The Normativity of What We Care About : A Love-Based Theory of Practical Reasons [1 ed.] 9789461660770, 9789058679055

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THE NORMATIVITY OF WHAT WE CARE ABOUT

The Normativity of What We Care About A Love-based Theory of Practical Reasons

KATRIEN SCHAUBROECK

© 2013 by Leuven University Press / Presses Universitaires de Louvain / Universitaire Pers Leuven. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (België) All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers. ISBN 978 90 5867 905 5 D / 2013/ 1869 / 7 NUR: 737 Cover design: Geert de Koning Typesetting: Friedemann BVBA

Contents

Preface

9

Introduction

11

Chapter 1

Internalism and externalism: some terminology 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Falk and Frankena 1.3 The internalist position modified 1.4 The externalist position elaborated 1.5 Judgment internalism/externalism versus existence internalism/ externalism 1.6 Other kinds of internalism and externalism 1.7 Varieties of existence internalism and externalism 1.8 Conclusion

15 15 15 18 20 23 25 27 32

Chapter 2

Bernard Williams on practical reasons 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The internal reason theory 2.3 Refining the sub-Humean model 2.4 Objections to external reasons 2.4.1 The no-explanatory-force objection 2.4.2 The no-motivational-fuel objection 2.4.3 The obscurity objection 2.5 The Tess case: an objection to Williams’ internal reason theory 2.6 Conclusion

33 33 33 35 44 45 48 56 60 64

The Normativity of What We Care About

Chapter 3

Michael Smith on practical reasons 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The moral problem 3.3 Cognitivism, internalism and Humean motivation 3.3.1 The objectivity of moral obligations 3.3.2 The practicality of moral judgements 3.3.3 The Humean theory of motivation 3.4 The conceptual analysis of normative reasons 3.4.1 Platitudes about normative reasons 3.4.2 The advice model (as opposed to the example model) 3.4.3 The ‘if fully rational’ condition: Smith versus Williams 3.4.4 The analysis captures the platitudes 3.5 Moral rationalism: the solution to the moral problem 3.6 Smith’s analysis of normative reasons evaluated 3.6.1 The analysis trivializes convergence 3.6.2 Why do reasons have to be objective? 3.6.3 The analysis does not guarantee practicality 3.6.4 The analysis rests on a false platitude 3.6.5 Normative reasons and what I would desire if I were fully rational 3.6.6 The advice model is inconsistent with the convergence thesis 3.7 Conclusion

67 67 67 71 72 73 75 77 77 79 82 86 90 92 93 96 97 100 101 103 105

Chapter 4

Derek Parfit on practical reasons 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Parfit’s externalism 4.2.1 The obscurity objection rejected 4.2.2 The no-explanatory-force objection rejected 4.2.3 The no-motivational-fuel objection rejected 4.3 Parfit’s value-based reason theory 4.3.1 Internalism and the desire-based reason theory 4.3.2 Parfit’s argument against reductive desire-based reason views 4.3.3 Parfit’s argument against non-reductive desire-based reason views 4.3.4 Arguments in favour of the value-based reason theory

6

107 107 107 108 110 110 112 112 115 118 123

Contents

4.4 Parfit’s normative non-naturalism 4.4.1 Korsgaard’s criticism of realism 4.4.2 Korsgaard’s constructivism 4.4.3 Parfit’s criticism of constructivism 4.4.4 The non-naturalist account of normativity evaluated 4.5 Conclusion

129 131 133 135 139 142

Chapter 5

Harry Frankfurt on practical reasons 5.1 Introduction 5.2. Frankfurt’s theory of care and love 5.2.1 The hierarchical model 5.2.2 Care 5.2.3 Love 5.3 The love-based reason theory 5.4 The love-based reason theory evaluated 5.4.1 Love and desire: both motivating, both natural 5.4.2 The groundlessness objection 5.4.3 The authority of love 5.4.4 The objection of normative triviality 5.4.5 The Tess case 5.4.6 The love-based reason theory and morality 5.5 Conclusion

