular the way Davidson accommodates Ryle’s example of the “boaster from vanity” to his analysis in terms of primary reasons that supports the first reading (see 1963, 689).  This reading is supported by the official account of what is necessary for something to be a primary reason (see 1963, 687).

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to his swimming, on which he bases this account of Ben’s reason for going to the pool by bike? 5. Extension of desire. Presumably he got it from David Hume, who wrote in the Treatise: ‘Tis obvious that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction. ‘Tis also obvious, that this emotion rests not here, but making us cast our view on every side, comprehends whatever objects are connected with its original one by the relation of cause and effect. Here then reasoning takes place to discover this relation; and according as our reasoning varies, our actions receive a subsequent variation. But ‘tis evident in this case, that the impulse arises not from reason, but is only directed by it. ‘Tis from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object: And these emotions extend themselves to the causes and effects of that object, as they are pointed out to us by reason and experience. (1978, 414)

Hume‘s emotion of propensity, aroused by the expectation of pleasure, is the same thing as desire³; and his thesis is that, when we desire something, we also come to desire causes and effects of what we desire; what we consider causes and effects, presumably. As it takes reason to view things as causes and effects of something, it is thanks to our reason that our desires are thus transferred up and down the causal chains. Reason does not on its own determine objects for desiring. It only provides information on what causes and is caused by what, and then desire is transferred along these causal tracks. With the help of Hume’s thesis, Davidson’s story on the second reading is home and dry. Ben’s desire to swim “extends itself” to actions of his that bring about his swimming, among them the one that is otherwise most convenient, going to the pool by bike. Desiring, then, to go to the pool by bike, he does go to the pool by bike, and for the reason that he desires it; which answers the question from the beginning. It would, if Hume’s thesis were credible, but it is not. Waive the problem raised by iteration: that by extending again from extensions, desire ends up extending to an entire path of the world’s history from beginning to end, so that desiring a cookie includes desiring the big bang, which is not plausible. Suppose the extension thesis can be limited to a suitably circumscribed neighbourhood. Even thus limited the thesis seems false. People just do not regularly desire what

 This is shown by the parallel passage (1978, 416), where ‘desire’ is used in the place of ‘emotion of propensity’.

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leads to something they do desire, nor do they regularly desire what results from what they desire. Nobody is keen on going to the dentist, or on having a head the morning after drinking a nice bottle of wine. Where we are not, as in these cases, positively averse to what leads to or results from what we desire, we may still be neutral with respect to it. Thus Ben may certainly be supposed, if not to hate going to the pool by bike, at any rate not to desire it. So the extension thesis appears false. Yet Hume took it to be, not just true, but obviously true. So it would help to have an explanation for his asserting something so glaringly false. Two might be suggested. First, Hume may understand ‘desire’, or if you like ‘emotion of propensity’, more loosely. I have used ‘desire’ so far in the full-blooded sense in which it refers to something like craving, yearning, lusting, being eager, but there also exists a broader use. Thus G.F. Schueler at one point speaks of his desire to get the coffee down from the shelf in case he decides to have another cup (1995, 23), but surely that does not mean that this act, getting the coffee down from the shelf, is something for which itself he is longing. It means that, once he has decided to have another cup, and for that he may indeed be longing, taking the coffee down from the shelf is something he has in mind to do as well. Similarly for Thomas Nagel’s “desire to shop for groceries, after discovering nothing appetizing in the refrigerator” (1970, 29; the same claim appears in Millgram 1995, 79): surely Nagel doesn’t burn, perversely, to be at A&P’s or whatever when he finds the refrigerator empty. He just puts shopping on his agenda so as to collect what he needs for a decent dinner, and that dinner is what he may be eager to get. So it could be argued that Hume‘s thesis only comes out false on an unduly narrow understanding of ‘desire’. This explanation is not effective. First for historical reasons: the broad notion of desire employed by Schueler and Nagel was not known in 18th century English (see the articles on ‘desire’, noun and verb, in the Oxford English Dictionary), and Hume in the Treatise uses the word consistently in the narrow sense indicated.⁴ Indeed, at one point in the present chapter he practically translates ‘desire’ as ‘longing’ (1978, 417). Second for material reasons: Hume’s thesis remains false even if the alleged extensions of the original desire need to be desires only in a loose sense. There are those after all who, while desirous to get their teeth in order, not only do not also desire to see a dentist, which is the normal case, but actually do not put it on their agenda to see one. Don’t say they are

 Except for the special use, here irrelevant, of the verb in the sense ‘to entreat someone’ (see for instance Hume 1978, 412).

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irrational. That is just to call them names, it does not affect the argument. For Hume’s claim was presumably to hold for people, not just for rational people. So only a less favourable explanation remains: Hume holds that desire extends itself to the causes and effects of its original object because without this he cannot prove, as he intends to do in this section of the Treatise, “that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will […].” (1978, 413) For if Ben is not carried by a desire, be it only a derived one, to taking his bike ride, Hume has nothing to prevent his opponents from claiming that it is reason which leads Ben to taking it, and then the gates are open for the metaphysical arguments and popular declamations on the “suppos’d pre-eminence of reason above passion” (1978, 413), which Hume visibly, and perhaps understandably, hates. The extension thesis just serves to make desire appear a good boy who needs no reason to come in and raise her voice. It is understandable, then, that Hume says what he does, but it is not justified; and with the extension thesis falls the Humean account that Davidson on the second reading espoused. 6. Reason governing. Hume’s bulwark taken, the rationalists enter: it is due to reason, not to a desire of his, that Ben goes to the pool by bike. Or rather, the rationalists return: that reason determines what we do, at least sometimes, is oldest philosophical doctrine. It is Plato’s doctrine. In fact, the very terms of this discussion derive from Plato. Both in Republic and in Phaedrus he distinguishes parts of the soul that correspond to, and actually are the ancestors of, what we call reason and desire. The reason part is described as that with which we figure things out (Republic, 439d) and which lets us see what truly there is (Phaedrus, 247c), as our cognitive faculty, that is; and the desire part is described as what pulls us toward the thing desired (Phaedrus, 254a). This division is still Hume’s: reason is “the discovery of truth or falshood” (1978, 458), whereas by desire we “are carry’d” to embrace what will give us satisfaction (1978, 414). Yet in contrast to Hume Plato has reason also determine, in accordance with what it sees, the path the whole person takes. Thus reason is said to be at the helm of the soul (Phaedrus, 247c), to be the charioteer governing the horses of good and bad desire (Phaedrus, 253c-254e), to resist desire’s demands (Republic, 439c). Plato, then, ascribes to reason the two achievements that Ben needs to go to the pool by bike. Reason sees what is, just as Ben realizes that taking the bike is the best way to go, and reason directs one’s steps in accordance with what it sees, just as Ben actually gets out his bike and goes. So if Plato’s account stands up, the opening question is answered. Why does Ben go to the pool by bike? Because thanks to his reason he sees that this is the best way to come to be swimming, as he desires, and thanks to his reason again he actually takes the course which he judges best.

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Plato’s account does not stand up, though. He just assumes that it is proper or natural for that part which gains insight also to be master over what the person does (Republic, 441e) and, if necessary, to enforce its superiority over desire by violent means (Phaedrus, 254e); and while this idea contributed to a tradition of people controlling, shaping and often injuring themselves in the name of higher ideals, the real trouble with it is that it is unintelligible. For what could reason’s being master over what the person does amount to, if reason is what gains insight, if it is the discovery of truth or falsehood? It does not matter whether reason sees “beauty and moderation on their holy ground” as in Plato (Phaedrus, 254b) or realizes, more modestly, that taking the bike is the best way to go to the pool. The problem is that it is not clear how seeing one thing or the other can be guiding. The same holds for the violence celebrated in Phaedrus (254e). This is repulsive, yes, in its opening the path to beating people up for the sake of virtue, but actually it does not even make sense. Not even metaphorically can reason pull desire’s bridle. Plato may be understood here as trying to improve on Smith’s “amalgams of belief and desire”. Yes, they do not mix, Plato says, so let reason instead pull or beat desire into submission. The trouble is, they do not tussle either. Perhaps it will be objected that it cannot be so absurd to say that the same reason both sees and guides. After all normal people do both these things too. – They do, but to give reason their abilities would mean to tell a homunculus story and thus go in a circle. Rationalists claim to understand what people do by appeal to reason, they must not then explain reason by appeal to what people do. Plato‘s idea of a reason which both sees and guides is probably at bottom a political doctrine, applying to the soul the view that those who know about things because they had a good education are best equipped to govern the whole city. So the well-known image of Republic (368d-e) needs turning around. The city is not the soul writ large, but the soul in Plato is shaped after a political vision, that of an aristocracy of wisdom. 7. Reasons. Why care about Plato, long dead? Because his thoughts are alive. Here is T.M. Scanlon desiring to drink. First, there is the unpleasant sensation of dryness in my mouth and throat. Also, there is the thought that a cool drink would relieve this sensation and, in general, feel good. I take this consideration, that drinking would feel good, to count in favor of drinking, and I am on the lookout for some cool drink. […] The present dryness in my throat, and the fact that this condition is not about to go away on its own, give me reason to believe that a drink of water in the near future will give this particular pleasure. But the motivational work seems to be done by my taking this future pleasure to count in favor of drinking (1998, 38).

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So if he drinks, it will be because he takes the pleasure that drinking is likely to provide to count in favour of drinking. Given that ‘counting in favour of’ translates ‘being a reason for’ (Scanlon 1998, 17), this is to say that he drinks because he thinks that the pleasure to be gained from drinking is a reason to drink. Simply, he drinks because he sees reason to. This would help with Ben’s case as well. Desire, as just argued against Hume, does not transfer up and down the causal chains from the object originally desired, but the quality of there being, or being thought to be, reason for doing something may well so transfer, at least other things being equal. That is to say, if Ben desires to swim and thus, according to Scanlon, takes the pleasure that swimming is likely to give him to be a reason for swimming, then it is also plausible to say that he takes that pleasure to be a reason for getting out his bike and riding to the pool, given that this is in his view the best way to come to be swimming. So we have an answer to the original question: Ben goes to the pool by bike because he sees reason to do so, and that is because he sees reason to swim, which in turn is because swimming is likely to give him pleasure. In fact, we do not understand Ben’s going to the pool by bike on being told that he sees reason to. Yes, swimming is likely to be fun, and so there is reason for him to swim as well as, other things being equal, reason to do what leads to his swimming, and he sees these reasons. Still, why doesn’t he leave it at seeing them? Actually going seems to be additional, something of which we do not yet see why he does it. – ‘But actually going is not additional, it is just what is called for by what he sees!’ – No, what he sees does not call for anything. What he sees is just: this counts in favour of, or is a reason for, that. This, however, is merely so, no call coming forth. A painting of one who calls does not call either. If we take Scanlon, contrary to what his text says, to be drinking because there is reason to, not because he sees such reason, and similarly for Ben, the difficulty remains. There are the reasons, the pleasures that drinking and swimming will probably bring, and they do count, in favour of drinking and of going by bike to the pool – but count is all they do, and people can with respect to them only register that they count. What then one goes on to do seems unrelated to what one thus recognized. In fact, Scanlon may have insisted on his drinking because he sees reason to, and not just because there is reason to, in order to give reasons right from the start a grip on the agent, or the agent’s mind. If that was his intention, he did not succeed, though. Whether there merely is reason or people have to see it, the reason remains something out there, something to be stared at. Agents as such do not get addressed. This is the problem of seeing and guiding that arose with respect to Plato already. There it was not clear why that in us which sees how things stand should also be what directs our steps. Here it is not clear why seeing that

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there is reason to do something should lead one to do it, rather than to say, Yes, that is so, this is a reason for doing that, and walk away. In fact, the Platonic influence may even hinder our seeing the problem. Used to a Platonic reason which both sees and directs, we help ourselves to similar devices and maintain with Scanlon that ‘the motivational work’ is done by one’s taking something to be a reason for doing something – whereas the difficulty is precisely to understand how one’s taking something to be a reason, and also something’s being a reason, could do any motivational work. 8. Goals. Ben does not go to the pool by bike because he desires to do so, for he doesn’t. Ben does not go to the pool by bike because he sees reason to do so, for though he sees such reason, it is not clear why therefore he should be going. So the original question is still open. Ordinarily, though, we take ourselves to make intelligible doings like Ben’s. We take ourselves to be saying why he goes. We use expressions like these: Ben goes to the pool by bike in order to have a swim, or so as to have a swim, or for the sake of swimming, or simply, to have a swim. To be sure, it is not clear what is actually conveyed by these phrases, and so it is not clear whether in using them we actually succeed in saying why he goes, and if so, how we do. Still, as we are normally confident that we do, it is worth determining what we say with such statements. The quoted expressions are commonly understood teleologically, i. e. as relating the activity specified on the left of the phrase to a goal of the activity specified on the right. Goal-talk itself, however, needs explaining: what is it for something to be a goal, and how is it that indicating the goal of one’s doing something is a way to say why one does it? Classically, being a goal was understood as being something towards which other things are directed, such directedness being a character of the things in themselves, a god who imposes directions on things only being added later. At present, goals are usually understood in terms of human intentions: something is the goal of what one does if one does it with the intention, or equivalently, if in doing it one has the intention, to bring about that thing. On this understanding, to say that Ben is going to the pool by bike in order to have a swim is to say that he takes his bike ride with the intention of having a swim, or that his intention in taking the bike ride is to have a swim (Wilson 1989, chap. 8). However, it is not clear what the relation between Ben and his bike ride is that is indicated by saying that he goes by bike to the pool with the intention of swimming. The difficulty is not only to see what sort of achievement the intention itself is. The main problem lies in understanding how this achievement is tied in with what Ben actually does, riding his bike. ‘With’, in ‘going with the in-

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tention’, suggests an accompaniment: along with pushing the pedals Ben also does some intending. That cannot be what is meant, though. The goal-directedness of what he is doing itself is not captured by some other event merely accompanying it. ‘In’, as in ‘his intention in going’, might seem to do better in this respect, but what it positively says remains obscure: in what sense is Ben’s intention to have a swim supposed to be ‘in’ his bike ride? Recourse to human intentions, then, does not really help in clarifying goaltalk. Thus George Wilson, among contemporary writers the foremost advocate of teleology in action explanation, in the end understands intention in action as a special case of a goal-directedness not founded on the intentions of human, or indeed sentient, beings (1989, 208, 213). Essentially, this is to return to the classical understanding of goals deriving from Aristotle. It is doubtful, however, that this idea, of something being in itself directed towards something, in contrast to having been so directed by somebody, makes sense. It is doubtful, that is, that we understand something’s ‘being towards’ something. What we understand, it seems, is just things being thus and so. 9. Sakes. Actually, ‘for the sake of’ is not restricted to indicating a goal. When ‘for old time’s sake’ you have a drink with a former classmate, old time is in no way the drink’s purpose, and when you are asked to give generously ‘for pity’s sake’, you are invited to give out of pity or in a spirit of pity, but not towards pity, whatever that could mean. Similarly, when W.D. Ross translates Aristotle as saying that virtuous actions are “done for the sake of the noble” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1120 a 23 – 24; 1941: 985), this is not to say that generous giving, which is what Aristotle is talking about in that passage as well, has the noble as its purpose, again: whatever that could mean. It is to say that for one who has the virtue in question the point of generous giving is its being a noble thing to do, rather than, say, the enhanced reputation it may bring. Christine Korsgaard argued therefore that Aristotle’s describing the virtuous as acting for the sake of the noble comes basically to the same thing as Kant’s insisting that only what is done from duty has moral worth (1996, 203 – 236), and surely ‘from duty’ in Kant does not specify the goal of the action. True, ‘in order to’, in contrast to ‘for the sake of’, is pretty much restricted to teleological contexts; and since to have a swim is indeed the purpose of Ben’s bike ride, we can indicate why he goes by saying that he goes in order to swim, which leaves us in the teleological quandary. The fact, however, that to indicate why he goes we also use expressions applicable both in teleological and in other contexts invites the thought that it is not specifically thanks to referring to the purpose of his ride that we come to understand it, but more generally thanks to referring to something or other about his ride, the ride’s purpose only being one such thing that appears

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prominent in the present case. And to see what these things are, it will help to take a closer look at expressions we use in saying why somebody did something that are not restricted to teleological contexts, as for instance ‘for the sake of’. Briefly and incorrectly, then, what are sakes? Briefly and misleadingly, they are causes. Unmisleadingly, they are causes, not in the sense of what made the action in question happen, but in the sense of that because of which, that is to say, by cause of which, or to speak Latin, ‘causā’ of which, as in ‘honoris causa’, the thing was done. ‘Because’ is indeed originally ‘by cause’, this translates an Old French ‘par cause’, which derives from Latin ‘causa’, meaning basically a matter brought to court. The idea here seems to be that in figuring out why someone did such and such we are doing something akin to a forensic investigation. Now a matter brought to court is called ‘Sache’ in German, and that is ‘sake’ in English. Norse, Danish and Swedish went for another rendering of ‘causa’, by ‘skyld’ and ‘skull’, the German ‘Schuld’, i. e. guilt (Rønnow-Rasmussen 2011, 8 f.; see also 2011b, chap. 5: For Someone’s Sake), the underlying idea clearly being the same as with ‘sake’. German itself, except where it uses ‘Ursache’, does not employ a construction directly or indirectly following ‘causa’, but mostly uses prepositional constructions to indicate why something was done, either ‘für’ (‘Für Geld macht der alles’), which with ‘for’ in place of ‘für’ goes straight into English, or ‘um’, often expanded to ‘um … willen’ or ‘um zu’, which did not make it into English. All these expressions, then, tell us why something was done by indicating its cause in the sense of ‘causa’. They do so either by means of a word itself descending from ‘causa’, like ‘because’, or by means of a word translating ‘causa’, like ‘sake’ or ‘skull’, or by means of a prepositional construction directly relating the thing done to its ‘causa’, without the latter being called so, as in ‘For money he does anything’. Because of the availability of the direct prepositional construction, the expressions ‘for the sake of’ and ‘because of’ are often dispensable. What he does for the sake of, or because of, money, he also simply does for money. And what sorts of things can be causes of one’s doing something, causes again in the sense of ‘causa’, i. e. of ‘that because of which’ or ‘that for the sake of which’? – Anything about the action can be such a cause. It only depends on the particular case what is. To be sure, we have our ways, and so it is unlikely that Ben goes to the pool by bike because of its being the 76th time in his life that he does rather than because of its getting him to have a swim, but he might. After all, having a drink for old time’s sake is not too far away from doing it because of its being the 76th time that one does. And if it is a particularly noble, or a particularly holy thing, to go to the pool by bike, he might do it therefore. He might do it for the sake of anything about the action.

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In fact he does it for the sake of swimming. As getting him to be swimming is just one of the bike ride’s various features for the sake of which he might undertake it, no special problem about the teleological character of this statement arises. The statement tells us why he goes, but not by indicating that he aims, or his bike ride is aimed, at his swimming, but just by indicating that the bike ride is going to get him to the pool, or is likely to do so, and that it is because of this feature of the ride that he goes. True, Ben’s trip might in fact end, not at the pool, but somewhere in the ditch. If so, he still will have gone for the sake of arriving at the pool, that being the end-state of his ride he anticipated, in this case wrongly. Once again (see sect. 4 above), were he not to anticipate his ride’s taking him to the pool, he would not go, but that does not make his belief that it will a part of why he goes. It is the pool-conduciveness of the ride that he is going in for, not his belief that it is pool-conducive. Should the ride instead turn out to be ditch-conducive, he will have pursued what is not there – not an uncommon fate after all. How do we find out which among the indefinite number of things for the sake of which he might be going is the one for the sake of which he actually goes? – Ask the historians, they are good at figuring out such things. Indeed we are good at that, having each done a lifetime of historical studies. Due to this experience we now can tell why people do what they do; within limits obviously. – And what makes it the case that Ben is going to the pool by bike for the sake of having a swim rather than for the sake of something else about his ride? – This question is difficult to understand. Either it means: How come that he does this for the sake of that? and so understood the question can be answered by producing biographical material showing the genesis of things’ being so linked in his life that he takes bike rides for swimming’s sake and not for the sake of the number they bear in the list of his bike rides. Or it is the same question as the earlier one, namely, how we find out that he does this for the sake of that, and then the answer is as before, by the ordinary means of historical study. However, those who ask: What makes it the case? usually insist that they do not mean either: How come? or: How do we know? Yet what they do mean, if neither of these, is obscure. To illustrate the difficulty. Davidson is commonly credited with, and praised for, an argument he did not himself spell out, so that writers following him offer their own reformulation. Here is Michael Smith’s: What is the feature that makes the difference between the case in which an agent φs and has a reason to φ and the case in which she φs because she has reason to φ? The only illuminating answer available […] is that the reasons in the second case – the case in which

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the reason explains the action – cause her φ-ing. (1994, 102; Smith refers in this passage to Davidson 1980, 8 – 11)

The obscurity mentioned in the last paragraph returns here in the phrase ‘the feature that makes the difference’. It is agreed on all sides that the case of one who merely does something while having a reason to do it differs from the case of one who does it for the reason he has to do it. Yet what could it be for a further feature to make that difference? The difference after all is fully laid out in the description just given. What more are we supposed to be asking for? That indicating the cause is the only illuminating answer available does not impress those of us who fail to see what the question is. Compare: ‘She is already an inch taller than her mother.’ – ‘But what is the feature that makes this difference?’ – ‘I don’t understand. Didn’t I just tell you?’ The idea seems to be that the difference between merely doing something while having a reason to do it and doing it for that reason is not good enough on its own, but must be founded on some other difference, whereas being an inch taller than somebody else is fine as it stands. One wonders why this should be so. It might be replied that the idea of doing something for a reason, as opposed to merely doing it while having that reason, is dubious, just as the idea of something’s being towards something was, and as the idea of being an inch taller than somebody is not. So if the idea of doing something for a reason is to be accepted in reasonable thought and speech, it needs to be based on some other idea that is not dubious, whereas being an inch taller is acceptable right away. This, however, seems just an invidious distinction. There is nothing dubious about the idea of doing something for a reason as opposed to merely doing it while having that reason. People draw this difference without any difficulty, as when they insist that they did some noble thing without regard to the monetary gain it might bring them. Sure enough, they may be dishonest in so insisting, but that does not cast doubt on the difference they employ. Indeed, to take somebody to be dishonest in this way is to employ that difference once again. The idea of something being towards something, by contrast, is indeed dubious. It seems at least that we can adequately describe what is going on without referring to anything towards which these goings on are directed. It seems, that is, that any relation of being towards is dispensable. True, argument might show that it is not, but the issue now is whether on the face of it doing something for a reason in contrast to merely doing it while having that reason is in the same league as something’s being towards something, and that does not seem to be the case.

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10. Answer. Ben goes to the pool to have a swim, and he takes the bike for convenience. This answers the question why he goes, fully and without relying on some other, allegedly primary answer. It succeeds by specifying a feature of Ben’s trip attending to which the questioner can be expected to understand Ben’s doing what he does. ‘Look where the bike ride is going to leave me’, Ben might say. ‘Right at the pool! That’s why!’ If the question is about his taking the bike in particular, he will point to the advantages of doing so, as compared to walking and driving. And were he to say that he goes ‘for the sake of the noble’, he would contend that riding a bicycle to the pool is a noble thing to do, this being why he does it. In this case, though, he would be mistaken, as there really is nothing noble about riding a bicycle to the pool, and so he would in fact not have succeeded in telling us why he does. What we could figure out, knowing more about him, is only how it got into his head that there is something noble about cycling. Then we would understand, not his going by bike to the pool, which on this story is as unintelligible as before. We would understand his becoming one who goes by bike to the pool, thinking that this is a noble thing to do. Take a serious case: Otto joins the Wehrmacht as a voluntary, kills and gets killed in World War II, ‘for the sake of the noble’, as his diary says. Do we understand what he did? No. Diary and all, it makes no sense. He killed and died for nothing – and ‘for nothing’ is not an answer to the question why he did it. What we may come to see, given suitable evidence, is only how he became one to think, do and suffer what he did. To return to Ben: Many other expressions, like ‘for the sake of’, ‘because of’, ‘in order to’, ‘so as to’, can be used, with suitable adjustments, to give essentially the same answer as that in the first line of the last paragraph, to the question why he goes to the pool by bike. Also, he can be said to do so for a reason, the reason being the fact that the bike ride is likely to get him to be swimming. None of these expressions has a privilege. This is worth emphasizing especially with regard to ‘doing something for a reason’, since this expression has acquired canonical status in the literature. Actually, all these expressions, and also the simple ‘to’ and ‘for’, serve to indicate something about the action or about its surroundings on considering which the questioner should come to understand it. There is no need to press into the reason mould all the various things to which we draw the attention of those who want to know why someone did something.⁵ We just tell them, using any one of these expressions, what the point of the action is, point as in ‘point of a joke’: the thing on recognizing which one should come to understand, the joke or the action.

 This is what I failed to see in Bittner 2001.

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Yes, this is to return to an essentially Rylean view that Davidson already tried to rebut fifty years ago, the view that to explain an action is to redescribe it and perhaps to place it in a broader context. Actually, though, Davidson didn’t claim that redescription and placing in context do not succeed in telling us why someone did something. He admitted that they do. He objected rather that this is not sufficient to let us “understand the sort of explanation involved” (1963, 692). This is an odd objection, though, for we know that these are reason explanations, indicating for the sake of what (or because of what etc.) something was done. What Davidson actually had in mind might rather be this: while we know which sort of explanation we are talking about, we do not understand it in the sense of knowing what the basis of these explanations is. Once again, though, why does there have to be some other basis? We are agreed that these explanations, reason explanations, actually explain. Why must this be due to some other relation holding between what explains and what is explained? Why should not ride and swim all on their own stand in an explanatory relation? Most likely, Davidson is simply assuming that explanation is basically causal, for with this assumption his objection makes perfect sense: Yes, explanations by redescription and placing in context do explain, they just do not let us understand the sort of explanation involved, meaning that they do not show us the causally determining factors. Yet if that is Davidson‘s assumption, it is not only doubtful itself, it also begs the decisive question against Ryle and his adherents. 11. Reason viewing. What it takes on Ben’s part to go to the pool by bike for the reason indicated, beyond things like the ability to cycle, is the ability to view his bike ride as likely to get him to be swimming. Were he to go for the sake of its being the 76th time that he does, he would have to be able to view the ride as the 76th. In either case he may be mistaken. It may in fact be only the 75th time that he goes, or his bike may be in such a state that its getting him to the pool is not at all probable. Still, that is what the world looks like to him: it appears to offer him a pool-conducive, or a 76th, bike ride; and he could not go for the sake of either without things so appearing. Not that their so appearing is part of what causes him to go. What causes him to go we had better leave to physiologists to determine. Rather, he will not count as going for the sake of something if that is not in some way present to him. Thus, if reason is according to Hume “the discovery of truth or falshood” (1978, 458), and if this means that through reasoning one comes to have true or false views of things, then it takes such reason on Ben’s part to be going to the pool for the sake of swimming or of anything else. And only such reason: it does not take a reason that orders him to go to the pool by bike, on the grounds of his desiring to have a swim and going by bike

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appearing the best means thereto. His cycling to the pool for the reason indicated requires nothing more of his reason than that it apprise him of that path. A reason issuing hypothetical imperatives (as reason does according to Immanuel Kant 1785, AA IV 414; see also Hill 1973, 429 – 450) is unnecessary. People do not have to be called upon to take what is, or appears to them, the best way towards what they desire. Nor are they by reason required either to do so or to stop desiring it (Broome 1999, 398 – 419). Ben gets out his bike just in view of the poolconduciveness of the ride. This being what the world seems to offer, he takes off. To start out on some course given what the world seems to offer, is a thing of which animals are capable as well. Thus it may be controversial to give “the discovery of truth or falshood” in the sense explained, the name ‘reason’, since it can be found in creatures commonly deemed to lack reason. Surely animals have views of what is going on around them and take steps accordingly, and they are also sometimes mistaken in their views and so misact. Whether or not we call reason their having views of things and adjusting their steps – what matters is that Ben’s feat in going to the pool by bike to have a swim does not in principle put him in a different class from the animals. In cycling he may beat all animal kingdom, but in doing something for the sake of something he does not. Hector running to catch the stick I threw is his equal. Not only does it not take on Ben’s part a reason that demands his going to the pool by bike, given his desire to swim and going by bike appearing the most convenient way to get to the pool. As argued earlier, we must not give him more than a reason by which he forms views on what paths the world offers. A reason ordering him to take what appears to be the best of these paths, a reason proffering dictates or, less harshly, guiding him or giving him recommendations⁶, is just another version of Plato’s reason supposed both to see the truth and pull the bridle, the impossible task. Properly speaking, there is no practical reason, a reason, that is, which not only finds out about things that happen to have practical import⁷, but which calls for this or that to be done. Reason just takes pictures. Seeing a path to the pool shown on one of them, a path that is not boring or troublesome, Ben takes it, in that respect no different from Hector who discovered on the pictures supplied by his reason, be it called so, a lovely path towards catching my stick and so started to run. No doubt the two use different cameras. Lots of things escape Hector that Ben registers and that are important to him, as well

 Schulte 2010, 62 f. takes rationality to recommend rather than demand courses of action.  This weak sense is the one ridiculed in G.E.M. Anscombe’s example of the mince-pie syllogism (Anscombe 1957, § 33).

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as conversely, and little wonder. They do not differ in the kind of intellectual outfit they employ. 12. Attractions. What it takes on Ben’s part to go to the pool for a swim is, reason-wise, just this modest, picture-taking reason, in contrast to a practical one that guides or requires action. Yet it does take more on his part to go for a swim, not in the reason department, though, nor for that matter in the cycling department or the like. A view of a path to the pool is, as noted earlier, merely a thing to stare at. Actually to go there takes in addition, in his case, a desire to swim. Not that this desire is that, or part of that, because of which he goes, i. e. is a reason or part of one. The swim is what he goes for, not the desire to swim. So we are not back with a desire/belief account of reasons à la Davidson. Still, to get going for a swim he needs to be after it, i. e. to desire it. So the question now is what it is to be a desirer, one who does not just look at the album of things he could do, but, eager to swim, actually takes off for the pool. The literature offers a number of suggestions. One is simply that desirers are those disposed to do what to them appears likely to bring about the desired thing (Stalnaker 1984, 15; see also Smith 1994, sect. 4.6). In fact, this is not how we ordinarily understand desire. People may certainly desire something and yet not be disposed to take what they consider suitable steps towards getting it, for instance when they see moral reasons against doing so. People may be disposed as well to take steps they consider suitable for getting something without desiring it, as when they act from sheer habit. Also, we say that very young children desire to be fed, but they are not disposed to take what in their view are suitable steps towards getting fed, because they have no views on the matter at all. To be sure, they cry, but at an early stage they do not employ crying for the sake of getting fed. Finally, we normally know our own desires without having observed ourselves. This would be strange, if desires were dispositions. More promising appears the suggestion that Christoph Fehige developed, taking up a broad tradition of psychological and philosophical theory. For him, a desirer is one who enjoys the thought of things being as desired, or would enjoy this thought, were he to have it (Fehige 2004a, chap. 4; see also Fehige 2004b, col. 1077– 1085). This proposal, unlike the dispositional theory, has no problems with desirers who regularly omit to do what in their own view will get them what they desire, for though they enjoy the thought of having it, they may no less see reason against pursuing it. Still, it seems that this proposal goes too far in severing desire from appropriate action. If Ben just enjoys, or is such that he would enjoy, the thought of his swimming, it is hard to see why he takes the trouble of getting out his bike. Enjoy his thoughts he can in his study. Desire

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should be ‘for’, not just ‘of’ something. It should be, in a sense different from the technical Fregean one, unsaturated, and on the present account it is not. Finally, desires are commonly taken in contemporary philosophy as propositional attitudes, i.e. as attitudes one has toward propositions (see for instance Fodor 1987, 17).⁸ Thus one may have the attitude of belief toward the proposition that Paris is the capital of France and the attitude of hope toward the proposition that it will rain tonight. Ben, accordingly, would be said to have the attitude of desire toward the proposition that he is swimming. However, as it stands this doctrine seems absurd, since Ben desires a swim, or to be swimming, and would be a fool to desire a proposition. The point is not that most desirers have not heard of propositions. Philosophers might have to enlighten people as to what their desires are really directed at. The point is that propositions are abstract entities, and that is not what Ben is after. He desires a swim, the real thing, and a proposition to the effect that he is swimming will not satisfy him. Neither will the mental representation of this proposition that Fodor recommends to insert between him and the proposition (1981, 200 – 202), and for the same reason: representations of propositions are as little fun as the propositions themselves. To avoid the absurdity of people lusting for propositions a distinction was introduced between an objectual use of verbs like ‘to desire’, as when one is said to desire that woman, and a clausal use, as when one is said to desire to be sleeping with her. In this way Ben, desiring to swim, could be said to be related to the proposition that he is swimming, not in the manner of desiring it, objectually, but in the manner of the proposition being the content of his desire, clausally (Künne 2014, sect. 8.7; Moltmann 2003, 77– 118). The trouble with this idea is just that it is not clear what ‘content’ means here. A content had better be something contained, at least figuratively, in that whose content it is, but there seems to be no way to make sense of Ben’s desire containing the proposition that he is swimming. It would seem, then, that the conception of desires as propositional attitudes is not viable (Ben-Yami 1997, 84– 89). What is lacking in all these accounts, desires as dispositions, as thought-enjoyments, as propositional attitudes, is that element of desire’s being for something. They make desire unworldly, a mere mental state, to use the revealing standard expression, rather than a kind of being involved with things. One can all by oneself be disposed to do such and such under such circumstances, or enjoy certain thoughts, or have attitudes toward certain propositions or their mental representatives, but to desire is to respond to something crossing

 Talk of propositional attitudes seems to go back to Bertrand Russell 1940, 65, 167.

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one’s way. A desired swim is experienced as being attractive, not as a neutral object that then happens to figure in the desirer’s dispositions or to be referred to in thoughts or propositions present to the desirer’s mind. To desire something it is not enough to put a term denoting it into one’s desire folder. Thus what it takes on Ben’s part to desire to swim and so to get out his bike and go is receptivity for swimming’s attraction. Without the moralistic connotation, it takes seducibility. He must be one to fall for things encountered. It is in this sense that desirers are worldly creatures: they respond to attractive things met. And then perhaps not only to things attractive, and the story can be generalized. Ben in particular desires to swim, but how for instance about running away from danger? The tradition was usually careful to mention aversion alongside desire (see for instance Hobbes 1651, chap. 6, §2), not as a species of it, thus suggesting that one who is running away from something is properly understood not as heading towards being without it, but as repelled from it. Whether this suggestion is correct or not, it invites the thought that it may be, not just desire as in Ben’s case, or even desire plus aversion, but a whole range of affects that things touch in us, attractive, repulsive, awe-inspiring, funny as they are, and many other things besides. Whether this variety can be derived from a small number of basic affects, as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza expected, is not the present concern. The important point for now is to understand agents as not just desirous, but in lots of different ways affected creatures; and to see in their affections not just mental events, but their being touched by things. The story of what it takes for agency, then, would become more generally one of creatures seeing things thanks to their reason and affected by what they see. 13. Medium. It may be objected that to think of agents as essentially affected by what they encounter is to make them passive, which as agents they cannot be. However, the division of what goes on with a creature into the part where it is active and another where it is passive is not complete. Take being and becoming: is being tall (treating states, like being tall, as events, with C.D. Broad 1923, 54 f.) and growing old something one does or something one is done to? Surely neither. (Age is not inflicted on you. You would have to be timeless in yourself, as you are not, for only to undergo ageing.) So there are things going on with people with respect to which they are neither active nor passive; and the concern, shared in various philosophical quarters, to conceive of human beings as essentially active may be merely due to the linguistic accident that both Romance and Germanic languages know merely two genera verbi, which makes it seem that wherever one is not active, one is passive, hence a puppet, which definitely we are not. To resist this reasoning it helps to keep in mind that ancient Greek has a third genus verbi beside active and passive, called medium, with the

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word for becoming precisely run in this third kind of conjugation. (Oddly, being seems to be always understood as active.) Some modern languages, not English, use reflexive constructions for medium effect: ‘sich täuschen’ and ‘se tromper’, for instance, are normally, i. e. when there is no suggestion of self-deception, active only in grammar, not in sense. (The fake passive of ‘being mistaken’ may serve a similar purpose in English.) Granted, it might be replied, people are involved in events with respect to which they are neither active nor passive, being and becoming among them. Still, should not their actions be, not among these, but among the events with respect to which they are active? The very words suggest it. – The very words mislead. Distinguish the question whether somebody, in doing what he does, is active, from the question whether in coming to do what he does he is active; the question, that is, whether an action involves, and the question whether it is owed to, the agent’s being active. Let us suppose the answer to the first question is always Yes, even though as a matter of fact this is doubtful. After all, waiting for someone is what one may be doing at a certain time, and yet one does not seem to be active then. Never mind. Let us once again take Ben as exemplary who is certainly active in pushing his pedals. The point is, the answer to the second question need not therefore be Yes as well. Active in what one does, one need not therefore be active in coming to do what one does. One may grow into one’s actions, the difference to growing old only lying in the latter’s not depending on special conditions: people become riders to the pool on being allured by a swim, but they grow old come what may, categorically, one might say. Thus Ben did not choose his going to the pool by bike, or determined himself to go. He did not set himself like a toy train on the tracks towards the pool. Such actions behind the action are only invented to save his being active with respect to his action, but he isn’t. With a swim beckoning he just became one to go to the pool by bike. To repeat, not making himself go, he is not therefore made to go by something else, by the prospect of a swim, say. With respect to his trip he is neither active nor passive, but medium: in view of a lovely swim to be had and of the advantages of going to the pool by bike he grew into one to get out his bike and go. Thus he showed a desirer’s reason: reason in that it was in view of things being so that he came to be going, a desirer’s reason in that in doing so he was attracted by something viewed.⁹

 Earlier versions of the present text received much constructive criticism from audiences in Bielefeld, Saarbrücken and Göttingen. For helpful suggestions I am also grateful to Andreas Dorschel, Jens Schnitker and in particular to Christoph Fehige.

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References Anscombe, Gertrude E. M., 1957: Intention, Oxford: Blackwell. Aristotle, 1941: Nicomachean Ethics. In: Richard Peter McKeon (ed.), The basic works of Aristotle, New York: Random House. Ben-Yami, Hanoch, 1997: “Against characterizing mental states as propositional attitudes”. In: Philosophical Quarterly 47, 84 – 89. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2001: Doing things for reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broad, C. D., 1923: Scientific thought, London, New York: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co; Harcourt, Brace, & Co. Broome, John, 1999: “Normative requirements”. In: Ratio 12, 398 – 419. Davidson, Donald, 1963: “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”. In: The Journal of Philosophy 60, 685 – 700. Fehige, Christoph, 2004a: Soll ich?, Stuttgart: Reclam. Fehige, Christoph, 2004b: “Wunsch I”. In: Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, Gottfried Gabriel (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Basel: Schwabe, 1077 – 1085. Fodor, Jerry A., 1981: “Propositional attitudes”. In: Jerry A. Fodor, Representations. Philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Fodor, Jerry A., 1987: Psychosemantics. The problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Freeman, Samuel Richard / Kumar, Rahul / Wallace, R. Jay (eds.), 2011: Reasons and recognition. Essays on the philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, Thomas (1973): “The hypothetical imperative”. In: The Philosophical Review 82, 429 – 450. Hobbes, Thomas, 1651: Leviathan, or the matter, forme and power of a commonwealth ecclesiasticall and civil, London: Crooke. Hume, David, 1978: A treatise of human nature. Peter Harold Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel, 1785: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Riga: Hatknoch. Korsgaard, Christine, 1996: “From duty and for the sake of the noble: Kant and Aristotle on morally good action”. In: Stephen Engstrom, Jennifer Whiting (eds.), Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics. Rethinking happiness and duty, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Künne, Wolfgang, 2014: “Truth without truths? ‘Propositional attitudes’ without propositions? Meaning without meanings?”. In: Kevin Mulligan, Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Tomasz Placek, Jan Woleński (eds.), The history and philosophy of Polish logic. Essays in honour of Jan Woleński. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Millgram, Elijah, 1995: “Was Hume a Humean?”. In: Hume Studies 21, 75 – 94. Moltmann, Friederike, 2003: “Propositional attitudes without propositions”. In: Synthese 135, 77 – 118. Nagel, Thomas, 1970: The possibility of altruism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plato, 1997: Phaedrus. In: John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson (eds.), Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Plato, 1997: Republic. In: John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson (eds.), Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

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Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni, 2011a: “For Kevin’s sake”. In: Anne Reboul, Kevin Mulligan (eds.), Philosophical papers dedicated to Kevin Mulligan, Geneva: Université de Genève, Faculté des Lettres. Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni, 2011b: Personal value, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, Bertrand, 1940: An inquiry into meaning and truth, London: G. Allen and Unwin Ltd. Ryle, Gilbert, 1949: The concept of mind, London: Hutchinson. Scanlon, Thomas M., 1998: What we owe to each other, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Schueler, G. F., 1995: Desire. Its role in practical reason and the explanation of action, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Schulte, Peter, 2010: Zwecke und Mittel in einer natürlichen Welt. Instrumentelle Rationalität als Problem für den Naturalismus?, Paderborn: Mentis. Smith, Michael, 1994: The moral problem, Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Michael, 2011: “Scanlon on desire and the explanation of action”. In: R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, Samuel Freeman (eds.), Reasons and recognition. Essays on the philosophy of T.M. Scanlon, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stalnaker, Robert C., 1984: Inquiry, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wilson, George M., 1989: The intentionality of human action, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Ansgar Beckermann

Explaining Actions by Reasons 1. About 50 years ago there was an intense debate concerning the question whether explanations by reasons are causal explanations or explanations of a quite different kind. Many participants in this debate followed Davidson in assuming that in explanations by reasons actions are explained by pairs of beliefs and desires. And indeed, this view fits rather well with a whole range of examples. Suppose, e. g., that we ask, ‘Why did Jerome stick a large number of needles into a small rag doll?’ The following answer may be perfectly appropriate: Because he was convinced that, by sticking needles into the doll, he would inflict real harm on Robert, who was represented by the doll, and because he was moreover convinced that his wife had cheated on him with Robert. This explanation evidently accounts for Jerome’s action by appeal to a belief and a desire: the desire to take revenge on Robert, and the belief that real harm would be inflicted on Robert by sticking needles into the doll. In many cases, this is the only appropriate (or even the only possible) explanation. There are no extra-mental facts that would explain Jerome’s strange behavior. This is true especially if Jerome’s wife did not even cheat on him, and Jerome merely believes that she did. Moreover, it seems perfectly appropriate to regard Jerome’s desire for vengeance and his belief about Robert as reasons for his actions. For these mental states are certainly acceptable answers to the question, ‘What were the reasons for Jerome’s action?’ Nevertheless, this so-called psychologism with respect to reasons has been heavily criticized in recent years. According to Jonathan Dancy, for instance, reasons are not mental states but rather facts in the outside (extra-mental) world.¹ It seems to me that this change of view is, above all, due to the fact that there are contexts in which we take reasons to be something altogether different from the mental states that we appeal to in explaining Jerome’s behavior. First of all, reasons are what we look for in contexts of deliberation – if we want to know

 Cf. also Gründe und Ursachen (Beckermann 1977). In Chapter 8 of this book I argued that one has to distinguish between reasons and the having of reasons. Reasons are facts that speak in favor of having a certain belief (i. e., in favor of the truth of the belief) or of performing a certain action. The having of a reason, by contrast, consists in having certain desires and in believing certain states of affairs to obtain that, were they to obtain, would, given the desires, speak in favor of an action. Reasons, I claimed, justify an action, but they do not explain it, while the having of a reason may explain an action, but, as such, does not speak in favor of that action. In this paper I am going to modify this earlier view.