143 143 143 143 147 156 159 167 167 169 178 183 185 187 192

Concluding remarks

195

Bibliography

199

7

Preface

This monograph has evolved out of my doctoral research at the University of Leuven. I defended my dissertation in 2008, and I have long been reluctant to publish any of it because I see it as only a starting point, not an end result. Wading through the vast literature on practical reasons felt like a journey through unknown territory. The dissertation reads almost as a diary, reporting the progress I made, the insights I gradually gained, finding my way up to a resting point from where I would have an overview. I chose to keep the explorative character. I hope that in particular students and others who come to the topic for the first time will benefit from this approach. Thanks are owed to many colleagues and friends, and I apologize to anyone I forget to mention by name. I am indebted to Stefaan Cuypers, Arnold Burms, Willem Lemmens, Bart Pattyn, Beate Rössler, Thomas Schmidt, and an anonymous referee of Leuven University Press who have read the whole manuscript and offered many valuable comments. Many philosophers discussed with me ideas that found their way into this book, and I want particularly to mention Patricia Greenspan, Ulrike Heuer, Annemarie Kalis, Barbara Herman, Ish Haji, Niko Kolodny, Sabine Roeser, Maureen Sie, Sander Voerman, Hans Maes, Griet Galle, Pieter Adriaens, Jerome Wakefield, Carla Bagnoli, Michael Smith, R. Jay Wallace, Thomas Nys, Esther Kroeker, Simon Kirchin, George Pavlakos, Petra van Brabandt, Joel Anderson, Anne Burkard, Benjamin Kiesewetter, Catherine Herfeld, Sebastian Rödl, Marcus Düwell, Andreas Müller and Daniel Friedrich. I am very grateful to them for offering enlightenment as well as encouragement. For support along the road thanks are due to my dear friends Myriam Caes, Tessy Troubleyn, Jenne Vereertbrugghen, Brigiet Croes, Karen Schaubroeck and Barbara de Coninck. My parents gave me the freedom to find out what I really care about, and I realize this is the most valuable gift parents can give. The editors of Leuven University Press have shown invaluable patience, and I sincerely thank them for that. The most encouraging, supporting and patient of all has been Hans. He made sure I never had to look far to find examples of actions done for reasons of love.

9

Introduction

Reasons and obligations pervade our lives. That is one crucial aspect in which humans differ from animals. Not just with regard to our beliefs, but also with regard to our actions, we are guided by norms that determine whether we have a reason to believe or to act as we are inclined to do. This book is about practical reasons (reasons to act), as opposed to theoretical reasons (reasons to believe). It starts from the observation that considerations such as ‘intentionally stepping on his toe is bad’ or ‘the food in that restaurant is excellent’ or ‘only this medicine will cure the disease I suffer from’ are normative, in the sense that they lay a claim on us, that they give us a reason or sometimes even an obligation to do something. The most basic question raised by this observation is: where does the normative authority come from? Or, in a popular phrase, what is the source of normativity?1 In the theoretical domain, reasons derive from the norm that is imposed by truth. What gives us a reason to believe P is ultimately the fact that P is true. In the practical domain, however, it is far less clear what should be considered the guiding norm. One might think that ‘goodness’ fulfils this role, in the sense that what gives us a reason to Φ, is the fact that Φ-ing is good. But if one understands ‘goodness’ in a moral sense, one falsely reduces practical normativity to ethics: the supposition that all acting for a reason is acting on a moral basis is obviously false. We often encounter reasons in practical life that are not derived from what we are morally obliged to do. To avoid this false restriction of practical normativity to ethics, one might suggest a broader understanding of ‘goodness’ than ‘moral goodness’. One might, for instance, define goodness in terms of satisfaction, in the sense that Φ-ing is good when it satisfies one of the agent’s desires. In fact, the idea that reasons for action must be defined in relation to an agent’s desires appeals to so many philosophers that it was, at one point, the default position. I will start an analysis of the debate on practical reasons with an elaboration of the idea that an agent’s practical reasons are a function of his desires, and move on from there. Bernard Williams offered the most famous defence of this idea in the agenda-setting article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ (1979). Because Williams defines reasons as essentially related or ‘internal’ to an agent’s desires, he calls his theory ‘the internal reason theory’. Chapter 2 provides a critical analysis of the internal reason theory and the arguments that Williams offers in favour of it. A great number of philosophers reject the internal reason theory for different kinds of reasons, the most important one being that Williams purportedly conflates 1

 e source locution has become popular since the publication of Christine Korsgaard’s book The Th Sources of Normativity. Not everyone finds this metaphor helpful. I will use it nevertheless, and what I mean by it is this: in spelling out the source of normativity we give an explanation of why a consideration counts as normative, whereby normative means ‘reason-giving’. 11

The Normativity of What We Care About

normativity with motivation. Critics press the point that even if desires are indispensable to an explanation of what factually motivates a person, this does not make them essential to a theory about reasons and what should motivate a person. The relation between normativity and motivation thus appears as the central problem in the debate on practical reasons. Prima facie, reasons are related to the things that motivate people. For example, when deliberating whether or not to take some medicine against a headache, an agent might think of its pain-relieving effects as a reason in favour, and of its disgusting taste as a reason against taking it. The fact that the medicine relieves pain plays a dual role: it is cited as a reason, but clearly also as something that can motivate. Reasons are those things mention of which often makes an agent inclined to perform a certain act. The word ‘often’ is an important addition of course, the scope and relevance of which will become clear. But as a starting point it seems fairly commonsensical to connect reasons to motives. Philosophers theorizing about this connection are divided into two camps: according to reason internalists like Williams, reasons always bear some relation to motivation. Exernalists deny that this is or should be the case. As I see it, the dividing question in the current debate is not so much whether there really is a connection between normativity and motivation – of course there is, since people are at least sometimes motivated to do what they have a reason to do – but rather how this connection should be conceived. If it is a conceptual connection, as Williams argues against the background of the Humean tradition, having a reason necessarily implies motivation, which seems too strong a connection to many. If the connection is considered to be empirical, the hardest task is to explain what makes it possible that reasons sometimes do influence motivation, if reasons are not conceptually related to desires. This book aims to cover only the major positions and arguments that have been developed during the last three decades. Yet, as we will see, many positions and arguments can be traced back to the practical philosophy of Hume, Kant and even Plato. A detailed analysis of these classic philosophers’ influential approaches to normativity, reasons and action is beyond the scope and ambition of this book, though it is important to note that they still serve as paradigms that structure the debate in contemporary analytical philosophy. In a way that I will have to explain and nuance later, one could say that Williams follows a Humean tradition while Michael Smith and Derek Parfit represent the other two classic lines of thinking, Michael Smith’s reason theory, which is analysed in chapter 3, attempts to connect desires and reasons through the notion of a fully rational agent. Rationality is invoked as the mediating term between what a person is motivated to do and what he has reason to do. Rationality is able to fulfil this mediating role in Smith’s theory because he conceives normative reasons as based on the desires of a fully rational agent. Smith’s position offers a clear illustration of how the debate on practical reasons is structured by the concern to find the right balance between normativity and motivation. Like Williams, Smith attempts to preserve a conceptual connection between normativity and motivation. But unlike Williams, he detaches reasons from 12

Introduction

the agent’s actual contingent desires and moves in the direction of a Kant-like theory about reasons in terms of rational principles. Derek Parfit goes a step further than Smith and disavows any conceptual connection between reasons and desires. He exemplifies the external reason theory which is directly opposed to Williams’ internal reason theory. Parfit defines reasons in a kind of Platonic spirit, namely in terms of external mind-independent facts about values. His defence of reason externalism and the problems it gives rise to is the subject of chapter 4. Both Smith’s and Parfit’s alternatives to the internal reason theory suffer from their own problems, as I will argue in chapters 3 and 4. They fail to offer a more plausible view of normativity than Williams’. Yet, their criticism of Williams does reveal a weak point in the internal reason theory. Even if Williams succeeds in distinguishing a desire’s motivational power from its normative authority (thus escaping the accusation that he conflates normativity with motivation), it remains doubtful whether normative authority can be rightly ascribed to something as arbitrary and transient as a desire. Chapter 5 examines this objection and offers yet another account of normative reasons, based on Harry Frankfurt’s notions of love and care. In addition to a critical evaluation of three established positions, this book thus aspires to introduce a new and promising perspective on practical reasons. In contradistinction to the things that we desire, the things that we love and care about possess an immediately acknowledged importance that authorizes them to guide and justify our actions. This means that the notions of care and love not only carry motivational force, but are also invested with normative authority. It seems that Frankfurt (who has written extensively on love and care) is therefore on firmer ground than Williams in defining practical reasons. In chapter 5 I will develop Frankfurt’s thoughts on the notions of care and love, and sketch the outlines of an alternative reason theory that connects normativity to motivation in an original and attractive way. Before I analyse the different positions and arguments in the debate, some terminological problems should be straightened out. It is common to denote positions in the debate on practical reasons as either internal or external. Unfortunately, these terms are ambiguous and denote many different claims about practical reasons. The ambiguity of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ actually serves as an apt illustration of the complexity of the contemporary debate on practical reasons. In chapter 1 I attempt to disentangle this complexity and I will stipulate the meaning of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ as they will be used in this book.