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whether we should believe p or whether we should do A rather than B. Suppose I wonder whether NASA has really put men on the Moon in 1969 or whether, instead, this whole event has merely been staged by NASA and the US government. I will then be interested in reasons that support either the first or the second hypothesis. And these reasons are not mental states, but facts of the outside world: either facts that support the view that NASA did put men on the Moon in 1969, or facts that support the view that everything was just a big show. Similarly, when I wonder whether I should invest my savings in government bonds or rather in stocks, I will not be primarily interested in mental states but rather in whatever circumstances support the hypothesis that, in the coming years, I will be able to achieve greater gains by relying on stocks rather than bonds, or vice versa. A second argument against psychologism with regard to reasons stems from the fact that if an agent X, before performing action A, deliberates and then decides to do A because he thinks that E – a fact that speaks in favor of A – has the most going for it, it is perfectly appropriate to explain A by citing E as the reason that led X to perform A. Think, e. g., of the following case. Laura is on her way to a job interview that is of extreme importance for her career when, suddenly, an elder woman collapses in front of her, complaining of severe pain. Should Laura help the woman, or should she keep walking so as not to miss her appointment? Laura thinks for a while and then decides to keep walking. It is perfectly appropriate to explain her action by saying: (1) Laura keeps walking because the job interview which she would otherwise miss is of extreme importance for her career. The same holds for (2) I take an umbrella because it is raining, and (3) John tried to get out of the way because someone threw a stone at him. On the other hand, if we take reasons to be extra-mental facts that speak in favor of, for example, an action, we have to acknowledge that such reasons are not always apt to explain the actions in favor of which they speak. Dancy, therefore, takes up the distinction between normative and motivating reasons. Normative reasons (in the practical sense) are circumstances that speak in favor of performing a certain action. Motivating reasons, on the other hand, are circumstances that lead someone to perform the action in question. Normative and motivating reasons may, but need not, coincide. James Lenman, in his Stanford Encyclopedia article on ‘Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation,’ offers the following example: Lancelot is actively supporting a campaign to save the rainforest. He doesn’t really care about saving the rainforest as such, but he is enamoured of Guinevere who, he believes,

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cares about this a great deal. He hopes his campaigning will favorably impress her, something he is very keen to do as he can imagine no happier state than being her spouse. (Lenman 2011, sect. 1)

Evidently, there are normative reasons to promote the preservation of the rainforest: the fact that forests are able to store large quantities of carbon dioxide, or the fact that the disappearance of a rainforest can lead to the collapse of the local hydrologic cycle. But these are not the reasons that motivate Lancelot’s behavior. What is important for him is, rather, that his behavior will ingratiate him with Guinevere. (Let us assume for now that this assumption is not mistaken.) The fact that normative reasons can differ from motivating reasons does not mean, however, that the former constitute in Dancy’s view a different class of things, as they would if, e. g., normative reasons were extra-mental facts and motivating reasons mental states such as beliefs and desires. To the contrary, while normative reasons may differ from motivating ones, they do not need to. Rather, if E is a normative reason to perform a certain action A, then E may also be a motivating reason that leads someone to perform A (Dancy’s maxim, see Lenman 2011, sect. 6). And perhaps it is also true that, conversely, E can be a motivating reason to perform A only if E is also a normative reason to do so. Consequently, normative and motivating reasons must belong to one and the same kind of thing, viz., extra-mental facts. Rüdiger Bittner, too, has argued against the psychologistic view of reasons. For Bittner, as for Dancy, reasons are not mental states but extra-mental facts – this time facts to which agents respond by their actions. “You move your bishop to b4. There it threatens my castle on f8. Then I move my pawn to d6. It blocks your bishop’s road to my castle.” (2001, §118) Your bishop’s threatening my castle is the reason for my moving the pawn to d6 because my moving the pawn is a response to this threat. Examples abound in games: to your sharp serve I respond with a long return, you draw spades and in response I trump with a jack, and when you leave me, in dominoes, with a three, my response is to get rid of my double three in turn. Examples occur outside games. You insult me, and I respond in kind, or else I respond by walking away silently. You sell me a lemon, and I cut up your tires. The lights turn red, and I step on the brakes. You do me a favor, and I do you a favor in turn. You publish a book in philosophy with big claims and little argument, and I write a scathing review. Simply, you ask me what time it is, and I tell you. (Bittner 2001, §119)

Bittner does not, however, tell us what general feature is common to all these examples. If there arises in the world a certain state of affairs E and, a little while later, some agent X performs the action A, then what has to be the case in order to render true one or both of the following statements: ‘In performing

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A, X has responded to E’ and ‘E is the reason for X’s performing A’? The only additional information supplied by Bittner consists in the remark that explanations by reasons are historical explanations, of the kind we find in every historical account of what people did and why they did it. However, even in historical narratives, we sometimes find events and actions described in a way that makes them seem as if they simply followed one another: ‘Shortly after his wife had died, John undertook a journey to Italy.’ But sometimes the author instead presents the events and actions as standing in an explanatory relationship: ‘In consequence of this insult, Ann severed all relations with Henry.’ Where is the difference between these two cases? According to Bittner, there does not exist a “general criterion” (Bittner 2001, §123) here. He thinks that, ultimately, we have to rely on the judgment of the authors and recipients of the respective narratives. All of us have in the course of our lives listened to and recounted very many stories, and in doing so, we have acquired the – apparently unanalyzable – ability to distinguish between the two cases. Is this really a convincing answer?² Another remarkable aspect of Bittner’s theory lies in the fact that he completely ignores the normative aspect of reasons. Normative reasons – circumstances that speak against or in favor of a certain action – find almost no mention in his discussion. Or in other words: it is in Bittner’s eyes no part of the concept of a reason that reasons are (or can be) circumstances that speak against or in favor of something. This aspect of his theory is somewhat neglected in the course of his arguments. But at least he can point to the fact that we often speak of reasons even where these do in fact not speak in favor of or against a certain action. I think that the examples with which he supports this claim are rather carefully selected. Reflecting on these examples, however, one cannot but realize that they fall into two groups. The reasons that belong to the first group are indeed facts that speak in favor of certain actions. If your bishop threatens my castle, this will speak in favor of a move by which I can protect the castle. Moving my pawn to d6 is one of the moves that do the job. Even if I respond to your sharp serve with a long return, respond to your drawing spades by trumping with a jack, and respond to your leaving me with a three (in a game of dominoes) by getting rid of my double three, these actions are all rational in the relevant sense, at least if they tend to bring me nearer to my goal of winning, or at least not losing, the game. On the other hand: Would anyone really say that your name-calling is a fact that speaks in favor of my responding in kind or of my walking away silently? Or that the fact that you sold me a lemon speaks in favor of my cutting up your

 Most reviewers are skeptical, too. See Leist 2003, Pippin 2004, Rittsteiger 2005, Schueler 2004.

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tires? Or that the fact that you publish a book with big claims and little argument speaks in favor of writing a scathing review? And what about the remaining examples? Does the fact that the lights turn red speak in favor of my stepping on the brakes? Does the fact that you do me a favor speak in favor of my doing you a favor in return? Or does the fact that you ask me what time it is speak in favor of my telling you? Bittner’s ‘trick’ is to suggest the following line of argument: At least in some cases, we single out a fact as the reason why someone performed action A, although this fact does not speak in favor of doing A. In all cases in which we explain actions by reasons, these actions can be seen as – more or less appropriate – responses to the facts we cite as reasons. Therefore: a reason is a fact to which we respond by our actions, but is not necessarily a fact that speaks in favor of the action. Is this kind of argument really convincing? Who is right, Dancy or Bittner? 2. Let us pause for a moment, however, and ask first how one might even approach the question of what reasons are. How can one decide which side is correct: those who claim that reasons are desires and beliefs, or those who think that reasons are extra-mental facts that either speak in favor of performing some action, that make the agent engage in a certain kind of behavior, or to which he or she responds by acting in a certain way? Evidently the problem at hand is one of conceptual analysis or explication. What do we mean when we use the term ‘reason’? What falls into the extension of this concept, and what doesn’t? As far as I can see, there are only two options: Either we try to describe how the term ‘reason’ is in fact used in ordinary speech, i. e., we try to analyze the ordinary-language concept of reason. Or we formulate a proposal as to how the term should be used, i. e., we try to provide a Carnap-style explication of the concept of reason.³ The first option does not seem very promising, for the ordinary-language concept of reason is altogether unclear. All kinds of things are commonly referred to as ‘reasons,’ and it is not even clear how the concept of reason should be distinguished from the concept of cause. At any rate, the linguistic means of expressing reason-based and causal relationships are for the

 “The task of explication consists in transforming a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one or, rather, in replacing the first by the second. We call the given concept (or the term used for it) the explicandum, and the exact concept proposed to take the place of the first (or the term proposed for it) the explicatum. The explicandum may belong to everyday language or to a previous stage in the development of scientific language. The explicatum must be given by explicit rules for its use, for example, by a definition which incorporates it into a well-constructed system of scientific either logicomathematical or empirical concepts.” (Carnap 1971, 3)

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most part identical (cf. ‘consequently,’ ‘hence,’ ‘because,’ etc.) (Bittner 2001, §160). A reason in the ordinary-language sense of the word is anything that makes for an appropriate answer to the question, ‘For what reason …?’ And this includes, of course, any circumstances that speak in favor of performing a certain action: ‘The reason why I moved my pawn to e6 was the threat that your bishop posed to my castle.’ But reasons in the ordinary-language sense of the word need not make an action rational in this particular sense. It is enough if the action constitutes a normal or understandable response to those circumstances: ‘The reason why John slapped Paul in the face was that Paul had insulted him.’ Finally, it is also in many cases possible to cite desires and beliefs as reasons in their own right. For it is obviously quite appropriate, if asked why Jerome had stuck needles into the doll, to answer by saying that his reason consisted in his desire to take revenge on Robert, and in his belief that he would in this way inflict real harm on him. Nothing about this reply is in conflict with ordinary usage. And according to Dancy, there are a whole range of circumstances by which an action might be explained, including not only motivating reasons: We can normally explain an agent’s doing what he did by specifying the reasons in the light of which he acted. But there are other ways of explaining an action – ways that do not involve specifying the agent’s reason […]. For instance, we might say that the reason why he did this was that he had forgotten his promise to her. In so explaining his action, we are not involved in laying out the reasons in the light of which he acted. … What explains why one person yawned may be that someone else yawned just next to them. What explains why he responded so aggressively may be that he is having trouble at home or that he has taken a particular form of medication. What explains why he gave this student a better grade than she deserved is that he was unconsciously influenced by the fact that she always dresses so neatly (or something even less defensible). What explains why so many people buy expensive perfume at Christmas is the barrage of advertising on the television. What explains why he didn’t come to the party is that he is shy. (Dancy 2000, p. 5; italics mine)

These explanations may quite certainly be correct. The crucial point, however, is that the various circumstances that are used here to explain the respective actions can unproblematically be regarded as reasons for those same actions. After all, the beginning of the quoted passage is quite telling. First of all, Dancy says that there are explanations of actions that appeal not to reasons, but to other circumstances. But already his first example for such an explanation is (in his own formulation) as follows: “For instance, we might say that the reason [sic!] why he did this was that he had forgotten his promise to her.” Although this is a blatant contradiction, it is also quite understandable. For indeed nothing in everyday discourse prevents us from describing as a ‘reason’ the fact that the agent had forgotten his promise. And it is equally acceptable to say: ‘The rea-

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son for his yawning was the fact that there were other people nearby who yawned’; ‘The reason why he gave his female student a better grade than she deserved was the fact that…’; ‘The reason why many people buy expensive perfume before Christmas is …’; and also, ‘The reason why he didn’t come to the party was his shyness.’ None of these constructions is a case of deviant usage. All these examples demonstrate, I think, that nothing much will be gained by trying to analyze the ordinary-language concept of reason and to list all the extremely different cases in which we use this term in everyday speech. After all, even the question, ‘What was the reason why the bridge collapsed?’ can quite unproblematically be answered with, ‘The reason was that load-carrying elements had become very brittle.’ Thus, the only way seems to be to look for a plausible explication of the term ‘reasons.’ But which proposal is the more promising – Dancy’s or Bittner’s? 3. I must confess that I prefer Dancy’s view. Lenman writes: “We might note, following Baier, (1958, chapter 6) that we think about reasons in three main contexts: contexts of justification, contexts of explanation and contexts of deliberation.” (2011, sect. 1) This seems to me exactly right, and, as already mentioned, I also think that, when thinking about reasons, it is helpful to begin with the context of deliberation. In general, the purpose of deliberation is to answer questions of what we should believe and do. Jenny claims that the climate change is not primarily caused by humans. Is that correct? Should we believe her? I am wondering whether I should get out of bed to take part in a departmental meeting or whether I can stay in bed a little longer. Normally, we try to answer the question of whether we should believe what somebody says, or what we should do, by examining which reasons speak in favor of – or against – Jenny’s claim or either of the two possible actions. Thus, deliberation typically consists in the attempt to find reasons and to weigh them against each other. And in this context, reasons are clearly circumstances that speak in favor of or against performing one action rather than another. To ignore this normative aspect of reasons would mean to ignore the entire context of deliberation. And in doing so, one would, I think, deviate too much from the ordinary-language concept of reason, even if one’s goal is the explication rather than the analysis of that concept (see Leist 2003, p. 339). However, if E can be a reason for A only if E speaks in favor of A, adherents of the belief-desire view might be tempted to argue that then at least desires must be reckoned as necessary ingredients of reasons. For there is a noteworthy difference between epistemic and practical reasons. E is an epistemic reason for p if E makes it at least probable that p is true regardless of what someone believes or desires. Whether E speaks in favor of action A, however, often depends

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on what the agent wants. Bittner himself gives a nice example: One and the same fact may, for some people, be a reason to take a certain course of action while, for others, it is completely irrelevant. “The barometer’s promise of a fine day tomorrow may be a reason for you to get your boots ready […], but it is not a reason for me to prepare mine if a lazy day is all I want for tomorrow.” (2001, §225) Thus, whether a given fact counts for a particular person as a reason to act depends, also in Bittner’s view, on the agent’s wants, desires, preferences, and on what she cares about. I.e., the fact that the barometer promises a fine day tomorrow speaks in favor of getting her boots ready if Adelheid wants to undertake a mountain trip and is only waiting for a day with suitable weather; the very same fact does not speak in favor of getting her boots ready if a lazy day is all Adelheid wants for tomorrow. All this cannot be denied. But it would be a mistake to draw the conclusion that a reason is a desire plus a fact that speaks in favor of a certain action A (with regard to agents who have just this desire). For it is not the fact plus the desire that speak in favor of A but the fact alone. Other than in the case of epistemic reasons, however, it depends on the agent’s wants, desires and preferences whether the fact speaks in favor of A. 4. Thus far we have learned that Dancy and Bittner offer two different suggestions as to how we should use the term ‘reason’ and what it means to say that someone acts for a reason. In Dancy’s view, the paradigmatic cases of someone’s acting for a reason – I shall call them ‘type-1 cases’ – occur whenever an agent, finding herself in a certain situation in which she has to choose between different possible actions, deliberates which aspects of that situation speak in favor of or against the various options open to her, and in the end performs whichever action is in her eyes supported by the strongest reasons.⁴ These are the (motivating) reasons for her action. To cite another example: Think of John who is wondering whether he should invest his savings in government bonds or rather in stocks. Maybe he already knows all the facts relevant to his decision. Maybe he believes that he should know a lot more about these facts. He is buying the relevant magazines. He is listening to TV shows and radio programs. At last he consults a professional adviser. All the information he gathers points in the same direction. As long as the central bank is doing everything in its power to keep interest rates low, it seems more profitable to invest in the

 I do not wish to consider here to what extent such deliberations can take place subconsciously or quasi-automatically.

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stock market and so this is what John does. In this case the following explanation of what John does will be entirely appropriate: (4) John invests his savings in stocks instead of government bonds because the central bank is doing everything in its power to keep interest rates low. The explanans here is a reason, a fact that speaks in favor of the explanandum, and the reason explains the explanandum because the agent would not do what he does if the reason had not been the case. Bittner is mainly concerned with a different kind of cases. The characteristic feature of these cases (‘type-2 cases’) is that, more or less out of the blue, something new, E, happens in the agent’s environment – something that demands a certain reaction by the agent. You move your bishop to b4; you draw spades; you leave me with a three in a game of dominoes; dark clouds are gathering, there is a sudden drop in temperature, the wind gets stronger, everything looks as if a thunderstorm approaches. Other examples are: Someone throws a ball or stone at me; the central bank decides to end its policy of low interest rates; the electric kettle stops working; a fire breaks out in the attic. What these examples have in common is that E is something that strongly speaks in favor of reacting in a certain way. If you move your bishop to b4 (thereby threatening my castle), I should protect the castle, e. g., by drawing my pawn to d6. If a thunderstorm approaches, I should hurry to reach the next house in order not to get wet. If someone throws a ball or a stone at me, I should try to catch the ball or get out of the way. If the central bank decides to end its policy of low interest rates, I should reconsider my investments; if the electric kettle stops working, I should try to fix it or buy a new one; if a fire breaks out in the attic, I should leave the building and call the fire department. In all these cases, too, explanations by reasons would be appropriate. E.g.: (5) I drew the pawn to d6, because by moving your bishop to b4 you threatened my castle, or (6) I tried to get out of the way because John threw a stone at me. Here again the explanantia are reasons, facts that speak in favor of the explananda, and the reasons explain the explananda because I would not have done what I did if the reasons had not been the case. Bittner includes in his account other cases (‘type-3 cases’) where something new, and maybe unexpected, E, happens where E does not in the same way speak in favor of a certain action: You insult me; you sell me a lemon; you publish a book with big claims and little argument; the lights turn red; you do me a favor; you ask me what time it is. Here again the respective explanations are similar:

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(7) I walked away silently because you insulted me, or (8) I cut up your tires because you sold me a lemon. However, I would at least hesitate to call these ‘explanations by reasons.’ For even if in these cases the explanantia may make the explananda intelligible, they do not rationalize them in the appropriate sense. But I will not pursue this problem further here. I would only like to add that if Bittner’s account is too wide in that it incorporates cases in which the facts to which the agent responds are not reasons that speak in favor of the explanandum, it is also too narrow in that it excludes type-1 cases like that of Laura. The new fact to which Laura responds is that an elder woman collapses in front of her, complaining of severe pain. But this is not the reason why Laura keeps walking. The reason for this action is that the job interview which she would otherwise miss is of extreme importance for her career. 5. Let us come to another point on which Dancy and Bittner seem to agree. Both emphasize the difference between (motivating) reasons and causes in the scientific sense, between explanations by reasons and explanations by causes. Bittner, for instance, whose central concept is that of a response to reasons, writes as follows: First of all, however, talking of one thing being a response to the other needs elucidating. What is not intended is the meaning that is common in the context of the natural sciences. (‘Already the first substance led to an intense response of his skin.’) (2005, §119; my translation. See also Bittner 2001, §§151 f.)

It seems to me that Dancy and Bittner have in mind something along the following lines. In some cases the circumstances in which we find ourselves lead so ineluctably to the resulting actions that we simply cannot help performing them. One might here think of the knee-jerk reflex; but it is doubtful whether the kick can even be classified as an action. Let us therefore imagine a situation like the following instead: Perhaps a certain person can tolerate being in an elevator together with several others only if she starts singing loudly; and perhaps she is unable to control this behavior. That is, whenever this person occupies an elevator together with several other people, she will start singing without being able to prevent this. If that is so, the circumstance of being in an elevator together with several others will provide an explanation of her behavior. However, it is not a reason for this behavior, but rather a cause. To say that reasons are not causes means, in the first place, that they do not inevitably lead to any particular behavior. In Bittner’s view, this is linked to the

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thesis that explanations by reasons do not support counterfactuals (§161) and that reasons usually do not allow the prediction of the resulting actions (§162). It seems to me that Dancy and Bittner share more or less the same picture. Reasons are facts in the world in which the agent finds herself; but these facts do not lead with nomological necessity to the agent’s performing a particular action. Rather, it depends on the agent herself whether and how she responds to those facts. If in type-1 cases, where an agent has to choose between at least two options, the agent deliberates which one of these options she should pick, looks for reasons for or against the available options, weighs them against each other, and in the end performs whatever action has to her mind the most going for it: then these are the motivating reasons for her actions. Without these reasons she would not perform the action, but the reasons do not by themselves necessitate it. The reasons alone would not lead to the action without the agent’s process of deliberation. According to Bittner, in type-2 and type-3 cases, reasons are circumstances to which the agent responds. But even in these cases it is up to the agent whether and how she responds. In Bittner’s view, an agent acts for a reason just in case she enters a situation in which something new, E, happens to which the agent responds. But she does not respond in the sense that E automatically leads to a certain action, but rather in the sense that the realization that E is the case⁵ triggers a decision-making process within the agent that ultimately results in the response, though the agent could, in principle, also have acted differently. Thus, I think that, both for Dancy and for Bittner, in acting for reasons the overall situation is as follows: An agent X performs action A for a reason E just in case E is the case; E is a fact that speaks in favor of A or that at least makes the response A intelligible; X recognizes that E is the case, and this realization triggers an internal decision-making process in X (possibly a process of deliberation) which, in the end, leads to X’s performing A because X thinks that E outweighs all reasons that speak against A. 6. What does this mean for explanations by reasons? Both Dancy and Bittner insist that the circumstances to appeal to when an action is to be explained by reasons are not mental states but extra-mental circumstances: viz., those circumstances that, in the agent’s deliberation, are ultimately responsible for her decision to perform that particular action, or again those circumstances to

 In Bittner’s view as well as Dancy’s, E can be a reason for X to do A only if X has become informed that E is the case. See Bittner 2005, §129).

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which the agent has responded in performing that action. This view can be supported by numerous examples. The sentence, ‘I moved my pawn to e6 because your bishop threatened my castle’ is evidently just as acceptable an explanation as ‘John slapped Paul in the face because Paul had insulted him.’ And the sentence, ‘He braked because the traffic light turned red’ is, equally clearly, just as acceptable an explanation as ‘John ran down the stairs into the open because there was a fire in the attic.’ However, if the above considerations are correct, all these explanations are in a certain sense incomplete or elliptical. After all, reasons do not lead to a particular action all by themselves; instead, there is an internal decision-making process occurring between the recognition of a reason and the action, which is crucially important for the question of which action the agent will perform in the end. Hence, a complete explanation cannot afford to ignore this process. That the latter receives no mention in the four examples is in my view only due to the fact that everyone who is reasonably familiar with the ordinary behavior of other people will have no trouble forming some conception as to what happens between the recognition of a reason and the action itself. But this is by no means always the case: the mentioned examples are certainly not representative for all explanations by reasons. Consider the following explanation: (9) Thales rented all the oil presses in Miletus and Chios because the storks had returned from their overwintering sites already in February. This explanation leaves us rather perplexed, for we don’t understand how the storks’ early return can be a reason for renting oil presses. It is only when we are told that the stork phenomenon is a sure sign for a plentiful olive harvest (and that Thales was aware of this)⁶ that we really begin to understand Thales’ actions. In general, an explanation that mentions the reason – an extra-mental fact – as to why someone did something will not render the relevant action intelligible to us unless we can see how that fact could have led the agent to perform that action. If the explanation is really to render the agent’s behavior intelligible, we will also have to know what processes have taken place within the agent. Furthermore, in some cases there are multiple reasons that speak in favor of performing a particular action. Consider Lancelot, for instance: The fact that the rainforests are of extraordinary ecological importance speaks in favor of working

 Aristotle reports in his Politics (1259a) that Thales was able to predict the rich olive harvest because of his astronomical knowledge, but unfortunately does not tell us exactly what information that knowledge comprised. For this reason, I have taken the liberty to elaborate the example somewhat.

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toward their preservation; in Lancelot’s view, so does the fact that this sort of activity would ingratiate him with Guinevere. However, (10) Lancelot works toward the preservation of the rainforests because they are of extraordinary ecological importance would be an incorrect explanation, for it is not their ecological importance that has led Lancelot to take up the cause of the rainforests. So in this case, too, we have to know what processes are taking place in Lancelot if we are really to understand what he did and why he did it. Finally, think again of Laura: She is on her way to a job interview that is of extreme importance for her career when, suddenly, an elder woman collapses in front of her, complaining of severe pain. Laura thinks a while and then decides to keep walking. In this case it will surely not be enough merely to cite the fact that the interview is of great importance for Laura’s career. For what is important here is not that circumstance taken by itself, but rather why Laura decided in favor of the one rather than the other alternative. And to know this, we have to know what kinds of processes have taken place within her. Maybe Laura said to herself: My whole future hinges on this interview; and while the old lady needs help, there are still other people nearby that will help her; for this reason, it is more important to me to keep walking so as not to miss my appointment. Hence, the fact that Laura keeps walking cannot be explained solely by reasons that speak in favor of or against the available alternatives; but what is decisive is rather how Laura herself weighs those reasons. So here, too, the crucial part of the explanation concerns what goes on in Laura’s mind. 7. If it is correct that reasons are in general extra-mental facts, could not mental states at least sometimes also be reasons for which an agent performs a certain action? Many critics have noted that Dancy’s and Bittner’s theories seem to be implausible especially in those cases in which the agent does what she does because she wrongly takes something to be the case that would speak in favor of performing the action in question. Bittner discusses the case of Henry who believes that a thunderstorm is imminent and for this reason asks to be given shelter in the house on the nearby hill. In fact, however, no thunderstorm comes, and thus no “imminent thunderstorm” could have been the reason for Henry’s actions. Still, his actions do not strike us as being without reason. Would it then not be completely appropriate to say that Henry’s belief concerning the hypothetical thunderstorm was a reason for his actions (see Rittsteiger 2005, p. 605)? Bittner denies this. On reflection, he says, we have to admit that there was no reason for Henry’s request. Henry thought he had a reason; but he didn’t. Thus, strictly speaking, his actions were without reason. But this does not mean, according to Bittner, that Henry’s actions were merely random:

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This is why saying that Henry thought a thunderstorm was coming helps to explain his going up to the house. After all, to say what the agent took to be the case very often does help in explaining what the person did […]. Saying that Henry thought a thunderstorm was coming is not to state the reason for which he went up to the house: his belief is not such a reason […]. Saying that Henry thought a thunderstorm was coming does not single out a cause of his going: as long as physiologists do not establish causal connections between believings and doings, there are no grounds for assuming that Henry’s belief causes him to go. Saying that Henry thought a thunderstorm was coming indicates that his going up to the house should be ranged with the goings up to the house done for the reason that a thunderstorm is coming, as a defective version of these. (2001, §209)

I find it difficult to understand what Bittner says in this passage about beliefs as reasons for actions (I will return to this in a moment); but I am sympathetic to his remark that Henry’s walk to the house is, as it were, a defective limiting case of a situation in which an explanation by reasons would be appropriate. I would, however, describe the case a little differently. I have already sketched the following tripartite picture of explanations by reasons: These explanations require (i) that the agent should find herself in a situation in which something, E, is the case that speaks in favor of performing an action A, or that might at least bring someone to perform A; (ii) that the agent should realize that E is the case; and (iii) that this realization should trigger some process within the agent that, in the end, makes her perform A. In such a situation, an explanation by reasons identifies E as the agent’s reason for doing A. Such explanations are, however, incomplete as long as they do not refer to the process that takes place in the agent and ultimately leads to her decision to perform A. Henry’s case deviates from this pattern insofar as the whole first step is missing, since it is in fact not the case that a thunderstorm is imminent. Thus, the explanation of Henry’s behavior cannot refer to any extra-mental event that might be cited as a reason for his actions. The explanation therefore has to begin with the second step. By whatever route, Henry acquires the belief that a thunderstorm is imminent, and this triggers in him a process that ultimately leads to the result that he walks up to the house and asks for shelter. Bittner himself says that “to say what the agent took to be the case very often does help in explaining what the person did.” I read this as conceding that information about the processes that occurred within the respective agent contributes importantly to reason-based explanations of her actions. On the other hand: if Bittner wants to suggest that (11) Henry walked up to the house because he thought that a thunderstorm was coming

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makes only for an incomplete or defective explanation, then I should like to register my strong disagreement. For, in the first place, (11) is just as acceptable an explanation as (12) Henry walked up to the house because a thunderstorm was coming would have been if in fact a thunderstorm had been about to occur. Nor is (11) incomplete, because it lists (almost) all the factors that are relevant for Henry’s action. Although it contains no reference to any extra-mental fact that could have been cited as a reason for his actions, this does not constitute a defect, for there is no such fact – and hence, no such fact could have been relevant for Henry’s behavior. What Henry believed is, together with the decision-making process triggered by this belief, completely sufficient to explain what he did. Certainly it is possible to disagree on whether we should count (11) as an ‘explanation by reasons’. I am sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn’t, since I regard it as entirely reasonable to reserve the term ‘reason’ for circumstances that, in one way or another, speak in favor of a certain action. And Henry’s belief does not do that – not even if taken together with his desire not to get wet.⁷ But if Bittner should want to argue as follows: (11) is no explanation by reasons; it is (for whatever reasons) also not a causal explanation; therefore, it is not a correct and complete explanation at all – then I simply find this to be counter-intuitive. Bittner supports his considerations with the premise that, in everyday discourse, we treat the following sentences as completely acceptable explanations: (13) I play my double-three because you, being my opponent in a game of dominoes, have played a three, (14) I move my pawn to e6 because your bishop threatens my castle, and (15) I cut up your tires because you sold me a lemon. But the same goes for explanations like (11)! Explanations of this sort are, at least in cases of mistaken belief, completely standard and are likewise generally accepted. One might even think that situations in which explanations by reasons are possible always allow for two explanations: one in which the action is explained on the basis of circumstances which speak in favor of the action and which are then referred to as ‘reasons,’ and another in which the action is explained on the basis of X’s beliefs and desires and the internal processes that have ultimately led to the action’s being performed. But this is no good idea. In my view, only  Indeed, there are some cases in which beliefs or desires are reasons which speak in favor of a certain action. E.g., if I believe that everyone is trying to steal my money or if I have the desire to have sex with little children, these facts may speak in favor of visiting a psychiatrist (the first example I owe to Thomas Spitzley). But these are very rare exceptions that I disregard here.

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the combination of these two explanations yields the full picture. If I explain A by citing E as the reason why X did A, I won’t really understand why X performed A if I don’t also know that X realized that E was the case and that, at the end of the following decision-making process, X decided to perform A because X thought that E outweighs all reasons that speak against A. (The reference to this process can, however, be omitted if it is already clear from the context what sort of process has taken place within the agent.) On the other hand, the specification of the internal process leading to the decision to do A will not yield the full picture either if some extra-mental state of affairs obtains such that the agent’s realization of it has triggered that internal process, i. e., if there really exists something in the extra-mental world to which the agent has responded with that process and his actions. (If there is no such state of affairs, however, the purely internal explanation may certainly be complete.) I would like to add a short remark on the question of whether explanations by reasons are causal explanations or explanations of a quite different kind. Both Dancy and Bittner deny that explanations by reasons are causal explanations. And the motivation for this position seems to mainly come from the observation that reasons – understood as extra-mental facts – do not lead to actions with the same inevitability that is often taken to characterize the relation between causes and effects.⁸ This observation strikes me as correct; for whether and how an agent responds to such a reason depends crucially also on the agent herself: on her emotional and cognitive reactions to it, and on what processes take place within her after becoming aware of it. Or, to put it in the way that I have been preferring here: on the decision-making process that has been triggered by the agent’s realization of the reason in question. But with regard to this process, there are evidently two possibilities: It may either have a causal-deterministic character itself, or it may be an open, non-deterministic process. Isn’t it appropriate, at least in the first case, to understand an explanation by reasons as a causal explanation? Of course, in such a case, the extramental fact that we cite as an explanatory reason will not be the only cause of the respective action. For what the result of the internal process will be depends crucially also on the internal states of the agent: on her beliefs, desires, moods, etc. But if the internal process is a causal-deterministic one, then the reason, in combination with these internal states, will evidently still have led by necessity to the to-be-explained action.

 This point of view ignores, however, all statistical approaches to the notion of cause.

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8. Let us take stock. Here are the main claims which I have tried to argue for: (i) The term ‘reason’ should be reserved for facts that speak in favor of a certain belief or action. (ii) To explain actions by reasons thus means to cite as explanans a fact that speaks in favor of the explanandum. (iii) There are entirely acceptable explanations by reasons – e. g., the explanations (1) – (5), (9) and (12). (iv) Nonetheless, all these explanations are in a sense incomplete. For whether an agent X responds to a reason E by performing A depends not only on E, but also on X’s realizing that E is the case and on a decision-making process being triggered by this realization which in the end leads to the decision to do A because during this process X comes to believe that E outweighs all facts that speak against A. (v) Explanations by beliefs and desires are not explanations by reasons although they may also be perfectly acceptable explanations at least in some cases. (vi) Bittner’s account of doing things for reasons is confronted with at least two problems. First, in Bittner’s view, explanations like (7) and (8) count as explanations by reasons although it is more than debatable whether in these cases the explanantia really speak in favor of the explananda. Second, Bittner’s account is unable to do justice to explanations like (1). (vii) Whether explanations by reasons are causal explanations depends essentially on whether the internal decision-making process that is triggered by the agent’s realization of the reason is itself a causally determined process.

References Baier, Kurt, 1958: The moral point of view, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University. Beckermann, Ansgar, 1977: Gründe und Ursachen. Zum vermeintlich grundsätzlichen Unterschied zwischen mentalen Handlungserklärungen und wissenschaftlich-kausalen Erklärungen, Kronberg/Ts: Scriptor-Verlag. (Electronic version: http://phillister.ub.uni-bie lefeld.de/publication/650.) Bittner, Rüdiger, 2001: Doing things for reasons, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2005: Aus Gründen handeln, Berlin: de Gruyter. Carnap, Rudolf, 1971: Logical foundations of probability, Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press. Dancy, Jonathan, 2000: Practical reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leist, Anton, 2003: “Am Abgrund der Gründe”. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 51, 335 – 341.

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Lenman, James, 2011: “Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation”. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/reasonsjust-vs-expl/, visited on 4 November 2014. Pippin, Robert, 2004: “Review: Rüdiger Bittner ‘Doing Things for Reasons’”. In: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23174-doing-things-for-reasons/, visited on 4 November 2014. Rittsteiger, Axel, 2005: “Rezension: Rüdiger Bittner ‘Aus Gründen handeln’”. In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 59, 602 – 606. Schueler, George Frederick, 2004: “Review: Rüdiger Bittner ‘Doing Things for Reasons’”. In: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69, 495 – 497.

Jens Kulenkampff

How to Improve On Bittner’s Proposal 1. The basic idea of Rüdiger Bittner’s Doing Things for Reasons is this: Sometimes we answer the question why someone did what he did by quoting the reason for which he acted. Such explanations are reason explanations. Basically, two questions are at issue here: First, “what is a reason for which somebody does something, and how is the reason related to the action?” (Bittner 2001, §117) Second, what kind of an explanation is a reason explanation? And what is the explanatory force of such an explanation (see Bittner 2001, §§146 ff.)? With regard to the first question, Bittner contends that “to be a reason for which an action is done is to be something [a state of affairs or an event] to which the action is a response.” (2001, §118) And the relation that obtains between reason and action is that both items together form (possibly part of) a history. With regard to the second question, Bittner contends that reason explanations are historical explanations, but that reason explanations don’t owe their explanatory force to their being historical explanations; reason explanations have explanatory force in their own right. These contentions raise a series of questions. First: In very many, if not all, cases of doing, or omitting, something we behave as we do in response to something, but not in all these cases would it be appropriate to call our behavior acting, let alone acting for a reason. So, it needs to be clarified in what sense of ‘response’ acting for a reason may, and especially in what sense of ‘response’ acting may not be understood as responding to something. Second: Since reason and action are said to be connected as parts of a history, the question is what it is, for some such things as states of affairs, events, and actions, to form a history? Third: Does the concept of a history really serve for explaining reason explanations? Finally: If we don’t find ourselves satisfied by Bittner’s proposal, how to improve on that proposal? 2. In a well-known sense of ‘response’, some of our behavior as well as much animal behavior is response to specific stimuli. Now, it seems rather obvious that our behavior when we are doing something for a reason, which in turn shall be understood as responding to something, cannot be of the stimulus-response type of behavior. For behavior of the stimulus-response type is not acting. A minimal condition for action is that the actor knows what he does, and a minimal condition for acting in response to something is that the actor has an idea of what it is he is responding to by his action. Sure, even he who behaves in the stimulus-response type of behavior, in some way needs to take notice of the stimulus, needs to see, hear, or feel something. Yet, neither is it necessary for him to

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know what he does, nor does he need to know, or at least to have an idea of, what it is that triggers his response. On the other hand, we cannot say that someone is acting in response to something if he doesn’t know what he does, and if he doesn’t know, or doesn’t have an idea of, what he is responding to. A further difference between behavior of the stimulus-response type and action is this. Bittner agrees that doing something for a reason involves deliberating one’s reasons, at least, we should add, the opportunity to do so (Bittner 2001, §§233 ff.). Now, deliberating one’s reasons is simply to consider the situation one finds oneself in, in order to decide what to do, or not to do, in that situation. Deliberation involves freedom of decision. Yet, between stimulus and response, there is no room for deliberation nor is there freedom of decision. Stimulus and response are tied together by some underlying mechanism which, of course, can be interrupted, or disturbed, by some intervening factor, but which doesn’t allow to postpone the response in order to consider the situation and to decide what to do. In acting for a reason, on the other hand, the state of affairs, or the event, which provide the reason, and the responding action are not tied together by any kind of mechanism. Indeed, they are tied together not at all, but they become connected through the very fact that there is an actor who considers the situation he finds himself in, decides what to do, and acts accordingly. So, since acting for a reason is not of the stimulus-response type of behavior, the question is: What does it mean that doing something for a reason is doing something in response to some other thing? 3. Bittner tries to convey an idea of what he has in mind when speaking of ‘response’ or of ‘responding’, by a series of examples (Bittner 2001, §§118 f.), some of which stem from games: a move in chess, a return in tennis, the adjunction of an appropriate piece in dominoes, a trumping in a card-playing. And Bittner assures that “examples abound in games” (2001, §119). But examples also occur outside games. You insult me, and I respond in kind, or else I respond in walking away silently. You sell me a lemon, and I cut up your tires. The lights turn red, and I step on the brakes. You do me a favor, and I do you a favor in turn. You publish a book in philosophy with big claims and little argument, and I write a scathing review. Simply, you ask what time it is, and I tell you. (Bittner 2001, §119) Convincing perhaps at first glance, at a closer look this series of examples turns out a mixed bag. Sure, in some sense or other, all these actions are responses, though there is only one (or so it seems) clear-cut case: answering a question is responding, if anything is. But are all the items acting for a reason? Let’s have a look at the chess example: Player A moves his bishop; he thereby threatens his opponent’s castle; player B realizes the threat, and saves his

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castle by a pawn move. The pawn move is done because of the bishop move, i. e. because of the threat of the castle. Of this case, we may aptly say the following things: First, there is an action (the bishop move) which results in a specific state of affairs that means something to player B (the threat of the castle). Second, there is player B’s doing something (the pawn move) which answers the given state of affairs in the sense that it removes the threat of the castle. Third, player B had a clear idea of the situation he found himself in, he considered what to do, he decided to save his castle by the pawn move, and he moved a pawn. So, not only is this a nice example of doing something for a reason, we furthermore get a clear idea what it means, in this case, that some action is responding, or is done in response to, a given state of affairs. Now, let’s have a look on another case. Deliberation takes time. A chess player, even if he is a very good player who may react instantaneously and without the slightest hesitation, has his span of time for deliberating his further moves, even if in fact he doesn’t use his span of time. Yet, there are lots of cases when we are doing something in response to a given situation where there is absolutely no such time and therefore no chance at all for deliberation. What, then, are we to say about the case when the traffic light turns red and the driver, quite automatically, steps on the brakes of his car: Is his stepping on the brakes behavior of the stimulus-response type, and therefore not action at all? Or is it acting for a reason? Or is it yet acting, though not acting for a reason? Though his stepping on the brakes is prompted by his seeing the traffic light turning red, it would be inappropriate to categorize his behavior as of the stimulus-response type. For, first, he quite clearly knows what he does. Second, even when he, quite automatically and without thinking about the situation, steps on the brakes and slows down his car, he may afterwards comment on his behavior, may evaluate it, and may explain why he stopped the car. So, his doing is clearly action. Furthermore his stepping on the brakes is a response to the traffic light turning red: Red traffic lights mean ‘Stop!’ Therefore, stepping on the brakes may be following a specific imperative. But is the driver’s stepping on the brakes acting for a reason? That depends. We should say yes when, say, the driver is approaching a crossing by midnight, with neither cars nor policemen in sight; the light turns red, the driver steps on the brakes and slows down the car, he realizes the situation, and the idea to neglect the traffic light flashes through his mind, yet, he decides to stop. We should say no when, say, there is heavy traffic, when many people are under way, and when the situation is such that it fully occupies the driver’s attention. In this latter case, the driver’s stepping on the brakes is surely action, and he is acting in response to the situation he finds himself in. Yet, because of the fact that there is no room for deliberation here, his behavior is not acting for a reason.

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Such cases as the last one occur very often. The return-in-tennis case from Bittner’s series of examples is of the same type. Many actions in such games as soccer are of the same type too. A common feature of these cases is that the given situation demands that one reacts in a specific way, but that one reacts as quick as a lightning, and without hesitation or reflection. We should call such behavior reflex action, which kind of action should not be confused with acting for a reason. What obscures the difference here is the fact that reflex action is so often a very rational behavior and very often looks so very like acting for a reason. The driver’s behavior, for instance, who quite automatically slows down his car when the brake lights of the car just before him turn red, looks as if he had considered his situation, has found out that the best thing to do would be slowing down his car and so decided to step on the brakes. Yet, nothing of these things in fact happened. Reflex actions and actions for reasons constitute different types of behavior.¹ A clear-cut case seems to be answering a question, for example answering the question “What time is it?” by telling time. If anything is, then in this case the action obviously is a responding. As we shall see, however, things are not that simple, but nevertheless it seems promising to take this case as a paradigm case and try to spell out what is meant by ‘response’ or ‘responding’ here. I shall come back to this idea later. 4. Despite of minor differences among them, I take it for granted that, except the disputed ones, the items from Bittner’s example series are genuine cases of doing something for a reason. The question, then, is what binds all these cases together. More specifically, the question is in what sense of ‘response’ or ‘responding’ are the cases from the list, and cases of doing something for a reason in general, doing something in response to something. Generalizing from Bittner’s list, we might venture to say: In doing something for a reason, the action is responding to something if the action has a specific meaning with respect to that something. More precisely: When there is some event or some state of affairs which have specific meaning to some person, then some action of that person is done in response to that event or that state of affairs if, on consideration, the action is meant to alter the situation in such a way that the ensuing state of affairs does not have any longer the meaning from the outset. The chess example fits this explanation. So do the dominoes and the card playing examples, and  It was, by the way, Leibniz who drew attention to this difference (see Monadology §26), and it was Christian Wolff who coined the term analogon rationis (see Psych. empirica §506, Psych. rationalis §§762, 765) for a kind of animal as well as human behavior that looks as if it were the outcome of some process of reasoning though, in fact, it isn’t.