13

Chapter 1

Internalism and externalism: some terminology 1.1 Introduction It is hard to believe that there ever was a time when a philosopher had to stimulate his fellow philosophers to use and to study more often the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ (see Frankena 1958, 50). In recent years it has become very common for any philosopher working in the field of (moral) agency and reasons to define himself as either an internalist or externalist. Unfortunately, however, the terms are vague and ambiguous. Since calling someone ‘an internalist’ often confuses more than it illuminates, the labels threaten to lose their significance. As a first step in clarifying the terminology, it should be emphasized that the words ‘internal’ and ‘external’ as such refer to a relationship between (at least) two things, one of which is said to be internally/ externally related to the other. Confusion arises when different philosophers apply the terms ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to different kinds of relations.1 In an attempt to disentangle the debate on internalism and externalism, I will start at the beginning, that is, by looking at the first appearance of the words internalism and externalism as terms to denote two opposite points of view in the domain of practical philosophy. They were launched in a meta-ethical discussion but, as we will see, they were soon considered to be useful in the debate on agency and reasons outside the moral sphere as well.

1.2 Falk and Frankena The terms ‘internal’ and ‘external’ were introduced into contemporary discussions about reasons and morality by W.D. Falk in his well-known article ‘Ought and Motivation’, published in 1948. In that article Falk criticizes H. A. Prichard for assuming that morality needs a sanction in order to motivate. Prichard (1928) denies that merely on account of the fact that we ought morally to do something we would have sufficient motivation for doing it, because, according to Falk, he looks outside the agent for the source of moral demands. Falk writes that philosophers like Prichard presuppose “that when someone ‘ought’ or ‘has a duty’ he is subject to some manner of demand, made on him without regard to his desires; and they imply that this demand issues essentially from outside the agent: that, whether made by a deity or society, or the ‘situation’ (if this means anything), it has an objective existence of its 1

 hat I will say about internalism and externalism is confined to their use in practical philosoW phy, though I am aware that debates using similar vocabulary go on in epistemology and other areas of philosophy. 15

The Normativity of What We Care About

own depending in no way on anything peculiar to the agent’s psychological constitution. Now, the view that morality needs some sanction is a traditional associate of all views of this kind and indeed their natural corollary.” (Falk 1948, 501-502) Falk opposes Prichard’s view, which he ascribes to W.D. Ross (1939) as well. He distinguishes an external meaning of words like ‘ought’ and ‘duty’ from a much-to-be-preferred internal meaning. If ‘I ought’ is used in an external sense it means ‘I am demanded from outside myself to do some act’, and then there will be no necessary connection between having the duty and being motivated to do the act. As a consequence, “[Prichard] holds that the man who while granting a duty doubts whether he also has a motive has a real axe to grind.” (Falk 1948, 497) But Falk is convinced that ordinary usage expects something more of a moral ought-belief: after acknowledging a duty the request for a motive is thought to be redundant and even absurd. In the internalist sense, being motivated would be “the logical implication of [somebody’s] saying that he had a duty.”(Falk 1948, 504) So, according to Falk, the internal connection between duty and motivation is a logical or necessary one. Falk believes that he is capturing a basic assumption of our thinking about morality, namely that moral obligations should stimulate one to act in a certain way, that knowing one’s duty should motivate, or, in one word, that morality is ‘practical’. Internalism, or the view that moral judgements necessarily motivate, is Falk’s way of expressing this intuition in a theory. The internalist requirement figures in many arguments in meta-ethics, and it is most notoriously used in the debate between non-cognitivists and cognitivists about moral thought and language. Cognitivism maintains that moral judgements are truth-evaluable. A cognitivist could be either a realist (by adding the claim that some moral judgements really are true) or an error theorist (who maintains that all moral judgements are false). Thinkers as diverse as John Mackie, John McDowell, David Brink, Peter Railton, Nicholas Sturgeon, Michael Smith, Derek Parfit, Jonathan Dancy and Russ ShaferLandau are cognitivists.2 Non-cognitivism maintains that moral judgements express some sort of conative attitude and that they are therefore not truth-evaluable. This view encompasses Alfred Ayer’s (and Charles Stevenson’s) emotivism, Richard Hare’s prescriptivism, Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism as well as Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivism.3 Non-cognitivists are convinced that the internalist requirement favours their view of moral judgements over cognitivism. Since they take moral judgements to be conative states, they believe they can easily account for morality’s motivational force.4 2