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also the insult case, the revenge case, the favor for a favor case, and, of course, the answering a question case. But this line of argument is not how Bittner proceeds, who expressly states: “I shall not offer you a general criterion of what it is for an action to be a response to something” (2001, §123). Instead, with reference to the chess example, he asks “how the relation between my pawn move and your bishop’s threat, to which supposedly it is a response, differs from the relation between my pawn move and some other state of affairs, like your castle sitting on a1, to which it is not a response.” (2001, §120) The answer is that the bishop’s threat and the pawn move are linked together as parts of the history of some determinate game of chess while the relations of the pawn move to indefinitely many other states of affairs do not form part of that history. Generally speaking, it is being linked together as parts of a story what makes some action to be doing something in response to some state of affairs. And so we get what Bittner expressly concedes: “Admittedly, this is to shift the burden of explaining what a response is, hence what a reason is, to the relevant stories.” (2001, §123) Now, one would expect Bittner to unfold his theory step by step, i. e. to elucidate now the concept of a history he draws on. But one gets disappointed, since this not what Bittner does. Instead he reminds us of ourselves and asks us to realize that we all already know the difference in question. We know it because we all are competent “historians”. (2001, §§121 ff.) We all are historians insofar as, for the many fields of action we are experienced in and are acquainted with, we very well know how to “describe [what is going on] by marking out paths among states and events, in particular actions.” (2001, §122) And in giving such descriptions we in fact are discriminating between the relevant and the irrelevant. “Thus the distinction between what an action is a response to and what is irrelevant for it is part of what we know of the histories making up the world. And we come to know it […] through our ordinary experience of how the world goes.” (2001, §122) This, then, is the kernel of Bittner’s explanation what it means for an action (which is doing something for a reason) to be a response to some state of affairs. Is Bittner’s proposal convincing? For sake of argument, let us assume that someone who performs well in some field of practice or other, will very probably be also a good historian, i. e. a good describer of what is going on in that field, and that very often he who is well acquainted with some practice or other, and is therefore a good describer, is possibly also a good performer. Then what Bittner offers us may do for the practical side of the matter: Getting experienced with how the world goes, or how to play chess for that matter, is the way for us not only to become good performers but also to become knowledgeable persons and insofar good historians who know, for some part of the world or other, to mark out “paths among states and events, in particular ac-

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tions.” (2001, §122). In short, we all know what to do when – experienced with the matter as we are – it is up to us to explain why someone did what he did by showing in what specific way his action was meant to respond to, and thereby was linked to, some state of affairs. But do we, by our everyday knowledge how to produce reason explanations also know what that is, acting for a reason? 5. This brings us to the second part of Bittner’s theory. “[E]xplanations of actions by reference to reasons are historical explanations, for it is as parts of histories that reasons and actions are related.” (2001, §146) So, it is to be expected that how reasons and actions are linked together will be explained by drawing on what and how historical explanations explain. What then are historical explanations, how do they differ from other types of explanations, and what is their explanatory force? This is a debated question. Bittner proceeds by reviewing and criticizing a long series of proposals how to answer it. In the end, on Bittner’s view, no one of the proposals on the table proved to hold water. Now, it certainly would be a mistake to conclude from these findings (provided that Bittner’s objections are sound) that the concept of historical explanation doesn’t yield a “general account of how historical explanations explain.” (2001, §158) Perhaps the day is still to come when a genius appears who will offer us the philosopher’s stone. Yet what are we to do for the time being? Bittner: “It just seems wise to wait no longer and to settle for what we have got, which may well be all we are ever going to get.” (2001, §158) This sounds a bit hypocritical to me; there is plenty of evidence that Bittner holds that we will never get a general account of historical explanation. For, on his view, there is none. The term ‘historical explanation’, then, is an umbrella term covering a variety of different types of explanations which all are called historical explanations because they have one feature in common: “Explanations are historical because they explain whatever it is they explain by reference to something happening or being the case before.” (2001, §148) Obviously reason explanations are of this kind since they explain actions by reference to something that happened or was the case before. But reason explanations, adds Bittner, owe their explanatory force not to the fact that they are historical explanations. And this is so because “historical explanations do not owe the force they have to their being historical explanations, but to their following some more specific pattern […].” (2001, §146) And just one such specific pattern is the pattern of reason explanations; “their force is not derived, but they hold it by virtue of being reason explanations.” (2001, §146) In other words: the bag labeled ‘historical explanations’ contains a sample of different types or patterns of explaining something by reference to something that happened or was the case before. None of these types or patterns may be reduced

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to another one; they all are valid explanations (when they are valid) “in their own right”. (2001, §168) All historical explanations tell stories about how it comes to pass that such and such happened or was the case. But there are relevant differences here: the story why the window broke is of quite another type or pattern than the story why one of my pawns now occupies such and such a position on the chess-board. In the latter case, the state of affairs results from an action of mine which was done in response to the threat of my castle. What is specific about this type of a story and how this kind of an explanation explains what it explains – we know it, Bittner assures us again, because, and insofar as, we are experts in this kind of explanations. This, then, is the end of Bittner’s story. We started with reason explanations, reasons being something which the action in question is a response to. Being done in response to something was explained to mean that both items were linked together as parts of a history. So, reason explanations turned out to be (a kind of) historical explanations. Historical explanations explain what they explain by reference to what happened or was the case before. Their explanatory force, though, lies not in their being historical explanations but in the specific way how they explain what they explain. One of these ways of explanation is the explanation of actions by reference to their reasons. 6. At this point, the reader of Bittner’s book can’t fail to feel as if on a merry go round: one ends where one started from, even though Bittner assures us that what he says does not amount to saying “merely that a reason is a reason.” (2001, §160) Yet does he really give us more than that? Bittner has two points here. First, he reminds us of the fact that our languages contain “phrases characteristically used to express” reason explanations. That is surely true, but the fact that we know to identify and to produce reason explanations does not tell us what reason explanations are and what it is that distinguishes them from other types of explanation. Second, “reason explanations can be identified and distinguished from others by telling stories […] in which reason explanations do or do not apply […]”, and by this procedure we may achieve it that other people come “to see what a reason explanation is […]”. (2001, §160) Well, but this is the same as teaching someone how to use a word or some phrase correctly; it is not an explanation of what he does when he gives a reason explanation. Sure, sometimes philosophers claim to get explanations where there in fact is nothing to explain. Things are what they are. And sometimes all we can do is saying or showing what and how things are. He who anyway insists on further explanation where there is nothing left that needs to be explained is stupid. But is what Bittner tells us about reason explanation really the whole story?

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In the end, there is perhaps something more to be said about what is involved when someone explains an action by reference to the reason of the actor. The concept of a history or of a story however seems to me of no use for this purpose since this concept is either too meager or too demanding: If for two things, the one being earlier in time than the other, in order to form a history nothing more is needed than that the later one may somehow be explained by reference to the earlier one, then it is not to be seen, indeed, how to spell out what specifies that type of histories which come to pass when someone is doing something for a reason. In this pale sense of ‘history’, not only reason and action, but also cause and effect, stimulus and response, or prompting situation and reflex action (and probably many other things more) form histories. In this pale sense of ‘history’ all these cases are alike – what Bittner expressly concedes (2001, §148). He takes it that the concept of historical explanation is a broad one, covering all and every explanation of something by reference to some earlier state of affairs. Yet saying only that much does not show what the explanatory force of reason explanations consists in. Such stories on the other hand which are told in novels or performed on stage form too narrow a category. They have to fulfill the condition that Aristotle stated for the well-wrought plot of tragedy, namely to form an integrated whole.² Such stories may neither start nor stop at whatever point. Their beginning must tell all that is necessary in order to understand what matters. And such stories as a whole must contain all that is necessary in order to understand the story step by step (at least in retrospect when the whole thing is over), i. e. why the one person did this and the other person did that in response to what happened, was done, or was the case before. Now, how sad or tragic things in the world or in our lives sometimes ever may be, neither do we outlive stories nor is our life drama nor underlies the way the world goes a well-wrought plot. Therefore nearly nothing of all the many things we are doing in response to something, let alone the many things we are doing for reasons, fits the pattern of a story. What holds good for tragedy, doesn’t tell us much about acting for a reason in everyday life or about reason explanation.³ Sure, we often tell stories about ourselves. It may also be true that we cannot do otherwise than shaping our remembering as stories just as a storyteller or a novelist does. And even the professional historian may be some kind of a storyteller when he sets out to write, say, the history of the French Revolution. Yet one must not confuse necessities of literary representation with necessities of explaining facts. – So, neither the meager con-

 “A whole is that which has a beginning, middle, and end.” Poetics, 1450b.  This point seems to be fully in line with Bittner (for instance 2001, §159).

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cept of a history nor the demanding one proves to be helpful here. We should therefore turn our back on the story about histories, stories and historical explanation. 7. Yet, how to proceed now? – It may be helpful to take several points into account here. It seems to me significant that we usually just not ask for a reason explanation when the action fits into a pattern that we well know from experience. For what the actor does was to be expected and doesn’t need any explanation. Yet when the actor does what is uncommon and not to be expected, we then ask for an explanation why he acts as he does. Then we want to know the reason. Sure, a satisfying theory of reason explanation has to be a general theory such that it shows how even in the most trivial cases a reason explanation would work. Yet it is the surprising cases when someone does uncommon things and behaves in unexpected ways that show us what a reason explanation has to achieve. Such an explanation should tell us something illuminating by which we may come to understand why the actor behaved as he did, the explanation should tell us something without which the action looks strange or even weird. For example, when I, instead of saving my castle through a pawn move, move another figure, a bystander might ask himself ‘Why, for God’s sake, doesn’t he counter the threat to his castle by moving the pawn?’ Two moves later, when my opponent took my castle and I put him check-mate by moving my queen the bystander understands my former action. He may now figure out for himself my consideration of the given state of affairs, and he thereby comes to see the point of my action. Generally speaking, as an answer to the question for what reason someone did what he did we should only accept what must be quoted in order for the explanation to be an illuminating one. We want to know what it was that gave the action its meaning or its point. This is why we ask for a reason explanation, and what such an explanation, when successful, states, is the reason. (By the way, in order to get such an explanation it might be necessary to wait and see, i. e. to take more into account than just the two items, the action in question and some state of affairs.) Another point is this. The relation between that event or that state of affairs, which is to become the reason for some action is neither just there nor does it come into existence quasi automatically; the relation is produced by the actor through his action. More specifically: by his action the actor completes, as it were, the relation whose first half, namely the situation the actor finds himself in, is already there. This is to say: the situation somebody finds himself in must have some feature by which the given state of affairs concerns him. By his action, then, he answers a situation that concerns him. And the resulting question is: What is it that makes some state of affairs a tua res agitur?

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To this question Bittner’s book provides an answer which, though insufficient as it stands, may help. With respect to what may figure as a reason for somebody there are, Bittner says, no limitations: any event and any state of affairs may be a reason for which someone does what he does. Yet, for some particular actor, not any event or state of affairs may be a reason at any time. It is the particular agent who makes the difference here: “The agent is a reason-selector”, namely by features such as his “knowledge, eagerness, expectations, and so on.” (2001, §191) Agents differ from each other with respect to “knowing, believing, expecting, desiring, or being eager to do, different things.” (2001, §192) An agent’s profile of features like these gives structure to his surrounding and makes him sensitive for what may be a reason for action for him. It is in this way that “[a]gents are differentially sensitive action-producers […].” (2001, §191) It should be added that agents are extremely versatile reason-selectors: As chess players, constellations on the chess-board are those states of affairs which the players are sensitive to as reasons for their moves. At high noon they interrupt the game for lunch, and now it is quite another property profile which makes them sensitive for quite other things as possible reasons for their actions, while at 2 o’clock p.m. they resume their chess game, and so on. In other words: Only for the two persons when they are playing chess, a particular constellation on the chess-board is a reason to act, not for them under different circumstances, nor for other people (not for instance for a bystander even if he realizes that the black bishop threatens the white castle). This in turn means that, though it is true that any state of affairs and any event may possibly be reasons to act, nothing as such or in itself is a reason to act unless there are agents whose property profile structures the world for them in such a way that they come to see what should figure in considering their situation and may be a reason to act. It is from the point of view of the agent that events and states of affairs sort out as reasons and constitute sections of the world that might be called action spaces. 8. With respect to such action spaces or action perspectives, the natural question now is whether it is possible or not to say something more than Bittner’s resuming passage says: The question was what selects the reasons for which one actually does something from the broad range of what could be such a reason […], and the answer is that it depends on features of the agent, in particular on such things as an agent’s eagerness, belief, and expectation, whether something is or is not a reason for which that agent does something […]. (2001, §213)

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This is surely right, but the ensuing question is what makes the difference, say, between the player whose castle is threatened by the opponent’s bishop, and the chess experienced bystander who realizes the threat, but for whom the state of affairs on the chess-board is not at all a reason for action? The answer, I take it, is obvious: While the player is heading for, or is out for, something, the bystander is not. This is to say that there is a difference here between such features as what an agent (or his bystander) believes to be the case or expects to come, and such features as the agent’s (not his bystander’s) heading for something or his eagerly being out for something. To be sure, features of the agent of both kinds are necessary conditions for some state of affairs to be a reason for action for him. The barometer’s promising fine weather tomorrow, to draw on another of Bittner’s examples, is a reason to get his boots ready today only if the agent takes notice of the weather forecast and is eager to reach the peak tomorrow (see Bittner 2001, §191). Yet both pieces, what the agent knows or expects to come and what he is eager to do, play different roles. It is his eagerness to climb the peak that makes the agent sensitive with respect to the barometer’s promising a fine day tomorrow which state of affairs then provides the reason for preparing his boots right now. The priority-order of the two conditions is not temporal order since it may well be that it was the weather forecast that prompted the agent’s eagerness to climb the peak tomorrow. Nevertheless, that our agent’s taking notice of the probability of fine weather tomorrow is taking notice of a reason for a particular action depends on his eagerness to climb the mountains, not the other way round. So, it is that specific eagerness that connects a given state of affairs (the barometer’s promising a fine day tomorrow) and some action (getting the boots ready) such that the latter is a sensible response to the former, i. e. acting for that reason. It is that specific eagerness that makes reference to the weather forecast an illuminating answer to the question why our man gets his boots ready. We may venture then to say that it is always some heading for something or some being out for something that makes the agent sensitive for specific states of affairs as possible reasons for action. It is our eagerness that makes us “differentially sensitive reason-selectors”. 9. Whether this is generally true or not can only be ascertained by considering particular cases (or types of cases). Some steps on this way can be made, by considering Bittner’s examples. A fitting case, it should be clear by now, is the case of the one who gets his boots ready because of the barometer’s promising a fine day tomorrow. The chess example is a bit more complicated. One difference is that the players are not eager to do something, but are eager to win the game, i. e. they are eager to reach some well-defined state of affairs by their moves. Another point is that the rules of the game play an important role here. For, it is

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only the rules of the game by which some constellation on the chess-board becomes a state of affairs that concerns me (or should concern me). It is by the rules of the game only that my opponent’s bishop threatens my castle which I, since I am eager to win, should try to save.⁴ All games, I think, when there are rules to be observed, when the players have time to consider what to do, and when the players want to win the game, are more or less like the chess case. Yet, what are we to say about the examples from everyday life? Well then: somebody is insulted and responds by insulting the other person in turn. Why does he behave as he does? When asked, perhaps he will say: ‘I don’t let myself getting insulted (by that person).’ Or the insulted behaves in a quite different way: he walks away silently. Why? When asked, perhaps he will say: ‘This is not my style of discussion.’ Such information would be illuminating, especially when the actor’s way of response is uncommon or unexpected. Yet it would be wrong in this case to suppose some particular eagerness to do something. The information about the actor discloses some particular trait or attitude of him which explain why he behaved as he did. That is to say, although the behavior of the insulted person is surely a doing something for a reason and is doing something in response to something, in this case, it is not some heading for something, some being out for something, or some eagerness to do something that makes the actor a differentially sensitive reason selector. So, the general contention ventured above is not true. Furthermore, if we stick to the principle that as an answer to the question for what reason someone did what he did we should only accept what must be quoted in order for the explanation to be an illuminating one, then in the present example it would be not enough for a reason explanation simply to point to the foregoing insult. Without that insult the insulted person would not have done anything in response to that act; so much is true. Yet, how the insulted person responded is due to some particular trait of the actor. What has to be explained is not simply that he person responded at all, but how he or she responded to the insult. Therefore, the reason to act was not the insult, full stop, but the insult together with the person’s readiness to counter an insult by an insult or together with his or her refusal of such a style of intercourse. Next case: Somebody cuts up the tires of somebody else’s car. Why does he do that? He says: ‘The owner of this car sold me a lemon, and I pay him in his own coin.’ In other words, because of some damage done to him, our man seeks to revenge himself, and it is this being out for revenge that structures the world

 By the way, this example in my view shows very clearly that there are constitutive rules what Bittner expressly denies – for reasons which I was unable to figure out.

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for him with respect to possible acts of revenge. It is this being out for revenge that lets him perceive some given state of affairs (may be, it is just by chance that he comes across the car of the dishonest salesman) as an opportunity to take revenge. So, in this case there is again some being out for something, and in this case too, in order to explain the action by quoting its reason, it would not be enough just to refer to the fact that our man happened to meet with the car of the salesman. Sure, there would have been no cutting up the tires if the agent did not happen to come across the car. But that the duped person did what he or she did is not to be explained, in an illuminating way, by just referring to a given state of affairs. It is the state of affairs together with the minding for revenge which explain the action, i. e. provide his or her reason. Next case: The traffic light turns red and the driver steps on the brakes. As we saw above, whether this doing is doing something for a reason or not, depends on further circumstances. In most cases, when stepping on the brakes is a reflex action it is simply an acquired habit that explains the action. Under some other circumstances things look different: When approaching a crossing at midnight with neither other cars nor passengers nor policemen in sight, stopping the car may be due simply to a character trait of the driver, namely that he habitually, or on consideration, obeys the traffic rules. Or the driver doesn’t stop the car, and in this case his behavior might be to be explained by the fact that the state of affairs lets him feel it an unnecessary inconvenience, in this particular situation, to stop the car. How are we to analyze this latter case? The driver is responding to a given state of affairs. His reason for not stopping the car is that, in that particular situation, stopping the car would be an unnecessary inconvenience. There seems to be no particular being out for something nor some particular trait of the agent that make him sensitive for the given state of affairs. It is not, that the given situation, by obeying the traffic rules, meant some unnecessary inconvenience to him in particular, but to any driver whosoever under the specified circumstances. This time, it seems most plausible to say that the driver simply realized what the situation allowed him to do, and so he did what he did. He aptly behaved in that situation, even though he disobeyed the traffic rules. Next item on Bittner’s list: Someone returns a favor for favor done to him. There are very different possible answers to the question why the person acted as he or she did. The agent might say for instance ‘from gratitude’, or ‘one simply behaves this way’, or ‘I would like my benefactor to stay kind to me’. In the first two cases, there is no being out for something; it is simply the comment that explains the action. In the third case however, the actor wants to produce some particular effect by his action. But note that it need not be the case that the actor (because, say, of some special relationship between the two persons) be disposed in some sense to behave as he does; it may be that the idea to return

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a favor by a favor in order to keep the benefactor kind to him occurred quite spontaneously to the agent. So, in this case it would be slightly odd to speak of some trait or property of the actor that makes him a sensitive reason selector. For, all we can say about the agent is that he is such that when some particular person did a favor to him he happened to get the idea to return a favor in order further to engage his benefactor. This, though it is true, says nothing more about the agent as was comprised in the original answer to the question why he acted as he did. The last but one example is this. “You publish a book in philosophy with big claims and little argument, and I write a scathing review.” (2001, §119) Why does Bittner do that? It seems to me that the example, as it stands, doesn’t provide enough information for an illuminating answer. Sure, the poor book occasions Bittner to write the review. Yet, since Bittner very probably is not eager to scathe every poor book in philosophy he comes across, it appears that we are lacking much context and further information which would enable us to explain and to understand why he scathes just this book. We need to know much more about the book, perhaps about its author, and mainly about Bittner if we were to uncover the reason why he acts as he does. Last item from Bittner’s list: Someone asks some other person what time it is, and the other one tells him. When we ask for what reason the agent told time, it is surely right to refer to the fact that he was asked ‘What time is it?’ Nevertheless this account is slightly ambiguous. Sure, the agent is responding to a question, i. e. to the fact that he was asked. Yet with respect to the idea that acting for a reason is responding to some state of affairs, not what the person says, but that he or she is answering at all is relevant here. In most every day cases, the interrogative sentence ‘What time is it?’ is used to address a request to somebody, namely to tell time. And in most every day cases polite people will answer that request without hesitation by looking on the watch and telling time. But one can imagine cases in which the requested person, on consideration of the given state of affairs, might decide to walk away silently, by which not answering the question the requested person nonetheless is responding to the given state of affairs. This point in mind, we can take the answering a question case nonetheless as a model case for very many cases of doing something for a reason. In answering a question one is doing something because one was requested to do just that what one is doing. The interesting point is this: Although the agent must fulfill some preconditions that enable him to do the right thing, it is not the case that some specific trait of his makes him a differentially sensitive reason selector. There is no want here, no eagerness to do something or being out for something. Since we usually are not request selectors, in such cases as these we are not a

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reason selector at all. It is rather the world (some other person, some state of affairs, etc.), which, as it were, selects us by requesting us to do something. And now it’s up to the agent to answer this request in this or that way. 10. To sum up: The question is what reasons are. Bittner’s idea: reasons are what the action is a responding to, may serve as a starting point. The ensuing question is what constitutes the specific relation between some state of affairs and some action that is a response to that state of affairs (see Bittner 2001, §120). The proposal in this paper is foremost a twofold methodological one: First, we should not try to answer the question what reasons are by a proposition of the form ‘reasons are xyz’. We should say instead: ‘Reasons are what needs to be quoted in an illuminating answer to the question why someone acted as he or she did.’ Second, let’s rephrase the question what constitutes the specific relation between some state of affairs and some action which is a response to that state of affairs; we should ask instead by which features some given state of affairs becomes a tua res agitur. One then should consider different cases (or types of cases). Doing so, it turns out that it is very different things which need to be quoted in an illuminating explanation of action. Generalizing on the examples, it seems there are at least two main kinds of cases: On the one hand, it is the actor’s being out for something or some eagerness to do something in the light of which some state of affairs becomes a tua res agitur and is responded to by a specific act. On the other hand, a given state of affairs addresses the actor; a given state of affairs is some kind of a request to him in the light of which what the agent does is meant as a response to that request. Yet there are other cases which don’t fit nicely the one or the other model. And on further investigation it is to be expected that even other types of cases will come to light. To improve on Bittner’s proposal means to take such a piecemeal course of research in order to get an overview about the different types of cases which all together make up what that means: doing things for reasons.

References Aristotle, 1996: Poetics, London: Penguin Books. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2001: Doing things for reasons, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1991: Monadology. An edition for students, ed. by Nicholas Rescher. London: Routledge. Wolff, Christian, 2013: Psychologia rationalis, Rare Books Club. Wolff, Christian, 1968: Psychologia empirica, Hildesheim: Olms.

Marco Iorio

Reasons, Reason-Giving and Explanation*

1. Much has been written about practical reasons since the birth of analytic action theory as an independent philosophical discipline some 60 years ago.¹ Without exaggeration one could say that the question ‘What are reasons?’ together with the two questions ‘What are actions?’ and ‘What is the nature of the relationship between reasons and actions?’ form the core of this young sub-discipline (see Sobel/Wall 2009). However, the results of more than half a century’s discussion about the nature of reasons are somewhat disappointing; since it would certainly be false to speak of a growing consensus. On the contrary, the number of theories continues to grow. And in this paper I too will offer yet one more. In order to better locate this contribution of mine in the on-going discussion, I will attempt a quick survey of the most commonly advanced positions in this field. I will do this by dividing the many answers to the question about the nature of practical reasons into three groups. First, there are those theories according to which the reasons an agent has for the things he does, or for the things that he should do, are found amongst his intentional (or propositional) attitudes. These are psychologistic conceptions of practical reasons.² According to this view, some belief, some desire, or some intention that I have can constitute (separately or in an appropriate combination) a reason for me to do something. Among the many versions of this psychologistic approach, one thesis with a long tradition is still prominent, namely that the reason for an action consists of exactly one desire and exactly one instrumental belief of the agent where the belief refers to a means/end relationship. The propositional contents of the two attitudes can be understood as the premises of a practical syllogism, the conclusion of which describes the action to be performed. The agent wishes a

* A German version of this article was published in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, Volume 65 (2011), pp. 485 – 505. I would like to thank the publishers of this journal for permission to reprint the article in English translation. I would also like to thank Paul Lauer for helping me with the translation.  Without thinking it necessary to argue the point further, I take it for granted that Ryle 1949 and Anscombe 1957 gave the initial impulses to recent research into the philosophy of action.  ‘Psychologistic’ is a simplification to the extent that the theories being bundled together here distinguish between whether the psychic states of the agent or the propositional content of these states are reasons. These contents are of course strictly speaking not psychic at all. However it would unnecessarily complicate things to pursue this distinction any further.

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particular end; believes that actions of this kind are means to this end: and for this reason undertakes an action of this kind (see e. g. Aristotle 1985, 701a 10 – 20, Aristotle 2010, 1113a 10 – 12, Goldman 1976, Davidson 1980, Hornsby 1993). Secondly, there is a number of more recent approaches in action theory according to which the reasons an agent has for the things she does or should do can be found in, as it were, her surroundings. That there is some circumstance or some state of affairs or some fact in the situation in which the action takes or ought to take place can, according to these approaches, be a practical reason (see von Wright 1981, Stoutland 1998, Dancy 2000, Bittner 2001, Iorio 2013). Actions in this view are seen as the intentional reactions or responses of an agent to facts. And it is precisely these facts that the agent is reacting to, which in this conception are considered to be her reasons. While according to the first view reasons are something to be looked for in the head (in the consciousness or in the mind) of the agent, in this second, non-psychologistic view they are located in the “real” world, so to speak. Proponents of this viewpoint rarely fail to emphasize that the agent has to believe that the facts which constitute her reasons are given. But in contrast to the adherents of the psychologistic view, defendants of the second position are convinced that the beliefs of the agent are not identical to her reasons. When a driver steps on the brake of her car because a child runs onto the street, then the fact that the child has run in front of her car is her reason for stepping on the brake – not her belief that this fact is given. Thirdly, there are theories that separate the two questions why an agent does something and why he should do something. The proponents of these theories distinguish between explanatory (or motivating) and justificatory (or normative) reasons (see especially Smith 1994, chapter 5). Reasons of the first kind are called what they are called because they serve as an explanation for the agent’s doings. Reasons of the second kind are meant to answer the question why an agent should do something or why he thinks it is right, reasonable or morally appropriate to act in one way and not in another. Here, in other words, the focus is on the justification of the action. The conception that advocates of this position have of explanatory reasons is similar to that of the psychologistic conception. Such reasons are constituted by a desire and a belief. There is however no general agreement on how we should conceive of justificatory, i. e. normative reasons. All three approaches can be found in many variations and combinations (see Alvarez 2013). This could lead one to suspect that there is no single right conception of practical reasons or that there might be more than one concept. Perhaps it is even the case that the everyday use of the term is ambiguous, vague or inconsistent. But I hope that I will be able to dispel all doubts in the course of this

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paper. There is a clear answer to our question. And this answer will also show why every single one of the many other answers is almost right. 2. What are then reasons for people to act? In order to answer this question, I would like to concentrate on a paradigmatic context in which agents “interact” with their reasons. Though in the philosophical literature this context is not totally neglected, in action theory specifically, it is not given sufficient attention. In the philosophy of action practical reasons are most often looked at from the perspective of their explanatory, motivating and justificatory potential. I will return to this question at the end of this paper. Now I would like to ask what role reasons play when an agent decides for or against an action. Since whatever reasons for action might be by their nature, an acceptable conception of practical reasons should doubtlessly make clear how these reasons enter into the decisionmaking of an agent and how they fulfill their function there (see Beckermann’s contribution to this volume). The starting point then is the question what role practical reasons play when an agent is deciding for or against a kind of action. But before we turn to this question I would like to point out a not inconsiderable advantage of this approach to the nature of reasons. The advantage is that we will not have to divide into two halves what belongs together, namely the question why someone actually acts the way he does and the question why he should act in one way or the other. There can be no principled difference between reasons that are thought to be motivational-explanatory and those that are considered normative-justificatory. It is impossible that there are two fundamentally different types or classes of reasons. If there were it would be the case that we could never act for those reasons that from a justificatory perspective speak for a particular action (see Williams 1995, 38 f., Stoutland 2001, 169 – 172, Bittner 2001, 120 – 122). Supposed reasons however that are not in principle reasons for actual actions will not lead to a viable conception of practical reasons. Of course it is not the case that the two questions I just referred to will always have the same answer in every situation. An agent might do what he does for a reason although there is another reason for which he should do something else. Another person might even be convinced that she should do something for this or that reason but then knowingly does something else for a different reason. The well-known phenomenon of ‘weakness of will’, or akratic action, is evidence that this does indeed happen. For our present concerns however the important thing is that if we assume – as the third category of theories does – that there are two separate and independent classes of reasons, those that are motivating and others that are normative-justificatory, we will not be able to understand such everyday situations. At best this would lead us to two acceptable

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theories about two different kinds of reasons, but we would be at a loss to say how these theories are related. Reasons, we should thus assume, are always and only reasons. That they motivate, explain or justify must be understood as features of reasons. Some reasons might have all of these features; others will have only one or two of them. If we approach the nature of practical reasons from the perspective of decision-making, then we will have the right view of the matter from the very beginning. Since from this viewpoint, the question why I actually do something and the question why I should do something refer to one and the same kind of reasons. And after a moment’s thought everyone should concede that this is the way it really is. The situations in which people ask what they should do have two possible structures.³ And it will simplify our task when we realize that one of these two structures is merely a special case of the other. In the first structure, the agent turns her mind’s eye, so to speak, to just one option. She then asks herself whether the weight of the reasons that speak in favor of this option is or is not greater than the weight of the reasons against it. ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’ is, from this perspective, the question. And the agent tries to answer this question by weighing the reasons she has for and against performing the action. This concept of weighing reasons, by the way, expresses a common and deeply rooted use of metaphor in our thinking about reasons. Reasons are comparable to entities that come with weights of different sizes, which in an act of deliberative reflection about an anticipated course of action we put on an imaginary scale. This is how we seek to discover whether the scale will tip in favor of or against the action we are considering. In this sense we are asking which are heavier, weightier or stronger: The reasons for? Or the reasons against? We can make use of the same metaphor also for the second decision-making structure. And it is here that the comparative character of reasons can be seen most clearly. Since the agent is asking himself in this case not only whether he should or should not take a single option to act. Instead he is comparing two (or more) competing actions and has to make a choice between the two. For example, someone who is looking for the best deal in a travel agency is in this kind of situation because as a rule a person is looking to book only one trip. And so he will have to decide which of the available options he prefers. He will have to choose.

 The following distinction is by no means exhaustive. There are many other decision-making structures that are however not of interest here.

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The simplification I promised has to do with the first decision-making structure being a special case of the second one. Since in the special case a (potential) action conflicts with the (potential) omission of the act. This also involves more than a single option to choose from. For example, an agent deciding whether his reasons, on balance, speak for or against a decision to pursue an academic career is also facing two competing options. He too must choose. Since he can either decide to try to find an adequate livelihood working in the scientific community. Or he can decide not to make such an attempt. In either case he will weigh the relative power of the reasons for and against the two competing options. He too is using, metaphorically speaking, the aforementioned scale and is trying to assess how weighty the reasons are that he is considering. Decision-making situations – this is the point I was trying to make in this section – are always situations of choice. Whoever has to make a practical decision has to choose what seems to her to be the best choice from at least two options to act. This makes it necessary to assess the weightiness of the reasons. Now that we have reached this understanding we can turn again to the main question raised at the beginning of this section. What role do reasons play in such choice situations? And what must be the nature of reasons so that they can play this role? 3. Whoever has to choose between (at least) two different courses of actions must decide what advantages and disadvantages these actions will, in all likelihood, have. It will thus be necessary to assess the relative weight of these advantages and disadvantages. The core idea of the position I will be arguing for is that it is exactly these advantages and disadvantages that are identical with the reasons for and against an action. A reason speaks for an action, just as an advantage speaks for the action it is an advantage of. Reasons have different weights just as advantages do, just as they are larger or smaller. And the explanation is simple: reasons are advantages of the actions they are reasons for. The following example will serve to illustrate this view. A person is facing a decision with three options: not to buy a car, to buy a sports car, or to buy a van. There are some well-known advantages to not buying a car. One of these advantages is avoiding all of the hassle associated with car repairs, insurance companies and so on. And this advantage is a reason that speaks for not buying a car. A reason in favor of doing something is at the same time a reason against a competing course of action. Since a reason that speaks for one option is usually also a reason that speaks against the alternative options. Reasons almost always lead this kind of double life. An advantage of one option can almost always be interpreted as a disadvantage of the other option; even if the disadvantage is simply that the option does not have the advantage that speaks for the alternative.

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Not owning a car has however for the person in our example not only the advantage we mentioned. There are also a number of disadvantages. Let us imagine that she lives in a small village and that it is difficult to reach the next city, which is far away. This constitutes a disadvantage of the option not to buy a car. This circumstance is thus a reason against this option and for the two alternative actions. For the person in our example, buying a sports car does promise certain advantages. With a car like this, she could cover the long distance she travels to work much faster than she could, if she had to take a train or drive a van. Without getting bogged down in unnecessary details, we can simply assume that there are also specific disadvantages to owning a fast, but small car. And we can also assume without further discussion that there will be advantages and disadvantages to owning a van. Whoever is facing a decision, it should now be clear, is trying to figure out what the advantages and disadvantages of her options are. These advantages and disadvantages are the reasons whose relative weights we have to estimate. It is about, in other words, the size of these weights, that is, their weightiness. And this quantitative aspect shows what is behind the metaphor of weighing reasons. 4. Reasons, so the basic idea until now, are the advantages and disadvantages of the options an agent is considering when making a decision. Let us now examine some of the implications of this core idea. Donald Davidson wrote quite some time ago: “A reason rationalizes an action only if it leads us to see something the agent saw, or thought he saw, in his action – some feature, consequence, or aspect of the action the agent wanted, desired, prized, held dear, thought dutiful, beneficial, obligatory, or agreeable.” (1963, 685; my emphasis) Caught up in a triad of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic, Hume’s conception of rationality and Hempel’s theory of explanation, Davidson drew a wrong conclusion from this correct observation. He came to the conviction that it was the agent’s wanting or desiring of a certain aspect of her action that is her reason. No, the desired and to that extent advantageous aspect itself is the reason.⁴ And this also explains how the reason leads us to see the relevant aspect, as Davidson writes: The reason simply shows itself. What is also right about Davidson’s claim is that in addition to the features or aspects of an action, in the narrow sense of these terms, we should also count both the causal and non-causal consequences of an action among its properties.

 For a similar aspect-theory of reasons see Bittner’s contribution to this volume.

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In this case the consequences of an action can also be reasons for or against this action. Suppose I have to decide whether to stay home one evening or go out with friends to the theater. Strictly speaking, of course I cannot know what will happen, if I stay home or if I go out to the theater. Nevertheless, past experiences in similar situations make it foreseeable that if I stay home I will spend the evening undisturbed and will find the time to finish some work I had set aside. And it is also foreseeable that if I go out, I will see an interesting production of a play and spend a nice evening with my friends. Such foreseeable consequences of possible actions are often part of the aspects we consider when we have to make a practical decision.⁵ And things that play this role in decisionmaking are, according to the thesis I am arguing for, reasons. Of course, actions do not always exhibit those aspects in general and those consequences in particular that, at the moment of decision, an agent foresaw or expected. When this happens, we are mistaken. Or, to put it more precisely, we should say that we can be mistaken about the reasons for our actions to the extent that these reasons do not exist. In such cases the agent believes he has detected an advantage in a course of action that the action in truth did not have or will not have. Agents in such cases see, one could say, putative reasons. It might turn out that the car I bought because of its supposedly low fuel consumption actually uses enormous quantities of fuel. I should then recognize that I did not have the reason for what I did that I thought I would have. I only thought I had it. If I perform an action for the sake of one of its likely consequences and this consequence does not happen, we have the same type of situation. In this case I also have a putative reason, a foreseeable advantage in mind. But it turns out that I am mistaken. As a result the action is done without a reason. As I already said, we should include the consequences of an action as advantageous or disadvantageous aspects of the action, and so as reasons for or against the action, since agents consider these consequences when making a decision. This observation suggests that we should be generous in dealing with the concept of an aspect (a property, feature, characteristic, quality etc.) of an action. And this generosity is called for not only with regard to, one could say, the temporal or consecutive aspects of actions but also with regard to their ontological dimensions. There are many different kinds of advantages and disadvantages, and so many different kinds of reasons for and against an action. This becomes clear when we realize that the advantages and disadvantages of an action do not need to be represented linguistically as aspects or characteristics of the action. It

 Richard Hare (1952, 56 ff.) had already drawn attention to the role of the consequences of actions in decision-making.

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is often more natural to speak about reasons as if they were facts. It is a purely linguistic and not a material difference when we conceptualize the reason for buying a sports car not as the (advantageous) characteristic of buying a fast car, but as the (advantageous) fact that it is the purchase of a fast car. This example also shows that the advantageous characteristics of an action are in many cases based on the advantageous characteristics of the entities involved. To the extent that the car is fast, buying this car is buying a fast car. And this characteristic of the action that is based on the characteristic of the car might in the eyes of the agent be a reason for his action and against alternative options. Therefore we should not hesitate to be ontologically generous and use the concept of an aspect of an action flexibly. Actions often have their advantageous and disadvantageous characteristics because of their (causal and noncausal) consequences or because of the characteristics of the entities the agent is involved with. With a bit of linguistic skill the reasons for an action can always be conceptualized as advantageous characteristics or favorable aspects of the action. Or, to put it differently, the reasons for an action are all those “things” that speak in favor of an action. And anything that speaks for an action is an advantage of this action, an advantageous trait, or an advantageous aspect of the action. 5. What is also right about Davidson’s claim is that a wanting, a pro-attitude or a desire of the agent is necessarily involved when we deal with the question what constitutes a reason for what kind of action. This has to do with the conceptual relationship between the concepts of desire and advantage. More precisely, the concept of the advantages and disadvantages of an action (of its advantageous and disadvantageous characteristics and consequences) can only be explained with reference to the desires, pro-attitudes or interests of a person. Since only by examining the desires of the person involved, we can explain which of the infinite number of aspects, characteristics and consequences of optional courses of action are advantages or disadvantages for this person. It is only because an agent has the desire to cover long distances as fast as possible that the speed of a car is a reason for buying this car. Whoever does not share this desire does not find this characteristic to be a reason for buying this kind of car. Only because another person wants to pay less for gasoline is the higher fuel consumption of a fast car a reason for him not to buy this car. Again it is the case that whoever does not share this desire does not have this reason for an action of this kind. If we did not have desires, the things around us would have neither advantages nor disadvantages. We would be indifferent to everything. It is only because we live in a world in which reasons speak to us that certain things that we can do

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seem to us more advantageous, more beneficial, that is, better than others. But it is not our desires themselves that speak to us as reasons. It is not only desires but also beliefs that have a necessary function for practical reasons. Since only if an agent believes that the course of action c (in the light of his desires) has the advantage a, is he able to perform the corresponding action for the reason r. But this necessity does not legitimate the conclusion that the belief of the agent is his reason for c (see Stoutland 2001, 103 – 105, Bittner 2001, chapter 7). The belief is also not a necessary condition for the advantage a being a reason. The belief is merely epistemically necessary for the agent to see the reason that speaks for h and then possibly take the corresponding action. Actions have, according to the conception I am arguing for, in the light of an agent’s desires their advantages and disadvantages, whether he is aware of them or not. To this extent reasons also speak for an action even when the agent does not hear them. Better still, we could say that not every reason a person has for an action is a reason this person also sees. Sometimes we are blind to our reasons. 6. In order to demonstrate a further implication of the core idea presented in the third section, I would like to recall two points I have already mentioned and point out a consequence they have. The advantages of an action, I was saying, are those aspects of the action that in the light of the desires of an agent present themselves as positive or advantageous characteristics. Furthermore, the brief passage I quoted from Davidson reminded us that the concept of desire, as it is used in the philosophy of action, is a very broad concept. In addition to desires and interests in the narrower sense of these words, it includes valuations, appraisals and the sense of duty, that is, phenomena of our mental and emotional life, that we do not usually call desires. As a consequence of these two points we should accept a similarly broadly conceived conception of the advantages of an action. This concept should not be interpreted in a narrowly hedonistic or utilitarian sense so that we think that only pleasant feelings, moments of happiness or satisfaction can be the advantages of an action that an agent can consider as reasons for an action. People, as a matter of fact, differ in this respect greatly from each other. It may be that there really are hedonists among us, i. e. people whose desires only allow pleasure to appear as advantages of, that is as reasons for actions. But most of us are not like that; we are more normal. In the broader sense of the word, we do not only desire our own happiness. We often also want that the people we love, those who are close to us, are happy. It can thus be in the light of my desires an advantage of an action if it has as a consequence that

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you are happy or at least that I do not cause you any unnecessary trouble, frustration or pain. Yes, evidently there are people who have such an upbringing or who for some other reason could never imagine doing anything shameful, wicked or mean. If a potential action has these negative traits, that is, in the light of their desires proves to have disadvantageous aspects, then for these people this is a strong, if not sufficient reason not to do it. It is not necessary to be like these highly sensitive individuals. In other words, it takes all kinds of people to make a world. For the purposes of this part of my argument it is simply important to emphasize that the concept of the advantages and disadvantages of actions should be interpreted generously enough to do justice to the variety and diversity of human reality. When I speak of an action’s advantages or disadvantages, please think more about Aristotle and less about Bentham. 7. For the second part of my argument, it is important to realize that a large part of recent and not so recent controversies in action theory have been distorted by a contingent linguistic fact. This fact is that the English language does not have equivalents for the German noun Begründung and the corresponding verb begründen, which are so to speak the natural allies of the central term Grund (‘reason’). As a result, many Anglo-Saxon writers (and many non-Anglo-Saxon authors strongly influenced by the English-language literature) resort to the terms ‘explain’, ‘explanatory’, ‘justify’ etc. when writing about practical reasons and the functions they serve. Due to such evasive action, talk of explanatory reasons and their supposed contrast to normative-justificatory reasons has become established. One feels, as it were, that the right words are missing.⁶ And with nothing better at hand terms have been adopted that have taken on their own independent existence. In an effort to fill this gap, I propose to translate Begründung and begründen with “reason-giving” and “to give a reason for”, respectively. In any case, the main purpose of referring to a reason as a reason is, as one might suspect, to give a reason for an action. From the position I am arguing for, that reasons are the advantages of an action, it follows that giving reasons for an action consists of referring to its relevant advantages and thus presenting the action in a favorable light. A person gives reasons for an action, in other words, by showing its advantages in comparison to alternative courses of action.

 It is symptomatic that in the passage cited, Davidson introduces the neologism ‘to rationalize’ where the meaning demands ‘giving reasons for’ the action. This term, however, did not find acceptance, either in his own writings or by others.

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That reasons by their nature serve to give reasons for an action indicates that the concept of justifying reasons points in the right direction but misses its target. Since justifying an action is only a subordinate type of reason-giving. As a rule we are only asked to justify our actions when the spoken or unspoken accusation has been made that we have acted irrational, wrongly, immorally, incorrectly or imperfectly. In this case a reference to the reasons does not need to only give reasons for the action, but the reasons should also show that, in spite of all of the accusations and charges that have been made, the action had its advantages or at least that it was less disadvantageous than its alternatives. Every justification of an action gives then reasons for that action, i. e. is a species of reason-giving. But the concept of reason-giving is much broader. Not every time we give reasons for an action are we justifying that action, since not every action undertaken for a reason needs to be justified. If we now turn to the question as to the relationship between the activity of giving reasons for an action and explaining it, we face a choice between two possibilities. We can, first, use a narrow concept of explanation, according to which the explanation of an event necessarily refers to the history or etiology of the event in order to show how this event came to be or where it came from or could come from. I think that the wide-spread intuition of many scholars in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of action that every adequate explanation of actions and other types of events must be a causal explanation (or at least reducible to a causal explanation) is based on this narrow concept of explanation. In this sense, explanation is always facing backwards in that it refers to the causes or the causal history of the explanandum. And every other form of putative explanation seems from this perspective to be a pseudo-explanation or is only acceptable if it can be reduced to a causal explanation.⁷ If we define explanation narrowly, then giving reasons for an action is not identical with explaining the action. Reason-giving, understood as a reference to an advantage of an action in the light of the desires of an agent, refers to something that does not yet exist at the moment of the agent’s decision and often not at the moment of the agent’s action, and perhaps never will. Giving reasons for an action is thus – in one of the many meanings of the term – teleological by its nature (see Sehon 2005). And if we presuppose the narrow concept of explanation there can be no teleological explanations as independent, that is, as irreducible explanations, since explanations, as I said, look temporally back to

 See again the quoted article by Davidson, where he uses an inference to the best explanation to argue that an explanation of an action by reasons must be understood as a causal explanation, since supposedly there is no other concept of explanation available.