3 4

S ee Mackie 1977, McDowell 1985, Railton 1986, Brink 1989, Sturgeon 1988 and 2006, Smith 1994 and 2000, Dancy 1993, Shafer-Landau 2003. See Ayer 1936 and Stevenson 1937, Hare 1952, Blackburn 1993, Gibbard 1990. In the words of Stevenson (1937), goodness possesses a ‘magnetism’, by which he means “[a] person who recognizes Φ to be ‘good’ must ipso facto acquire a stronger tendency to act in its favour than he otherwise would have had.”(1937, 16) According to Stevenson, this ‘magnetism requirement’ rules out any attempt to define ethical terms without reference to the interests of the speaker. In The Language of Morals R.M Hare uses the internalist requirement in a similar way to argue for his prescriptivism. He writes, “Value-judgments, if they are action-guiding, must be held to entail imperatives.” (1952, 163) and “[t]o guide choices or actions, a moral judgment has to be such that if a person assents to it, he must assent to some imperative sentence derivable from it.” (1952, 171) 16

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

When a moral judgement is thought to express an emotion or attitude it can also function as the cause of the agent’s effectively doing what he judges to be morally recommended or obligatory. Because cognitivists think of moral judgements as beliefs, they have a harder time showing that they can meet the internalist requirement, for, in contrast to desires, beliefs are inert, or at least have a much weaker link to actionreadiness. Beliefs differ from desires in their ‘direction of fit’, as Michael Smith puts it, following Elisabeth Anscombe (Smith 1994, 111). Beliefs obey the world: this means that when the content of the belief does not match the way things really are, the belief should be adapted to the world. But when there is a discrepancy between what I desire and the way things are, it is not necessary to adapt my desires, but more appropriate to try to change the world. This is summarized by Smith in the thesis that beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit, whereas desires have a world-to-mind direction of fit. It is not a feature of beliefs (for example about how warm it is, or what the capital of France is) that they move an agent to action. If a moral judgement is conceived as a belief the motivational force that we expect of moral judgements has to come from something besides the belief. In defences of their theory cognitivists mostly concentrate on another common assumption about moral judgements, namely that they are truth-evaluable. Some cognitivists, among whom are Brink and Railton, are happy to give up the internalist constraint. They deny that moral judgements necessarily motivate. Other cognitivists argue that beliefs are not always inert and defend the fact that moral judgements manifest ‘besires’, a unique, hybrid kind of beliefs that have both an assertoric and a motivational force.5 Smith’s reconciliation of cognitivism with internalism consists in ascribing a special content to the belief that one has a moral reason to do something, a content that does not represent external facts about how the world is, but facts about what an agent would be motivated to do under certain circumstances. Discussions in meta-ethics are thus fuelled by the question whether moral judgements carry their motivational force in them. Though Falk introduced the terms internalism and externalism with regard to obligation and motivation, it is fair to honour William Frankena as the man who really coined them. Frankena considers himself an externalist, but it takes him a 41page article to explain what that means. In ‘Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy’ (1958) he lists various criticisms of externalism, and rejects all of them on the ground that they misconceive the disagreement between internalists and externalists. By analysing and rejecting objections, Frankena works towards a description of the externalist position. Externalists, he claims, regard motivation as external to obligation, in the sense that “it is logically possible for an agent to have or see that he has an obligation even if he has no motivation, actual or dispositional, for doing the action in question.” (1958, 49) Internalism denies this possibility. Though some necessary adjustment was added later – most importantly the separate treatment of 5

 ough it is sometimes said that David Lewis invented the convenient term ‘besires’ in his Th ‘Desire as belief ’ (1988), the label was actually introduced by J.E.J. Altham in ‘The Legacy of Emotivism’ (1986) to denote the hybrid states that moral judgements are often considered to be, having both descriptive and directive aspects. 17

The Normativity of What We Care About

‘having an obligation’ and ‘seeing that one has an obligation’ in relation to motivation – Frankena’s discussion of the topic is very accurate. I will, therefore, report the main arguments and positions distinguished by Frankena, show their relevance to the current discussion and indicate how they lead towards a refined account of the internalism–externalism distinction. The use of the terms might look confused at first, but I find it interesting to show the history of these terms and to observe how insight and refinement were gradually gained.