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the history of the explanandum. By contrast, reason-giving is teleological in so far as it is directed to the future. This view to the future does not of course explain how the explanandum comes into being. Generally speaking then we can say that reasons do not explain, at least not in the narrow sense of the word. There is however a more comprehensive concept of explanation that allows the reason-giving of an action to be included in its set of explanations. In this broader sense, all (correct) answers to the question why the explanandum exists are, to the extent that they somehow contribute to its understanding, explanations of their explanandum (see Salmon 1990). In order to contribute to this understanding, an explanation must not necessarily answer the question how the explanandum came into existence. We often better understand something, for example, when we learn its function, that is, what its purpose is. Insofar a reference to the reason of an action serves to answer the question why the agent acts as she does (or acted as she did), this reference also serves to explain the action. A relevant answer to the question ‘Why?’ increases our understanding, because we learn what advantage the agent had in mind when she did what she did. Whoever defines the concept of explanation narrowly feels, as I have already mentioned, some pressure to interpret expressions that claim to be explanatory as if they were, overtly or covertly, causal explanations. If she then makes the mistake, despite her narrow definition of the concept of explanation, of attributing explanatory power to practical reasons, she cannot but consider the reasons to be causes (or somehow reducible to causes). If she avoids this mistake, she can see that reasons do not, in the narrow sense of the word, explain but are in their nature teleological and serve to put the corresponding action in some favorable light. Alternatively, she can ascribe to reasons not only their capacity to give reasons for an action but also a power to explain an action. But then she would have to replace the narrow definition of explanation with the broad one and would then as a result not have any need to identify explanations with causal explanations and reasons with causes, respectively. It is by now obvious that given the conception of practical reasons I am proposing the explanation of an action by the reason of the agent is not an explanation in the narrow sense of the word, not a causal explanation. How could it be? Since the aspect of the action behind the agent’s decision to take this action, that is the reason of her action, cannot be the cause of the action. A characteristic is never the cause of the thing it is a characteristic of. Even less so does the intended consequence of an action cause the action. That explanations of actions by reasons can be easily confused with causal explanations is because of the relationship, discussed in the fifth section of this paper, between reasons, desires and beliefs. It is this relationship that allows us to conclude that whenever an agent acted for a reason (an advantage), she had a desire in the light of which

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this reason appeared to be an advantage of the corresponding action. And if we know that the agent acted for this reason, then we can also conclude that she believed that there was this advantage to the action. Where there is a reason for someone to act, there is also a relevant desire and a fitting belief on the part of the agent. And it may very well be true that such desires and beliefs are able to causally explain the action in question.⁸ This relationship between the reason for an action and the desire and belief of an agent, which allows a causal explanation of an action, is easy to overlook. And the reason for this oversight would presumably also explain why over the past years action theory has seen so many and such disparate conceptions of practical reasons. This factual pluralism, which was the subject of the first section, demands an explanation. And to my mind the explanation is that there are two different versions not only of the concept of explanation but also of the concepts of reason and reason-giving. In the narrow sense, which I have made use of until now, only direct reference to the practical reason of an action can be called reason-giving. This reason is an advantage of the action. In a broader sense, the word ‘reason’ can also be used so that any factor at all can be considered a reason if it serves to explain in one way or another an action or some other event (see Bittner 2001, 77 f.). Reasons in this sense of the word are nothing else but explanatory factors. And the broad concept of reason-giving may, from an extensional perspective, be identical to the broad concept of explanation.⁹ In this broader use of the term ‘reason’, beliefs and desires can also be reasons for an action. They are able to be this because they are able to explain an action. In this broader meaning, facts that are part of the world of the agent can also serve to explain his action. This is especially the case when the action of the agent can be conceived of as an intentional reaction or response to the fact in question. The fact that the traffic light turned red explains why an agent stops his car. And to the extent that the red light explains his action it is also a reason in the broader sense of the word. It is an explanatory reason. That we are dealing with a concept of reason that is much more comprehensive than the concept of practical reason can be easily seen in light of the fact

 Whether this is right or not seems to depend in the first place on what theory of causation one makes use of. With counterfactual theories, for example, there are no arguments against accepting mental attitudes as causes (and as effects). More physicalistically oriented theories of causation lead from the question whether attitudes can stand in causal relations to other attitudes and actions to the tangled mazes of the philosophy of the mind. See for example Gibb/Lowe/Ingthorsson 2013.  If this suspicion is correct then we can do without the broad concept of reason-giving. What is essential is that there are two different concepts of reason.

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that in the broader use of the word many things can have reasons that, in the narrower sense of the word, which in philosophical contexts are called practical reasons for actions, cannot have reasons. Since in this broader interpretation of reasons as explanatory factors, we are also speaking of the reasons why buildings collapse, rivers burst their banks, epidemics spread or financial systems break down. Reasons in this sense of the word are, as we have said, explanatory factors. They do not have anything to do with actions as actions and so they are not practical reasons. Often these reasons are best interpreted as causes. They explain actions as mere events caused by other events. But where we are dealing with reasons for action, that is, with practical reasons that agents consider before making a decision and which could serve as reasons for them taking an action, we are not dealing with the broad concept of explanatory reason. Here we are dealing with practical reasons in the sense of the advantages of actions they give reasons for. Here only the narrow concept of reason-giving is important. 8. So we have to differentiate between different sized concepts of explanation and reason-giving. A reason-giving in the narrow sense is not an explanation in the narrow sense but only in the broad one. Explanations in the narrow sense are not reasons-givings in the narrow sense but only in the broad one. At this point of the discussion I would like to return once more to the paper of Davidson I quoted from earlier. He makes a distinction there between primary and non-primary reasons in order to account for the fact that in our everyday talk about reasons for actions we rarely refer to the exact combination of desires and beliefs, which he holds to be the primary reasons of actions. The distinction between primary and non-primary reasons accounts for this fact, to the extent that Davidson can claim that everything that is an answer to the question why an agent acts the way he does is acceptable as a non-primary reason as long as it is explicitly or implicitly clear how the primary reason can be reconstructed from the non-primary reason.¹⁰ With this distinction in mind we can designate the advantages of actions as primary reasons and classify all other reasons that fall under the broader concept of a reason as non-primary reasons. In doing this we will of course not forget that something is only acceptable as a non-primary reason if it shows sufficiently clearly what the primary reason of the agent is, that is, what advantage an action had in the eyes of the agent. To the extent that such a reconstruction of the primary reason is possible, non-pri-

 “For us to understand how a reason of any kind rationalizes an action it is necessary and sufficient that we see, at least in essential outline, how to construct a primary reason.” Davidson 1963, 686.

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mary reasons serve, so to speak, to indirectly give reasons for an action in the narrow sense of the word. If we keep these stipulative definitions in mind, we can now designate desires, beliefs, intentions and other intentional attitudes of agents as non-primary reasons. They are such reasons to the extent that they serve to explain the action in question and they clearly show which advantages of the action, that is, which primary reasons are important in a given situation. Additionally, those circumstances of an action that allow us to understand it, to the extent that the action is understandable as a reaction or response of the agent to these circumstances, are covered by the concept of non-primary reasons. When we learn that stepping on the brake is a response of the driver to a red light, then we can easily imagine which advantages the agent saw in stopping his car at the red light. The notion of a non-primary reason should be taken as a very broad concept. Since it would then account for everyday intuitions about reasons. Jonathan Dancy, for example, is convinced that the fact of having promised something is a reason for undertaking the promised action (2004, 38 ff.). Promising something is however difficult to interpret as a characteristic of an action and so it should not be understood as a primary reason to keep the promise. But we understand and accept the explanation that the agent did what he did because he had previously promised to do it, since it is sufficiently clear what could be the primary reason for his action. It could be, for example, that the advantage of the action was to do something nice for the person the promise had been made to. It could be that this advantage prevailed over the disadvantages of the action. It was for the sake of this advantage that the agent kept his promise. It was for this reason he acted in this way and not in any other.

References Alvarez, María, 2013: Kinds of reasons. An essay in the philosophy of action, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anscombe, G. E. M., 1957: Intention, Oxford: Blackwell. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2001: Doing things for reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dancy, Jonathan, 2000: Practical reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dancy, Jonathan, 2004: Ethics without principles, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, Donald, 1963: “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”. In: The Journal of Philosophy 60, 685 – 700. Gibb, Sophie C. / Lowe, E. Jonathan / Ingthorsson, Rögnvaldur D., 2013: Mental causation and ontology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Alvin I., 1976: A theory of human action, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Hare, Richard M., 1952: The language of morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Hornsby, Jennifer, 1993: “Agency and Causal Explanation”. In: John Heil, Alfred R. Mele (eds.), Mental causation, Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 161 – 185. Iorio, Marco, 2013: Reasons without reason, Heidelberg: Synchron Wissenschaftsverlag der Autoren. Ryle, Gilbert, 1949: The concept of mind, London: Hutchinson. Salmon, Wesley C., 1990: Four decades of scientific explanation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sehon, Scott Robert, 2005: Teleological realism. Mind, agency, and explanation, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. Smith, Michael, 1994: The moral problem, Oxford: Blackwell. Sobel, David / Wall, Steven (eds.), 2009: Reasons for action, Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stoutland, Frederick, 2001: “Responsive Action and the Belief-Desire Model”. In: Grazer Philosophische Studien 61, 83 – 106. Stoutland, Frederick, 1998: “The Real Reasons”. In: Jan Bransen, Stefaan E. Cuypers (eds.), Human action, deliberation and causation, Dordrecht: Springer, 43 – 66. Williams, Bernard, 1995: “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame”. In: Bernard Williams, Making sense of humanity and other philosophical papers. 1992 – 1993, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 35 – 45. von Wright, Georg Henrik, 1981: Explanation and understanding of action. In: Georg Henrik von Wright: Practical reason. Philosophical papers. Vol. I, London 1983, 53 – 66.

Onora O’Neill

How Much Can We Say about Practical Judgement?

1. Practical judgement is widely taken to be indispensable, yet its philosophical discussion remains episodic, scattered and contentious. Even within philosophical work on normative questions – political philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence – it is common to find discussions of the justification of principles or normative standards taking centre stage, but that little is said about their deployment in practice. In this short paper I shall try to set out some points about what is done, and what is not done, in judging practically. I shall comment briefly on a few earlier treatments, including some of Kant’s claims and distinctions, and will try to articulate some differences between practical and non-practical judging. In using the term non-practical judging I intentionally avoid the terms theoretical judgement and theoretical judging, which have several uses, and leave it open that non-practical judging may be of several sorts. 2. Anscombe’s Accusation. In her influential 1958 paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ G.E.M. Anscombe argued that both Kant and the Utilitarians took an inadequate view of the relation between principles and action, placed too much emphasis on principles and ignored the need for practical judgement (Anscombe 1981). They failed to see that acts fall under many descriptions, consequently failed to realise that principles which incorporate one (or a small number) of specific act descriptions are not enough to guide action. Attempts to create an ethics of principles, she concluded, are doomed. She wrote of Kant that: […] it never occurred to him that a lie could be relevantly described as anything but just a lie […]. His rule about universalisable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count with a view to constructing a maxim about it. (1958, 2)

She levelled exactly the same charges against Mill: Mill, like Kant, fails to realise the necessity for stipulation of relevant descriptions, if his theory is to have content. It did not occur to him that acts of murder and theft could be otherwise described. He holds that where a proposed action is of such a kind as to fall under some one principle established on grounds of utility, one must go by that […]. (1958, 2 f.)

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She concluded that both Kantian and Utilitarian ethics – which she sees as the two most prominent currents in ‘modern moral philosophy’ – are inadequate for the same reasons: even supposing that their fundamental ethical arguments justify certain principles (Anscombe thinks that they fail to do so), these principles lack determinate practical implications, so are pointless. Her accusations became influential when they were accepted and elaborated by a wide range of Wittgensteinian, Communitarian and Feminist writers on ethics (routes of transmission include Wittgensteinian writing and Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential After Virtue, both much influenced by Anscombe’s work). Anscombe moves from the thought that acts can be described in many ways – surely incontrovertible – to a claim that principles of action cannot be action guiding. The defect she contends is that while principles can incorporate correct descriptions of any given act, they can offer no reasons for preferring any one description over others that are also true of that act. This claim seems to me mistaken. It is true that any given act – say one of lying or murder or theft, to stick with Anscombe’s examples – can be described in countless other ways. But it does not follow that principles that prohibit murder, theft or lying cannot guide action. They guide action in that they prohibit action that constitutes murder, theft or lying, and are satisfied by action that that does not constitute murder, theft or lying, as the case may be. What they, of course, do not do is to pick out particular act-tokens for performance. Oddities apart¹, practical principles do not, indeed cannot, pick out act tokens. But nor should we expect them to do so. In practical reasoning we aim to instantiate or enact practical principles and the act descriptions they incorporate, rather than to apply principles and the descriptions they incorporate to already existing instances or cases, as we do in much non-practical (above all in empirical) reasoning. Where we seek to fit the world to our words – in some small measure – we aim to reshape it. This contrasts with non-practical reasoning, in which we seek to fit our words to the world, for example by describing or reporting some aspect of the way the world is. By contrast, in practical reasoning – whether ethical or technical, legal or political – we seek to justify principles, and then to enact or instantiate them in actual situations: here the particularity of enactments is necessarily subsequent to action, so neither can nor needs to be presupposed. If we can justify principles, there will no doubt be situations in which it is taxing, sometimes even impossible, to enact or instantiate all of the principles that we have reason

 Oddities may arise if the act description in a principle includes a (contrived) definite description that could be satisfied only by a single act token.

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to take seriously as well as we would hope to – or at all. But this is not because particular acts can be relevantly described in multiple ways, but because some situations make it difficult, and others impossible, to enact certain principles or combinations of principles. Anscombe is right to claim that practical principles will not pick out particular acts, but mistaken in thinking that in consequence their point as guides to action is lost. 3. Non-Practical Judgement. In non-practical judging, a particular item or case is judged, and it matters to discover the features of that item or case. Non-practical judging (I hesitate to call it theoretical, since that term plays various roles) has (at least) two quite different versions. In one type of non-practical judgement, a particular item, case or example is available, and the aim is to judge whether it does or does not fall under some preselected or given description or principle. In such cases we seek to classify or describe the item: We may seek to answer questions such as ‘Is this bird a chaffinch?’, ‘Is this coin counterfeit?’, ‘Was that speech-act a truth-claim?’ or ‘Is this poem a sonnet?’. Non-practical judgements of this sort may be empirical or speculative, factual or fictional, everyday or technical, true or false, clear or unclear. Here judgement is indeed a matter of working out whether a particular item can be subsumed under some preselected description or principle. A second type of non-practical judging also begins from consideration of particular cases or examples, but does not assume or preselect specific descriptions, categories or principles as the relevant, let alone the only, ones for judging the case at hand. In such cases the questions posed for judgement are more open, and the aim is to find one (or more) appropriate way of seeing, interpreting or describing the case at hand. We may ask, for example, ‘What species of a bird is this?’, ‘What sort of situation is this?’, and ‘What type of a speech-act is this?’ This sort of non-practical judgement is often open to a range of answers. In some cases the open question receives a definite answer: the bird may be definitively a blackbird and belong to no other species of birds. But a situation may be both a tea party and a family quarrel, both the first meeting of a new club and the loudest dinner in the restaurant. And a speech act might be both a call to arms and a declaration of war, both a truth claim and a joke. Questions that invite this sort of judgment may be open to a range of answers, and there may be no obvious method, let alone a checklist, by which an optimal answer can be identified. Nevertheless, judgements of this open-ended sort can be assessed by a wide range of cognitive, social, ethical and aesthetic standards: they may be more or less thoughtful or intelligent, more or less courteous or provocative, more or less acceptable or cogent, more or less accurate or sloppy, more or less honest or deceitful.

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4. Kant’s views of Non-Practical Judgement. In some of his writing on judgement, Kant labelled the types of non-practical judgement that I have just distinguished respectively determinant (or subsumptive) and reflective judgement (see Teufel 2012). In the Third Critique he writes that “[i]f the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the particular under it is determinant. […] If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply reflective.” (2008, 15) It is not feasible to give a complete account of the process to be used in theoretical judging of either sort, but for different reasons. Kant had pointed out some of the difficulties of subsumptive (or determinant) judgement in the First Critique, claiming that we can offer no complete account of the processes followed in making such judgments. For if one wanted to […] show generally how one ought to subsume under these rules, i. e. distinguish whether something stands under them or not, this could not happen except once again through a rule. But just because this is a rule it would demand another instruction of the power of judgement, and so it becomes clear that although the understanding is certainly capable of being instructed and equipped through rules, the power of judgement is a special talent that cannot be taught but only practised This is also specific to so-called mother wit, the lack of which cannot be made good by any school. (1998, A133/B172)

But if judging (non-practically) has to rely on incomplete rules, how is it to proceed? A checklist or a classification can provide a starting point for determinant judging, but will offer only incomplete guidelines, since judgement has already had to be used to select the list or concepts or classifications, and to articulate the criteria for their use. We cannot set out the rules for applying concepts exhaustively. Determinant judging has to select certain categories and to assume certain criteria for their application, and while we can always seek to make more of the background considerations explicit, there is no way of setting out complete rules for making such judgements. This limitation is generic, and does reflect specific problems that may arise in judging borderline or difficult cases. Reflective judging differs in that it begins without any fixed list of concepts or scheme of classification, so is even further from having a complete set of rules to be followed. The point is to find a concept or description that seems apt to the case. Judging reflectively is therefore likened to other interpretive activities, in which we see a case (a situation, an image, a text, a person) as being of a certain sort: reflective judgement is a matter of “seeing something as of a certain sort” (Wittgenstein 1980). A number of other metaphors have been used to characterise this feature of reflective judging, and in particular its use in the appraisal of morally significant situations For example, John McDowell characterises moral judgement or deliberation as “a capacity to read the details of situations” (1996, 23) or a

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“capacity to read the details of situations in the light of a way of valuing actions” (1996, 30) or a “capacity to read predicaments correctly” (1996, 26). Others have characterised it as a matter of finding appropriate descriptions for a given situation, and have likened doing so to attending to or appraising or reading the case, with the aim of finding an apt way of seeing or understanding it. Although these discussions of the sort of interpretive judgement that Kant called reflective judging and Wittgenstein called ‘seeing as’, are often illustrated by examples that have morally important features or moral aspects, reflective judgement is a matter of judging or assessing existing situations. It is not a form of practical judgement or deliberation (see again McDowell 1996 and Wiggins 1987). Reflective judgement starts ‘further back’ than determinant or subsumptive judgement, in that it does not assume a fixed list of categories against which cases are to be judged, but takes a more open-ended, exploratory approach to judging them. It is often preliminary to practical, including ethical, judging. But it too is not a form of practical judgement, since it too requires that a particular case or example be available to be judged. Practical judgement – whether ethical or prudential, legal or technical – presupposes that the context of action has been construed by such a process of reflective judging, but is not itself a matter of judging anything that is already to hand. However carefully, however well we judge a situation that is to hand, the judgement that we reach will not by itself tell us how to respond, react or engage, let alone show which particular act token is called for. This suggests that it may be harder to say anything useful about the process of practical judging than it is to say something about the two types of non-practical judging. 5. Practical Judging: Instantiation and Enactment. In practical judging, where no particular is given antecedently, the task is not to judge a particular case, or situation, or example. Rather it is to enact or instantiate some aim or requirement, principle or standard. So while Kant’s account of non-practical judging is relevant to any preliminary non-practical judgement of situations in which practical judgement is called for, it will be enough to deliver a practical judgement of what to do. So it is not surprising that Kant warns us how hard it is to say anything useful about the process of practical judgement, noting at one point in the Critique of Practical Reason that “Judgement depending on laws of pure practical reason seems, therefore, to be subject to special difficulties […].” (1996a, 68)²

 He discusses underlying aspects of these special difficulties at 1996a, 67– 71, but does not it seems to me reach any useful conclusion about practical judging.

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In other passages Kant looks more closely at practical judgement and discusses the defective practical judgment of those experts who are competent in theory but fail in practical matters. For example, in a well known passage in the First Critique he notes: A physician therefore, a judge or a statesman can have many fine pathological, juridical or political rules in his head, of which he can even be a thorough teacher, and yet can easily stumble in their application, either because he is lacking in natural power of judgement (though not in understanding) and to be sure understands the universal in abstracto but cannot distinguish whether a case in concreto comes under it, or also because he has not received adequate training for this judgement through examples and actual business. (A134/B173)

This passage starts from a point about non-practical judging, and moves to – or perhaps only towards – a claim about failures in practical judging. The passage provides an apt account of everyday failures in practical judging: the expert with the rules in his head, who can ‘talk the talk’ but is unable to ‘walk the walk’. It then claims that the defect lies in the expert’s inability to tell “whether a case in concreto comes under it [the universal – here the rule] […].” However, this is not an illuminating account of the expert’s failure. For Kant here still assumes that there is a case or example in concreto, i. e. already to hand to be judged, but this would mean that the agent faces a non-practical rather than a practical task. The failure would be one of diagnosis or discernment or appraisal – either of determinant or of reflective judgement – rather than a failure in practical judgment. Yet very often the would-be expert’s practical problem is a failure to see or work out how to instantiate or enact a principle, rule or standard that he proclaims in the actual situation. Such experts cannot work out what it would be to enact the principles that they know are appropriate. So this passage gets us no further towards an understanding of practical judgement. Rather it returns us to the case of non-practical judging, where an expert cannot tell “whether a case in concreto comes under it […].”³ However in some of his later discussions of expert judgement, Kant explicitly focuses on what must be done when practical judgement is required. In the opening section of his 1793 essay Theory and Practice, Kant distinguished two ways in which experts may fail as practitioners. He describes experts as knowing “a sum of rules, even of practical rules” which “is called a theory, if those rules  See also the slide from practical to non-practical judging that occurs in the Critique of Practical Reason, where Kant writes that “Now, whether an action possible for us in sensibility is or is not a case that stands under the rule requires practical judgement, by which what is said in the rule universally (in abstracto) is applied to [angewandt wird] an action in concreto.” (5, 67)

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are thought as principles having a certain generality, so that abstraction is made from a multitude of conditions that yet have a necessary influence on their application.” (1996b, 275)⁴ (Here ‘theoretical’ is obviously not contrasted with ‘practical’.) However, in the same paragraph he describes practice as a matter “effecting an end which is thought as the observance [Befolgung] of certain principles of procedure [des Verfahrens: of the activity] represented in their generality”, that is to say as a matter of living up to (observing, conforming to, enacting) principles or standards. Experts are here seen not merely as having command of some (more or less) abstract principles (a theory!), but as practitioners who seek to deploy or put their expertise to use, thereby enacting the principles or theory which constitutes their expertise. The interesting contrast between this passage and the earlier passage in which Kant discusses expertise is that he here explicitly identifies practical judging with enacting or instantiating principles, not with applying them. He now uses the term Ausűbung rather than Anwendung. Unfortunately he did not (so far as I can make out) use this distinction systematically in discussing the differences between the application of principles in non-practical judging and their enactment in practical judging. In any case, Kant’s earlier and (as I think) less appropriate idiom has prevailed, and we now have a powerful movement in so-called applied ethics which typically (mis)characterises the task of practical judging as a matter of applying principles to cases, rather than as a matter of seeking or devising ways to live by or enact principles in varied situations. 6. Enacting Principles. If we think of practical judging as a matter of enacting or instantiating certain ideas, rules, principles, or standards, we need to understand how much we can say about how it is done, and which processes it should use. An initial thought might be that once practical judging is seen to be a matter of enacting principles or standards, it is ridiculously easy to give an account of the process to be followed. Reverting to Anscombe’s examples, we need only ask

 An older and valuable translation by H. B. Nisbet can be found in Hans Reiss 1991. The German reads “Man nennt einen Inbegriff selbst von praktischen Regeln alsdann Theorie, wenn diese Regeln als Prinzipien in einer gewissen Allgemeinheit gedacht werden, und dabei von einer Menge Bedingungen abstrahiert wird, die doch auf ihre Ausübung notwendig Einfluß haben.” This makes it clearer that the emphasis is on theory guiding action, by using the word ‘Ausübung’ (‘enactment’, ‘instantiation’) rather than the general term for ‘application’, which is ‘Anwendung’. Nisbet’s translation marks the difference by rendering ‘Ausübung’ as ‘practical application’, which seems to me unfortunate.

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whether an action that we consider doing would be an instance of theft or lying or murder, and (assuming that we do not think these permissible types of action) refrain if it looks as if it would be any of these. On this account, practical judging would be no more than a matter of assessing what might be done (under one or a number of descriptions) to work out whether action under that description was required or ruled out by accepted practical principles or standards. However, if practical judgment amounted only to this, we would lack a basis for distinguishing better from worse practical judgement, ways of grasping why or whether the descriptions under which action was assessed were important or trivial, and a grasp of reasons why good judgement matters, is demanding and is highly prized .We would have only the beginnings of an account of practical judgement. A time honoured move at this juncture is to appeal to actual practices, culture and traditions. Such appeals may be convincing if we think of practical judgements as internal to certain cultures or traditions, crafts or professions. Many (neo‐)Aristotelian and communitarian writers claim that they offer an adequate account of practical judgement, and suggest that an appeal to shared practices and accepted standards of performance may offer a basis for distinguishing better from weaker practical judgement. However, it is questionable whether this way of thought can be stretched to deal with the case of practical judgement about moral issues. If we merely identify practical judgement with judgement that draws on established practices or traditions, we will lack an answer to the ancient problems raised by evil traditions, corrupt practices, and demeaning or degrading cultural practices. It is one thing to judge weavers excellent because of the quality of their textiles, another to judge assassins or terrorists excellent because of the number of their killings, or business leaders excellent because of the wonders of their ‘bottom lines’. At most the latter may have technical expertise – at the cost of moral failure. If we are not willing to see the practical judgement of those whose success lies within corrupt, barbarous or degrading traditions as lying beyond ethical criticism, an appeal to shared practices cannot provide an adequate basis for an account of practical judgements that is morally adequate. 7. More ‘theory’? But if an appeal to existing practice is insufficient, where can we look? One suggestion that Kant made in Theory and Practice is interesting. He suggests there that we can look for more theory, and develops an argument first for the case of technical and then for the case of moral judgement requiring more rather than less theory. He claims that “The worth of practice rests entirely on its conformity with the theory underlying it” (1996b, 277) and concludes there can be nothing else that guides moral action. This conclusion assumes that practical reasoning and practical judgement do not even aim to fit the world, and cannot

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be derived from examples, and infers that this being the case there is nothing but theory – words, rules, principles – to guide moral action. In contemporary terms, this amounts to a claim that practical judgements must be principle or theory led, and not world-directed like empirical judgement. What we need if we are to judge practically is not fewer principles or standards, but more. Kant illustrates the point first with examples of practical reasoning about technical action. In one example he suggests that an artilleryman who criticises the underlying physical theories on which his practice is based, such as mechanics and ballistics, because their relation to practice is approximate rather than precise, should augment these theories with further theories of friction and air resistance: here failure in practice arose from relying on too little rather than too much theory. A more complete theory would offer a better guide to practice: it would enable the artilleryman to aim more accurately. Similar issues arise in other technical fields (Kant’s other examples in this essay are taken from agronomy and medicine). Can anything analogous be said about morally practical judgement? I think that it probably can. We do not, so to speak, encounter moral considerations one by one. We constantly face situations in which a plurality of practical principles (theory!) is relevant, so need to work out how or how far they can be jointly met in actual contexts. It may be simple enough to check whether a proposal for action would conform to (not violate) an individual practical principle, but it is often far from simple to find a way of acting that is both honest and kind, or that both respects others’ freedom and protects their safety. Practical judgement is demanding because it is not a matter of living up a single principle in each action, but of living by “a sum of rules, even of practical rules [which is] called a theory […].” (1996b, 275). Morality and justice begin with standards or principles. Neither can be derived from experience or from particular cases. Neither can be practiced without working out how to confirm to and enact a plurality of principles. The person with good practical judgement is someone who works out how to satisfy a plurality of morally demanding rules and principles.

References Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958: “Modern Moral Philosophy”. In: Philosophy 33, 1 – 16. Kant, Immanuel, 1998: Critique of pure reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel, 1996a: Critique of practical reason. In: Immanuel Kant: Practical philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel, 2008: Critique of judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith; revised, edited, and introduced by Nicholas Walker, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kant, Immanuel, 1996b: “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice”. In: Immanuel Kant: Practical philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair C., 1981: After virtue. A study in moral theory, Notre Dame, Indiana.: University of Notre Dame Press. McDowell, John, 1996: “Deliberation and Moral Development”. In: Stephen Engstrom, Jennifer Whiting (eds.), Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics. Rethinking happiness and duty, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, David, 1987: “Deliberation and Practical Reason”. In: David Wiggins, Needs, values, truth. Essays in the philosophy of value, Oxford: Blackwell, 215 – 237. Reiss, Hans (ed.), 1991: Kant: Political writings, New York: Cambridge University Press. Teufel, Thomas, 2012: “What Does Kant Mean by ‘Power of Judgement’ in his Critique of the Power of Judgement?”. In: Kantian Review 17: 297 – 326. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1980: Remarks on the philosophy of psychology. Volume I, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

R. Jay Wallace

A Modest Defense of Regret* 1. Should we regret things that we have done? Why, more generally, does it so much as make sense to be subject to feelings of distress about events that have occurred in the past (regardless of whether they result from acts of ours, or instead involve situations that came about independently of our agency)? Retrospective feelings of these kinds can easily seem to be pointless, or worse. They occur at a point in time at which it is no longer possible to do anything about the events that occasion them. Moreover, they seem to make a bad situation worse, adding to whatever is unfortunate about the past event that is their object a second and distinct misfortune, which consists in an emotion of present pain. One of my favorite contributions by Rüdiger Bittner is his paper, “Is it Reasonable to Regret the Things One Did?”, which develops this skeptical line of thought about regret.¹ The paper has many of the hallmarks of the Bittner oeuvre: it is concise, direct, and utterly free from pedantry, jargon, and other symptoms of professionalized philosophical practice. The paper raises a simple but profound question about a phenomenon that is familiar and important to all of us, and it doesn’t shirk from following its reasoning to a startling conclusion: that it just doesn’t make sense for people to regret the bad things they have done. I have regularly used this paper in undergraduate classes on moral psychology, and it always stimulates the most lively and productive discussions of the semester. It defends a position that is very hard to accept, but advances arguments that are at the same time extremely difficult to counter. In this paper I’d like to offer a modest defense of regret in the face of Bittner’s arguments against it, which I shall henceforth refer to as ‘the skeptical challenge’. I describe my defense as ‘modest’, because I’m aware that Bittner’s arguments, considered on their own terms, are more or less unanswerable – once you are prepared to raise the question of whether it makes sense to feel regret about past events, there is probably nothing that will completely put your doubts about it to rest. Nevertheless I shall attempt to provide some reassurance, by situating the emotion of regret in the context of other phenomena that are extremely important to human life.

* Material in this paper is adapted from Wallace 2013, chap. 2; reprinted with permission.  Bittner, 1992. Compare Samuel Johnson, from which the following section takes its title: “The other passions are diseases indeed, but they necessarily direct us to their proper cure. […] But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature […].” (2013, No. 47)

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2. “For Sorrow There is No Remedy.” To come to terms with the skeptical challenge, it may be helpful to begin by considering some familiar situations: the team you have been following since childhood has just lost the world series in heartbreaking fashion (after leading in extra innings in the sixth game and potentially deciding game). Or the political situation in your country goes from bad to worse, as insane demagogues score huge electoral successes during a period of increasing economic stagnation and misery. A close friend or relative is diagnosed with severe cancer, and dies shortly thereafter. Or you yourself lash out cruelly against someone who is sensitive and vulnerable, in a mood of anger and general frustration. Someone who experiences an event of one of these kinds will typically be prone to a range of familiar emotions in its aftermath. In their most generic forms we might speak of grief or sorrow, experiences that involve acute feelings of pain or distress on account of an event or situation that is contemplated by their bearer. I want to make two observations about the feelings that are involved in these situations. First, they seem utterly familiar and even natural. A person who would not be subject to some version of retrospective sadness or sorrow in situations of the kind we have sketched would be a very odd bird, indeed pathologically so in some cases. Thus the ‘Unfähigkeit zu trauern’ of the Germans in the years immediately following the Second World War was famously taken by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich (2007) to be a remarkable phenomenon, involving collective neuroses that required a psychoanalytic explanation. If you aren’t able to be pained by contemplation of a serious misfortune in the recent past that you yourself were directly involved in, then it seems there is probably something wrong with you. Second, sadness about one’s own bad actions seems to be continuous with the negative emotions about the past that we are prone to in cases that do not involve our own agency. Our remorse or regret about the things we have done (to ourselves, or to others) are no more or less remarkable than our sadness or sorrow at the loss of a beloved friend or at political developments that we view as dangerous and incomprehensible. This is something that Bittner himself acknowledges – though his paper is focused in the first instance on regret about expressions of our own past agency, he grants that the skeptical challenge extends equally to other forms that this retrospective emotion might assume (1992, 272 ff.). The basic structure of these retrospective attitudes involves an emotion of present pain or distress, occasioned by an event or situation that lies somewhere in the past. But the “occasioning” relation that is at issue is not merely a matter of brute causality. It is not just that a present pain or distress emerges in a person as a result of something that happened some time ago. Rather, the relation between past occurrence and present pain is mediated by the person’s own

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thoughts. In particular, those who are subject to emotions of this kind think of the past event or situation that is their object, conceptualizing it in negative terms, as something that is unfortunate or lamentable along some dimension or other. Their consciousness of the past occurrence thus involves an element of negative assessment, one that is crucial to our understanding of the painful emotions that are at issue. Those who are in the grip of an emotion of these kinds apply standards of evaluation in reflecting on things that lie (at least partly) in the past, and their doing so renders the feelings to which they are subject fitting or appropriate, from their own point of view. It makes sense to be pained about an event or a situation that you evaluate in negative terms. Of course there are variations in our experience that are covered only imperfectly by these generalizations. Among other things, the element of negative assessment does not always involve a form of conscious awareness that would admit of easy articulation by the agent. I can be subject to feelings of guilt, or to emotions of mourning or inchoate grief, without being entirely clear myself what it is that has given rise to these forms of emotional experience. But cases of this kind are not genuine counterexamples to my generalizations; the emotions in question, I submit, only count as cases of grief or mourning or guilt insofar as they have proper objects, and these objects are fixed by the evaluative cognitions of those who are subject to them. What the cases bring to light is that the evaluative cognitions in question are not always easily accessible to the subject’s own conscious reflection. In some cases it might take quite a lot of introspection or conversation or even therapy to get clear about what exactly the unfortunate event might be that has occasioned in one feelings of grief or of guilt. (That ‘It is Margaret you mourn for’ is not, for instance, something that is yet clear to Margaret herself, in the well-known poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1997).) The emotions under discussion thus involve a negative evaluation of their object, which is an occurrence or situation that lies at least partly in the past: the outcome of an important game, the death of a loved one, political developments in one’s community, or something that one has oneself done or left undone. We may therefore think of these emotions as feelings of retrospective assessment. If some assessment of this kind is partly constitutive of the emotions at issue, however, then we might suppose that it could help us respond to the skeptical challenge. The challenge concerns the significance and point of feelings of present pain, when they are occasioned by situations that lie in the past, and that we are therefore no longer able to affect one way or another. But the pains in question are, as we have seen, connected constitutively to a negative assessment of the past event that occasions them. Perhaps we can find in this connection an explanation that renders intelligible to us the present pain

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that these emotions involve. Thus to assess something negatively is, it might be thought, to be subject to a range of behavioral and emotional dispositions with regard to it, including e. g. dispositions to effect changes in the negative situation if one can, and to experience sadness or grief if one cannot. Emotions of retrospective assessment, on this line of thought, would then derive their point and significance from the assessments that they constitutively involve. Insofar as those assessments are called for or justified, the corresponding feelings of present pain will be as well. The two things stand or fall together, and the emotions of retrospective assessment are simple byproducts of a realistic assessment of things that have happened in the past. This way of responding to the skeptical challenge is not successful, however. The problem is a fairly fundamental one: evaluative assessment does not in general involve the behavioral and affective tendencies that this account ascribes to it. Thus to evaluate something is not the same as to value it. I can judge that something is good or bad, welcome or unfortunate in various ways, without thereby acquiring any particular behavioral or affective tendencies in regard to the target of my evaluative judgment. Values are complex and multifaceted, and we can and often do acknowledge that they have been realized or thwarted in the world, without that in any way moving us to action or engaging our emotions. I can acknowledge that the standard of play in the recent test match between England and Australia was exceptionally high, and yet remain utterly dispassionate about this state of affairs, so long as I don’t care all that much about the sport of cricket. Or I might concede that the musical practices of classical performance are in a bad way in the contemporary world, and still fail to be moved to do anything about it, or even to feel any particular emotion in response. This might simply represent one of the countlessly many evaluative questions that I happen not to take a lot of interest in myself. If this is right, however, then we cannot make sense of retrospective pain simply by citing the retrospective assessments that fix the content of the backward-looking emotions. There is lots of scope for endorsing negative verdicts about events or situations in the past, while lacking the element of pain or distress that is characteristic of the emotions of retrospective assessment. But if this emotional affect is ancillary in relation to the element of retrospective assessment, then the skeptical question remains as to its significance and point, even after we have acknowledged the role of the evaluative assessments that these emotions involve. This is just to say that we can make perfect sense of Bittner’s affectless agent, who “sees that what he did was wrong and […] [is] perfectly aware of the suffering he inflicted on others. He just does not grieve.” (1992, 265) Nothing in our conception of normative or evaluative judgment, at any rate, would seem

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to rule out this Spinozistic stance. So what is the rationale for our tendency to experience feelings of regret? 3. Attachment and Emotional Vulnerability. A plausible answer to this question, it seems to me, will not take the form of a justification of our susceptibility to present pain about past events, considered in isolation from other psychic phenomena. The key, rather, is to situate this form of retrospective pain precisely in relation to other aspects of our lives; only then will its significance come into clear focus. But what other aspects are of interest in this connection? We have just seen that feelings of present distress cannot be made sense of by connecting them to the evaluative element that the retrospective emotions include. A different possibility, which I shall attempt to defend and develop in what follows, is to connect the feelings of present pain and distress with the phenomena of valuing and attachment. It is a familiar idea that there is a difference between judging something valuable, and valuing it. As we have seen, it is entirely possible to acknowledge the value of something, without caring about it much one way or another oneself, or being invested in it personally. I know perfectly well that, say bluegrass music and organic chemistry are valuable genres of human activity, but I don’t myself value them. That is to say, I am not concerned personally about how things fare with activities in these domains, in the way I am concerned about how things are with (say) my friends or with research in philosophy. To acknowledge the value of activities in these various domains is –according to a line of thought that I find attractive – in part to make a claim about reasons for action and attitude. It is to hold, among other things, that the activities in question are ones that people have reason to engage in (if e. g. they are drawn to them and have the requisite talents), and also activities that the rest of us have some reason to support or at least not to interfere with. It is to say, furthermore, that there are reasons for at least some people to learn about the activities in question, and that they are appropriate objects of consideration and concern. But one can endorse normative judgments of these kinds without oneself valuing the activities whose value one thereby acknowledges. Valuing goes beyond judging valuable in, among other things, involving an element of emotional engagement.² To value something is not just to believe that it is a locus of reasons for positive responses of various kinds. It is also, and cru-

 I draw heavily, here and in what follows, on Scheffler 2001, 97– 110 and Wallace/Pettit/Scheffler/Smith 2004, 247– 269. Also important for my treatment of this topic are Anderson 1993, chap. 1, and Kolodny 2003, 135– 189.

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cially, to take an active interest in the thing, caring about it in a way that renders one emotionally vulnerable to how it fares. If I care about philosophy, then I will find that my attention is drawn toward its problems and results, which engage my interest, and generate in me (under appropriate circumstances) affective responses of attraction and excitement and satisfaction. I will also be subject to a range of characteristic emotional reactions, depending on how things are going with the object of my concern. I will tend to be pleased or delighted, or at the very least relieved, when I learn something that indicates that philosophical research is an interesting and fruitful phase. I will also become discouraged or despondent upon hearing of serious setbacks to the contemporary activity that I care about and value, or if I have been prevented from engaging in the activity myself (on account, e. g., of tedious administrative assignments that have made it impossible for me to pursue my own research). This is the phenomenon of emotional vulnerability to which I referred, and we can already see that it exhibits the basic pattern that is characteristic of the emotions of retrospective assessment that are our larger topic. In particular, there is a susceptibility to a feeling of present pain (or pleasure), which is occasioned by an event or situation in the past, and in a way that is mediated by evaluative thoughts on the part of the subject. What secures the crucial link between these different elements is precisely the phenomenon of valuing, which consists in part precisely in a susceptibility to retrospective emotions of these kinds. To value something just is, inter alia, to be subject to feelings of distress when one recognizes that things are not well with the object of one’s interest and concern. But if this is on the right lines, then we can begin to see the outlines of a response to the skeptical challenge. To understand the emotions of retrospective assessment, it seems, we should see them in relation to the phenomenon of valuing. These emotions, in particular, appear to be symptoms of valuing, which involves a susceptibility to retrospective feelings of just this variety. It follows that the point of the retrospective emotions will be closely connected to the point of valuing things in the first place. That is, if we want to understand why people should be subject to feelings of pain about events and circumstances that lie in the past, we need look at the phenomenon of valuing with which those feelings are constitutively connected. The retrospective emotions will have a point so long as valuing itself does, and their rationale (such as it is) will be the rationale for having this form of response in our repertoire and for sustaining rather than suppressing its instances when we are subject to them. Friends of Bittner’s skeptical argument might object, at this point, that it is question-begging to assume that valuing constitutively involves a susceptibility to retrospective sorrow. They are not against the broader stance of valuing things, but merely want us to detach it from the disposition to experience negative feel-

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ings of retrospective assessment.³ But this does not seem to me to be a realistic proposal. The positive aspects of the stance of valuing include dispositions and experiences that would not so much as be possible for us unless we were also susceptible to feelings of retrospective pain and sadness under certain circumstances. That one takes pleasure in an opportunity to engage in a valuable activity, or experiences satisfaction when one is able to achieve some measure of success in the activity, reflect the very same underlying stance that also makes one vulnerable to retrospective sadness when (e. g.) things are in a bad way with the activity one values. The positive and negative tendencies are two sides of the same coin, constitutively connected to each other as different aspects of a single underlying syndrome or stance. So it isn’t a real option for us to attempt to retain the positive dispositions that the syndrome involves, while jettisoning the vulnerability to retrospective sadness.⁴ Once we appreciate this constitutive connection of the retrospective emotions with valuing, however, the skeptical challenge seems to lose much of its force. Note, for one thing, that there is hardly any genuine question as to whether human beings will cease valuing things. We are, for better of worse, valuing creatures, and it is simply part of our nature to respond to values by coming to care about and to engage with them. Of course, there are individuals who lose the capacity for this kind of response, over a shorter or a longer period of time, ceasing to take an interest in anything that happens to them or to others in their world. But this is a pathological condition, a form of depression or anomie that requires treatment or therapeutic intervention of some kind. Thus the naturalness of the retrospective emotions, which I noted above, seems connected to our nature as valuing beings. There is something amiss about the person who is never subject to feelings of retrospective assessment, and this can be traced to the generalized indifference that such a person displays, their utter lack of the emotional engagement characteristic of valuing. As Bittner observes, however, a psychological tendency might be part of our present repertoire, without it being on that account desirable or worthy of celebration (1992, 263 ff.). Thus, even if we are by nature valuing creatures, it is at

 This was Bittner’s own reaction to my argument when I presented a version of it at the conference in his honor in Bielefeld.  It might be suggested that this is ultimately an empirical question, one that is not finally subject either to confirmation or to refutation by the armchair speculation of philosophers. I do not disagree with this, but think that reflection on our own emotional experience, and on the nature of the positive and negative dispositions involved in valuing, suggest that the skeptic’s empirical hypothesis about the severability of those dispositions is implausible. That is the spirit in which the remarks in the present paragraph are to be taken.

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least conceivable that we might be better off without this familiar tendency, and gradually seek to free ourselves from it. But this possibility, though barely coherent, hardly seems worthy of serious attention. The investment of things with emotional significance that is characteristic of valuing is among the most important sources of value in our lives. Emotional engagement involves forms of experience that are themselves desirable, animating the spirits and intensifying our sense of being alive. Furthermore, engagement of this kind is bound up with other things that are intrinsically valuable in human existence. Consider our attachments to the individuals and projects that give structure to our lives, and that imbue them with meaning and subjective significance. Examples include important interpersonal relationships of various kinds, such as those between friends or romantic partners or family members. There are also our personal commitments to ends and projects, as in the case in which I not only care about philosophy, but make it my life’s work to engage in this activity and to teach other people about it. To be attached to a person or a project in these ways is, among other things, to value the object of one’s attachment, adopting toward them a stance whose structures of evaluative judgment and emotional vulnerability we have already identified. We take ourselves to have good reasons to engage in suitable activities together with our friends, for instance, and to care about them, to help them when we can, and to share aspects of our lives with them. We also value both them and our relationship to them, and this element of emotional engagement involves in part a tendency to grief and distress when things are not well with our friend (or with our relationship to them).⁵ Similarly with projects: to be committed to something like philosophy is not just to value philosophy in the abstract, but to take oneself to have special reasons to engage with it, and to care about how things are with one’s own philosophical activities in particular – whether or not e. g. one is teaching it effectively, or making some kind of progress with one’s own reflections and research. This kind of emotional engagement, as we have seen, consists in part in a disposition to emotions of retrospective assessment when one’s projects are in a bad way. Two observations about attachments of these kinds are in order. First, their emotional and affective aspects involve experiences that are themselves of great value to us. It can be exhilarating to be invested in something in these ways, to be drawn to a project or a person, to take an active interest in them, to find that it matters to one how they are faring. This is in part because the affect that is involved in these value-laden experiences is itself often pleasurable. Consider in

 For a sophisticated statement and development of these ideas, to which I am much indebted, see Kolodny 2003 and Scheffler 2001.

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this connection, for example, the delight or familiar comfort one takes in the company of a good friend, or the satisfaction that is involved when one has met with interim success in one’s philosophical activities. These experiences are deeply pleasurable, indeed they are among the most profound pleasures that human beings are capable of. The pleasures at issue are, moreover, intrinsically valuable, so long at least as they are not premised on a fundamental misapprehension of their objects (for instance, the investment of value in an activity or relationship that is itself not worthy of that kind of response). But the experiential value of attachment is not merely a matter of the pleasures that it undoubtedly involves. There is a quickening of the senses, an intensification of experience, that is present in many of the emotional ingredients of attachment, including those that could not justly be described as forms of pleasure. The anguish or anxiety that is occasioned by loss or defeat may be regrettable on balance, but there is something positive to be said on their behalf. Our experiences are more textured and complex in virtue of containing these forms of emotional reaction; they help in these ways to enrich our lives, at least when they reflect a truthful understanding of the events that occasion them and a proper valuation of their objects. But there is a second and more important point to make in this connection as well. Not only are the experiences to which attachment makes us prone valuable, our attachments are themselves valuable. That is, it is a good thing that our lives include projects and loving relationships, where these in turn are understood to constitutively involve patterns of affective engagement and emotional vulnerability. Attachments are among the most important measures of the success of someone’s life. They are the main sources of meaning for us, and their presence adds depth and value to our existence. This is the case, at any rate, so long as the condition mentioned above is also satisfied: that the relationships and projects to which we are attached are themselves of genuine value.⁶ Thus, to be emotionally invested in activities that are worthless and simple-minded, or in relationships that are one-sided and demeaning, is not something that really makes for a meaningful or worthwhile individual life. Attachments are of undeniable value, however, when they involve emotional engagement with things that are worthy of that kind of response. Our basic human capacities for emotional engagement, for taking an interest in things and caring about how they fare, are in good order when they light on objects of concern that are independently valuable. Moreover, the realization of attachments of this kind, to worthwhile projects and relationships, is the most significant dimension in which our

 For a defense of this general approach to issues of meaning in life, see Wolf 2010.

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lives can go well. We live better to the extent we achieve attachments that meet this condition, and attachments are to that extent important sources of value in their own right. I would maintain that these points about the value of attachments form the proper context for thinking about the skeptical challenge to the emotions of retrospective assessment. Those emotions involve, as we have seen, feelings of present pain that are occasioned by an event or situation in the past, and that are mediated by evaluative thoughts about that event or situation. The challenge was to elucidate the point or rationale of feelings of this kind, given their unpleasant phenomenology and the fact that at the time they are experienced, it is no longer possible to do anything about the events that gave rise to them. But we are now in a position to articulate a convincing response to this line of thought. The fundamental idea is that the emotions of retrospective assessment need to be seen as part of a larger syndrome of attitudes and emotional tendencies, which together count as cases of valuing or (more specifically) of attachment. Once we view them in this light, they start to look much less puzzling than they do when looked at in isolation. Bittner’s basic skeptical suggestion is that it is pointless to feel pained about an event or situation that it is no longer in our power to affect, one way or another. This suggestion seems troubling when we think about the episode of retrospective emotional distress simply on its own. But it is not in fact a self-sufficient emotional phenomenon, but belongs to a broader pattern of emotional and affective tendencies that hang together to constitute a single, complex phenomenon. These tendencies include, among other things, motivations to action with regard to the object that one values or is attached to. Thus if some misfortune befalls the cause or person that one values, it may not any longer be possible to do anything about that event, insofar as it lies in the past. But the underlying stance that renders one susceptible to grief or sorrow about the past misfortune also renders one disposed to take constructive steps going forward: to help the victim of misfortune cope with its effects, for instance, or to assist in other ways with that person’s undertakings.⁷ The larger syndrome to which the emotion of retrospective assessment belongs, in other words, might well have a constructive point, even if the individual emotional episode, considered in isolation from that syndrome, does not appear to be a constructive response to the event that occasions it.

 These tendencies should not be thought of as brute behavioral dispositions. They are rather dispositions to be subject to motivations that have characteristic phenomenal and affective aspects. Compare Scanlon’s discussion of desires in the “directed attention sense” (2000, chap. 1).

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But this is only a partial response to the skeptical challenge. It leaves us without anything to say, for instance, about those cases in which we are grieved by the death or demise of the object of our concern, so that there is no longer anything that can be done to assist that object in the future. The more significant point to make here is that the value of the larger syndrome we have identified does not lie solely in its production of beneficial effects. As we have seen, attachment is valuable in itself, at least when it latches onto appropriate objects of evaluative concern. It is the main source of meaning in human existence, and a constitutive part of human flourishing or well-being. This, it seems to me, is the deeper rationale for the emotions of retrospective assessment. They are elements in a complex emotional syndrome that has great intrinsic value, and our lives would be immeasurably impoverished if we were no longer susceptible to them. This is the fundamental point that we lose sight of when we focus on instances of retrospective emotion in isolation from the broader psychological structures that give rise to them. This last point applies, strictly speaking, only to cases of what I have called attachment, involving our emotional bonds to individuals or activities that constitute valuable interpersonal relationships and life projects. But valuing is a more general phenomenon, and it is possible to value something without being connected to it through a relationship of love or a pattern of meaningful individual activity. To return to an example mentioned above, one might care about one’s political community, in a way that renders one vulnerable to feelings of sorrow or distress during a period of rampant injustice and political dysfunction, without being an activist or someone who has made it a personal project to fight for social change. (Perhaps one just doesn’t have time for that sort of thing, because one has decided to devote oneself to other worthy causes instead.) Insofar as one’s evaluative stance in this example does not amount to a case of attachment, it would seem to lack the intrinsic value that inheres in significant personal projects and relationships. Even here, however, the connection of the retrospective emotions with valuing helps us to understand their role in our lives. Valuing things, in the way that characteristically involves emotional vulnerability with respect to them, is among the factors that most significantly shape our identity and constitute our perspective on the world. Our values are in large measure a matter of what we care about in this distinctive way, and they help to define who we are. This connection of the retrospective emotions with identity may not exactly serve to justify them. But it does help us to make sense of the emotions in this class, adding thereby an additional and complementary line of response to the skeptical challenge. To suggest that we might be better off without these emotions is to suggest, in effect, that it might be better for us if we lacked one of

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the things that most importantly define our distinctive point of view as individuals. Couched in these terms, however, the suggestion seems absurd on its face. We are the individuals we are partly in virtue of caring about some things rather than others. To the extent this is the case, there can be no real question for us of ceasing altogether to care about things, and the emotions to which we are susceptible in virtue of this valuing stance are in that way beyond justification.

References Anderson, Elizabeth, 1993: Value in ethics and economics, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Bittner, Rüdiger, 1992: “Is It Reasonable to Regret Things One Did?”. In: Journal of Philosophy 89, 262 – 273. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1997: Spring and fall. To a young child, Orr’s Island, Me.: Martha Hall. Johnson, Samuel, 2013: The Rambler. In: Delphi complete works of Samuel Johnson. Kolodny, Niko, 2003: “Love as Valuing a Relationship”. In: Philosophical Review 112, 135 – 189. Mitscherlich, Alexander / Mitscherlich, Margarete, 2007: Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens, München: Piper. Scanlon, Thomas M., 2000: What we owe to each other, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Scheffler, Samuel, 2001: Boundaries and allegiances. Problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheffler, Samuel, 2001: “Relationships and Responsibilities”. In: Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and allegiances. Problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 97 – 110. Scheffler, Samuel, 2004: “Projects, Relationships, and Reasons”. In: R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, Michael Smith (eds.), Reason and value. Themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 247 – 269. Scheffler, Samuel, 2011: “Valuing”. In: R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, Samuel Richard Freeman (eds.), Reasons and recognition. Essays on the philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 23 – 42. Wallace, R. Jay, 2013: The view from here. On affirmation, attachment, and the limits of regret, New York: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Susan, 2010: Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ralf Stoecker

Of Ducks and Men 1. The main topic of Rüdiger Bittner’s book Doing Things for Reasons is action theory. We learn what it is to have reasons for action and how acting in response to reasons should be construed; we learn to what extent these reasons are elements of our mental life (and in particular that they aren’t mental at all). Almost at the end of the book, however, in chap. 12, all of a sudden we learn something more. We receive an answer to the very core question of anthropology: who we are, as men and women, and what is so special about us – or rather that there is nothing special about us. It is this last part of the book, easily overlooked, that I want to concentrate on in my contribution. 2. Why is it philosophically interesting to ask who we are? Obviously, there are numerous good reasons for this question, starting from sheer curiosity up to concrete dilemmas in applied ethics. The point of Bittner’s answer becomes most apparent, however, if we read it as a response to a particular current of philosophical tradition, which is marked by two characteristics: first by an initial skeptical suspicion that any insight into the essence of man will be bleak, and second by the soothing conclusion that in the final analysis the initial suspicion was unfounded. A particularly vivid example of this tradition is to be found in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, where Pascal writes (in the context of many other similar remarks): Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. (1958, §347)

According to Pascal, when man, who initially regarded himself as king of nature, is faced with the vastness of the universe, its astronomic size and endless microscopic subtlety, he is thrown back on the humble conclusion that in fact he is anything but a king. Rather, man (and woman, by the way) is a cosmic orphan, lost in space and time, somewhere in between eternities, defenceless like a blade of grass that might be bent and snapped at any time, accidentally, in passing. Then, however, rising from the ruins of his pride man suddenly starts to realise how blockheaded, ignorant and clumsy all these mighty powers surrounding

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him in fact are. Only man has knowledge; they don’t. So, despite his weakness, he is justified in feeling superior. Although he isn’t the king of nature, he has something much more precious to show, knowledge and reason that raise and dignify him high above everything else in the world. 3. This scheme – man, apparently a wretched creature, turns out to be the pride of creation – can be found recurrently in the history of philosophy, in diverse versions that differ, first, with respect to the grounds of the apparent misery of man (whether it is his poor biological endowment, his mortality, his being at the mercy of destiny, or his being an original sinner), and secondly with respect to the features which will nevertheless raise man from insignificance (e. g. his being distinguished by God, or having reason). In any case the ugly duckling emerges as a beautiful swan. According to Bittner, however, this view is thoroughly mistaken, on both sides, regarding the apparent misery of man as well as regarding his resurrection into the highest ranks. The picture of rational agents emerging here [i. e. in the course of the book] may be summed up by saying that they are worldly creatures through and through. […] The world is their element, and they do not raise their heads above it. (2001, §314)

We, as men and women, float with the way the world goes, Bittner claims, neither standing out nor sinking down to irrelevance. In order to explain what Bittner is driving at and how radical he wants us to depart from the ugly ducklings and beautiful swans of traditional philosophy, let me remind you of another prominent representative of this tradition, Immanuel Kant, who writes in the famous Beschluss of his Critique of Practical Reason: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. […] The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature […]. The latter, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense […]. (AA V, 161; 1956, 166)

Evidently, Kant’s view is very similar to Pascal’s. Once again, we seem to be doomed to irrelevance, before, thanks to our faculty of reason, we return into our top-ranking position. What is different, though, is that according to Kant it is not mere knowledge that elevates us but, as he puts it, the moral law within us. At first blush, this is a surprising justification. While Pascal’s assumption that knowledge is superior to ignorance is intuitively convincing, being subjected

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to a law seems to be evidence for an inferior position and not for a higher rank. Why should someone be honoured by being subordinated to a law? Even more surprising, however, Kant shares this concern. For him, too, it is humiliating to be subjected to a law. Hence, emphasizing the existence of a moral law tends to strengthen the appearance of human nothingness instead of securing human superiority. The moral law in itself could not save our pride. The picture changes, however, when it becomes clear what being subjected to the moral law entails. Kant makes this very clear in Section Two of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: From what has just been said it is now easy to explain how it happens that, although in thinking the conception of duty we think of subjection to the law, yet at the same time we thereby represent a certain sublimity and dignity in the person who fulfills all his duties. For there is indeed no sublimity in him, insofar as he is subject to the moral law, but there certainly is insofar as he is at the same time lawgiving with respect to it only for that reason subordinated to it. (AA IV, 439/40; 1998, 46)

Insofar as we are subjected to law we are degraded. We are not free to act at liberty but have to obey instead. Yet, what is special about the moral law is that we are not only ruled by law, we are also those who make the law and are ruled by law because we ourselves are the lawgivers, and hence we have the majesty of a legislator. Again, we observe the transition from the ugly duckling to the beautiful swan, in this case: from the mere subject of law to the lawgiver. Evidently, Kant’s claim is based on the premise that we are indeed authors of the moral law, which sounds like cultural or social arbitrariness, or like “ethical republicanism” as Bittner has dubbed Kant’s thesis in his habilitation Moralisches Gebot oder Autonomie. (1983, §87) To my mind, however, this would be a misunderstanding. Basically, what Kant has in mind is to be found in a short, catchy phrase at the beginning of Section 3 where he summarizes the upshot of the first two sections of the book: “a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same”. To see why Kant believes this, it is helpful to recollect his argument in the first two sections of the book. In Section 1 Kant demonstrates that it is possible to deduce, merely from our common understanding of what morality is, the following moral law: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law”. In Section 2 he demonstrates that based on a different premise, namely that we want to act rationally, we can deduce the famous advice: “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Evidently, both demands that result from the two deductions are equivalent. What morality demands reason demands as well.

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One might think that this insight is already sufficient to liberate man from his humiliating role of being subdued to the moral law. If the law is confined to the demand of acting reasonably, one could venture, it does not really interfere with liberty. Quite the opposite, reason’s being so important could be read as support for the assumption of human superiority. Kant, however, is more cautious. The concurrence of the demands of reason and morality can only provide us with the special status we are longing for, if we are able to obey these demands, in short: if we can indeed justifiably regard ourselves as reasonable beings. There is a serious obstacle for this assumption, however, that threatens to kick us into insignificance again: our principled lack of freedom in a determined world. As long as we have to understand ourselves as being an integral part of the causally determined way the world goes, we cannot according to Kant actually regard ourselves as reasonable. Nor would it help to confine human liberty to mere freedom to act, i. e. the capability of doing what one wants to do, as some compatibilists suggest, because, as Kant puts it in a famous analogy in the Critique of Practical Reason: And, if the freedom of our will were nothing else than the latter, i. e., psychological and comparative and not at the same time also transcendental or absolute, it would in essence be no better than the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up also carries out its motions of itself. (AA V 97; 1956, 100 f.)

Here it is again, the threat of dropping into insignificance, this time down to the level of a mechanical barbecue gadget. If our freedom were confined to doing what we want to do, then according to Kant we could act on our own only inasmuch as a turnspit acts on its own, namely without anybody from the outside having to turn a crank. But Kant is convinced that there is more to our freedom than the liberty of a mechanical turnspit. Instead, we are ‘absolutely free’, as he puts it in the sentence quoted. And he also explains how this should be understood: Since the conception of causality brings with it that of laws in accordance with which, by something that we call a cause, something else, namely an effect, must be posited, so freedom, although it is not a property of the will in accordance with natural laws, is not for that reason lawless but must instead be a causality in accordance with immutable laws, but of a special kind. […] Natural necessity was a heteronomy of efficient causes, since every effect was possible only in accordance with the law that something else determines the efficient cause to causality; what, then, can freedom of the will be other than autonomy, that is, the will’s property of being a law to itself? (AA IV 446 f.; 1998, 52)

Kant takes it for granted that free agency consists in an agent initiating, causing an action. Causation, however, entails the existence of a covering law (e. g. a nat-

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ural law), according to which, given the cause, the effect is not arbitrary. Yet, since it is specific for free rational action not to be brought about from the outside, in accordance with natural laws, rational action is only possible if there is a different law, covering the action, which originates from within the person herself, i. e. the respective law must be self-given by the agent. Kant’s term for such a kind of causality by self-legislation is ‘autonomy’; and it is autonomy that Kant has in mind when he appeals to the moral law within, which makes us so admirable compared to everything else in the world, since, as he says in the Critique of Practical Reason: “[…] the moral law expresses nothing else than the autonomy of the pure practical reason […].” Hence, Kant’s claim that we are authors of the moral law is not primarily an ethical claim, a plea for “ethical republicanism”, but the conclusion from a very strong metaphysical claim, namely our ‘trancendental’ freedom to cause actions deliberately, not merely as a result of the validity of natural law. It is intriguing to assume that we only need to give rein to reason and hence inevitably act morally well – yet it is perhaps too intriguing to be true. As Bittner points out in Moralisches Gebot oder Autonomie, it is essential to morals to make demands on the agent, which is not true of Kant’s moral law. “Moral laws cannot be held against someone reluctant since they gain their validity from this person’s self-legislation.” Bittner 1983, §124; my translation) Therefore, according to Bittner, Kant has not established that we are morally bound by the demands of reason. This criticism is directed at Kant’s normative ethics but it is not necessarily a challenge to the idea that what is so special and particularly wonderful in us humans is to be found in autonomy. As Bittner explains it in the last chapter of Doing Things for Reasons Kant’s idea of autonomy fits well into a traditional understanding of human agency that at least goes back to Plato’s simile of the charioteer. According to this understanding what is characteristic for agents is the way they are determining, goading, controlling, and surveying their doings. With respect to her actions, it is assumed, the agent is master; and whenever she isn’t quite that, a multitude of philosophical problems arise (usually subsumed under the label of ‘weakness of will’) which in turn occasionally provoke radical solutions, for example equating the ‘weak willed’ agent with a drunk or anancastic person. 4. Today this understanding of agency is still very influential, and the term ‘autonomy’ plays an important role in it. While ‘autonomy’ is only rarely used for a special kind of causality, it is typically employed for designating the special relationship with oneself, i. e. the special kind of mastery that distinguishes human agents not only from the inanimate world but also from other animate

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beings. Harry Frankfurt has described this feature in his influential article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, which provides one of the classical expressions of the so-called hierarchical concept of autonomy. The paper starts with the very question who we are and what is so special about us. And its wellknown answer reads: at least we are not just wantons. A wanton is someone who is moved by his desires “to do certain things, without its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires.” (1998, 16) A wanton is someone who “does not care about his will” (1998, 16). And obviously, Frankfurt claims, we are not like that. We are not wantons, we are persons, which means: agents who care about their will and therefore do not merely let themselves be moved by their desires. As persons we take care that our will leads us into the right direction – unless bad luck, like an addiction, limits our freedom of will. It is this special faculty of supervising ourselves that distinguishes us from the rest of the world. As Bittner puts it: “The soul contains kings and people because one part, thanks to its superior knowledge, tells the other what to do.” (2001, §297) Therefore, as agents who do not merely comprise soul people but also soul kings, i. e. higher-order evaluations, we are ranked high above mere wantons. Again we find a way to see ourselves as superior beings, high above the inferior wantons, although this is not metaphysically grounded as in Kant but psychologically. Yet although Frankfurt’s hierarchical concept of a person was very influential, it had a particularly weak point. It could not justify its glaring favouritism with respect to the higher parts of the soul. Why prefer the reflexive, second-order attitudes to where our wants may lead us, to these first-order wants themselves? Why should self-mirroring and self-dominance turn the ugly duckling wanton into the beautiful swan person? In the debate following Frankfurt’s article, a number of answers were suggested, most prominently Frankfurt’s own proposal who added to his picture the idea of the importance of idiosyncratic preferences (‘what we care about’) that are also supposed to distinguish persons from non-persons. But being quirky will not make you a king. Hence, the question is still open why the mechanisms of self-control and guidance should ground our high self-esteem. 5. This question brings us back to Bittner, who provides us with a particularly radical answer: On the present conception, by contrast, there is no need for a distinction between leading and inferior parts within the soul. The whole agent follows this or that path the world is offering, and domination within agents ends. […] Rational agents are animals sniffing

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their way through the world. They are not in control. They are given to what they encounter. (2001, §297)

Any pretension is mistaken that thanks to the faculty of giving orders to ourselves, of keeping ourselves in check, we are somehow superior to other beings who do not have an internal watchdog breathing down their necks. Freedom according to Bittner is not to be found in the power of internal watchdogs but in their nonexistence. Rational agents are, in this sense, free: not subject to master or law within. The ducks, though presumably they sometimes do for reasons what they do, do not govern themselves, nor are they called upon to heed laws implicit in their kind of agency. We are like them, the idea is, going about our business unbroken. No doubt the business is different: in being unsubordinated within ourselves we resemble them. The inner state of rational agents is anarchy. (2001, §313)

Instead of trying desperately to uncover the swan within us, even at the expense of degrading us to being subjected to ourselves, we should better accept that we are embedded in the world seamlessly, without any distance, like the sniffing dog or the ducks in the pond. As we should have known already, from the early days of Darwin, neither the mighty heavens nor our animate nature are reasons for feeling wounded in our pride; hence there is no need to resort to reason, autonomy or morals for rehabilitation. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being part of nature. As Bittner puts it: “Why not allow ourselves to grow actions the way trees grow leaves?” (2001, §308) To my conviction this is the anthropological core of Bittner’s action theory. As agents we are like ducks, but these aren’t ugly ducklings longing for their transformation into beautiful swans, they are paradigmatic representatives for all animate beings, following their paths through life, back and forth, attracted or repelled from whatever the pond is offering them. Admittedly, I have told the story in a flowery language, more flowery then Bittner himself, and I have ignored numerous questions raised and answered by the book. In the remaining part of my contribution, however, I want to concentrate instead on one objection, which is discussed by Bittner, too. If the distinguished status of human beings really were an anthropological fiction, if there really were no autonomy, as Bittner explicitly states (cf. 2001, §315), shouldn’t this insight have far-reaching consequences for our moral claims to consideration and respect? Here we encounter a concept that already occurred in two of the citations, but on which I haven’t yet commented, the concept of dignity. Pascal and Kant both saw themselves as being concerned with human dignity, which is

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threatened by the mighty cosmos or by the rigor of the moral law, unless philosophy succeeds to re-establish it, e. g. in Kant’s famous claim: “Autonomy then is the basis of the dignity of human and of every rational nature.” Bittner’s response to these defenses of dignity is straightforward, though. If we assume, following Kant and other philosophers, that human dignity depends on our distinguished status (e. g. of being autonomous), which endows us with unmatched value, then it is one consequence of Bittner’s anthropology that human beings don’t have dignity at all. Hence he concedes: If we are not doing better in principle than the ducks, then we may as well forget about human dignity. […] ‘Humanity’ is a term lacking all honorific overtones and moral significance; it is a term like ‘anthood’. (2001, §§315 f.)¹

Humanity, human dignity, these are according to Bittner reminiscences from the obsolete picture of the beautiful swans and ugly ducklings. Yet, as he is ready to admit, this seems to be a steep price to pay for his conception of agency. After all, human dignity was less a philosophers’ idea than a political and intellectual reaction to numerous humiliations, prosecutions and harassments during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. It is therefore hardly conceivable that such a concept could simply be filed away as being philosophically mistaken. John Steinberg’s novel Of Mice and Men for example, from which I borrow the title of my contribution, tells us the sad story of the desperate lives and broken dreams of American seasonal workers during the Great Depression. To lead a life as they did, one is inclined to say, is not humane, it is not in accord with human dignity. The same is true, even more so, for the martyrdom of millions of victims under the sway of Hitler and Stalin, in reaction to which human dignity gained an outstanding position in post-war declarations and constitutions. In the light of its historical background, it sounds almost absurd to give up the concept of human dignity. 6. Of course, Bittner is well aware of this aspect of human dignity, yet – as far as I understand him – he doubts that a genuinely hierarchical concept like dignity is suitable to express what is so awful and disgusting in the way these people were treated, and he suggests that his radically egalitarian anthropology could provide a much better framework for living together in peace than the traditional alternative, where we interact with one another just like rulers of sovereign (one man‐)states do in international affairs and where dignity is a kind of diplomatic immunity, resulting from the authoritarian regime within.  In the German version of the book it is not ‘anthood’ but ‘Entheit’ – ‘duckhood’.

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To a certain degree, I think, Bittner is right. Our conception of agency has an influence on the way we value our own behavior as well as the behavior of our fellows, on the way we raise our children and structure our personal relations, and hence finally on how militant or peaceful the world becomes. If we no longer take pride in putting ourselves down, we might also stop attempting to hold the reins with respect to other people, again making the world a better place. I doubt, however, that such a positive development would be a satisfactory substitute for the universal claim right to be treated humanely, out of respect for human dignity. Men and women have to be treated differently from ducks, just because they are human. There is more to ‘humanity’ than to ‘anthood’ or ‘duckhood’. In order to explain what I have in mind, let me first ask where Bittner went wrong. How can we still stick to the claim that there is something in us but not in ducks that gives us the protection of dignity, despite Bittner’s convincing arguments against the traditional view of the superior value of humans? The initial observation is that perhaps dignity is not so tightly connected with being something valuable as was frequently assumed in the traditional debate. Kant notoriously distinguished two kinds of value, price and dignity, the latter being incommensurably high so that it could not be traded in for other values. This is not the way we usually talk about dignity, however. In fact, there is even a certain tension between value and dignity. Sometimes respecting someone’s dignity can demand not to get too close to this person, not to attempt seeing behind the curtain, not to evaluate her. In fact, it is part of her dignity not to be appraised. The idea that respect may entail keeping a certain distance plays an important role in one of Bittner’s recent papers, “Achtung und ihre moralische Bedeutung” (“Respect and Its Moral Importance”), in which he rightly claims that we should better not maintain that everybody has a duty to approach everybody else with a respectful attitude, since in the end this would void the concept of respect of all its meaning. Respect, Bittner claims, is certainly not the right attitude towards the people we love; and even with respect to other people it is a rather timid attitude, serving to avoid conflict or fight by not getting close to them from the outset. Bittner, therefore, suggests an alternative: “What is advisable, instead, is having the courage of attempting, again and again, to live together, thereby learning from old and new failures.” (2009, 350, my translation) If we had to read the obligation to respect human dignity as the demand to approach someone with a reserved, respectful attitude, it would not be very attractive to have human dignity, indeed. But there is a different, much more appealing reading of this obligation which, to my mind, Bittner could happily admit as well. As I said, the importance of the concept of human dignity in the mid-20th century resulted from the extensive and widespread experience of

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numerous forms of violence. A considerable part of the violence was embedded in various forms of systematic social ostracism, degradation and humiliation. All of a sudden, numerous citizens and social groups in developed modern societies had to make the experience that even minimal standards of decent interaction were no longer upheld but systematically destroyed. Appeal to human dignity was meant as a reaction to this disturbing encounter. Dignity in this context should not be construed as a kind of value but as a kind of importance, the importance of a society in which every man and woman is someone who counts. And the principle that human dignity is inviolable reflects the historical experience that many people no longer counted, that within society they were of no importance, that they could be exploited, cast out and chased away, penned up in ghettos, gulags and concentration camps, and finally annihilated. It is a difficult question how to incorporate such an understanding of dignity into moral theory (see Stoecker 2010), in particular how to unwrap the idea of counting, but I take it for granted that its roots are not to be found in our biological endowment, nor in our distinguished value above everything else in the world, but in our social affiliation. To take up Bittner’s simile again, the pond in which we swim is society, and treating ourselves with dignity is a feature of how we interact in this particular pond. Hence we have dignity, and the ducks don’t.²

References Bittner, Rüdiger, 1983: Moralische Gebot oder Autonomie, Freiburg: Alber. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2001: Doing things for reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2009: “Achtung und ihre moralische Bedeutung”. In: Analyse & Kritik. Zeitschrift für Sozialtheorie 31: 339 – 350. Frankfurt, Harry G., 1988: The importance of what we care about. Philosophical essays, Cambridge England, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel, 1956: Critique of practical reason, translated, with an introduction by Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Kant, Immanuel, 1998: Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, ed. by Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge, U.K, New York: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, Blaise, 1958: Pensées, New York: Dutton Publ. Stoecker, Ralf, 2010: “Three Crucial Turns on the Road to an Adequate Understanding of Human Dignity”. In: Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, Elain Webster (eds.), Violations of Human Dignity, Dordrecht: Springer, 7 – 19.

 I want to thank Rüdiger Bittner and Jens Kulenkampff very much for their help.

Martina Herrmann

Reasons for Bare Respect

1. Rüdiger Bittner is well known for his radical revisionism. He light-heartedly parts with ethical concepts that the philosophical mainstream has taken to its heart. In the case of respect I would like to keep him back from throwing out the baby with the bath water. 2. My starting point is the moral status of human beings. I take it that all living human beings have equal moral standing. No one can claim to be more valuable than their neighbour. No individual’s interests have priority over others’ interests just because the interests are a particular person’s. This is not an empirical claim; we see all the time that some people are treated ‘more equal’ than others. It is a normative claim. From a moral perspective this should not be the case. Some philosophers like Ernst Tugendhat and Stephen Darwall express this claim in terms of respect: All people when considered morally should be respected equally. Does the word ‘respect’ make a difference to ‘having equal moral standing’? Well, it seems to me that to respect someone implies or at least emphasizes the positive value of the person. We could be all morally equal if we were worthless creatures tainted by original sin. If that were all that mattered about us morally, this kind of equal moral status would have nothing to do with respect. Someone who should be respected is neither worthless nor to be disdained. Respect in the following is taken to be an attitude towards someone or something.¹ It is an attitude of positive evaluation. In this attitude someone or something is valued and regarded as valuable. As an attitude respect is expressed in behaviour. Some patterns or kinds of behaviour are seen among other things as an expression of respect, e. g. greeting someone, paying attention to someone, not making fun of someone in public, not drawing attention to someone’s faults, but rather highlighting his or her assets. It seems perfectly clear to me that respect, understood as an attitude that can be expressed in behaviour, is a way of showing, embodying or expressing what a person values. This much seems to me to be part of the meaning of ‘respect’. However, I find it less clear what kind of relation exists between valuing some-

 The everyday use of ‘respect’ is much wider. Bittner (2009) gives an account of the German ‘Achtung’. Dillon (2014) discusses various meanings of ‘respect’ and then focuses on an attitude in normative contexts as I do.

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one (or something) and respecting her/him (or it) apart from the implication that showing respect means valuing what is respected. Though respect includes positive valuation, the reverse does not hold. One might value someone without respecting the person.² And, there is probably more to the meaning of ‘respect’ than simply valuing the respected. More on that shortly. But I would like to exercise caution concerning interpretation of the relation of value to respect as constitutive, foundational or basal. It is not implied that it is because of the value of B that A respects her. It is not implied that it is always the case that, because B is accorded a certain value B deserves respect. This might be the case, but not as part of the meaning of ‘respect’, for there may be respect even if it is not caused or explained by the value of B. 3. There is a second concept of respect understood as an attitude towards others that is likewise evaluative. But in this attitude of respect one does not evaluate others as equals. Human beings compare themselves and others with regard to what they deem advantageous or disadvantageous. Someone might be a fast runner – compared to me, compared to others, compared to average – have a clever mind, an attractive smile, or be a simpleton, be unkempt, have shifty eyes. According to the result of such appraisals people are respected. They can be esteemed or disesteemed relating to their qualities. There are all sorts of qualities that give rise to reactions on a scale from high respect to great disdain. And the main point seems to be that this kind of respect applies to people unequally. When this second concept is employed there is always an aspect of the evaluated person the respect pertains to. It is a real property of the person, at least a property taken to be real. These properties can be moral ones, like virtues or goodness. But there are many, many non-moral properties that are respected such as experience, acting, art, or professional competence. The same applies to qualities that are disrespected such as e. g. vices, but also are ignorance, dogmatism, incompetence, etc. Respecting people more or less is warranted by the way they fare in comparison. Hegel is more dogmatic than Kant, Emil Nolde is less avant-garde than Pablo Picasso, Ursula von der Leyen is politically more skilful than Manuela Schwesig. The characteristics referred to admit of degrees, if only roughly so. A person may have many different qualities, some more and some less appreciated by others. This opens up the possibility of interrelating their qualities and  Dillon in his article on “Respect” (2014) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy concentrates on respect as an attitude or feeling. He thinks that an attitude of respect typically includes “attention, deference, judgement, acknowledgment, valuing, and behaviour”. I focus on valuing as at least part of what is involved in respecting.

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striking a balance between them. When writing a report about an employee, one might emphasize his creativity and commitment, while hinting at a lack of attention to detail. When recommending a physician, one might weigh great expertise against a lack of attention in physician-patient communication. When reflecting on the qualities of a friendship, one might appreciate the sympathy, while lamenting on the friend’s lack of time. Balancing multidimensional judgements like these is difficult. Nevertheless, such overall assessments are very common. Distinguishing two kinds of respect seems to me commensurate with accepted usage when ‘respect’ refers to persons, even though it does not cover all uses. Stephen Darwall (1977) draws the distinction in a similar way in his seminal paper and others have adopted it (Helm 2011, Dillon 2014). The way we talk reflects the assumption that there is a kind of respect that applies to others equally, as well as the assumption that there is a kind of respect that applies to others unequally. In the first kind of respect people are valued equally, in the second kind they are valued in a way that is relativized to particular qualities. 4. The respect that applies unequally is determined by one or more properties of a person. This might suggest that in the case of respect that applies equally there should be a property which all people have equally and which makes respect the proper attitude towards them, i. e. there should be some quality that forms the basis for the respect that everybody has. Kant thinks that this basis is common humanity. Contemporary moral philosophers have proposed a variety of candidates as the basis for respect that look self-evidently valuable and like qualities true of every person worthy of respect: capability for self-determination and a claim to execute this capability (e. g. Schaber 2009), the claim not to be used or exploited (e. g. Tugendhat 1993), autonomy (e. g. Gosepath 2004), the potential for an affirmative social identity (e. g. Stoecker 2010, Honneth 2004), human dignity (Joerden 2010), capability to respect valuable others as valuable (Darwall 1977, 2004), vulnerability to humiliation.³ I am not going to discuss these candidates. I list them simply to illustrate that philosophers, seemingly as a matter of course, look for a basis for respect, and they look for a basis that contains moral value itself. Still, if respect is a kind of valuing one might wonder whether this implies for A that A believes that the valued B deserves respect. When someone respects something others can ask for his reasons. One kind of reason A may offer is one  Vulnerability to humiliation may be a quality that is not valuable by itself, but nonetheless of import and to be regarded, according to Margalit (1996). If someone is vulnerable to humiliation, she has a capability of and/or a need for self-esteem or self-respect, and this might be the valuable basis for moral respect.

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of B’s properties. This property one might say is the basis for A’s evaluation. B is valued because of the property or with respect to the property. A piece of music might be highly regarded because of a superb performance. A child may be cherished for its laugh. A person may be respected for her impartiality. So A may respect B because of a specific property. If A values B because of a property B has, can this basis itself be deemed value neutral by A? It looks like the value accorded by A in respect is due to the specific property. So at least from A’s perspective, it is true that A respects B because of B’s valuable property, where the ‘because’ may be causal or explanatory. If someone points out to A that this property of B is not valuable at all and A comes to believe this, A will stop respecting B. Although I think this is often the case, I am not convinced that if A respects B then it is somehow implicit in her respect that A believes that B has some valuable property which is the basis for A’s respect. A may respect B without further thought and have no assumptions about valuable properties. Asked for reasons, A may be puzzled and be unable to offer any. Or, A may respect B because of a property she herself does not regard as valuable, like having a green thumb, or not as intrinsically valuable, like being good at social networking, or not as morally important, like caring for others.⁴ But I am not sure about that. If I am right about this last point, it would anticipate my conjecture that respect may not need a basis. However, in the next sections I will assume that respect does require a basis and, moreover, a basis that is itself of moral value. 5. Rüdiger Bittner (2009) calls respect for others as equals “bare respect” or “unmitigated respect” (“blanke Achtung”), a term that alludes to its lack of gradability and differentiates it from respect in the sense of appraisal or high esteem. I find this term quite compelling and will adopt it myself. Bittner argues that there is no basis for bare respect. From this he concludes that talk about bare respect is empty. According to Bittner, to say all people should be respected equally in order to express their equal moral standing would be vacuous. We do not understand what equal respect means if it does not refer to some shared, viz. equally distributed, valuable quality.⁵ Bittner suggests abandoning all talk of respect as equals or bare respect in moral philosophy. Without a basis it seems vacuous to him and

 A might be a Kantian.  This does not necessarily mean that equal moral standing needs to be reconsidered. There might be other ways of elaborating this kind of equality in moral status, for instance in terms of moral rights and their functions.

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to play no fruitful role in moral theory. Respect as non-equals in the sense of estimation or appraisal, on the contrary, seems to him unproblematic. In view of the competing proposals for a basis for respect, Rüdiger Bittner’s thesis has prima facie plausibility. If there are so many different suggestions, there is not much hope of finding a non-controversial, compelling candidate. However, Bittner’s reasoning does not rely on plausibility. He has two arguments. First, Bittner argues against a presupposition common to all suggested bases for bare respect, namely the presupposition that they are co-extensional with bare respect. He does this by way of counterexamples. When maintaining that objectification violates human dignity, Kant’s basis for respect, even Kant employs examples that do not support his thesis. Ridicule, defamation and pride are attitudes that lack the appropriate respect for humans, but they are not objectifications. On the other hand, to pay over the counter or to ask someone for directions are objectifications, but they do not imply a lack of respect. Counterexamples can also be found for self-determination as the basis for respect. If someone is called a ‘stupid idiot’ or a ‘blockhead’ this infringes on his right to be respected, but it does not affect his self-determination. On the other hand, imprisoning someone places a severe constraint on his self-determination without necessarily being a deprivation of respect. Bittner‘s first argument can be extended to other proposed bases for ungradable bare respect. Probably all of them lack co-extensionality. Bittner has a shorter list than I do. So let me add examples for the divergence of humiliation and disrespect. It is disrespectful to bar someone from exercising her right of free speech, but it can be so without humiliating her. To point out someone’s fault in a presentation may humiliate him, this may even be the purpose of the action, but it can be so without taking him to be somehow less valuable than oneself. I find it quite plausible that there are counterexamples for further candidates. 6. There is a second objection to finding a basis for bare respect in the literature on respect. Bittner’s point is that uses of ‘respect’ in the meaning of ‘bare respect’ do not correlate with the existence of the qualities proposed as bases for respect. The second objection stems from the gradability of the qualities appealed to. Valuable properties come in unequal degrees. If autonomy, for example, is the basis for respect, it seems obvious that more autonomy is a reason for more respect. So how can the existence of autonomy in different degrees be the reason for respecting people equally? The variations in autonomy e. g. would not matter if respect were due to possessing any amount of autonomy. But this is somewhat circular, since the subsequent question would be just how a demand for equal or bare respect can be based on a property that is not itself distributed equally. To avoid this circularity

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an argument is needed to explain why different degrees of a property are morally irrelevant, while its possession is not. In a recent article Ian Carter (2011) addresses this second objection. He proposes a two-step solution. First, he points to the fact, that morally relevant properties are “range properties” (2011, 548). Being autonomous, construed in a certain way, might be a case of a range property. Range properties are properties that supervene on other properties. In the case of autonomy one might think that rationality, independence of judgement, determination and other qualities are gradable qualities that autonomy supervenes on. These qualities are not distributed equally themselves. In order to form the basis for autonomy, they must attain a threshold level in order to become morally relevant. So one might think that what is relevant is whether the threshold level is reached. Carter thinks equality itself is such a range property. Being equal to other people in entitlements is the basis for equal (bare) respect. But this is not sufficient as Carter points out (2011, 549 f.). Even if possessing the property in the minimal amount of the threshold level is the crucial issue for moral status, it is only a starting point. Possessing more of it would seem to entail even greater moral status. If there are no other relevant reasons for discounting differences in the basis for equality, there is no reason to regard people as equal as long as moral status is acquired in relation to those qualities. Carter brings in such a relevant reason in the form of an argument for why it is morally wrong to even consider these differences further when assessing the moral status of an individual as long as the range property ‘equality’ is present. He thinks there is a relevant reason not to evaluate “agential capacities on which moral personality supervenes” (2011, 552) as long as the threshold level is met. The reason is a normative one. At times an attitude towards other people is appropriate that explicitly refrains from looking into their capacities when considering them as worthy of respect, given the threshold level. Refraining from judging their capacities means leaving their ‘clothes on’ and not looking inside of them. This attitude is particularly appropriate if people interact in the role of citizens. He calls this reticent stance “opacity respect”. The basic idea is that opacity respect is desirable for the person as an agent. To respect someone as an agent in many interactions consists partly in refraining from judging how good an agent he or she is (2011, 558). To expose that someone is being (partly) manipulated, has (some) weakness of will or is prone to rationalizations would be offensive. It would be switching into an inappropriate explanatory, objective mode instead of upholding a ‘reactive attitude’ that is con-

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stitutive of treating a person as an agent.⁶ As a factual reason for upholding a stance of unqualified recognition of agency, or as a reminder of what it is like to treat other people as agents, I find this idea quite convincing. A gradable basis can be the basis for unmitigated respect, if there are other reasons to discount actual differences as relevant for respect. Nevertheless, Carter’s own suggestion that agentive capacity forms the basis for respect falls prey to Bittner’s argument. There is a lack of correlation between agentive capacity and the demand for bare respect. Regardless of where the threshold for agency may be set, people below this threshold have equal moral standing and should be respected equally. Thus, the question of the basis for bare respect remains unsettled. But Carter provides a valuable clue as to why giving up on bare respect, as Bittner suggests, is not really attractive, even if it should turn out to be dispensable for elucidating morality. If treating persons properly is not only a matter of action, but requires beyond that an attitude of unmitigated respect, then this kind of respect might be normatively required and cannot be dispensed with.⁷ 7. In my view Bittner is right concerning the lack of co-extensionality between bare respect and the proposed basis that is to explain why persons are to be given equal and not gradable respect. However, in contrast to Bittner, I do think we can understand and use the concept of bare respect without a co-extensional basis and maybe without a basis at all. Likewise, I accept his analysis according to which bare respect entails some distance in personal relations. But I do not accept that this interferes with love. On the contrary, bare respect can foster close personal relationships; it is a normative feature of every relationship be it close or distant. As a start, let me agree that I do not regard respect as a defining characteristic of close relationships. Only if there are other features like caring would we consider a relationship close. But a caregiver has to accept boundaries for his or her care. And these boundaries entail a certain distance. In his critique of Bittner Peter Schaber (2009) argues similarly. In loving relationships with a partner, within the family or towards a child, out of care one tends to forget that the loved one is a separate person. We tend to ignore the factual interests of others

 This is in reference to P. F. Strawson 1962. Carter sees another reason in a liberal commitment to preserve the “outward dignity of agents” (2011, 558), but I find ‘dignity’ misleading in this context, since dignity itself is a candidate for a basis for equality of moral status in human beings.  Bennett W. Helm (2011) argues in more detail that Strawsonian reactive attitudes form a rational pattern that constitutes respect for persons.

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in favour of what we take to be their best interests. Instead of considering their self-determination, they are treated like a continuation of one’s own person. But the loved one is a separate person with objectives of his own that may conflict with what a caregiver takes to be best. Angelika Krebs (2002) has pointed out at length that a lack of distance in close personal relations may not just lead to overprotection but to exploitation. Both are not just infringements on self-determination but demonstrate an asymmetry in the relationship. One person does not view the other as on a par with himself and is not prepared to let the other decide on his best interest. And this among other things is what an attitude of respect is good for in love. To consider the other’s perspective as equally important as one’s own means accepting the other’s decisions – perhaps after some discussion. Another part of being respectful in love is not to be over-demanding. Mutual support should be somewhat balanced in the long run. These principles themselves stand in need of qualification when applied. Here is scope for work on a relationship. In sum, bare respect in close personal relationships is appropriate, if not indispensable. It limits overprotection and prevents exploitation. In close personal relations there should not only be closeness, but distance as well. 8. Close relationships are consequently not a point against bare respect as a normative expectation in all relations between people. Moreover, there are points in favour of it. First, I would like to note that bare respect does exist as a social phenomenon and that bare respect and gradable respect are two distinct social phenomena. In general bare respect is inconspicuous and hardly noticeable in fluent interaction. But the fact that lack of bare respect may be combined with its contrary, namely bare disrespect, is particularly striking. I would like to illustrate this point by way of two examples. In both examples I want to bring out the difference between disrespect as low estimation and as bare disrespect. A child says of a classmate: ‘He’s no good at soccer.’ This looks like a clear value judgement. But it is not without ambiguity. It can mean various things depending on context. In the context of physical education it might mean that the classmate is not the first choice when selecting a soccer team. But otherwise the child might be well liked by the speaker or even a close friend. Just in relation to soccer the friend is a bit inapt. This would be graded disrespect with regard to a single quality. For another child this judgement may be a weighing up. For this child playing soccer is a main part of life and in order to be eligible as a friend, one has to play soccer well. But this does not preclude doing unimportant things together like walking to school or talking in the schoolyard. The poor soccer player is not a friend, but a part of the accepted peer group.