1.3 The internalist position modified As Frankena defines internalism, it is the view that “motivation must be provided for because it is involved in the analysis of moral judgments and so is essential for an action’s being or being shown to be obligatory.” (1958, 49) Internalists can easily explain morality’s action-guiding force because it follows from their analysis that “when words are used in the ordinary way, it is absurd to ask of an act which it is admittedly right for me to do ‘why should I do it?’.” (Frankena 1958, 55) Externalists have a harder time explaining this absurdity, which is regarded by internalists as an argument in their favour. But is the question ‘I know I have a moral obligation to Φ but should I really Φ?’ really that absurd? Frankena, defending externalism, holds that it is only so if ‘should’ is used in its moral sense: the question concedes that indeed I should Φ morally speaking. But if one understands ‘should’ in a motivation-seeking sense (‘I know I have a moral obligation to Φ but why should I be motivated to Φ?’), the question surely makes sense. Frankena criticizes internalists for not noticing the ambiguity in the word ‘should’. The same criticism applies to the internalists’ use of the word ‘reason’. When internalists insist that it is undeniably true that moral obligation provides reasons for action and that therefore internalism must be true, they fail to distinguish between ‘exciting reasons’ and ‘justifying reasons’ (Frankena 1958, 51), or, as it is mostly put nowadays, between ‘motivating reasons’ and ‘normative reasons’.6 According to Frankena an externalist can accept that the fact that an action is obligatory is a reason for doing it as long as ‘reason’ is understood in its justifying sense. But he doubts whether moral obligation always provides exciting reasons. Moral obligation may fail to excite action simply because agents are not always motivated to do the right thing. The distinction between these two kinds of reasons still receives a great deal of attention in current discussion. The fact that justifying, also called normative, reasons and exciting or motivating reasons do not always coincide is, for instance, at the centre of a classic article by Michael Stocker. In ‘Desiring the Bad’ (1979) Stocker presents a series of cases in which agents fail to be attracted to things they take to be good and cases in which agents are attracted to things they believe to be bad. Stocker gives 6

 e distinction between normative and motivating reasons is crucial to Smith’s account of pracTh tical reasons, as we will see in chapter 3. 18

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

both moral and non-moral examples, but the former interest us here. Depression may lead to a person failing to be motivated by her judgement that gratitude requires of her that she pay a visit to her ill mother. An angry or jealous person may be motivated to harm someone despite his judgement that he ought not to. Stocker draws the conclusion that the connection between normative (including moral) judgements and motivation is complex, mediated by things such as interests and moods, and that therefore the connection is often broken. Stocker’s observations force the internalists to modify their position. If the internalists were right about the necessary connection between moral judgement and motivation, akratic action, that is action against one’s better judgement, cannot be allowed for. At this point one might think that leeway is provided by the fact that, strictly speaking, internalism concerns only the connection between a judgement and motivation, not between a judgement and action. According to internalists, genuinely accepting that one should Φ implies that one is inclined to Φ. This is not to say that one actually will perform the action. Motivation imported by a moral judgement may be overridden by a competing and stronger desire. That is one way to block the undermining threat coming from akratic actions. But there are other counter-examples at hand. Alfred Mele (1996), for instance, invokes the example of a person who suffers from clinical depression due to a recent tragic loss in his life and who remains apathic under the genuine belief that he is morally required to aid his ailing uncle, whom he had been nursing before the tragic accident happened. Because of his depression, he is listless, not in the least motivated by the moral judgement that he should help his uncle, though he genuinely accepts the judgement (see Mele 1996, 733). So internalists should be able to defend their view in the face of examples of listlessness and depression that prevent an agent not only from acting but from being motivated at all by his moral judgements. To incorporate these cases two very well-known internalists, Smith and Korsgaard, have argued that internalism can be formulated in such a way that it can allow for listlessness, depression, and similar emotional disturbances that intervene in the motivational process. Their reformulation of the internalist standpoint has become standard, but it is controversial as well. According to Smith, the cases of listlessness and depression show that the relation between moral judgement and motivation is defeasible. To accommodate for this possibility he interprets the internal relation as a normative one. He describes internalism as “the view that an agent who judges something good should feel a pull towards promoting it, whether or not she does in fact.” (Smith 1995b, 321; my emphasis) As long as we remember that internalism posits “a normative connection between moral judgment and motivation” instead of an actual one, Smith believes that depression or compulsion or weakness or emotional disturbance does not defeat internalism. But how should we interpret this normative connection? What does Smith mean by claiming that an agent should be motivated by his moral judgement? He explicitly qualifies this normative connection as a conceptual requirement that holds only if the agent is rational (1994, 61; 1995b, 321). Rationality requires one to be motivated by one’s own moral judgements. Smith thus modifies the internalist requirement in 19