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For a third child the same words might express something much more severe. If playing soccer well enough is not just a major part but the whole meaning of his life, someone who does not play it well can be no part of it. Whatever other qualities the classmate may have are not taken into account; he is dismissed as a whole. The child may turn away from the classmate in complete indifference and take no notice of him at all. This may not be out of a lack of concern, since for this child there is nothing to be concerned about to start with. It might even mean active rejection in disregard if the classmate approaches him, especially in a situation in relation to a game. There may be all sorts of other things ‘He’s no good at soccer’ can mean. My first point here is that my three examples are among them and that these three meanings are distinct, although all of them express disrespect. My second point is that the first two meanings differ from the last one in kind. The first two are in a way comparative. An evaluation is made according to a rough scale of ability. In the first context the scale is the ability as a soccer player. In the second context the ability as a soccer player is embedded in a multidimensional scale of attractiveness as a friend. But in the third case, there is no comparison involved. A balanced judgement is not pursued. In an attitude of complete indifference the object does not merit attention at all, and in an attitude of contempt the object is looked down upon and is excluded from social intercourse. It seems evident to me that indifference as well as contempt are attitudes that are incompatible with bare respect. Bare respect is exactly what is missing here. If bare respect were present, contempt and complete indifference would not be possible. Bare disrespect in the form of complete indifference or contempt is a social well-known phenomenon. Although bare disrespect is distinct from graded disrespect, as an empirical point it is interesting to note that both may be directed towards the same situation. And a person or a group can switch from one attitude to the other. Apparently among children a turn from graded respect to unmitigated disrespect is quite common. A child that does not quite meet peer standards in terms of looks, clothing, gadgets, coolness or whatever is deemed to be important can be considered deficient in this point, but esteemed in others. He can be considered not eligible for friendship or even company if this point seems to be important enough. These I would consider cases of graded disrespect. But the child can also be looked down upon as a second rate person. No other features will be taken into account to balance this evaluation. This may just happen or it may be the outcome of a social process that begins with graded disrespect. Mobbing seems to be a case in point. The mobbed child is badly abused and to the mobbing group this seems to be a reasonable thing

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to do. One reason that comes to mind is the disregard itself.⁸ The bad treatment is at least in part a way of conferring a lower social standing on the mobbed child and at the same time instigating it via the treatment. I take this disregard or contempt not to be graded disrespect, but bare disrespect.⁹ These cases of all-embracing disregard towards another person are morally objectionable, no doubt. Maybe unmitigated disrespect is always morally wrong. Many actions done out of bare disrespect most certainly are always morally wrong, like humiliation, discrimination and violation of human rights. Nevertheless, unmitigated disrespect like contempt is not uncommon as social phenomenon. Let me give you one further example involving a case among adults. This case in my interpretation shows attitudes of graded disrespect by some and unmitigated disrespect by others towards an adult, and both for the same reason. Moreover, in this case the reason for the disrespect is an ethical one. In Germany the public has witnessed a long chain of internet joint ventures aiming successfully at exposing politicians for plagiarism in their doctoral dissertations. Probably the first and most salient campaign was the case of KarlTheodor zu Guttenberg, former minister of defence. The details of the campaign are not of interest here. I shall just assume it was a case of plagiarism and that it was intentional, even though there might be doubts concerning the latter. The moral reaction of public persons as related in the media is what I am interested in here because they were not uniform in a revealing way. Some hold that plagiarism is a failing of no importance outside of academic life. It does not affect one’s capabilities as a politician and therefore provides no reason to resign from public office. The underlying attitude, whether proper or not, seems to me one of graded disrespect concerning the person zu Guttenberg in relation to one particular area of study, namely science and the humanities, or maybe just jurisprudence in particular. There is no balancing interdependence with other areas or other qualities. But part of the public and many politicians assessed the person and his character differently. They found him discredited as an academic and as a member of government. One reason for this evaluation of zu Guttenberg could be a different assessment of the gravity of plagiarism. To author a doctoral thesis is to contribute to a public research enterprise and as such is a serious undertak-

 This does not touch deeper psychological explanations of motivation. I do not consider here explanations like lack of self-esteem, bad upbringing, desire for power etc.  I do not go into the further conceptual relations. I do not know how to construe the contrary or complementary opposite of bare respect. In complete indifference the object seems to lack any value, whereas in contempt it seems to be attributed a negative value. On the other hand, being met with complete indifference is humiliating and can be a form of contempt.

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ing. To have deceived academic researchers and other readers is a breach of professional duty and does not inspire trust in future publications. Fraud in one public area tends to have an effect on trust in other public areas. Trust in an official’s disposition to uphold his or her duties is essential for holding public office. And a loss of this trust makes a minister inacceptable as a minister. It remains an open question whether the person is still eligible to be a member of parliament or maybe qualified as a real-estate agent or an investment banker. This kind of reasoning involves weighing up qualities and a form of graded disrespect. It is the assumed lack of a quality that is deemed essential for an office and cannot be replaced by others.¹⁰ A third moral reaction is even more severe. As the diverging reactions show, it is not commonly agreed whether plagiarism in the humanities is a rather trivial offence or a serious matter. So if one takes it seriously, one might be inclined to look upon the person with more disdain than others. Readiness to deceive in one area of life may spill over to all others. The more serious the case seems, the harsher the verdict. The reaction can still be of the balancing kind and nevertheless consist in an overall rejection of the character of the person as a partner in further cooperation but still remain within the framework of overall politeness. However, the reaction can also be of a different kind such as abandonment or even contempt. This kind is like a form of opacity disrespect. Other qualities of the person seem irrelevant and are not taken into account. The person is excluded from further interaction, meeting him face to face is avoided and if meeting is unavoidable, he is treated as if he is not present. I take this to be an empirical point. Exclusion from social intercourse is quite a strong expression of a reactive attitude of rejection, out of disgust or contempt. Evidence that this reaction was not out of line was provided by zu Guttenberg’s own conduct. He literally got out of people’s way by moving to the United States of America. When he returned, he made a very telling comment: “Aber man kann damit beginnen, die Dinge innerlich abzuarbeiten. Dass ich die härtesten persönlichen Konsequenzen gezogen

 We see the same kind of uncertainty concerning balancing of plagiarism now in 2014 concerning Annette Schavan. She was minister of education and research when her degree was revoked, which made her plagiarism even more salient. She had to leave office in 2013 but one year later she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lübeck. The University of Lübeck had considered her merits in saving the university from being closed in 2010 deserving of an honorary doctorate and decided in favour of it in 2012. It caused some surprised reactions in the media when it was handed over after the demission (e. g. FAS, 13.4. 2014, No. 15, p. 2). No one seems to consider social exclusion in Schavan’s case, since she is a candidate for the permanent representation of Germany at the Vatican.

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habe, war ein erster Schritt in diese Richtung.” (2011, 18) Unfortunately, it is not the exiled who determines the end of exclusion, even if the exile is by choice. Both examples highlight that not all social phenomena that fall under the concept of respect or disrespect are cases of graded respect. There is such a thing as unmitigated or bare disrespect. And it is not far-fetched to presume that in these cases the disrespected person is looked down upon as lacking moral standing or worth, i. e. that the other is not viewed as an equal. Noting the possibility of combining them in the same situation can show that both attitudes, graded and ungraded disrespect, are distinct. Someone can be disregarded in a certain respect, can even be disregarded on balance as not being a decent person and still be treated with bare respect, e. g. as a classmate or as a professional. Or, the same person can be disregarded in the same respect combined with bare disrespect, be it in the form of contempt, exclusion from interaction, by ignoring the person or some other form. Here I think a comment should be added. Unmitigated disrespect always seems to be morally wrong. This seems to be one of the points of human rights and civil rights. Nevertheless, one can argue that it is somehow imbedded into our everyday moral practices. It is a widespread phenomenon. It might be a reaction to a great personal disappointment, e. g. in a relationship that ends with a divorce. Someone who was trusted unconditionally has turned out to be a traitor. It might be a reaction to a crime. In the face of enormous crimes many people, not only victims, turn away from the criminal and never again consider him worthy of their time. Even if morally inappropriate, it is probably sometimes comprehensible and not necessarily a character fault – if controlled. Maybe it is even arguable in some cases that unmitigated disrespect is justified. Media and movies play with emotions of unmitigated disrespect for morally bad people. Feelings of contempt and revenge are part of ordinary human life. Not everyone would agree that the feelings themselves are never justified. Most people would agree, hopefully, that nevertheless most harmful actions they tend to provoke are not justified. If this general description is plausible, we might just regard it as a piece of human psychology to be reckoned with. But if its occurrence is a case in point for justifying unmitigated disrespect, some rationale should be given. I have nothing but some hints in the direction of a rationale. I think one can spell out just how unmitigated disrespect is embedded in moral practices. One way, I suggest, is to spell out how moral reactions work. Approbation and disapprobation are basic moral reactions. There are ways to express approbation and disapprobation as moral sanctions. Moral sanctions are ways of affirming moral norms. Turning away from others, for instance, is a way of expressing disapprobation. If you do not want others to turn their back on you, you should live up to

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their (justified) expectations. Turning away from someone is also a way of showing disrespect. And this seems to me no mere coincidence. Moral sanctions are in themselves a form of showing respect or disrespect. Maybe this is not as self-evident as it was for Kant.¹¹ Many moral sanctions are a form of graded respect or disrespect. If someone is fun to be with but not very reliable, he will still be invited to parties but not relied upon to come and to bring the refreshments. The relationship might cool a bit in some respects when someone stops trusting him, but still he may be appreciated for his social strengths. But other moral sanctions go deeper. What appeared to be a moral strength may not count in favour of the person any more. Many people had great respect for Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. Then he was accused of rape. If the accusation is true, the moral defect discredits him in the eyes of many as a person. It is somehow incongruous to say something like ‘This person is a rapist but on the other hand, he did a lot for transparency in politics’, even though the statement would be perfectly true.¹² Balancing is inadequate when the moral defect is utterly unacceptable. In moral matters there sometimes is no possibility of balancing, or so it seems. The person is judged by one feature only. The disapprobation is of a kind that cannot be qualified by taking into account other qualities. In that case unmitigated disrespect is a moral reaction. And as far as the refusal to balance is justified, bare disrespect is justified as well. Pointing out that there is a significant social phenomenon justifiably referred to as ‘bare disrespect’ is a step towards giving content to ‘bare respect’. If there is an attitude of bare disrespect and if bare disrespect is very often (if not always) morally wrong, it is something that is worth exploring and deserves closer attention. Since it is very likely that what is morally wrong about it is that it is the wrong attitude, then an attitude of bare respect is a very good candidate for the right attitude. One should not condemn, exclude or dismiss others, but remain polite and treat them with care. Nobody is completely without value.

 To Kant unmitigated respect in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals was the only form of moral respect, as Bittner (2009) specifies it. We need not be as rigorous as Kant. We may show graded respect to people acting morally out of mixed motives and at the same time unmitigated respect to a person acting out of duty.  Another case in point is the life and works of the German painter Emil Nolde. He was greatly admired as a painter and as a resistance artist who continued painting although he was banned from his profession during the reign of National Socialism. The discovery of his ideological affinity to National Socialism and his playing up to it apparently caused some to discount his merits as a painter as well (Behrisch 2014). In an attitude of graded respect his estimation as a painter should be unaffected by other parts of his personality or there would be no point in discussing it.

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Nonetheless, all this will not meet Bittner’s critique that there is no basis for bare respect, for there is no basis for bare disrespect either. ‘Not playing soccer well’ is no basis at all and ‘plagiarising one’s dissertation’ is a rather doubtful and limited one. There are many bad qualities that might be a basis for contempt, disregard, rejection and other forms of bare disrespect. But contempt, disregard, rejection and the like do not have an obvious common ground that might be a candidate for a basis for disrespect. Another objection at this point is that one might be tempted to reconstruct all respect as graded respect. The right attitude is one that acknowledges a human being as valuable at least in some respect. That some people reject others outright is wrong. But they do it out of a wrong kind of balancing, because they think that some bad character traits cannot be outweighed by others and/or that some bad character traits justify disregarding all other traits. My third argument is aimed at both objections. Bare respect is not an empty concept, and bare respect, i. e. that is not gradable respect, is morally required here and it is so without a basis. 9. Racism is morally objectionable. Racists treat a certain group of people wrongly. Even if racism is not acted out, as an attitude it is to be condemned. Among the various moral wrongs stemming from racism are humiliation, discrimination, and the violation of human dignity. Racism is a motive for violations of all human features that have been discussed as a possible basis for bare respect: autonomy, human dignity, the right not to be used or exploited, the feeling of self-worth, human agency. Racism is obviously an attitude of disrespect or lack of esteem for all members of a certain group of people. In my view it is an attitude of bare disrespect. It is one of several attitudes of bare disrespect. What makes it racism, and not for instance sexism, is the group of people it is directed at, namely people of a certain race. The morally right attitude it should be replaced with is bare respect. This is what I shall argue. Prima facie, a racist holds certain people in disrespect because of a characteristic feature, namely their race. So racism looks like a case of graded disrespect. Because from the racist’s point of view someone is debased in some respect, he is held in less esteem than other people. Just as a coach might think a poor soccer player is of not much use when it comes to building a winning team, a racist might be convinced that a person of some race is of not much use for whatever because of some quality or lack of a quality that all people of this group share, which the racist would specify according to circumstances. But, first of all, race is a contested concept. Historically it is linked to a biological foundation. Members of a race are classified as such because they supposedly share certain physical and/or psychological characteristics, discoverable

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by science. Apparently there is no such foundation (Herrmann 2011). So, unlike ‘being bad at soccer’ ‘being bad because of being of a certain race’ cannot be a feature of a person a fortiori, because being of a certain race is an empty concept. Therefore, the racist’s disregard cannot be a disregard referring to a specific deficient feature. Racism is an error and calls for enlightenment. Racism is disrespect without a basis. Still, racism might be a disregard referring to a property, if we take that property, although not a biologically founded one, to originate in a different way. ‘Being of a certain race’ may be a property attributed by most people. The racist might just wrongly think of a person as being of a certain race – and to regard belonging to this race as degrading. If there is more than one racist and all of them implicitly agree on who belongs to the group, if the racists believe these people to be of a certain race and they also agree that to be of that race is degrading, we have racism without races (Glasgow 2009, Haslanger 2012). To be of a certain race is a social feature then, but the racism is still real in thought and action and hurts an identifiable group of people. So being of a certain race, even if it is a socially attributed characteristic, very often works in social intercourse in all relevant respects like a characteristic with a biological basis. Racists do hold certain people in disrespect because of their race, even without a basis. Is racism to be classified as graded disrespect? I do not think so. Racism is pure disrespect, and that is what it essentially is. To see why, let me explain why I take racism to consist in pure disrespect, even though it comes in many guises. I do admit that there are features of racism that make it look like graded disrespect. Stereotypically a racist might think, for example, that black people cannot work hard enough. So this stereotypical racist believes they are of no use in building a strong workforce. Therefore, they do not deserve good jobs, because a person is eligible for a job only if she can do the work well enough. Whoever is best suited for the job should get it. Some people are better suited than others. For a racist employer this is the basis for his hiring policy. This looks like graded respect or disrespect in relation to a person’s suitability. Of course black people can work as hard as anybody. Qualities referred to in order to justify graded disrespect meet the same fate as race. They are not qualitative characteristics of every member of the group. They are ascribed to the group socially predetermined as a race. But stereotypical racists tend to ignore the available evidence. And this resistance by itself is not morally innocuous, but morally objectionable. It is itself a condemnable attitude and it is reaffirming racism. However, ignoring evidence contrary to one’s beliefs concerning a certain group of people is not the main objectionable point in racism. Racism is not es-

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sentially a system of false beliefs with sometimes harmful consequences, e. g. where eligible people are not hired. More objectionable is that racism, for instance, at times humiliates, often discriminates, and violates people’s dignity. And this might be done simply by saying, ‘Black people can’t work hard enough’ in a particular situation like a job interview.¹³ By saying this, the racist can refuse to hire a person and at the same time do any one of the more objectionable things, depending on circumstances. Racism is a motive for humiliation, discrimination, violations of dignity and other highly objectionable wrongs. But those moral wrongs can be committed out of motives other than racism. So the types of wrongs cannot be the defining feature of racism. In addition, racism is a motive for a variety of other moral wrongs quite as bad or less bad as well. Racism is wrong even if it is just an attitude that is not acted on. So the wrongs for which racism is a reason cannot by themselves explain what racism is. That is the drawback of a wrong without a basis. Part of what defines racism is that it is an attitude towards people of a certain race. But that does not specify what is morally wrong about it. Is there something particular about racism that makes racism wrong? The common ground of all of these objectionable actions performed with words is that they express an attitude of superiority in the racist and an ascription of inferiority towards people of some other race. And this superiority is assumed without any basis at all. This I take to be the heart of racism, metaphorically speaking. This attitude of superiority does not concern just a single feature of other people. A racist does not think people of a certain race are on a par with him apart from this one complex feature. He considers every one of them as a person of lower standing, socially and even morally. Whatever else might speak for a person of a certain race in terms of graded respect, e. g. being the fastest runner on earth or the most ingenious scientist, does not affect the racist’s looking down on him or her. It does not affect the racist’s presumed superiority. Such qualities are not considered as relevant for a balanced evaluation and they do not enter judgement as a basis for a graded judgement. And this seems to me to be the mark of bare disrespect. There still seem to be two ways not to be a racist. One is not to join in the social pattern of ascribing a pejorative concept like race to a group of people and therefore not to have an attitude of bare disrespect towards them. The other is to maintain an attitude of bare respect instead. To me these seem to

 This is legally forbidden in order to prevent this sort of discrimination to which people are inclined.

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be one and the same thing. In an attitude of bare disrespect others are assessed as having lower moral status. I have argued that this is the mark of disrespect. In an attitude of bare respect others are assessed as having the same moral standing. That was the starting point. If it is morally required not to disrespect others what this requires is regarding them as having the same moral standing and to manifest this attitude in behaviour, i. e. to have an attitude of bare respect. And in respect this moral status is judged to be of positive value. So if racism is wrong, it is bare respect that is required instead and it serves even so without a basis as a point of reference. 10. I hope to have clarified the substantial loss that comes with Bittner’s revisionary suggestion that we dispense with the concept of respect in the sense of ‘bare’ or ‘unmitigated’ respect and his suggestion that we only keep ‘respect’ in the sense of ‘estimation’. We would lose the vocabulary for the moral evaluation of a particular phenomenon. We would no longer be able to identify what is jointly lacking in moral wrongs like bullying, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and the like. We would be in danger of losing a socially beneficial attitude and its expression in behaviour. Rüdiger Bittner will not agree, because he thinks that we do not have reasons to be moral. Maybe he is right, although I do not think so. But arguing that bare respect is an empty concept is not the right way to support his antipathy to morality with reasons.¹⁴

1 References Behrisch, Sven, 2014: “Noldes Kämpfe”. In: Die Zeit, 06. 03. 2014, http://www.zeit.de/2014/ 11/retrospektive-emil-nolde, visited on 11 November 2014. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2009: “Achtung und ihre moralische Bedeutung”. In: Analyse & Kritik. Zeitschrift für Sozialtheorie 31: 339 – 350. Carter, Ian, 2011: “Respect and the Basis of Equality”. In: Ethics 121: 538 – 571. Darwall, Stephen, 1977: “Two Kinds of Respect”. In: Ethics 88: 36 – 49. Darwall, Stephen, 2004: “Respect and the Second-person Standpoint”. In: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Associations 78: 43 – 60. Dillon, Robin, 2014: Respect, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/respect/, visited on 11 November 2014.

 I am especially grateful for detailed comments to Ulla Wessels, Christoph Fehige and the Saarbrücker ‘Doktorandenkolloquium Praktische Philosophie’, and I am afraid I could answer only part of their qualified critique.

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Eppelsheim, Philip, 2014: “Im Schavan-Land. Die Uni Lübeck verleiht Annette Schavan den Ehrendoktor – und niemand findet das komisch”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 13. April 2014, No. 15: 2. Glasgow, Joshua, 2009: “Racism as Disrespect”. In: Ethics 120: 64 – 93. Gosepath, Stefan, 2004: Gleiche Gerechtigkeit. Grundlagen eines liberalen Egalitarismus, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Zu Guttenberg, Karl-Theodor, 2011: “Vorerst gescheitert. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg im Gespräch mit Giovanni di Lorenzo”. In: “Vorabdruck von Auszügen in der Zeit”, 24. 11. 2011: 17 – 21. Haslanger, Sally, 2012: Resisting reality. Social construction and social critique, New York: Oxford University Press. Helm, Bennett W., “Responsibility and Dignity. Strawsonian Themes”, Carla Bagnoli (ed.), Morality and the Emotions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 217 – 234. Herrmann, Martina, 2011: “Rassismus und Sexismus”. In: Ralf Stoecker, Christian Neuhäuser and Marie-Luise Raters (eds.), Handbuch Angewandte Ethik, Stuttgart: Metzler, 293 – 297. Honneth, Axel, 2004: “Recognition and Justice: Outline of a Plural Theory of Justice”. In: Acta Sociologica: 351 – 364. Joerden, Jan, 2010: “Das Versprechen der Menschenwürde – Konsequenzen für das Medizinrecht”. In: ZiF-Mitteilungen (Universität Bielefeld), Nr. 3: 10 – 23. Krebs, Angelika, 2002: Arbeit und Liebe. Die philosophischen Grundlagen sozialer Gerechtigkeit, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Lotter, Maria-Sibylla, 2011: “Achtung. Ihre sozialen Grundlagen und Formen”. In: Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 97: 378 – 392. Margalit, Avishai, 1996: The decent society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Schaber, Peter, 2009: “Wieso moralische Achtung wichtig ist”. In: Analyse & Kritik. Zeitschrift für Sozialtheorie 31: 351 – 361. Stoecker, Ralf, 2010: “What is It Like to Be a Humiliationist?”, talk at the conference Human Dignity, Contingent Dignity, and Rank, Bielefeld. Strawson, Peter Frederick, 1962: “Freedom and resentment”. In: Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1 – 25. Tugendhat, Ernst, 1993: Vorlesungen über Ethik, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

Kirsten Meyer

Pacifism and Moral Judgment 1. Do we endanger peace by placing ourselves morally above others? Rüdiger Bittner’s pacifism is based on a general advocacy of peacefulness – and a warning against the corrupting influence of morality. It seems, however, that pacifists themselves need to make moral judgments. In the following, I will show that Bittner’s critique of morality is well suited to guide the pacifist in deciding whether, when and how to deliver moral judgments. Bittner does not treat those who differ from his philosophical opinion with kid gloves in his works. Without rhetorical digressions he argues for his philosophical position and he does so even if it means to radically oppose other positions. Nevertheless, his contributions to moral and political philosophy are characterised by an appeal to peacefulness which results in an advocacy of pacifism in his writings about the conduct of war. Bittner’s diverse contributions and smaller articles, which I will discuss in the following, are, in my opinion, unified by this particular appeal to peacefulness. However, at first sight, some of his claims in those contributions do not seem to be compatible with each other. For instance, how can Bittner fundamentally criticise the practice of moralising, but then, elsewhere, give moral advice himself? It shall not be my main concern, however, to work out those putative contradictions. In fact, my aim is a different one: namely to highlight the common core that unifies Bittner’s thoughts on pacifism and moral judgment and to bring out the systematic gain of his considerations. For this purpose, I first want to concentrate on Bittner’s thesis of a “Devastation through Morality” (1), and then deal with his critical remarks concerning the role of morality for the justification of warfare in section two (2). In the third section, I will take a look at statements in which Bittner delivers moral judgment himself and defends pacifism by relying on moral considerations (3). Since this, at first glance, conflicts with his critique of morality, I will eventually in section four investigate the role of morality for pacifism and explore the options pacifists may have in dealing with this tension (4). 2. Devastation through Morality. I want to start with Bittner’s critique of morality. In a same-titled paper he argues against the “Devastation through Morality” (“Verwüstung durch Moral”, 2004a). The paper stresses the devastation which can be caused by moral judgment. When somebody morally judges somebody else, she does so from a standpoint of superiority. Only when the person expressing the judgment is herself involved, is her judgment the retaliation of

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the offended. Otherwise the person expressing the impersonal judgment strikes the other “from above” (2004a, 100). Whenever we make a moral point, we speak about what has happened in a judgmental and distanced fashion. According to Bittner the preferable alternative is living together and the attachment to one another. In this attachment one is affected by the other, positively as well as negatively. The crucial point here is that one is affected, not distanced. Bittner speaks out in favour of this kind of attachment between people. We should throw ourselves into life together and confront each other with our (mutual) disappointments. Thereby we can, according to Bittner, speak about the things that happened from the perspective of the involved. And in doing so we should only speak as persons involved and not from an impersonal moral standpoint. Bittner hastens to emphasise that this is in fact no moral demand (since he wants none of that). Instead, he wants it to be understood as a mere recommendation. It is a recommendation for those who “distrust speaking from a standpoint of superiority, beyond the human world”, and it is “a recommendation for those who, like me, are fonder of the people’s lives than of justice.” (2004a, 103)¹ Where does this suspicion against speaking from a superior standpoint “beyond the human world” come from? Here and elsewhere one can tell Bittner’s strong affinity towards Nietzsche. To him Bittner ascribes the claim that every form of moral judgment is optional. You may do it or not and Nietzsche denies that moral judgment “is somehow more deeply rooted in us than just historically; for instance, that it is part of our human nature as reasonable beings” (Bittner 2004c, 526). This allows Nietzsche to ask what the point of making moral judgments is: Making them is in fact debatable and only one of many options for us. Apparently, Bittner shares Nietzsche’s doubts concerning what philosophers call the “foundation of morality” (2004c, 527). Since morality can be questioned in this way, one may ask for its benefits as well as its disadvantages. The question is whether morality does in fact give the individual a richer and better life. Like Nietzsche, Bittner denies this. He points out that no criterion can be found in Nietzsche “with whose help amongst the actions and features of people one may find the lively ones.” (2004c, 531) But although Bittner does not offer clear criteria, either, he does paint a picture of how he thinks humans should live together. It is a picture of a life in which humans live in freedom and without repression of morality (2004c, 537). Bittner argues for a life without giving in to a feeling of superiority when rendering moral judgments. He thinks that we often cultivated moral judgments because judging

 All translations of Bittner’s quotes are by Linda Gafke.

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“is so nice”. This, however, is a childish pleasure that we might as well leave alone (2004a, 103). At this point, it is important to clarify the term ‘moral judgement’. On the one hand, if Anne judges Peter’s action to be morally wrong, this means that Anne is of the opinion that Peter has done something wrong. Anne, however, may not share her thoughts with Peter. Her judgement is not necessarily followed by an action, not even by the action of expressing her moral judgement. On the other hand, the term ‘moral judgement’ can also just denote the action of expressing her moral thoughts. Most of what Bittner says fits better with this second understanding. For example, he points out that whenever we make a moral point, we speak in a judgmental and distanced fashion about what has happened. It seems that he thinks that this action has devastating consequences. Bittner’s critique of morality outlined above can be separated into three different aspects. (a) Firstly, he aims to debunk morality. What lies behind morality and its demands for our obedience is no more than the emotions of moralists who want to judge because judging “is so nice”. (b) Secondly, Bittner claims that morality neglects the true human life; that it is not beneficial to us and distracts us from what is really important in life. (c) Thirdly, one may understand his critique of morality as saying that moral demands are simply not justified. In order to reach such a justification one would need to point toward something “beyond the human world” (for instance divine commandments or obscure moral facts). But Bittner is suspicious of this kind of language. I will now go through these points step by step in reverse order. (c) The third point shall be put aside quickly. First of all, it cannot be clarified here what exactly is the problem of finding a justification of morality. Is it the question, why it is in the interest of individuals to be moral? Or is it the question, where the (putative) normativity in moral demands comes from? And do the answers to such questions really need to refer to something “beyond the human world”? I do not want to go further into these questions; by mentioning them I only intended to suggest my doubts concerning the problem of finding a justification of morality as such. Furthermore, I refrain from focusing too much on this issue since Bittner is on board again when it comes to the justification of individual moral judgments, rather than the justification of morality as such. Later we will see that he himself for instance argues that wars are always unjustified because it is impermissible to kill. (b) The second point seems to be the core of his critique of morality. Morality is not beneficial to us. Instead, Bittner argues for a life of freedom without the distance which is expressed and reinforced by moral judgment. Bittner (2004a, 103) is of the opinion that we should instead let each other be touched by common interests, in awareness of the things we share, but also in rivalry. He

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warns us not to lead a shallow life by living not together but in (moral) distance from each other. This moral distance is likely to develop especially when people are spatially distanced from one another. Due to this distance we should not judge those with whom we are in fact not involved – because in such cases our moral judgment is clearly not rooted in personal concern. Bittner (2004a, 103) explicitly says that we should be very careful judging what happens in other countries. Even instances of torture in another country should not be of our concern morally speaking because they do not affect us due to the geographical distance. However, there seems to be a tension between this second point and Bittner’s pacifism. Admittedly, he seldom makes normative claims in his philosophical works, but when it comes to war he drops his reservations. Pacifism is a position according to which war is always wrong. Bittner is a pacifist. He stresses that in war there are always non-combatants getting killed, and this cannot be morally justified. I will deal with Bittner’s argument for this claim in the third section and I will come back to the aforementioned tension in section four. For now, I will take a look at how Bittner’s claims concerning warfare relate to his critique of morality which I dealt with in (a). (a) The first point, that is the debunking of morality or the debunking of individual moral demands, also plays a role in Bittner’s works on the conduction of war. Unlike in (b), there is no tension between his critique of morality and his pacifism here. It will be my aim in the next section to show to what extent his criticism of the justification of warfare includes the debunking of moral judgments. 3. Devastation in Wars Fuelled by Morality. In his essay “Good Wars, Bad Enemies” (“Gute Kriege, böse Feinde”) Bittner emphasises that it is especially those who conduct war that make use of moral language. In this essay, it is the USAmerican government’s framing of the war against Iraq with a moral passe-partout, that he criticises sharply: “Take this picture literally: in the middle there are people getting killed, partly with weapons, partly by starvation, and around this dirty work lies a wide white band of moral gallantry. It is not a matter of ruling religion, much less it is a matter of controlling rich oil fields; it is a matter of conquering evil.” (2003, 13) Because others, namely the war planners, already made use of moral language, Bittner wants to distance himself from making use of it himself. The others already took possession of the moral language and this is why he wants to relinquish it and “put down the jacket of the moral philosopher.” (2003, 13) Instead, he prefers to only talk about morality. He wants to address the question of what the talk about morality can and should do for political issues. He starts out

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by describing what is happening: “The Iraq War, as far as I can see, has not been orchestrated with racist, political or religious conflicts, but in an impersonal and downright bald way as a moral necessity. The war has not been fought against God’s enemies or the Yellow Peril, not for freedom or for western humanity. It has been fought simply against evil, and that, presumably, by the good guys.” (2003, 13) At this point, apparently, we are faced with the kind of morality to which Bittner elsewhere ascribes devastating qualities. The war has been morally justified in an “impersonal and downright bald” manner; invoking moral superiority, without any signs of personal concern. In “Devastation through Morality” Bittner articulates deep distrust against this kind of ultimately “impersonal” moral language. Here his focus lies on our individual dealing with one another. By contrast, “Good Wars, Bad Enemies” mainly deals with governments taking possession of the moral language. So, the devastating power of the moral language is of a different kind here. In “Devastation through Morality” Bittner predominantly points to the devastating impact morality has on social coexistence within a community. In “Good Wars, Bad Enemies” he points to the devastating impact moral language has on third parties – people far away from us against whom a war is fought. But could the politicians not have done without the moral language in order to release the devastating power of the Iraq War? Why moralising the war? Bittner (2003, 13) explains this development with reference to an increased sensitivity for the moral dubiousness of war in our times. A war that is no longer supported by the moral standards of the majority of society cannot be fought in the long run. So, in order to secure society’s support the war planners need to “occupy the strategic ‘high seats’ in the moral terrain” right from the beginning (2003, 14). Moreover, international law has become more explicit and more powerful so that the possibilities for acts of war are now much more restricted. But since morality has the power to break the law (since laws can sometimes be wrong), those who manage to occupy the moral ‘high seats’ in time, may be in a position to disregard the law. For “[E]verything is permitted in the war against evil.” (2003, 14) In the end Bittner at least seems to be gently optimistic. In the long run, he thinks, morality will not be conquered by the states and their power. “What speaks against this? The fact, that despite the bombardment with moral arrogance and with evil, demonic, diabolic enemies, people still do not buy the story.” (2003, 14) However, Bittner is still of the opinion that a grim sign is revealed in this moralization of war, the sign that the modern state, solely geared to keeping peace, is past its peak. Instead we are returning to states which “seriously understand themselves as consisting of ‘the good’ and therefore beat down

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evil.” (2003, 14) This does not only apply to the enemies out there, but also to those within. There are tendencies showing that certain states fighting against the evil enemies also lose their forbearance with regard to internal affairs and do not consider it their goal to secure peace within their own boundaries either. At this point the general call for peacefulness comes into play. Bittner pleads in favour of states establishing peace in their internal affairs, too. This also explains his reservations against demands of justice. After all, in his article “Devastation through Morality”, he sees his ideas as suggestions for “those who, like me, are fonder of the people’s lives than of justice.” Here one could again think that Bittner accuses the moral demands for justice of losing sight of the actual goal which is, in fact, to secure peace. This point is also taken up in his paper “Morals in Terrorist Times”. In this paper, Bittner expresses sympathy for Hobbes’ position: “Hobbes had told states to leave behind all moral intentions and to restrict themselves to the one aim of securing peace within and abroad.” (2005, 212) In “Morals in Terrorist Times” Bittner does not only accuse politicians of using the moral language in a devastating way. He also refers to philosophers, such as Michael Walzer, focussing on Walzer’s discussion of a supreme emergency. According to Bittner, “on Walzer’s view those who fight, not evils, but evil itself, are no longer subject to the moral laws governing war. Which is excellent advice for war-planners: by all means, take the very high moral ground, present yourself, not as pursuing lowly goods like oil, power, or even freedom, but as just fighting the forces of evil, and you will be off any hook whatever.” (2005, 211) Bittner does not want to suggest that Walzer wrote his text in order to open a gate for governments to evade the strictures of the war convention. He suggests, however, that Walzer did in fact open such a gate. Bittner does not present himself as a moral sceptic in this paper. Instead, he points to a discrepancy “between what moralists say and what they do in terrorist times.” (2005, 211) He states that morality rejects both terrorism and war waged under the pretence of fighting terrorism. In effect, however, morals serve the efforts of war. They do this for two reasons: Firstly, they fend off doubts about one’s own contribution to the conflict. Secondly, they lift the restrictions to which warfare is subject, by law or by custom (2005, 211). I think that the first point can also be traced back to Bittner’s considerations in “Devastation through Morality”. The danger of speaking from an impersonal moral standpoint instead of speaking as persons involved may also emerge when we neglect being involved in what we are judging to be morally impermissible. We should refrain from moralising, because it jeopardises peace. A reason for that is one’s speaking from a standpoint of superiority when rendering moral judgments. The certainty to be ‘on the right side’ and the distinction be-

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tween good and evil are threatening to subvert what Bittner regards as the crucial good of our social coexistence: We must accomplish living in peace with one another, and therefore it is important for us to tolerate differences and appreciate the things we have in common. I find this comprehensible. Moral judgments do not have to be destructive, but they might be. Bittner takes this danger very seriously. In taking the moral point of view we judge others and this is always dangerous. But if we are to relinquish moralising as far as possible, should pacifists also refrain from saying that war is wrong? Can this pacifist position be reconciled with Bittner’s reservations against moral judgments? Can he say that humanitarian interventions are wrong? After all, this judgment is also distanced: One judges others (for instance the political leaders of one’s own or of another country) who are involved in such an intervention. One does not know the civilians who could be killed there. Can or should a pacifist still provide moral judgment in this case? I will come back to this question in section four. But first I will show how Bittner defends pacifism building on moral considerations – the part of his work that seems to be in tension with his aversion for moral judgments. 4. Moral Judgments against War. In the first part of his essay “Good Wars, Bad Enemies” Bittner himself delivers moral judgment – before he then goes over to explicitly taking off the jacket of the moral philosopher. In this context he emphasises that the fundamental prohibition of killing people does not apply if someone freely gives up his right not to be killed. This is for example true of professional armies if they consist of people who agreed to go to war by their own choice. However, this does not hold true for armies consisting of conscripts. Therefore, Bittner concludes, fighting wars with conscripts or against conscripts is wrong (2003, 10). Conscripts are no combatants and war is only acceptable if it is fought amongst combatants. Hence, it is morally inacceptable to kill non-combatants in a war. Here, Bittner explicitly makes a moral point: “[I]ndividual military actions as well as whole wars which are likely to cause deaths of non-combatants, cannot be morally justified […].” (2003, 10) Bittner thus seems to think that such actions “cannot be morally justified” since one should not kill anyone who did not declare his agreement to being killed in the first place.² However, since all the wars that have been fought in the near past and present drew a vast number of non-combatants into war and brought foreseeable death to many who indeed did not want to fight a war, all these wars were wrong (2003, 12). Contrary to the classic understanding of the

 Bittner (2006) even argues that killing in self-defense cannot be morally justified.

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just-war theory Bittner holds that even those wars are unacceptable, in which the harm done to non-combatants is unintentional. Traditional just-war theory only forbids taking military actions which follow the aim of harming non-combatants. It does not forbid, however, military actions which may harm non-combatants only foreseeably, but not intentionally. The moral relevance of this distinction is denied by Bittner (2005): It is always wrong to kill civilians, regardless of whether the killing is done intentionally or unintentionally. He also emphasises this claim in another essay entitled “Humanitarian Interventions are Wrong” (2004b). Here, the moral position is already implied in the title of the essay. In contrast to Bittner, other philosophers have defended the distinction between intended and unintended harms to third parties, and they have done so by referring to what is mostly called the ‘doctrine’ or ‘principle’ of double effect. It plays a major role in just-war theory. The principle of double effect says that it may sometimes be permissible to bring about a bad outcome as a foreseen but unintended side effect, although it would be absolutely impermissible to bring about the same outcome as an end or as a means to an end. The principle starts from the premise that it is clearly morally wrong to harm others intentionally. This would be the case if the harm were brought about either as a means or an end (for instance if someone is being killed in order to reach a certain aim). The fundamental prohibition of harming others, however, is not necessarily disregarded if one isn’t looking to produce the harm that the action causes. Bittner rejects the principle of double effect. This leads him to declare socalled ‘humanitarian interventions’ as wrong. Humanitarian interventions cause the death of people foreseeably, and this makes such wars morally impermissible. According to Bittner, it makes no difference whether these people were killed intentionally or whether their deaths were merely condoned. Even if the killing of civilians (e. g. during the bombardment of an oil deposit) was not intended, killing them amounts to sending them to the slaughter if their deaths were foreseeable. At one point Bittner (2004b, 100) says that one buys some people’s lives with those of others, which is, he thinks, unacceptable. Here, he explicitly refers to the prohibition of treating others as a mere means. From Kant’s principle of not treating people as a mere means it can be derived that one should not buy the life of a number of people with the death of others. The famous example that it is impermissible to sacrifice a healthy person in order to harvest his organs so five other sick people can be healed, shows that Kant meets our ordinary moral beliefs about this issue. However, those who agree with the principle of double effect agree with the prohibition of treating others as a mere means, too. They would just additionally claim that people are not treated as a mere means if what happens to them is only an unintended side effect of our actions. James Sterba, for example, defends

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the principle of double effect on these grounds in his article “The Most Morally Defensible Pacifism”. Only if the caused harm is not intended it can be morally justified. However, the principle of double effect carries an additional condition that must be satisfied in order to make the condoning of unintended consequences permissible: The caused harm must not be disproportionate and it must bear an appropriate relation to the pursued goal of the action. But how does Sterba determine what counts as ‘disproportionate’? He provides us with a simple calculation here: “[I]f the proportionality requirement of just war theory is to be met, we must save more innocent lives than we cause to be lost.” (2006, 200) I think that we should be sceptical about formulations like this one. First of all, it can be doubted that we will ever be able to assess whether this condition is fulfilled (as has been argued for instance by Müller 2004). Secondly, a deontologist should surely have further doubts. She should formulate the proportionality condition of the principle of double effect in far less consequentialist terms (on this issue see Meyer 2011). Otherwise deontologists would have to explain why such consequentialist considerations do not lead us to overthrow the prohibition of killing in the case of intended outcomes, too. Given Sterba’s condition, why should one not be allowed to kill one person intentionally in order to save many others from certain death? Thus, in order to maintain their perspective, deontologists should formulate the proportionality condition in deontological terms. In this way pacifists who point to the fact that the death of innocents is indeed foreseeable in humanitarian interventions, have given a very strong reason against such interventions. Since we do not know which individuals exactly will be killed, we often overlook the fact that through military intervention it is not just very likely that innocents will be killed, but it is indeed (as good as) certain. It is this certainty which makes the pacifist position, as advocated by Bittner, especially worth considering. It seems to me, therefore, that the proportionality condition, at least if understood in deontological terms, can incorporate Bittner’s substantial concerns. However, his rejection of the principle of double effect goes further than that. He even denies that it makes a difference, morally speaking, whether the innocents who are killed during war are killed intentionally or whether their deaths were only condoned. Neither form of killing can be morally justified. For the sake of argument, I will grant Bittner this complete rejection of the principle of double effect as well. What I am interested in is another problem which relates to the concerns he articulated in his article “Devastation through Morality”. How can Bittner’s substantial moral claims, his endorsement of Kant’s principle that people are never to be treated as a mere means and his own claim that one should not buy the life of some people with the death of others, be recon-

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ciled with his fundamental rejection of moral judgments? Isn’t this incompatible with his own demand only to judge as someone who is involved? To avoid this challenge, Bittner could be more defensive. He could refrain from making a moral judgment and thus refuse to sign the moral demand that we should go to war (e. g. in the context of so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’). He even could generally refuse to carry moral judgments into the discussion. We saw that this perspective can indeed be found in his essay “Good Wars, Bad Enemies”. However, in the first part of this essay and in some other contributions, too, Bittner himself throws moral judgments into the discussion. What exactly, then, may speak against pronouncing moral judgments – and which of the moral criticisms developed in the first section is pertinent here? 5. Pacifism without Moralism? The passage which probably clashes most vigorously with Bittner’s pacifism is a suggestion he gives in “Devastation through Morality”, namely the suggestion only to make judgments when we are personally involved and to abandon the “pure moral judgment”. More precisely, he thinks that we should suspend moral judgments about events in other countries. Even torture that happens in other countries shouldn’t be the subject of our moral judgments since it does not affect us due to the geographical distance (2004a, 103). How does Bittner substantiate this claim? I think the moral critique above subsumed under a), the debunking of moral judgments, is most pertinent here. According to Bittner it is especially those judgments made from a great distance that we have only cultivated in order to indulge in the “childish pleasure” (2004a, 103) of judging others. A person who does judge torture in another country could, however, decisively reject this assumption of Bittner’s. And even if it could be shown that Bittner was right and our moral judgements did in fact originate in such a “childish pleasure”, this could at most give us a reason to doubt those judgements. Bittner’s critique would then raise questions about their validity. But it would not fully answer these questions for it could still be the case that the moral judgements are justified, despite stemming from a “childish pleasure” of judging others. Indeed, fundamental doubts about the justification of such judgments are at most hinted at in “Devastation through Morality”. Bittner (2004a, 103) writes that we only believe to have such judgments at hand and that they are often misguided. But what exactly is the reason for doubting their justification? I suggest that the reason lies in a general distrust of the distinction between good and evil, since such distinctions are often unjustified. The genealogical considerations Bittner puts forward give rise to these doubts about the justification of moral judgments. However, these doubts need to be further substantiated.