The Normativity of What We Care About

an important way: the connection between moral judgement and motivation is conceptual but defeasible: it holds only if the agent is fully rational. The internalist and externalist positions are then reformulated as follows: “[i]f an agent judges that she morally ought to Φ in certain circumstances C then, according to internalists, absent practical irrationality, she must be motivated to some extent to Φ in C. … Externalists deny this. They hold that agents may not be motivated to any extent to act in accordance with their moral judgments, and this without any irrationality on their behalf.” (Smith 1995b, 318) Many externalists object that the introduction of the practical rationality condition solves a problem by creating a new one, as it shifts the explanatory weight to the question what is built into the practical rationality constraint (Svavarsdóttir 1999, 164). Moreover, it is objected that this modified version does not succeed in capturing the internalists’ distinctive claim (Schroeter 2005, 4). Some externalists, like Schroeter (2005) and Copp (1995) say that they could agree with Smith that whenever a subject is practically rational he will be motivated to act in accordance with his moral judgements. But the question that divides the parties is whether lack of motivation and the practical irrationality that causes it prevent a subject from truly making a moral judgement. Internalism concerns the practicality of morality, or more particularly the intrinsic motivating force of moral judgements, while Smith seems to turn it into a position about the requirements of rationality. We will see in chapter 3 that the crucial move in this regard is Smith’s interpretation of moral requirements as rational requirements.

1.4 The externalist position elaborated Exposing the implausible implications of the internalist stance is one way to defend externalism. Another strategy, also applied by Frankena in his pioneer article, consists in showing that there is nothing an externalist theory could not explain, and so there is absolutely no reason to prefer an internalist theory. Most importantly, externalists can make sense of the connection between a moral obligation and motivation in their own way. There are at least three external ways to account for this connection. First, there is an important preliminary remark made by Frankena. He urges us to keep in mind that internalists and externalists disagree not on the fact that motivation matters in morality but on the way in which they interpret this fact: “[t]he question is whether motivation is somehow to be built into judgments of moral obligation, not whether it is to be taken care of in some way or other.”(1958, 50, emphasis added) On the one hand, internalism presents it as a conceptual truth that an agent cannot be considered to have made a specific moral judgement unless he was motivated in a specific way. The non-cognitivist Hare for instance says that it is “a tautological truth” that one cannot sincerely assent to a moral command without performing it, provided it is in one’s power to do so (Hare 1952, 20). When a person is not motivated by the moral judgement that he assents to, Hare is convinced that that person did not make 20