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Bittner’s deliberations show that pacifists are able to critically question the distinction between ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ which is put forward by those who wage war. This is rather obvious in the case of the Iraq War, but there are more difficult cases, too, and a pacifist can be sceptical here as well. An illuminating example are Olaf Müller’s considerations (2004) about the situation before the Kosovo-Intervention. He thinks that the situation, as always in such cases, was so confusing that it was simply impossible to arrive at a conclusion which may have justified a war against the putative aggressor. The fact that one can question the justification that has been provided for this war is reason enough to reject it. I find these aspects of Bittner’s and Müller’s appeals to peacefulness very reasonable. We should generally be sceptical about any distinction between good and evil and we should refrain, if possible, from placing ourselves above others morally speaking. This is a less radical position than the one Bittner puts forward in “Devastation through Morality”. But it meets the common core of the texts discussed. Bittner’s pacifism is based on a general advocacy of peacefulness – and a warning against surrendering it by placing oneself morally above others. The moral self-certainty of a pacifist may seem somewhat disturbing, too. For the pacifist has to advocate that the conflicting parties try to see their own situation from the perspective of the opposing party. Of course, this also applies to the pacifists’ dealing with the proponents of war (cf. for instance Müller 2011). Pacifists should try not to declare the other as ‘the evil’ or even meet the other with hatred. Clearly, however, Bittner is not a pacifist who demonises others – and it may be his scepticism towards moral judgements that saves him from becoming one. His deliberations are indeed filled with a great deal of philanthropy. His moral critique endorses closeness instead of (moral) distance. This is also conveyed in one final article I would like to mention here. It carries the title “Respect and its Moral Meaning” (“Achtung und ihre moralische Bedeutung”). In this article Bittner once more argues against the distanced moral perspective. More precisely, he criticises the moral meaning of what is often called ‘respect’ (‘Achtung’). When somebody respects someone else, not ‘highly’ or ‘extraordinarily’ but ‘simply respects’ her, then this implies a kind of appreciation; one values the other person. But Bittner claims that respect also implies a certain distance: “When I respect someone then I acknowledge her worth, but she is at the same time distanced from me.” (2009, 347) He goes on to emphasise that this kind of mere respect hardly plays a role in his life: “The people I come into touch with I appreciate for what they are or what they do, or they are repulsive to me for what they are or what they do. But the mere acceptance based on the distance of respect you virtually will not find in my life.” (2009, 349) Our at-

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titudes towards others differ. And Bittner explicitly says that it is “unlikely that there is an attitude towards others which is always correct, a moral passport for all countries, so to speak.” (2009, 349) I think at this point it would be wise for the pacifist to take another path. She should indeed be extremely careful in dividing the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, into torturers and non- torturers. But she should not give up her moral passport for all countries, since she needs to show this passport in order to justify her moral judgements. I also think that Bittner himself travels with this passport. Maybe this passport is less grey than depicted by the term ‘respect’. And it rather refers to attachment than to distance. Bittner says in “Devastation through Morality” that we should only speak from an involved perspective – and this does not seem to be the case when we find something reprehensible, inacceptable or plainly wrong. But when are we affected then? For instance, when we feel compassion. But this is too narrow, Bittner thinks, for we are also touched by others when we share their joy. Moreover, we are affected “by team spirit, by the shared interest in an accomplishment, by a continuous antagonism or rivalry, or by the awareness of deep commonalities.” (2004a, 103) I think it is the latter which a pacifist should bring along to be able to show her moral passport for all countries. What counts is the awareness of deep commonalities of all humans as humans. And it is this awareness which provides the basis for distrusting every distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in general, and even more so when it extends to a distinction between good and bad persons. This kind of awareness of deep commonalities nicely fits with what Bittner describes as a perception of “the beautiful and the evil that I can find in my fellow human beings.” (2009, 349) Insofar as we are able also to recognise the evil aspects in our fellow humans, Bittner does not proceed from an uncritical philanthropy. But his deliberations do warn us against morally downgrading persons and separating them into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. If we abstain from making distanced moral judgments our eyes can be opened for our fundamental human commonalities, such as mortality and the desire to stay alive. This can result in real concern for the interests of those whose lives are threatened by war. This applies for instance to the many innocent people who inevitably get killed in war. And the awareness of our deep commonalities can even involve those who are the alleged sole causes of violence. But what if these commonalities are denied, people are separated into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and this is taken as a basis to justify war? In that case the pacifist herself intervenes with her moral judgment. She then says that it is morally wrong to kill in war. This kind of judgment can indeed be found in Bittner’s works. To what extent it can be justified depends on the question of whether one can reasonably maintain a categorical prohibition of killing. The extent to which it also

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applies to the unintended killing of civilians, depends on the question of whether one can reasonably maintain the principle of double effect, or whether one has to give it up, possibly because it is challenged by Kantian considerations (such as the prohibition to treat others as mere means). At this point one has to speak as a moral philosopher. And this is what Bittner does. He primarily focuses his attention on non-combatants and he impugns that they may be killed during war. Since non-combatants are killed in all modern wars, no war can be morally justified. 6. Conclusion. It became clear that some of the forms of Bittner’s moral critique are well suited to guide the pacifist in deciding whether, when and how to deliver moral judgments. Pacifists should be concerned with unmasking dubious moral judgments put forward by the proponents of war and with revealing the true motives behind these judgments. Pacifists can generally be mindful of how moral judgments may impede a peaceful coexistence, and this is in fact often the case when people put themselves above others, separating the world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Bittner’s suggestion that we should generally refrain from judging what happens in other countries is not a very attractive option for the pacifist. I still think that geographical distance is an important issue, although rather an epistemic one. Indeed, geographical distance is often the reason why we simply do not know how a conflict originated. So, the proponents of war, who would need this information to justify a military intervention, are epistemically not in the position to make this judgment. These epistemic difficulties reinforce Bittner’s warning against the danger attached to moral judgments. Often our judgements are simply not justified and sometimes it is even dangerous to separate the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – this is precisely what can threaten peace. Pacifists can spot this in the judgments of the war proponents and warn us about possible consequences. At the same time though, pacifists articulate moral judgments themselves and Bittner is no exception. For instance, his criticism of humanitarian intervention hinges on the rejection of the principle of double effect. Here, Bittner puts forward arguments of a moral philosopher: He thinks that there are reasons for why the principle of double effect cannot be maintained, and why, consequently, all modern wars are wrong. However, I do not see a reason for a fundamental scepticism towards the justification of such moral judgments. Therefore, a general critique of morality which rests upon the alleged problem to justify any moral judgments cannot be upheld here. If morality is only being misused by all parties (e. g. for the justification of war), then maybe pacifists themselves should relinquish the moral language

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for a while. They could, for instance, point to the international law which, hopefully, would not provide justification for the war in question. But when the law changes in favour of the war proponents, then the pacifist has to draw on moral language again. However, used in this context moral language does not aim at distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. What it does is blame those who who build on such distinctions to wage war.³

References Bittner, Rüdiger, 2003: “Gute Kriege, böse Feinde”. In: Information Philosophie 4: 7 – 14. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2004: “Friedrich Nietzsche: Das Problem der Moral”. In: Ansgar Beckermann, Dominik Perler (eds.), Klassiker der Philosophie heute, Stuttgart: Reclam, 519 – 537. Bittner, Rüdiger (2004): “Humanitarian Interventions are Wrong”, in: Georg Meggle (ed.), Ethics of humanitarian interventions, Frankfurt/Main: Ontos-Verlag, 207 – 213. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2004: “Verwüstung durch Moral”. In: Brigitte Boothe, Philipp Stoellger (eds.), Moral als Gift oder Gabe? Zur Ambivalenz von Moral und Religion, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 98 – 103. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2005: “Morals in Terrorist Times”. In: Georg Meggle (ed.), Ethics of terrorism and counter-terrorism, Heusenstamm: Ontos-Verlag, 207 – 213. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2006: “Ist Notwehr erlaubt?”. In: Barbara Bleisch, Jean-Daniel Strub (eds.), Pazifismus. Ideengeschichte, Theorie und Praxis, Bern: Haupt, 265 – 275. Bittner, Rüdiger, 2009: “Achtung und ihre moralische Bedeutung” In: Analyse & Kritik. Zeitschrift für Sozialtheorie 31: 339 – 350. Meyer, Kirsten, 2011: “Die moralische Bewertung humanitärer Interventionen: Deontologische Positionen zum Prinzip der Doppelwirkung”. In: Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 97: 18 – 32. Müller, Olaf, 2004: “Was wissen Sie über Kosovo? Fallstudie über Pazifismus, Propaganda und die Verquickung von Fakten mit Werten”. In: Georg Meggle (ed.), Humanitäre Interventionsethik. Was lehrt uns der Kosovo-Krieg?, Paderborn: Mentis, 53 – 90. Müller, Olaf, 2011: “Hasserfüllte Pazifisten: Eine verstörte Nestbeschmutzung”. In: Siri Granum Carson (ed.), Kant: here, now and how. Essays in honour of Truls Wyller, Paderborn: Mentis, 273 – 296. Sterba, James, 2006: “The Most Morally Defensible Pacifism”. In: Barbara Bleisch, Jean-Daniel Strub (eds.), Pazifismus. Ideengeschichte, Theorie und Praxis, Bern: Haupt, 193 – 203.

 I am grateful to Maike Albertzart, Olaf Müller, Johanna Privitera and Thomas Schmidt for their critical remarks and helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Raymond Geuss

The Metaphysical Need and the Utopian Impulse 1. Philosophers, and others, have in the past discussed a number of different ways in which the imagination impinges on different aspects of our life, such as the imaginative supplementation of what is in some sense immediately given to us in everyday perception so that we see three-dimensional objects and not two-dimensional patterns, the role of imaginary reconfigurations of important social institutions – for instance, the way in which we are trained to see our specific form of the market economy as especially ‘free’ – and finally the large scale forms of speculation, of the kind embodied in religions and largescale social and political movements. So we have learned from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined communities that nationalism requires Muslim Javanese and animist Sumatrans to imagine themselves as ‘Indonesians’, while presumably also imagining the Dutch administrators in Jakarta to be ‘not Indonesians’, or the Catholic Bohemian resident of Prague to see the Protestant Moravians in a small village as ‘fellow-Czechs’, but not his German-speaking neighbours in his own city (Anderson 1983; see also Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). This paper is a discussion of a set of connected topics involving such largescale forms of speculation, that were very widely canvassed in the 19th and the first third of the 20th centuries, but which have fallen rather out of fashion during the past fifty years or so in the sense that they are not even much discussed any more. These 19th century views are centred around theses about certain ways in which humans are brought to go beyond the world as we see it, our everyday universe and its familiar structures and either imagine something ‘beyond’ or even act to realise the content of an imaginary image of that which is radically different. 2. It seems to be a reasonably well supported hypothesis that all human societies give themselves some kind of general account about the world as a whole and their place in it. These can take a variety of different forms including myths, narratives, religious dogmas, philosophical theories, or world-views. Religious and philosophical world-views will be my main examples. These general accounts of the world seem to have some striking properties. First, they seem to be non-utilitarian, a form of luxury; they go beyond what one would need to know for any obvious pragmatic purpose. They often provide some special concepts which give the mundane affairs of our world a kind of

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extra or surplus meaning: ‘This is not a decision to live together and support each other, but the Sacrament of Marriage’ or ‘This is not a civil disturbance, but Revolution’ or ‘This is not picking one deodorant rather than another or one set of almost indistinguishable politicians to rule us rather than another, but Autonomy or Democracy.’ Such concepts often show themselves particularly resistant to nominalist interpretation. Second, they seem to have deep practical effects on the way people act. Not only will martyrs allow themselves to be tortured and killed from what seem to outsiders to be utterly obscure and insignificant points of doctrine, but as the various wars of religion showed, they will also kill large numbers of people because those people refuse to accept a particular imaginative image of the world, and insist on remaining Protestant, rather than Catholic, or vice versa. Third, some of them are very persistent, even in the face of apparent refutation, so that one suspects that they are held for reasons that are not strictly cognitive. At the beginning of the 19th century one could have found two different ways of thinking about how it came about that humans held these general accounts of their world, or, as the ancients put it, how humans began to philosophise. First, there was a very old view which was formulated very clearly by Aristotle, who was essentially an extroverted biologist and natural historian rather on the model of David Attenborough, but who also engaged in a bit of general theorising on the side. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the assertion that all men ‘by nature’ desire to know. That is, we all have a deep-seated curiosity about the world around us and this causes us to want to see in a perspicuous way how the world is and understand why it is the way it is. Since the desire to know is naturally boundless, satisfaction can come only from some kind of complete view of everything. Given Aristotle’s view about the connection between satisfying one’s natural desires and experiencing pleasure, one can expect the satisfaction of our curiosity about the world to be associated with distinct pleasure. This is very definitely not any kind of pragmatist view, that is, Aristotle does not hold that we desire to know what we need to know in order to make our way around in the world; he is very clear that the kind of speculation he is interested in comes to its fullest fruition when people have the luxury of leisure-time, that is when they are precisely not trying to satisfy their basic biological needs in the most efficient way. This account of the origin and nature of world-views does not, however, help us to understand one of the phenomenally most striking features of many of the historically most influential world-views, which was mentioned above, namely their sometimes uncanny persistence. If we had a natural curiosity, and that was the end or at any rate the main burden of the story why should we not be keen to find out something new, to come to a better understanding and thus to change our view of the world? So the keenest pleasure then might be in

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enquiring if or even in finding out that one had been wrong and acquiring a more adequate view than the one one had held. Philosophers in the ancient world were continually coming up with new systems, just as the ancient gods were constantly presented anew in unfamiliar combinations and under different aspects by ancient poets. For Christians in the Middle Ages, after all, curiosity was a vice precisely because it was thought to have this property of making people eager to move on to new views and lacking in loyalty to positions they had once taken (Blumenberg 1966). 3. There was, however, at the start of the 19th century another way of thinking about world-views which did not refer their origin in the first instance to the intellectual exuberance of human beings who had natural curiosity and leisure, but gave them a rather darker aetiology. This second strand emphasises the overwhelming experience of weakness, failure, pain, loss, disharmony in human life, and the difficulty we humans have in facing up to this fact and dealing with it in one way or another. If the more optimistic notions about the importance of our natural desire to know and a relaxed attitude toward its consequences is characteristic of the mainstream of ancient philosophy, this second strand is more closely associated with various religious views. One might think here of the Book of Job which is about apparently meaningless suffering, human weakness, and the pointlessness of human curiosity – as God helpfully points out to Job, he is not up to the task of understanding the foundations of the earth anyway, so what, one might reasonably ask, is the point of trying? This religious motif has a slightly subterranean life in the West running with full force through St Augustine. In his Confessions (Bk. XI, 12) Augustine considers the question what God was doing before he created the world, and he canvasses the answer, apparently held by at least some Christians at the time, that he was preparing hell as a place of eternal torment for people who asked this kind of question. In the early 19th century this strand of thought emerges in a rather significantly modified form in some philosophical writers. Hegel, characteristically enough, has versions of both of the two strands of thought. On the one hand, in the main body of his work he has a story of the generation of the three great cultural artefacts – art, religion, and philosophy – as the teleological culmination of the development of (the human) spirit, which is essentially constituted by a desire to know. To be sure, Hegel thinks that this desire to know takes what one might think is the slightly peculiar form of a desire to know itself, i. e. to understand and grasp itself ‘in concepts’ – (“Seinen Begriff zu erkennen gehört zur Natur des Geistes.” (1970, 9)) – but, given that everything that is is (in a sense to be specified by philosophy) ‘spirit’, the injunction spirit gives itself to ‘know oneself’ is not really a limitation on the universal desire to know. On the other

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hand, in some early writings Hegel has very strong traces of the other strand. Thus, he writes that “the need for philosophy” arises under highly specific social and historical circumstances, namely when “life has lost its ‘unity’.” (1970, 20 – 25) Philosophy, then, is the attempt to replace the social and other bonds that have been lost or destroyed through speculation. We might think of this as an appeal to ‘the imagination’ (although Hegel would not put it this way) in some uncertain relation to more strictly cognitive human faculties. One can easily see how prima facie implausible it is to think that such unity, if it ever in fact existed in human societies and was lost, could be re-established by speculation alone. This, of course, was a line of argument Marx developed extensively. In fairness to Hegel, however, he did not think that abstract theorisation alone could solve what were actually social problems, but rather had a very complex theory about the way in which modern society had various real hidden resources, which were adequate to restore social unity and harmony if they were correctly understood, laid bare and mobilised. The role of philosophy was imaginatively to activate them. 4. Still two aspects of Hegel’s claim are significant. First of all, it is also highly significant that Hegel speaks of a ‘need’ for philosophy rather than merely a desire or wish or interest. Human beings have all sorts of desires, wishes, and preferences many of which are transitory, unimportant, or even whimsical. Even if Aristotle’s “desire to know” is universal in all humans, that fact by itself does not yet tell us anything about how systemic this desire is or how urgent or important its satisfaction should be. Perhaps all human occasionally desire to sneeze, but no one thinks that is important. Perhaps a desire always to think well of oneself and put one’s own action in the best possible light, is also universal, but we think this is rather a desire it would be good for us to resist and combat, or at least to try to control. When we speak of ‘desire’ we are usually adopting a first-person or intentional point of view of the subject. At least in pre-Freudian life I know what my desires are, and even in post-Freudian life ‘desires’ will be attributed to me only when my own intentional action exhibits a certain subject-structured form. On the other hand, we sometimes use ‘interest’ in a subjective way and sometimes in a more objective way. In either case, to speak of an ‘interest’ is to speak of something which one ‘ought’ to cultivate or continue to cultivate in a coherent or consistent way. To speak of an interest is roughly to speak of what it would be rational for me to desire to concern myself with – in a sufficiently flexible and open-ended sense of ‘rational’ –, even if we all know that I do not in fact always want what it would be rational for me to want. So you can say of me that I actually have an interest in preserving my health, even if I do not acknowledge it, because I ‘ought’ – in some relatively ab-

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stract and objective sense of ‘ought’ – to take care of my health, even if I do not at the moment want to, but I can also say that I have an interest in Greek poetry because I have not merely a momentary whim to read it, but have a coherent, long-term view that it is in some way objectively important to cultivate it, or that it will continue to be a source of enlightenment and pleasure for me, and I generally also have a desire to act on that view in appropriate circumstances. A need is something of an entirely different character altogether from either a desire or an interest. A need is a conditio sine qua non of successful functioning, and as such has nothing in principle whatever to do with anything anyone might be aware of. So if I need a certain minimal caloric intake, that means that without that intake I will malfunction, and this is an objective state of affairs that has nothing in principle to do with what I might want to desire. To say I will malfunction does not necessarily mean I will die off immediately. I can live for months on a seriously inadequate diet, but it does mean that there will be distinct pathologies I will develop, perhaps diseases like scurvy or anemia. If I do have a need of which I am unaware, I can also say I have an interest in satisfying that need (even though I do not know that I have that interest). However, even if I am using ‘interest’ in a strictly objective way, as when I say that you have an interest in maintaining a healthy non-privatised postal system, even if you don’t know it, I am at most saying that you should wish to support such a system because it is really to your rational advantage, whether you recognise that or not. However I can probably continue to function without pursuing or attaining everything that it would be to my rational advantage to pursue or attain. You might not eventually like a world without a public postal service, but I am not necessarily saying that you will seriously malfunction without it, in the way in which you will malfunction if one of your strict needs is not met. The difficulty arises when one extends this analysis of ‘need’ to the psychological and social domains. It seems rather clear, though, that there is no insuperable obstacle to forming psychological and social analogues to the concept of (physical or biological) malfunction, and that is sufficient to permit the range of the concept ‘need’ to be appropriately extended. This account would, I think, go some way toward explaining the persistence with which populations cling to their traditional religious beliefs. If those beliefs really did satisfy a need, even a psychological need for continuity – provided one can genuinely understand an interest in continuity of life as a need – then it is understandable that people will not give these beliefs up until and unless they find a substitute which is shown to be equally good, a hard proposition when what is at issue is a complex structure which has lasted thousands of years, has constructed cathedrals, inspired paintings, and run large numbers of educational and charitable institutions. One further possibility, of course, would be not

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to satisfy the need in some other way, but to get rid of it altogether. The question would be whether that is possible at all, and, if so, how that might be possible. 5. One of Hegel’s predecessors, Kant, leads the way here in talking about reason and its needs, but he construed these needs as cognitive and atemporal. He had a complex theory of the nature of the human mind which had as one of its corollaries that the human cognitive apparatus really could not function without generating large-scale imaginative constructs like the ideas of the world as a whole, the soul, and God, and in that sense they satisfied a need we had and could claim a kind of legitimacy although they had no cognitive content. Oddly enough, then, Kant thought that things like metaphysical and religious world-views were inescapable and essential for the functioning of the mind, but also had no truth value in the sense in which normal statements about the world, such as ‘Margot lives in Marburg’ has truth-value. He devoted much energy to examining various systematic ways in which the natural tendency of the mind to totalise might also result in illegitimate constructions. We see, he thought, that every event we encounter in the world has a cause and we then might be tempted to think that the world as a whole is a single huge event of which there is one cause. There is, as it were, one cause which is the cause of everything. This, Kant thinks, is the origin of the idea of God. This idea has some practical uses in that it gives us a useful practical directive, namely ‘whenever you find the cause of something, never stop there, because in principle that cause itself has a cause and you could go on indefinitely’. To that extent it has a kind of legitimacy or a practical warrant. Nevertheless this idea has no cognitive content of the kind Christian theology attributes to it. The same is true of the ideas of the soul to the extent to which this is more than a merely formal category. These were, as it were, necessary by-products or signs of the healthy functioning of our mind, ‘subjectively’ necessary, he says, but also objectively contentless, and potentially very dangerous, because they could be incorrectly taken to be forms of cognition although they were not (Kant 1929, 104– 123). This Kantian theory of a human need to which large speculative structures were a response, construes this human need as essentially timeless, and his view is essentially individualist. The need is connected with the requirements of healthy functioning on a part of the human cognitive apparatus of each human individual, and that is assumed to be the same everywhere and at all times. Hegel’s view is distinct from this in two aspects: first of all Hegel does not share either Kant’s individualism or the so-called ‘faculty psychology’ to which Kant subscribed. ‘Faculty psychology’ is an 18th century invention, a programme which divides the human person up into distinct functional systems that do not have much to do with each other. For Hegel the need to which spec-

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ulation is a response is not a mere feature of the isolated cognitive apparatus of each human being, but is a holistic property of human individuals (and groups): we need to see and understand ourselves as part of a group with which we can positively identify, and which collectively has a cognitive grip on the world as a whole. This is as much an emotional and moral need as a cognitive one, and it is a need for which there could be only a collective form of satisfaction. Second, Hegel does not share Kant’s exclusively atemporal orientation to the human world. For Hegel our needs, too, have their history. That brings us to the second significant aspect of Hegel’s claim that the need for philosophy arises when life has lost its unity: the context very strongly suggests that there was a time when life had its own unity, and philosophy would not only have been a luxury but would also have been so superfluous that it would not have existed at all as a serious enterprise. This idea that life had lost a unity which it had previously had (there was something problematic or deficient or defective in their own society and the modern age in general which prevented their contemporaries from leading a full and happy life) was very widespread during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and there was very wide agreement that what was wrong had something to do with a loss of forms of large-scale social identification or the fragmentation of human life. This disharmony or alienation was thought to have a number of interlinked aspects: a) individuals experienced themselves as internally split rather than psychologically unified and felt unable to develop all their powers harmoniously with the result that they became ‘one sided’ or felt mutilated; b) being subject to particular sets of systematically and irreconcilably conflicting demands all of which had a hold and claim on the individual; c) human populations saw themselves as divided into inherently antagonistically related groups; d) individuals were unable to ‘identify with’ and have a positive and affirmative attitude toward oneself, one’s fellow humans and one’s social and political institutions; e) human life in modern societies lacked ‘meaning’. This was also virtually universally construed as a specifically contemporary problem, that is, one specific to the late 18th and early 19th century. It was not thought to have beset the ancient Greeks (Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel), the members of the Universal Church in the Middle Ages (Novalis), or immediate producers in pre-capitalist societies (Marx). If ethics is the discipline which helps us to understand what features of our world and life are difficult, dangerous, or problematic, and suggests ways of dealing with these features, this account makes it seem natural to try to supplement traditional forms of ethics with a philosophy of history. I would like to point to the implausibility of the comparative claim that the ancient world exhibited natural or unreflective or naive unity of interests. Anyone who reads the history of Thucydides will find it hard to believe that each

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city was a beautifully structured harmonious concert of citizens with as yet undifferentiated interests.¹ Again, in fairness to Hegel, he is very clear that this view about a primordial state of unity is a kind of ideal type constructed for analytic purposes, a bit like the idea of a perfectly frictionless plane, and so it need not, and was not, ever actually instantiated, but still has value by virtue of throwing cognitive light on an important aspect of our situation. 6. I spoke above of several interlinked aspects of contemporary society to which the thinkers I am discussing took exception. Obviously these aspects can be seen to be connected if one takes as a tacit ideal the idea that a meaningful human life is to be one in which psychologically unified individuals are able fully to develop their powers in a unified society with which they are able positively to identify and which imposes on them only coherent demands. The lack of a unitary world-view which allowed me to identify with my world and society would then result in some distinctly pathological forms of human behaviour. If there was a time, however, when life had its own unity, before the need for philosophy arose, then there might in principle be a time in which that unity was reconstituted as it were from within society itself. This raises the distinctly unKantian possibility which fascinated several later philosophers in the Hegelian tradition, among them Marx (1978, Vol. I, 378 – 380), namely the idea that in a satisfactory society, from which certain kinds of deep-seated conflicts were absent, philosophy (along with religion) would be superfluous and would disappear. Of course, even in such a basically harmonious society there might be a pale successor-discipline to the antique magnificence of Philosophy, which might, for example, take the form of straightforward attempts to get an overview of the state of our knowledge or even suggestions for minor improvements in our social arrangements. People in such a society might have a use for a kind of encyclopedic summary of their knowledge, but they would not need anything like a traditional world-view. They could be happy nominalists, living lives without dark shadows, ‘metaphysics’ and deep, hidden meanings. One line of criticism of what are sometimes called ‘positivist’ strands in 20th century philosophy consists in claiming that positivists in fact propound methods of direct observation

 We don’t know much about the reforms of Kleisthenes, and what we do know is from later writers, but the later writers, who are the source of most of our information, were themselves Greeks of the fourth century, and they clearly attribute to his reforms the motivation to produce a political structure which will neutralise the effects of significant differences of interests between different regions and tribes. In a city of citizens with as yet undifferentiated interests, no mechanism like this would be necessary. Also remember Plato’s account of the psychology of the ‘democratic man’ in the Republic (Book VIII).

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and theory construction which would in principle be cognitively perfectly appropriate in a fundamentally harmonious society, however by advocating the exclusive use of such methods in repressive and conflict-ridden societies like ours, they tacitly contribute to diverting attention from fundamental social antagonisms (Adorno 1969). 7. One of Hegel’s followers who took the possibility of a society without largescale speculation seriously was Feuerbach (1975), although he was primarily concerned with theology rather than philosophy. He brought out in an especially vivid way something that Hegel and Kant had only gestured toward, namely that beneath various other rather superficial desires and interests humans have a vital need for self-affirmation which they will go to any lengths to satisfy. Despite themselves Kant and Hegel were still in thrall to the traditional philosophical view that gave to cognition and the striving for propositional truth a central role in human life. To some extent Feuerbach ignores this and shifts the focus from the cognitive correctness of world views to the role speculative constructs play in our psychic economy; he concentrates on what we would probably call psychology; what he called ‘anthropology’. Religion, he thought, arises out of human experience of weakness, failure, i. e. experience of the direct negation of such self-affirmation. When we experience our weakness in some crucial area of endeavour, we genuinely find it difficult to face this fact directly, and so we attempt to compensate for it in imagination by creating the idea of a Being (God) who has exactly the powers we experience ourselves as lacking. This compensatory projection gives us a certain pseudo-sense of power, self-affirmation and meaningfulness, a sense mediated through the imaginary Being. So the idea is that, for instance, the members of some extremely primitive tribes wish desperately to cross a river, and find that they cannot. They find it difficult if not impossible simply to accept this state of powerlessness, so compensate or console themselves with the imaginary thought of an entity to whom they are related and who can, or could, do exactly what they cannot. They can’t cross the river, but they are the children of a God who could, if he wished. A consequence of this, Feuerbach thought, is that the more human powers develop, the more this imaginative projection becomes unnecessary. As its basis in experienced impotence progressively dissolves, the conception of God becomes ever thinner. When human powers are fully developed, we will be able to dispense with the compensatory fantasy altogether; this theology loses its object. Feuerbach thinks that this state of affairs has already been reached and so theology has had its day and is over. He thought, to be sure, that a naturalised religion, a kind of celebration of our human necessities (such as eating and drinking) would survive – because we would realise that in such celebrations we were actually affirming

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ourselves – but that is a separate issue. Still the history of conceptions of God is epistemically significant because it can be seen as a laying out in thought the various features of human nature, of our needs, aspirations, and developing powers. The whole process of history is one in which we attribute to this alienated fantasy – the imaginative image of a Being who is utterly different from us/ alien to us – what are our own aspired natural powers. What happens historically is what Feuerbach calls an inversion of subject and object which we need merely to re-invert to get the original real sense. In Feuerbach’s memorable phrase: When we say ‘God is Love’ we really mean ‘Love is divine’, that is, that the human capacity to love is a positively valued feature of human nature. A power that we wish to cultivate. History then is the story of the way in which we re-appropriate these alienated powers by making them our own and realising that they are our own. One might well say, or rather one is virtually forced to the thought, that this use of the imagination to create a god was cold comfort at the time, and that it remains cold comfort now. If I want to cross the river, the imaginary idea of a God who can cross the river in my place is no substitute. I think that it is precisely this inadequacy that causes people to hold fast to these imaginative constructs. They are not the objects of obsessive concern although they do not work, but precisely because in one basic sense they do not work. If they did work they would truly and fully satisfy our need, and would they not then themselves become dispensible? This would seem rather clearly to be the consequence of Feuerbach’s reductionist approach to theology and the theological form of activation of the imagination. Once Divine Love may have given our inchoate aspirations a certain structure and direction, but if it is merely a compensatory fantasy, then once you have the real thing – once humans really have the power of love for each other – the imaginary form is useless, and at best of historical value. Divine Love, however, was supposed to be both a) something located in an alienated construct of the imagination-God and also b) something infinite. Even if one agrees both that the imaginative projection has its origin in real experienced human failure, and if one admits that the localisation of the imagined power (in God) is a mistake because what are finally at issue are human powers and their development, does this necessarily devalue the aspiration for limitlessness in the development of human powers, for the ‘infinity’ of purportedly divine love? Might not there still be a residue of something which is not completely without value left, a utopian impulse that arises to be sure from finite disappointments, but develops a legitimate life of its own which does not automatically disappear when real human powers progressively unfold?

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There seem prima facie to be two further difficulties with Feuerbach’s account of a post-theological society. First, an individual may find complete meaningfulness in integration into the productive activity of a collectively organised society, but then again he may not. Whether it is likely that such integration will be fully satisfactory to any given individual depends on many empirical factors, including details about how the society is organised, and perhaps features of personal temperament. But even if a social group is optimally well organised, it is not, or should not be, a foregone conclusion that that is what the individual will adopt existing structures of meaning as his or her own. Is he, or she, to be forced? Forced to lead a meaningful life against one’s will? There is also a second objection: this whole discussion, while interesting enough in itself, has focused on only one aspect of the original problem and left one important factor out of consideration. Thinking back to Job, his problems are not overwhelmingly either cognitive (like those analysed by Kant) or social (like those analysed by Hegel and the proto-idealists). Job’s problems are not exclusively lack of feeling of identification with his society or even lack of developed powers, but the loss of his flocks, boils and pustules on his body, the death of his children etc. Maybe greater power would have allowed Job to keep his flocks intact, and save his children from certain well-defined dangers, but no amount of human power will render his body completely invulnerable to illness or his children immortal. It is true about man as much today as it was two thousand years ago that ἅπορος ἐπ҆ οὐδὲν ἕρχεται τὸ μέλλον· Ἅιδα μόνον ϕεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπάξεται (Lloyd-Jones/Wilson 1990, line 360 – 363)²

One might use the term ‘existential’, as opposed to ‘cognitive’ or ‘socio-political’, to refer to these concerns. There are actually two slightly distinct issues here, but both of them can be abstractly categorised as relating to human finitude. In fact, ‘finitude’ is often adopted as a more general description of what it is about human life that makes it unsatisfactory in a way no social reform could change. First, these are forms of concern for fundamental features of human life, such a birth and death, that seem to be rather independent of the particular social, economic, and political order in which we find ourselves, and which are yet not merely atemporal properties of our cognitive apparatus. Many philosophers held that the central existential feature of finite human life was death (Heidegger  “Heencounters nothing that will confront him which he does not have the means to deal with: the only thing he cannot provide himself with is a way of escaping death.”

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1963, §§ 46 – 53). The second kind of issue that is often discussed here is one having to do with the inherent nature of human desire and choice. To choose X is not to choose any Y that is not compatible with X, and there is no reason to deny that this represents some kind of limitation inherent to the human condition. We all have to face our own death alone, and no amount of sensible work during my lifetime or social solidarity with my friends and neighbours will completely do away with the need for me to find some way of facing up to this aspect of my finitude, although forms of social organisation can clearly make death more or less bitter. Similarly, it has been argued, despite Marx’s early fantasy about a form of society in which I hunt and fish in the morning and write philosophy books in the evening (1978, vol. 3, 33), if I choose to spend the day boxing, I simply will not be able to spend the evening playing the violin. Much of the central part of the intellectual history of Europe during the 20th century was dominated by disagreements with followers of Feuerbach (for instance, Marx) and existentialists. 8. Once a connection is established between certain forms of enquiry or intellectual discipline, such as philosophy, with interests or needs, however, the door is open to further subversive thoughts. It might be the case that some particular conceptual or theoretical invention itself creates a set of psychological needs which, once they are in existence, are difficult to get rid of. This is the model that Nietzsche uses for Christianity (Nietzsche 1967, 245 – 413; see also Geuss 2005, 153 – 161). It develops a complex set of practices and institutions which arise for perfectly understandable, but utterly contingent, and perhaps slightly disreputable reasons, for instance human weakness and resentment of that weakness, but which, once they get themselves established, generate from within the new set of human needs of which Christianity is the fulfilment. The salvation which Christianity offers is, arguably, not for everyone but for those who need it. Since salvation means in the first instance salvation from sin, so it would seem that the Christian κήρυγμα – the message that sins could be erased and salvation was at hand – would have no purchase on those with no sense of sin. Missionaries have special difficulty with people lacking a sense of sin, so they may need to create one. Christianity did not in the first instance cure the pre-existing problem of sin, but attempted to cure a completely different (and, Nietzsche thinks, virtually incurable) other condition, namely a historically specific widespread form of human illness. Christianity, as he puts it, “turned sick people into sinners”. This means that Christian institutional life can genuinely not merely inculcate a belief that one is a sinner, but can actually produce people whose somatic constitution is one which is correctly described as ‘sinful’. The model here is addiction to drugs. Those who believe or feel themselves to be sin-

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ners will think they need the consolations Christianity can provide; those who really have been turned into sinners really do need that consolation, in the way the addict needs the drug. The only difference is that whereas we tend to assume that drug addiction is ‘in principle’ reversible (i. e. given sufficient will power and a facilitating environment), Nietzsche seems to think that for most people the changes introduced by Christianity will be effectively irreversible. Still, this is compatible with thinking they are radically contingent. Nietzsche, then, agrees with Marx that most members of contemporary populations really do have a metaphysical need, but attributes this not to deficient social conditions which cause people to need consolation for the exhausting but meaningless work to which they are condemned, but to their own inherent weakness, and the operation throughout millennia of social institutions which generate that need. Still there is the kernel of something else in this Nietzschean view that it is important to keep a grip on, and that is his account of the way in which the imaginative satisfaction of an otherwise unsatisfied need can change what I really need. I try to remedy my weakness by inventing the imaginary consolation of Christianity, but the real operation of the institutions which Christianity in turn develops, changes what I need. This may be a positive development, at any rate one which we as the heirs of the change retrospectively judge positively. The priests who invent various religious fantasies, after all, in some sense render the human being for the first time an “interesting animal”.³ It is an important fact about the development of human culture that sequences of events like these are possible. Suppose we clap our hands together to draw the rain god’s attention to us. Then we do that rhythmically. Then we sing and dance in rhythm to please him. Since pleasing the god is, we think, very important, we develop more and more complex forms of clapping and singing. Eventually, after four or five thousand years we get the b-minor Mass. It is perfectly possible that we might not have got that, had we not had the illusory religious beliefs we had. The music of that mass is made to be as close to being an appropriate, satisfying sound for God to hear as possible, but would also be an appropriate sound for any human of an appropriate level of musical cultivation to hear. It is neither the case that the origin – even the necessary origin – of this music in utterly ridiculous beliefs makes the music any the less beautiful, nor should the fact that we  St. Paul’s, after all, in a slightly bizarre passage (Romans 7, 7– 11) seems to claim that the point of the Jewish Law was to increase consciousness of sin. One can hold that Christianity generates the sense of sin to which its message of redemption from sin is purportedly the only adequate response.

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find the music beautiful commit us to endorsing the matrix of beliefs out of which it arose. Perhaps one needs in some circumstances to have aspirations to something beyond what one can ever in fact achieve in order to attain certain high levels of achievement at all. One might here speak of the ‘utopian’ aspirations or a ‘utopian impulse’. Note, too, that one should not be too quick in this area of human life to apply the simple dichotomy between ‘true/false belief’ (or even ‘well-supported/disconfirmed belief’). A lot of the beliefs associated with traditional forms of philosophy and religion don’t even purport to be descriptive or they are too indeterminate, too lacking in specific propositional content, for us even to say whether or not they are true (or false): ‘God is an agent who created the world 4500 years ago’ is perhaps a statement that can be true or false, but what about ‘Be perfect even as your heavenly father is perfect’ or ‘There is a destiny that shapes our ends as we will’ or ‘Ζεῦς γὰρ μεγάλης γλώσσης κόμπους/ ὑπερεχΦαίρει’. (Nietzsche 1980, 266). An aspiration, such as to make music so perfect it would please even the god, may be more or less ambitious, more or less energising for those who nourish it in themselves, more or less socially useful, it is not obvious that looking for the truth value of the more propositional beliefs perhaps associated with the aspiration is always the best way of attaining any kind of interesting understanding of it. As everyone knows, the word ‘Utopia’ is a coinage of Sir Thomas More, which he used as the title of the book he wrote in Latin and published in 1516. This title is an erudite pun because this invented Latin word could seem to come from one or another of two completely different, also invented, Greek words. In ‘U-topia’, the second component ‘τοπία’ is straightforward: ‘place’ (in an abstract sense; contrast ‘τόπος’ as a concrete, specific place). However the first Latin syllable ‘U’ can either represent the Greek ‘oὐ’ meaning ‘not’, so ‘utopia’ is ‘no-place’, or it can represent the completely different word ‘εὖ’ meaning ‘well’ or ‘good’. So Utopia means either a place that is very good or a place that is no-where, that does not exist in reality, but since it is being discussed at all must exist at least in the imagination, but only in the imagination. In More, and following him the tradition, these two meanings are conflated: It is a place that is too good to be anywhere, too good to exist. We are all familiar with Marx’s criticism of utopian social thinking. There were two prongs of this criticism, one rather superficial, and the other much more deeply rooted. The superficial criticism ran: What is the point of describing the ideal society if one cannot specify a mechanism by which we can act to realise it? Many utopian theorists seem to have accepted a highly naive and very implausible theory of human motivation, that is, they seemed to think that by describing a certain state as good and recommending it to humans’ attention, they have solved the issue of how to attain it. In so doing they overestimated,

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he thought, the power which imagining the good has actually to motivate us to act effectively in the world we live in, and also the power which such motivated action might have to attain in the face of a recalcitrant reality, including other agents with their own powers and vested interests, the goals it might actually set itself. The deeper criticism is rather epistemological than practical. Utopian thinking assumes that we have sufficient cognitive ability to detach ourselves from the world we actually live in, to “jump over our own shadow” as Hegel put it. But that is not the case. Every philosopher, even the utopian, is a child of the times, and what look like utopian speculation about something completely different will eventually show itself to be not so very different at all, a way of taking some features of the present at face value and absolutising them. Utopian projects, thus, are not so much impossible to realise, but they might all too easily be realised and would then however turn out to have the same basic defects of the present, merely magnified. 9. This all seems perfectly reasonable and unobjectionable, but there is still something left out. What that is can best be seen by a consideration of the work of Gustav Landauer. In 1907 Landauer published a book entitled Revolution which contains a rudimentary anarchist theory of history. In this book he distinguishes two factors in human history: Topia and Utopia. Topia is the total state of a society at any given time considered under the aspect of its givenness and stability. So one might think of ‘topia’ as a term describing the really existing world simply as it now really is. ‘Utopia’ on the other hand designates all those individual impulses which under certain circumstances can come together and move this world in the direction of a perfectly functioning social formation that “contains no harmful or unjust elements”.⁴ One might bridle at the inclusion of moralising terms like ‘Ungerechtheiten’ in this account, but it is possible to understand this in a historicist way: at any given time a given population will have (various) conceptions of what is harmful or unjust and these changing conceptions provide the kernel of the utopian aspiration. The state of affairs intended in these utopian strivings will not ever be fully realised, and so their significance consists simply in driving Humanity on from one Topia – from one ‘place’ – to the next. However, because they actually do have a kind of motivating force, they are equally not nothing. At any given point in time, then, Landauer maintains, the utopian impulses actually and effectively in existence derive from two sources: specific dissatisfaction with the given topia, and remembrance of

 “[…] Tendenz eine tadellos funktionierende Topie zu gestalten, die keinerlei Schädlichkeiten oder Ungerechtheiten in sich schließt.” (Lloyd-Jones/Wilson 1990, line 1.127)

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all previous utopias. He puts particular emphasis on the role of history as a way of revitalising past utopian impulses. He appeals in particular to the twofold sense of the English word ‘realise’ which means both come to an understanding of and bring into existence. History is supposed to realise previously embodied utopian impulses in both senses of the word. History, he thought, was at least as much about creating new forms of cooperative human action, and thus about the future, as it was about the past. To return to my example at the start, when people in the late 19th century started writing histories of the Czech nation this was partly a way of producing a set of institutions in which those who realised that they were Czech (in both senses of the English word) could effectively act so as to pursue some collective goals which would otherwise be beyond their reach, in fact creating a Czech nationality rooted in and supported by a state. I merely note that a theory of this kind might also be thought to assign to literature a clear function in human life, as the repository of preserving and clarifying utopian aspirations. The metaphysical need in the 19th century was construed as essentially retrospective and eirenic. The satisfaction of this need was to reconcile us with this world in more or less its present form by showing us that we could see ourselves as integrated into a pre-existing metaphysical order. The utopian impulse, by contrast is future-oriented and polemical. My dissatisfaction with the status quo and recollection of previous moments in history at which similar dissatisfaction has lead to effective change is itself directed at a potential future transformation of the present topia. From the fact that all of the content of my utopian striving is not fully realised (in the sense of effectively embodied in the world) it does not follow that any of that content that did come into existence could have been realised if it had been presented in a non-utopian form. Neither does it follow that whatever transformation eventually does come about is unimportant, because it does not satisfy the utopian impulse fully. Finally, it would also be incorrect to conclude that my retaining my grip on those impulses that are not yet realised or realisable is insignificant. In fact, Landauer is committed to the view that utopian impulses are motivationally essential in permitting any form of human progress or any higher cultural achievement to come about. [W]ir dürfen […] ruhig sagen, daß allen großen Gestaltungen des Mitlebens der Menschen ein Wahn vorgeleuchtet hat, daß die Menschen immer nur durch Wahn aneinander gebunden waren, daß immer nur der Wahn die Individuen zu höheren Organisationsformen und Gesamtheiten aufgebaut hat. (Landauer 2003, 52)⁵

 “We can say without fear of contradiction that some delusion/obsessive illusion has always

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The word I have translated ‘delusion/obsessive illusion’ here is ‘Wahn’, which originally seems to have meant ‘hope, wish’ then ‘wishful thinking, groundless hope’ and now in addition carries a very strong connotation of ‘erroneous, compulsively held conviction’. The relation between those two components in ‘Wahn’ – on the one hand: ‘error’ and on the other: ‘belief compulsively held and acted on’ – is unclear. One can, of course, hold an erroneous factual belief and yet not cling to it or act on it compulsively, and one can act compulsively on a belief of indeterminate truth value – ‘I shall win’ – or even on a belief that is true – ‘There are traces of dust in this room; I must get rid of them completely (no matter what the cost)’. ‘Wahn’ was one of Richard Wagner’s favourite terms, and I suspect it was from Wagner’s Meistersinger that Landauer derived if not the general idea of the cultural productivity of Wahn – that idea goes back to antiquity – at least the use of this specific term for it. At the end of Act II of Meistersinger a civic disturbance has broken out in Nürnberg, caused partly by Beckmesser’s poor singing and the critical reaction to it by the townspeople, and partly by a complex case of mistaken identity. On the next morning, Hans Sachs, the main protagonist reflects on the previous night’s riotous activities, and comes to the conclusion that the whole thing was Wahn, but adds: Jetzt schaun wir, wie Hans Sachs es macht daß er den Wahn fein lenken mag, ein edler Werk zu tun: denn läßt er uns nicht ruh’n, selbst hier in Nürenberg, so sei’s um solche Werk’, die selten vor gemeinen Dingen und nie ohn’ ein’gen Wahn gelingen.⁶

So no b-minor mass without the obsessive illusion of God, and no Czech Republic without the obsessive illusion in the 19th century that there was a naturally given Czech people with a coherent, distinct, history. Wagner makes it easy for himself because his Hans Sachs trusts himself to be able to guide the development of the illusion carefully, but, as we know to our cost, in most cases that is not as easy as it looks. There is in fact one might think some incompatibility gone ahead and illuminated the path to any large form of structuring of human communal life, that humans were ever only bound to one another by some delusion, that only such an delusion ever put together individuals to higher forms of organisation and collectivity.”  “So watch how Hans Sachs carefully guides this obsessive illusion so that it produces a noble work, for, if such illusions never leave us alone, not even here in Nürnberg, it is because works like that that stand out above ordinary things seldom succeed, and if they do succeed never do so with a small admixture of obsessive illusion.”

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between the very concept of an obsession and the idea that there can be a careful guidance of the way that obsession works itself out. This, however, might, as it were, be a problem for human life, not a problem resulting from some theory, and so might not be a reason to deny the importance of utopian impulses. I’m suggesting that the metaphysical need and attempts to satisfy it do represent the dead hand of the human past. Perhaps we cannot completely avoid our past; it would be highly surprising if we could, and so it might be perfectly natural for us to be tolerant toward those who still experience this need in its more vivid forms. Being tolerant does not of course necessarily mean agreeing with them, admitting their claims to truth, or allowing them to impose various of their imaginative structures on others. On the other hand, unless one thinks that we already live in the best of all possible worlds and that lack of flexibility in our relation to our own future is a good thing, giving up our utopian impulses completely would represent a serious loss.⁷

References Adorno, Theodor W., 1969: Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand. Anderson, Benedict, 1983: Imagined communities. Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, London: Verso. Aurelius Augustinus, 2007: Confessions, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Blumenberg, Hans, 1966: Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1975: Das Wesen des Christentums. In: Erich Thies (ed.), Feuerbach. Werke in sechs Bänden, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Geuss, Raymond, 2005: Outside ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1970: Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie. In: Eva Moldenhauer, Karl Markus Michel (eds.), Hegel. Werke, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin, 1963: Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hobsbawm, Eric J. / Ranger, Terence (eds.), 1983: The invention of tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel, 1929: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. by Karl Vorländer, Hamburg: Meiner. Landauer, Gustav, 2003: Die Revolution, Berlin: Unrast. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh / Wilson, Nigel Guy (ed.), 1990: Sophoclea, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marx, Karl, 1978: “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie”. In: Marx-Engels-Werke, Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag.

 I am very grateful to discussions of the topics treated in this paper with Rüdiger Bittner, although I think he continues to think I am wrong about the positive role of utopianism.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1967: Zur Genealogie der Moral. In: Wolfgang Müller-Lauter (ed.), Nietzsche – Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin: de Gruyter. Plato, 1997: Republic. In: John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson (eds.), Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

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Reasonable Movies for Reasonable Agents 1. Introduction. Some movies impart knowledge about the world we live in. They give insight of an ethical, psychological or anthropological kind about the reasons for our actions, about how our consciousness works and what we are capable of doing. Giving insight is not what they are made for, as they are ‘functionless’ works of art, not instruments for passing on truths or moral norms, but I focus here on the epistemic and emotional impact that some movies can have on reasonable action. This does not apply to the same extent to all kinds of feature films. Some don’t want to point to anything and some only deal with the world of movies itself. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003/4), for example, is not meant to impart knowledge about how a woman feels after being shot in the head by her lover or about how sharp a samurai sword has to be to allow a solitary woman to triumph over an army of bodyguards. Kill Bill displays a climax of choreographed fights and multiple references to film history. Fictionality here becomes l’art pour l’art and thus undermines philosophical or sociocritical interpretations. There are other films, however, that give deep insight into the human mind or reveal moral ideas. For example, the films of the Austrian director Michael Haneke. In his motion picture Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) he shows how people potentially react when suppressed, and how ideologies may arise which lead to violence against dissenters. In Caché (2005) he challenges the self-deceptive sense of upper-class-security by figuratively setting its skeletons in the closet in motion. At the same time he implicitly poses the question of how real reality may appear in a movie. This kind of question became fashionable with The Matrix (1999) and is carried to extremes with Christopher Nolan’s Inception a decade later (2010). The multiple dream levels in this story cause confusion about what’s real and what’s imagined, and thus raise general epistemic questions. 2. How can a fictional film be a bearer of truth? A fiction film can be an eye opener or cast a different light on things as long as it resembles the world in which we live. This statement can be traced back to Aristotle who considers fiction to be a mimesis of action offering universal traits in single events.¹ Fiction

 Poetry relates “what may happen”, it is “philosophical” and “tends to express the universal” not the particular: “By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or

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may not express propositions. Yet it may convey philosophical truth, for example about tragic guilt. Fictional film, I argue, also happens to be philosophical. The narrative form is crucial here because telling stories means to establish relationships between different things. Hayden White (1973) expressed this thought by the term emplotment and Paul Ricœur (1983 – 85) by synthèse de l’hétérogène. Our understanding of life is already narratively structured, and that’s why the narrative form of a story helps make the flow of heterogeneous things comprehensible. The importance of narrativity is, at any rate, less controversial than the relation between fictionality and truth. Peter Strawson (1950) and John Searle (1974/75), for example, argue that nothing expressed in fiction could ever be true or false because fictions do not even claim to be true. Caché for instance doesn’t state that the French couple who received the anonymous video tapes is real; the film merely pretends as if they were. But does this mean that fiction cannot be a vehicle of truth? This argument would need to be based on an empirical concept of truth according to which truth is nothing but the statement of an historical factum. But you can’t measure fiction with historical facticity and the verifiability. Caché offers knowledge about the pseudo security of an upper-class life and about the impossibility of repressing one’s responsibility. Such insights depend on interpretation of the whole story, not on the verification of statements. However, from this it does not follow that interpretation constitutes knowledge which is not implied in the fictional film. To interpret is not to read tea leaves. The film theorist Edward Branigan asserts that “a story exists less on the screen than in our predisposition to make sense.” (1992, 62) But this is wrong or exaggerated at best, because in fact a film story is a complex configuration of many narrative elements like mise en scène, camera viewpoints, sounds and the montage of the chronological order. I admit that films don’t argue explicitly. Only the characters in a film argue sometimes. But their beliefs are challenged by those of the other characters and mostly don’t mirror the standpoint of the film itself. In this way films may create an ambiguity which provokes thought. Some scholars infer from this that films in general are not capable of being a truth bearer. Murray Smith claims: “Few criticisms are more apt to strike terror into the heart of the philosopher than the assertion that such-and-such a proposition is ‘ambiguous’, while in the world of art, that term is more apt to be used as a term of praise.” (see Warten-

act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages.” Poetics 1451 b.

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berg 2007, 17). A philosophical text should be disambiguated, an ambiguous film instead is considered a work of art. This may be true but it does not follow that it is impossible to reformulate the leading thought of a movie. The philosophers Lamarque and Olson emphasize the implicit character of fictional truth: “A literary work ‘implies’ general propositions only in the sense that the practice of literary appreciation makes use of such propositions to organize into an intelligible pattern the events and situations described literally in a work.” (1994, 327). Everything depends on the word ‘implies’, and it is not very clear what it means here. Literature does not express general propositions but interpretation does, they say. So, where does the truth lie? Maybe we can put it this way: Stories tell their truth indirectly, they do not speak like theorems. Nevertheless they can show us how things are or at least how they may be. They give reasons to believe in such and such statements, and thus they change one’s attitude. All this applies to the relationship between fiction and truth in general. Now I would like to find out what role the audio-visual form of movies plays in the imparting of truth. 3. How does the audiovisuality of films contribute to the imparting of truth? Audiovisuality means that image sequences, sounds and music become a temporally ordered composition. Needless to say, sound films make use of language, for example dialogues or a narrator’s commentary. But that’s not specific to the audiovisuality of film, it’s rather a literary form. In Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987) Peter Handke’s poem Lied vom Kindsein (Song of Childhood) is partly heard and seen: “Als das Kind Kind war, wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war.” This kind of reflection is philosophical, but it’s not typical for film. The question is: Can a film be philosophical by its audiovisuality alone? Sometimes the meaning of what a film shows is symbolical. Here is an example: Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011) is characterized by an extremely powerful (or you might say flamboyant) audiovisuality. The story is about the childhood memory of the protagonist Jack, about the strictness of his father, about his loving mother, his two brothers and the birth and death of one of his brothers. But the film is also about the evolution of the world, the power of nature, the meaning of life and afterlife. Reflections here are not made explicit but indirectly displayed in moving images and sounds. Monumental sights of nature are cut together with heavily symbolic takes of humans, especially children, in relation to the grown-up Jack whose childhood memories are directed by existential questions. Malick’s film doesn’t make statements, it just presents memories, visions and reflections by

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leading individual experiences like that of the brother’s death and of the father’s power into dimensions of theodicy and the evolution and purpose of life. At the same time, the music establishes the mood of a religious experience. In sum, the film doesn’t impart know-ledge, but simulates and provokes philosophical thoughts about what we can know, what we should do and what we may hope – in a specific audiovisual manner. Some scholars state that films initiate reflections upon a philosophical issue in more engaged or in “deeper and more adequate ways” (Wartenberg 2007, 25) but they fail to explain how that works. The American philosopher Thomas Wartenberg claims: “It has become something of a commonplace for philosophers of film to remark on the similarity between the situation of the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and that of film viewers.” (2007, 15). Some films demonstrate their power of creating illusions and thus force the viewer to reflect on what is real just like in skeptical scenarios like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Descartes’ genius malignus. For example, The Matrix has often been compared to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave because of Morpheus taking Neo out of the world of simulated reality, into the real world behind (which hardly anybody knows) (see Burkhart 2004, 50). There are also films with an unreliable narrator or a final twist that baffle the viewers by initially setting them on the wrong track like Existenz (1999), Fight Club and The Sixth Sense (1999). Films can easily simulate reality by means of their audiovisuality. Some movies impart truth by the content of the story and explicit reflections, others by making the process of illusion and disillusionment an experience. The viewer becomes an active part of a skeptical scenario which in a philosophical discourse can only be rationally described or told. Audiovisuality has an intensive effect on the viewer’s emotions. The emotional reception of a film, I argue, contributes to the imparting of truth. 4. How do emotions contribute to the imparting of truth? Movie-watching is entering an enthralling state of consciousness: Colin McGinn writes in his book Power of Movies: “The mind seems to step into another sphere of engagement as the images on the screen flood into our receptive consciousness. We are gripped.” (2005, 4).² The mesmerizing effect of a film can be explained by its interaction between visual and auditive impressions creating an illusion of reality like a dream.

 “In the movie-watching experience we enter an ‘altered state of conciousness’, enthralling and irresistable.” McGinn (2005, 4)

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A challenge to the idea of emotions as important for truth are movies that use the fascination of the audiovisual experience to manipulate the viewers. The Polar Express (Leslie Zemecki 2004), for example, promises a ‘pleasure island’ for children who believe in Santa Claus. The promising train ride to the north pole where Santa Claus resides with all his glamour and with the Christmas presents electrifies the children because of its enchanting visual appearance and film score. There is not the slightest chance of critical reflection. On the contrary, the audiovisuality of the film only cements the belief in Santa Claus. We have to admit that movies have the emotional power to transport myths, world-views, and ideologies as well. Do movies, on the other hand, have the emotional power to transport truth or critical reflections? A further challenge to this idea is the make-believe theory of the American philosopher Kendall L. Walton. In his book Fearing Fictions (1978) he states that our emotions with regard to fiction are only ‘quasi-emotions’. This means that our fear while watching a horror movie is not real fear but merely quasi-fear because we only pretend to be afraid. Our emotions are as fictional as the film’s fiction. This position is controversial. Recent critics of this view come from a neurological perspective. Katja Mellmann (2006) claims that our brain cannot differentiate between the emotional reaction to a real story or a fictitious story. It has been proven that the human brain initializes the same emotional program in both cases which means that emotionally our brain cannot tell reality from virtual reality (see also Neill 1993 and Voland 2007). Now I would like to know more about the impact of the emotional reception of fiction on our lives. Is there a call for action that goes together with watching movies? On the one hand we know that it’s fictional and we don’t feel the need to help the actor on the screen (this is Walton’s position). On the other hand we sometimes are affected by a story and feel concerned about what we see. And in these cases the film may have a lasting effect and influence on our actions. For example, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark may dispose its viewers to protest against death penalty. In 1987 the Steven Biko biopic Cry Freedom made me become a member of Amnesty International. I knew a little bit about apartheid before when I was 13, but only this movie had the power to move me effectively. In Tom Hooper’s film Red Dust (2004), also about apartheid, there is an archetype scene of deep sorrow and indignation. A woman grieves for her son when his bones are found and dug out. He was tortured to death because he was an ANC-member. The mourning music expresses the mother’s grief. A lot of South African actors know this kind of grief very well and that’s why this woman’s acting is extremely authentic when she voices her part hoarsely and starts to cry. Our sympathies with this woman have moral implications which

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certainly do not come from this scene alone, but scenes like this stir our moral indignation about the brutality and injustice of the apartheid regime. Films, in general, can provoke empathy and thus lead to an increased moral sensibility of the recipient. The question was: How do emotions contribute to the transmission of truth? Here is my answer: Though empathy doesn’t generate factual know‐ledge, the sympathy with characters and the emotional response to the story, like heartbeat, goosebumps, laughing, crying, etc. create the illusion of a real psychosomatic experience which is certainly more intensive and persuasive than knowledge we get from theoretical discourses. It is hard to say, however, whether it is also more sustainable. 5. Sympathy and Approval. There is one final objection. I had to ask myself whether there is an essential relation between sympathizing with a character and morally approving of his or her deeds. According to Schiller’s Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (Dishonoured Irreclaimable, 1786) we’ll judge a criminal’s deeds less strictly when we get to know his story and the reasons for his actions. This is the idea Adam Smith developed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. The more we are acquainted with someone’s situation the easier we can relate to him or her and approve of his or her actions. The same should apply to the judgment of characters in a movie. But some movies don’t have characters with whom the viewers can identify or at least feel sympathy; some movies don’t stir emotions and thus complicate the viewer’s moral judgment. For example, in the cases of Alex in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Tom in The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella 1999) the viewer is well introduced into the stories and motivations of these criminal protagonists. However, the viewer is not invited to approve of their deeds, since the films don’t conceal their brutality and the victims’ suffering. Does this mean that emotions in such cases do not contribute to the imparting of truth? No, because we are not invited to sympathize with Alex or Tom. This means that we don’t sympathize with characters only because we know their motivation. A Clockwork Orange is narrated from Alex’ point of view, but the film offers many opportunities to loathe and condemn him. Thus it is possible to be acquainted with a character’s situation and still disapprove of what he does. But as soon as we feel sympathy, our moral judgment becomes generous, and rightly so.³

 I would like to thank Rüdiger for all the years of team teaching and for the books on philosophy and fiction we made together.

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References Aristotle, 1895: Poetics, translated with a critical text by Samuel Henry Butcher, London: Macmillan and Co. Branigan, Edward, 1992: Narrative comprehension and film, London: Routledge. Burkhart, Maximilian G., 2004: “Ich bin eine Pfeife: Die Matrix der Ästhetik”. In: Bernd Scheffer, Oliver Jahraus (eds.), Wie im Film. Zur Analyse populärer Medienereignisse, Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 45 – 75. Lamarque, Peter / Olsen, Stein Haugom, 1994: Truth, fiction, and literature. A philosophical perspective, Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGinn, Colin, 2005: The power of movies. How screen and mind interact, New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Mellman, Katja, 2006: “Literatur als emotionale Attrappe: Eine evolutionspsychologische Lösung des ‘paradox of fiction’”. In: Uta Klein, Katja Mellmann, Steffanie Metzger (eds.), Heuristiken der Literaturwissenschaft. Disziplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur, Paderborn: Mentis: 145 – 166. Neill, Alex, 1993: “Fiction and the Emotions”. In: American Philosophy Quarterly 30: 1 – 13. Ricœur, Paul, 1983 – 1985: Temps et récit, Paris: Seuil. Searle, John R., 1974/1975: “The logical status of fictional discourse”. In: New Literary History 6: 319 – 332. Strawson, Peter F., 1950: “On referring”. In: Mind 59: 320 – 344. Voland, Eckart, 2007: “Virtuelle Welten in realen Gehirnen: Evolutionspsychologische Aspekte des Umgangs mit Medien”. In: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 146: 7 – 22. Wartenberg, Thomas E., 2007: Thinking on screen. Film as philosophy, London: Routledge. White, Hayden V., 1973: Metahistory. The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hajo Kurzenberger

Performing on the Media Stage 1. The metaphor of the world being a stage has in today’s medialized society been extended enormously, giving it new and different meanings. It is not just ‘society as theatre’, ‘event culture’ or ‘media democracy’ that we are talking about; these developments are happening on many different kinds of stage, especially on those of the mass media. At the same time in a number of disciplines, above all in the social sciences, researchers have discovered the relevance of this metaphor for their work. As early as 1959, Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1990) turned theatre into a paradigm and used it to explore the network of social agreements and rules and so the presentation of self and role performance in different social situations. In the mid-1990 s interdisciplinary research programs promoted ‘theatricality’ as a model from the cultural sciences that, since contemporary culture is increasingly found not in completed works but in theatrical processes, should be adopted by anyone whose research topics or objects of study are constituted by staging processes or theatrical action. Admittedly the metaphor of the world as a stage is nothing new. In his study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Robert Curtius traces the theatre metaphor back to classical antiquity, with its roots in Plato, where human beings are called “divine puppets” and “playthings of the gods.” Curtius also shows that already at the time of the Cynics comparing human beings with actors, and so the theatrical constitution of humankind, had become a popular cliché. The metaphor of the world as a theatre can be seen then throughout centuries of European cultural history. In the 12th century John of Salisbury in his major work Policratus gave the metaphor an interpretation that would last into the beginning of the modern era. He expanded the stage not only to include the entire world but gave it a new and final ‘enlargement’, namely, “from earth to heaven. There sit the spectators of the terrestrial play: God and the heroes of virtue. The scena vitae has thus become a theatrum mundi.” (2013, 140) It is this theatrum mundi that in the 16th and 17th centuries became a general symbol of reality: theatre as an illusion, life as a dream and the world as a theatre (see Alewyn and Sälzer 1959, 68 f.). This holds for the Elizabethan Renaissance theatre and Shakespeare as well as for the Spanish and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep,” as Prospero instructs Ferdinand and Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, expressing the quintessence of his knowledge of the world. Twenty years later in Calderón’s three-act play Life is a Dream, the Polish prince Segismundo comes to the conclusion that “dreams themselves are only

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dreams” and a person will awaken to real life from this illusory and theatrical life when he stands before the eternal producer and director of this worldly theatre, who will judge whether he played his part well or poorly. “Life is only a play before God, the highest judge,” says the allegorical figure World in the Epilogue of Calderón’s The Great Theatre of the World. This is however the striking difference to the theatre of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare the human being, in his many forms in the comedies, tragedies and histories, was reinvented and at the same time forced to rely on himself. His development and his increasing metaphysical vulnerability go hand in hand where he tests his positive and negative potentialities through his actions, contemplating his worth and his finiteness. The courtier Jaques, a melancholy figure in the comedy As You Like It, declares that all the world is a stage “and all the men and women merely players”. At the end of the play he utters the damning verdict: Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing. [II, 7]

“There is no God, as we find in Calderón, holding his hand over the great theatre of the world. Play is for Jaques something without meaning. It leads to nothing”, writes the anglicist Ernst Sehrt (1961, 38). Now one might rightly object that this is only one possible perspective. And especially in the comedy As You Like It the lovers’ game, their game within a game, is so full of life and sensual pleasure that it repeatedly dissolves the boundaries between appearance and reality, mixing both dimensions to the point where they become virtually indistinguishable. 2. What has all of this, you might ask, to do with acting on the media stage? First of all, this brief historical sketch helps us to see more clearly how great the distance is to our modern or post-modern conception of reality and its theatrical worldview. But it also hints at analogies that might be worth pursuing. Theatrical forms of social practice are in an exchange, an interaction with theatrical forms of art. This thesis holds just as true for the plays of Shakespeare and Calderón as it does for the theatre of Christoph Schlingensief or the Rimini Protokoll group. Kotte’s formula ‘theatricality constitutes society, society theatre’ (see Warstat 2005, 262) of course always needs to be situated in a concrete historical context if it is not to be an empty phrase. Shakespeare’s “primal scenes of theatricality”, as Stephan Greenblatt (2005, 40 f.) calls them, found their inspiration in the folk customs of the course tales of Robin Hood as well as in the magnificent splen-

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dour of the ‘royal progresses’ Elizabeth I staged as she travelled through her kingdom, demonstrating and legitimating her royal power. Calderón’s great theatre of the world was a so-called auto sacramentale, a religious play held on Corpus Christi and inspired by the baroque wealth of form in the Counter-Reformation. Calderón’s worldly and spiritual plays are, although he was younger than Shakespeare, grounded in the order and imaginative world of the medieval period. They served the greater glory of God, which the Spanish King was able to wholly identify himself with. But the historical perspective also reveals that the metaphor of the world as a stage is usually accompanied by generalizations and moralizations. Curtius found that this was the case for Spain’s Golden Age of theatre, where the comparison of human life with the theatre soon became a platitude. The theatre metaphor has always tended to be interpreted moralistically and trivially. We will see that this also holds true today. Before we finally turn to the present and its media stages, one last historical example should be brought into play, and with it one last essential category, without which there could be no theatrical performance: the audience. “There is a marvellous Persian Letter of Montesquieu’s, in which his hero, wandering into the Comédie Française one night, cannot distinguish who’s on stage and who’s supposed to be watching; everyone is parading, posing, having a good time. Amusement, cynical toleration, pleasure in the company of one’s fellows, these were the tones of feeling contained in the everyday notion of man as an actor”, writes Richard Sennett (2002, 142) in his major study The Fall of Public Man. With the concept of the ‘tyranny of intimacy’ he explains, among other things, how performance in theatre depends on the performance of public roles and conversely how the public sphere and the new understanding of personality in the 19th century is especially dependent on the theatre. In the 19th century the art theatre became the stage of real life. This means that generally speaking actors and spectators came to need each other in their reciprocal performance and reception functions. 3. We should now turn to newer, more contemporary functions of the spectator, as well as to the widely differing but concurrent understandings and practices of acting and dramatic art prevalent today, and, needless to say, the interaction between the performer and the spectator, which is essential to creating theatre. I would like to examine these topics by using three examples from three different fields. Let us begin with the traditional place of the dramatic art, the theatre. In Germany this place was convulsed not long ago by a so-called theatre scandal that far exceeded the bashing of the classics or offending generally held stand-

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ards of taste that one might consider typical for the theatre today. In a performance that was intended as a revival of Ionesco’s The Killing Game, an actor dared to attack, verbally and to an extent physically, a critic in the audience. The critic struck back, not in the literal sense but with the tools of his trade, verbally. Thomas Lawinky had torn Gerhard Stadelmeier’s notebook out of his hands and shouted after the fleeing man, “Get out of here you bastard, piss off. A round of applause for the critic!” Gerhard Stadelmeier’s outraged reaction was soon published in the arts section of his newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung (FAZ), in an article entitled ‘An Attack’ (2006, 35); a charge which of course had consequences. The mayor of Frankfurt, Petra Roth, (at the urging of the FAZ and to further her re-election campaign) intervened and called for an “immediate and appropriate reaction”. The director of the theatre willingly obliged, and Lawinky was promptly fired. In the aftermath, there was tumultuous coverage in the media with the different sides all coming to word. There are three aspects that make this scandal socially and theoretically interesting: first of all, the question is, what is theatre supposed to do and what is it allowed to do? What is art supposed to do and what is it allowed to do? In other words, are there set rules for the interaction space in theatre that must be followed? Or is it instead one of the fundamental conditions of art that it is based on the violation of norms? The second interesting question is, where the real theatrical events take place that are popular and have far-reaching consequences – on a small stage in an experimental German theatre or on the medial wide-screen stages of the press and television? Third, who was the more successful actor: Lawinky in his role as a professional actor or Stadelmeier who as a critic traditionally would count as a professional spectator? My formulation of these questions reveals my opinions, which I am simplifying and somewhat overstating here. It is only by violating established rules of art that the theatre can change and continue to develop. However, whether every violation of prevailing norms of taste is productive would have to be discussed on a case-by-case basis. In a mass media era (art) theatre has only a niche function in culture. The theatre that reaches the largest audiences, the greatest performances are taking place in the media. However the critical potential of this art niche should not be underestimated. In this multi-media system the role of the spectator, the so-called recipient, has become considerably more important. In many cases he is the true protagonist who determines the rules of action. In our theatre scandal the critic was not only instrumental in the firing of an actor but for good measure also drove him into exile since an extraordinarily media-savvy spectator, Claus Peymann, recycled this allegedly scandalous incident by offering him refuge in the Berlin En-

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semble theatre. The former Berlin senator for culture, Christoph Stölzl, remarked that Stadelmeier had “played all the registers of outrage” in this “martyr drama of the freedom of the press.” In addition he rightly pointed out there was a “double forgetting-your-role” by both the actor and the critic (Stölzl 2006). It remains to be seen whether in our complex, multi-dimensional media reality, in which every stage can become a stage on the next stage, where the canniest actor knows how to switch role and stage as necessary, the traditional allocation of roles is still valid or whether it will become unpredictable. Will the spectator become the leading heroic actor and will the professional actor become a supporting actor in a performance that he is no longer able to influence? Let us pursue this question in another field, namely that of the football stadium. Every attempt by a striker to gain a penalty kick by taking a so-called dive in the box is accompanied by calls of playacting. Such acting in the sense of simulating a foul is a part of many competitive sports. Fouled or supposedly fouled players exaggerate the offense by rolling around on the ground, their faces contorted in make-believe pain. “Fabian Ernst was angry that he was not able to persuade the referee to give the HSV player Atouba a red card although he had performed five pirouettes on the ground. Simulation is a part of the German Bundesliga.” In the English Premiere League however it is so scorned that a campaign (“Say No to Diving”) was started against the “addiction to diving in the League.” The British conviction about the morality of fair play can be heard in the charge that “playacting is unmanly, unfair and deceitful.” A change in the rules for the World Cup was even called so that players would be given “a red card for particularly perfidious playacting.” (Honigstein 2006, 33) Playacting in this sense has also spread to the sidelines. The coach of a team in the German Bundesliga, Norbert Meier, head-butted a player of the opposing team and then, in a theatrical reversal of the principle of causality, immediately fell to the ground holding his face. He was caught out by television cameras; just as the playacting of players taking a dive rarely goes unrecorded. Such deception is rarely hidden from the all-seeing eye of the media. Actors in the sense of the old ‘as-if’ theatre are still in demand on the football pitch. But the incident involving the football coach gives call to think that such playacting might not follow the old rules of the theatre of illusion after all. Though various types of wrongdoing, crimes and even murders abound on its stage, the actors are never punished. Fictional events, following the agreement, are and remain a theatrical illusion. The theatrical criterion is that the theatre of representation and illusion is not beholden to social conventions. On the football pitch and on its sidelines this rule only holds to a certain extent. Some ‘dives’ have ended in month-long injuries. Meier’s performance as a victim accelerated his being fired as coach. And a penalty kick brought about by such play-

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acting has won games, or caused the relegation of a team and its financial bankruptcy. Playacting can then have serious consequences. Theatre Should Be Like Football (Roberg 1981) was the title of a book about independent theatre groups in Germany at the beginning of the 1980 s. The title and its claim have not been forgotten. What was called for was a theatre that thrived on the “atmosphere of a playing field,” “the ingredients of the fans and the players’ form on game day,” a popular theatre that joined together “an intimacy with the audience and spontaneity,” that fulfilled a “growing need for live events.” (1981, 173 f.) Long before this development was given this label, the independent theatre scene dreamt of a performative theatre, a visceral theatre that would finish off the old theatre of ‘as if’, of theatrical illusions, of simulation and pretence. A different kind of ‘football theatre’ than the one just described would come quite a bit closer to the desires of these theatre utopians: the performative theatre in the oval of the stadium. There are few other places that are in so many different ways, both live and medial, about the physical “production of presence” (Gumbrecht 2002, 147). Once again it is the spectator that has taken the initiative and he has done so in increasingly creative ways. Whereas the player on the pitch still behaves in many ways as the solo actor of a performance, that is as an actor in the traditional sense, the spectator is the performer of himself and his fan club. Physically, vocally, and rhythmically, he becomes the leading and collective hero of the stadium event. Fan scarf, team jersey and face painting are his outward signs. In chants and songs, in choreographed movements, in calls and responses, from the stadium announcer and chorus, echoing from one section of the stadium to the next, in the fan choreographies of bodily movement, of flags and banners, with la-óla waves and tirades of abuse, football becomes – on the basis of classic theatrical interaction – a comprehensive, self-generated bodily event. The spectator is not just part of the game or merely a ‘recipient’. At the theatrical level the spectator is the one who is making the game. Dread and suffering – the old categories of effect in the ancient tragedies – receive in the stadium a new and thoroughly profane meaning and form. Not only are they given back their original bodily experience and physical observation but they also become a theatrical activity. They are inter-body resonance and gestural incorporation in the sense that the French philosopher Roland Barthes thought applied to the ancient tragedies. “The cheering, the dissatisfaction, the expectation, the surprise, all of these fundamental modes of being of the human body find expression here” (2001, 42). What can we learn from a football game? There are many different forms of performance and styles of acting, which – to put it simply – are able to produce the illusion of theatre or physical presence. The question who is actually playing

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theatre where and why does not – even in the football stadium – by any means have a unique answer; there are many answers. Some play theatre it in a traditional form of deception in order to gain an advantage; others, wrongly called spectators, are the actors of a physical performance undertaken for their own pleasure. It is as well an open question what is still a game and what has become something more serious. Where and when is the boundary of ‘only-a-game’ transgressed? When a coach is fired, a player injured or when hooligans go on the rampage? The question of transgressing boundaries remains – just as in the case of the theatre scandal – an open one. Our third example is in the field of politics. The politician, similar to the football player, is often accused of stage acting. Politics, the accusations has it, is now more than ever theatre or politics is no more, in the sense of deception and show, than theatre. Again we see the moralistic claim of the old, traditional paradigm of theatre that there is a clearly drawn line between appearance and reality, between the fictional reality of arts and play and the ‘real’ reality of life. “Yes, politics is theatre” called out the minister president of the Saarland Peter Müller boldly – and disturbingly – as he revealed that the ‘spontaneous’ protest in the German Bundesrat in March 2002 had actually been rehearsed. Müller went on to ingeniously declare that this deception had of course a “sincere background”. We can be grateful to him that he was so open about the nature of politics and even openly defended it (much to the displeasure of his fellow politicians and party by the way). Müller’s argument most deserving of consideration (and being taken seriously) is that in a communication society the most valuable political commodity is attention – and this can be best gained by theatrical performances. Moreover, it is the task of politicians to establish contact with their audience, the voters. Political theatre of this kind is, according to Müller, by no means manipulative. The manipulation he sees in the voting behaviour of the political opponent. On a theoretical level what Müller was claiming corresponds to a modern and contemporary concept of performance and theatre. For Andreas Kotte (1997, 16 f.) interaction and ‘accentuation’ are essential conditions for a performative event to be theatre or to be perceived as theatre. Kotte is of course also revealing that accentuating and showing, that is attracting and directing attention, is always accompanied by the concealing or hiding of reality. This is something that Müller did not have in mind when he was expressing his understanding of theatre, or if so then he was hiding it from his public. Müller attempted to justify his understanding of theatre with a traditional criterion for performance, with the believability that is supposed to be behind theatrical actions. The theatre of politics is always also a question of the authenticity of political talk and action. It seems that Müller was not thinking of the

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usual definition of authenticity – which the media has worn out with its celebrity shows and reality soaps – when he said that “we agreed we would be outraged”. There was, it goes without saying, a “sincere background”. This is a controversy about the nature of performance that goes back to the 18th century. The actor must appear sincere, believable and authentic on the basis of careful preparations that have been made before the performance and are then called on during the performance. The task of a performer is thus paradoxical. By repetition and reproduction he creates an illusion of life in a way that makes this seem unique, spontaneously occurring, pure life so to speak, without any preparation or mediation. This is, since Müller’s revealing disclosure at the latest, no longer only the task of the traditional actor but also the art of the political actor. It goes without saying that both arts serve different goals. The rehearsed outrage of Müller’s party was political theatre that did not attempt to represent life per se, did not want to fill characters, fictive conflicts or stories with life. It had a political goal, to stigmatise the questionable voting behaviour of Berlin’s governing party and so to (potentially) defeat the Immigration Act before the parliament. It was not then the case that this was ‘action without consequences’ or with ‘reduced consequences’, criteria Kotte proposes for his aesthetic theatre. The exact opposite was the goal of the performance. This theatrical action was without any doubt meant to be political action, as effective action with real consequences. To this extent we are not dealing with a marginal phenomenon like the theatre scandal or diving on the football pitch, where the boundaries between game and reality had not been clearly drawn or had been deliberately blurred. 4. Let us see how far we have come. In all three examples it is clear that theatrical performance is not limited to the stage. We have already admitted this is not a new insight. What is new is the theatrical dimension and its perception. In the debate about theatricality theorists of theatre and culture, sociologists and philosophers have confirmed the validity of extending the theatre metaphor in the era of electronic mass media. Staging is the distinctive format of this media society. It is accompanied by aestheticization processes, that make the boundaries between art and society, game and social reality more and more indistinct, more and more blurred. The long-asserted claim that the realm of art, the space for theatre, is clearly demarcated from that of life and of the spectator’s community can hardly be credited anymore. Theatre is now a game without borders, a game that can take place almost anywhere (this is also true for, is especially true for art theatre), a game almost completely without rigid rules. One of the most exciting and stimulating developments today in the art of theatre is that the conventional rules governing play and perception are being

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questioned. Yes, and this is happening on any given evening in the theatre. The rules between performer and spectator are being renegotiated in each play. As we saw with the Frankfurt theatre scandal, roles and stages can be exchanged. The question as to who is the winner and who is the loser in theatrical play is often open – and not only on the football pitch. I hope it has become clear that theatrical performance today is no longer limited to one paradigm. The range of theatrical offerings, which varies depending on venue and intention, from the old ‘as-if’ actor to the performer of his own physicality, from the performer that shows and accentuates in order to illustrate something to the provocateur who makes use of emotional machinery to trigger appropriate effects. And the third and final point is that the position of the spectator has been revalued and newly defined. He is increasingly becoming the actor in the performative process, is mobile in the interactive performative space, has options that can influence the process of the event. Gone are the orderly bourgeois times in which the spectator, silent in his seat at the theatre, could arrange himself in the darkened auditorium as a voyeur. His new playing field is no longer the room of his inwardness, that is of his identification and emotion, imagination and fantasy. The spectator today is challenged as a new kind of player: in many completely different places of art and society.

References Alewyn, Richard / Sälzer, Karl, 1959: Das große Welttheater. Die Epoche der höfischen Feste, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Barthes, Roland, 2001: Ich habe das Theater immer sehr geliebt, und dennoch gehe ich fast nie mehr hin. Schriften zum Theater, Berlin: Alexander Verlag. Curtius, Ernst Robert, 2013: European literature and the latin middle ages, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goffman, Erving, 1990: The presentation of self in everyday life, Harmondsworth: Penguin books. Greenblatt, Stephen, 2005: Will in the world. How Shakespeare became Shakespeare, London: Pimlico. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 2002: “Ästhetik und Sport – am Beispiel von Fußball und American Football”. In: Matias Martinez (ed.), Warum Fußball? Kulturwissenschaftliche Beschreibungen eines Sports, Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag. Honigstein, Raphael, 2006: “Tauchen verboten”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 04. 04. 2006: 33. Kotte, Andreas, 1997: “Andere Situationen fangen an, Theater genannt zu werden”. In: MIMOS. Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Theaterkultur 3: 14 – 19. Roberg, Dietmar, 1981: Theater muß wie Fußball sein. Freie Theatergruppen – eine Reise über Land, Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag.

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Sehrt, Ernst Theodor, 1961: Wandlungen der Shakespeareschen Komödie, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Sennett, Richard, 2002: The fall of public man, London: Penguin books. Stadelmeier, Gerhard, 2006: “Ein Angriff: Bericht von einer Attacke auf mich im Schauspiel Frankfurt”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18. 02. 2006: 35. Warstat, Matthias, 2005: “Theatralität”. In: Erika Fischer-Lichte (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, Hamburg: Metzler.

Index Adorno, Theodor W. 149 agency 23, 64, 87 f., 102 f., 105 – 107, 115, 122 Albertzart, Maike 140 Alvarez, Maria 62 Anderson, Benedict 141 Anderson, Elizabeth 91 Anscombe, G.E.M. 20, 61, 77 – 79, 83 anthropology, anthropological 99, 105 f., 149, 161 Aristotle 14, 38, 52, 62, 66, 70, 84, 142, 144, 161 aspect theory of reasons, see feature theory of reasons 5 Assange, Julian 121 Attenborough, David 142 Augustinus, Aurelius 143 autonomy 101 – 106, 111, 113 f., 122, 142 Baier, Kurt 33 Barthes, Roland 174 Beckermann, Ansgar 27, 63 Behrisch, Sven 121 belief and desire 5 – 12, 21 – 23, 27, 29, 31 – 33, 41 – 43, 61 f., 72 – 75, 96, 104, 144 Ben-Yami, Hanoch 22 Bentham, Jeremy 70 Biko, Steven 165 Bittner, Rüdiger 18, 29 – 37, 39 – 43, 45 f., 48 – 52, 54 – 59, 62 f., 66, 69, 73, 87 f., 90, 92 f., 96, 99 – 101, 103 – 109, 112 f., 115 f., 121 f., 125, 127 – 139, 158 Blumenberg, Hans 143 Branigan, Edward 162 Broad, C.D. 23 Broome, John 20 Burkhart, Maximilian 164 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 169 – 171 Carnap, Rudolf 31 Carter, Ian 114 f. cause, causation 8, 10, 12, 15, 17, 19, 27, 31, 36, 40 – 43, 52, 71 f., 74, 88, 102 f., 112, 146

consider, consideration 46 f., 53 f., 66, 74 Curtius, Ernst Robert 169, 171 Dancy, Jonathan 27 – 29, 31 – 34, 36 f., 39, 42, 62, 75 Darwall, Stephen 109, 111 Darwin, Charles 105 Davidson, Donald 6 – 8, 10, 16 f., 19, 21, 27, 62, 66, 68 – 71, 74 decision, decision-making process 37 f., 40 – 43, 46 f., 63 – 67, 74 Deliberation 46 deliberation 27, 33 f., 37, 46 f., 64, 80 f. Descartes, René 23, 164 desire, see belief and desire 5 dignity 99, 101, 105 – 108, 111, 113, 115, 122, 124 Dillon, Robin 109 – 111 disrespect, see respect 125 Dorschel, Andreas 24 Elizabeth I 171 explanation – by reasons 27, 31, 36, 41 – 43 – causal, see cause, causation 41 – historical 16, 30, 45, 49 – 53, 71 – teleological 13 – 16, 71 f., 143 extra-mental facts 27 – 29, 31, 37 – 42, 62 feature theory of reasons 5, 16, 18, 66 Fehige, Christoph 21, 24, 125 Feuerbach, Ludwig 149 – 152 Fodor, Jerry A. 22 Frankfurt, Harry 104, 172, 177 Frege, Gottlob 22 Freud, Sigmund 144 Gafke, Linda 128 Geuss, Raymond 152 Gibb, Sophie C. 73 Glasgow, Josuah 123 Goffman, Erving 169 Goldman, Alvin I. 62 Gosepath, Stefan 111

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Greenblatt, Stephan 170 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 174 Handke, Peter 163 Haneke, Michael 161 Hare, Richard M. 67 Haslanger, Sally 123 Hegel, Georg Willhelm Friedrich 110, 143 f., 146 – 149, 151, 155 Heidegger, Martin 151 Helm, Bennett W. 111, 115 Hempel, Carl Gustav 66 Herrmann, Martina 123 Hill, Thomas 20 history, see explanation, historical 177 Hobbes, Thomas 23, 132 Hobsbawm, Eric J. 141 Hölderlin, Friedrich 147 Honigstein, Raphael 173 Honneth, Axel 111 Hooper, Tom 165 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 89 Hornsby, Jennifer 62 human rights 118, 120 Hume, David 8 – 10, 12, 19, 66 Ingthorsson, Rögnvaldur D. Ionesco, Eugène 172 Iorio, Marco 62

73

Job 143, 151 Joerden, Jan 111 Johnson, Samuel 87 judgement – determinant 80 – 82 – interpretive 81 – moral 80, 84, 129, 136 – 138 – reflective 80 – 82 – subsumptive 80 f. Kant, Immanuel 14, 20, 77, 80 – 85, 100 – 107, 110 – 113, 121, 134 f., 139, 146 f., 149, 151 Kleisthenes 148 Kolodny, Niko 91, 94 Korsgaard, Christine 14 Kotte, Andreas 170, 175 f.

Krebs, Angelika 116 Kubrick, Stanley 166 Kulenkampff, Jens 108 Künne, Wolfgang 22 Lamarque, Peter 163 Landauer, Gustav 155 – 157 Lawinky, Thomas 172 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 48 Leist, Anton 30, 33 Lenman, James 28 f., 33 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 151, 155 Lowe, E. Jonathan 73 MacIntyre, Alasdair 78 Malick, Terrence 163 Margalit, Avishai 111 Marx, Karl 144, 147 f., 152 – 154 McDowell, John 80 f. McGinn, Colin 164 Meier, Norbert 173 Mellmann, Katja 165 Meyer, Kirsten 135 Mill, John Stuart 77 Millgram, Elijah 9 Mitscherlich, Alexander 88 Mitscherlich, Margarete 88 Moltmann, Friederike 22 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de 171 More, Thomas 154 Müller, Olaf 135, 137, 140 Müller, Peter 175 f. Nagel, Thomas 9 Neill, Alex 165 Nietzsche, Friedrich 128, 152 – 154 Nisbet, H. Barry 83 Nolan, Christopher 161 Nolde, Emil 110, 121 Novalis 147 of Salisbury, John 169 Olson, Stein Haugom 163 pacifism 127, 130, 133, 135 – 140 Pascal, Blaise 99 f., 105 peace 106 f., 127, 131 f., 139

Index

Pettit, Philip 91 Peymann, Claus 172 Picasso, Pablo 110 Pippin, Robert 30 Plato 10 – 13, 20, 103, 148, 164, 169 practical syllogism 61 principle of double effect 134 f., 139 Privitera, Johanna 140 psychologism, psychologistic 27 – 29, 61 f. racism 122 – 125 Ranger, Terence 141 reasons – explanatory 62 f., 70 – justificatory 28, 33, 62 f., 70 f. – motivating 6, 28 f., 32, 34, 36 f., 62 f. – normative 28 – 30, 33, 62 f., 70, 90, 103, 130 – primary 6 f., 74 f. regret 87 f., 91, 95 Reiss, Hans 83 respect 105, 107, 109 – 125, 137 f. response theory of reasons 29 – 32, 36 – 38, 42 f., 45 – 52, 56 – 59, 73, 75, 99 Ricœur, Paul 162 Rimini Protokoll group 170 Rittsteiger, Axel 30, 39 Roberg, Dietmar 174 Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni 15 Ross, William David 14 Roth, Petra 172 Russell, Bertrand 22 Ryle, Gilbert 5 – 7, 19, 61 Salmon, Wesley C. 72 Scanlon, Thomas M. 11 – 13, 96 Schaber, Peter 111, 116 Schavan, Annette 119 Scheffler, Samuel 91, 94 Schiller, Friedrich 147, 166 Schlingensief, Christoph 170 Schmidt, Thomas 140 Schnitker, Jens 24 Schueler, George Frederick 9, 30 Schulte, Peter 20 Schwesig, Manuela 110 Searle, John R. 162

181

Sehon, Scott Robert 71 Sehrt, Ernst 170 Sennett, Richard 171 sexism 122, 125 Shakespeare, William 169 – 171 Smith, Adam 166 Smith, Michael 6 f., 11, 16 f., 21, 62, 91 Smith, Murray 162 Sobel, David 61 Spinoza, Baruch de 23, 91 Spitzley, Thomas 41 St. Paul 153 Stadelmeier, Gerhard 172 f. Stalnaker, Robert C. 21 Steinberg, John 106 Sterba, James 134 f. Stoecker, Ralf 108, 111 Stölzl, Christoph 173 Stoutland, Frederick 62 f., 69 Strawson, Peter F. 115, 162 Tarantino, Quentin 161 terrorism 132 Teufel, Thomas 80 Thucydides 147 Tugendhat, Ernst 109, 111 Voland, Eckart 165 von der Leyen, Ursula 110 von Trier, Lars 165 von Wright, Georg Henrik 62 Wagner, Richard 157 Wall, Steven 61 Wallace, R. Jay 87, 91 Walton, Kendall L. 165 Walzer, Michael 132 war, warfare 79, 106, 120, 127, 129 – 140, 142, 163 Warstat, Matthias 170 Wartenberg, Thomas E. 163 f. Wenders, Wim 163 Wessels, Ulla 125 White, Hayden 162 Wiggins, David 81 Wikileaks 121 Williams, Bernard 63

182

Index

Wilson, George M. 13 f. Wilson, Nigel Guy 151, 155 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 78, 80 f. Wolf, Susan 95 Wolff, Christian 48

Zemecki, Leslie 165 zu Guttenberg, Karl-Theodor

118 f.