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

a real moral judgement, but only a moral judgement “in an off-coloured way.” (Hare 1952, 164) On the other hand, externalists regard motivation as external to obligation, in the sense that “it is logically possible for an agent to have or see that he has an obligation even if he has no motivation, actual or dispositional, for doing the action in question.” (Frankena 1958, 49) Making obligation independent of desire in an ‘analytical’ or ‘logical’ sense, however, does not rule out any kind of connection between a moral obligation and motivation. Externalists could consider it logically possible, but at the same time highly implausible or even psychologically impossible, that a moral judgement fails to motivate. As Thomas Nagel rightly remarks, “[Externalism] is even compatible with the view that such a motivation [for being moral] is always present – so long as its presence is not guaranteed by moral judgments themselves, but by something external to ethics.” (1970, 7) Internalists believe that the motivation for acting morally is guaranteed by the truth of ethical propositions themselves; externalists deny that but they can conceive the connection between motivation and ethics as a highly probable, empirical one, mediated by an external factor. Second, externalists can ascribe the moving force of moral judgements to the act of assenting to a moral obligation. Frankena allows that an externalist “may hold, for example, that judgments of obligation have a conceptual content of an external kind, but add that we do not speak of a man’s assenting or sincerely assenting to them unless he not only apprehends the truth of their conceptual content but is at least to some extent moved to conform to it.” (Frankena 1958, 64) In other words, merely saying (or believing, judging, thinking) ‘I ought to Φ’ while not being motivated to Φ, is not contradictory according to Frankena, but assenting to a moral obligation and not being motivated is.7 When Frankena speaks about making a moral judgement, he has the mere intellectual apprehension of a moral fact in mind, which he distinguishes from assenting to a moral fact. (Frankena 1958, 76) I am not sure I understand what it means to believe or apprehend that “torturing babies is wrong” as opposed to assenting to it that, indeed, torturing babies is wrong. If one apprehends or grasps the moral wrongness of an action, does one not by that act of understanding also acknowledge it to be wrong? I do not find helpful the distinction between believing that one is morally obliged and assenting to the obligation and I will not use it. I consider the next externalist elaboration to be the most interesting. Third, externalists can ascribe moving force to the presence of desires that are activated by the knowledge conveyed by moral judgements. For instance W.D. Ross and H.A. Prichard, the externalists attacked by Falk, identified the desire to do what is right as the source of moral motivation. In more recent days, Alfred Mele, David Brink, Peter Railton and Sigrun Svavarsdóttir promoted the externalist view, holding that moral judgements “do not encompass motivation but are nevertheless well-suited for the task of generating corresponding moral conduct in conjunction with relevant desires.” (Mele 2003, 130) In combination with e.g. the desire to do whatever one is 7

 mong current externalists David Copp (1995) has recourse to this explanation. He draws a A distinction between moral beliefs and moral convictions, taking himself to be an externalist with regard to the former but not with regard to the latter. 21

The Normativity of What We Care About

morally required to do, a moral judgement can motivate on the externalist account.8 As we will see in the chapter on Michael Smith, this version of the externalist position evoked an extensive response from internalists who criticized the purportedly implausible psychology underlying this externalist explanation of moral motivation. There is a second reason why Mele’s, Brink’s, Railton’s and Svavarsdóttir’s commitment to externalism is interesting. It leads us in the direction of a distinction at the heart of the debate on practical reasons. Externalists like Mele turn their attention from the existence of moral requirements to the belief that they exist. They find it essential to conceive of the external relation as one between a moral judgement and motivation, as opposed to the relation between a moral requirement and motivation. Mele illustrates the importance of this distinction by pointing out the insanity of saying that Hitler was not morally required to release the Jewish people, because he was not motivated to do so. Nobody would want to say this, and neither does the externalist. The only point deserving discussion in the eyes of the externalist, Mele insists, is whether Hitler’s lack of motivation reveals something about his moral judgements (Mele 2003, 108-109). Mele sets aside what he calls the opposition between ‘requirement internalism and externalism’ and thinks only the disagreement between ‘belief internalism and externalism’ is worth discussing.9 The discussion between internalists and externalists in Mele’s writing revolves round the question whether making a moral judgement intrinsically motivates, or whether an external factor, such as a desire to be moral, should be invoked. By thus limiting the field, Mele reveals a crucial distinction in the debate on practical reasons. It is a distinction between two fundamentally different ways in which the relationship between morality and motivations can be examined and characterized as internal or external. Stephen Darwall was the first to point out the distinction between those two perspectives under the names of judgement internalism/externalism on the one hand and existence internalism/externalism on the other – a distinction that I will explain in the next section.

8

9

S ee Railton 1986, 156; Brink 1989, 49; Svavarsdóttir 1999, 170; Mele 2003, chapter 5. Their versions of externalism differ with regard to the specification of the required desire. Railton specifies it as a desire to be able to justify one’s conduct from a general standpoint. Brink speaks in general terms about sympathy for others. Svavarsdóttir grounds the disposition to be motivated by one’s moral judgement in a conative attitude taken towards objects under a moral mode of presentation. Mele invokes ‘the generic desire to do what is morally required’ as the source of moral motivation. Mele distils both requirement internalism and belief internalism from an ambiguous passage in Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism. Nagel there defines internalism as the view that “the motivation must be so tied to the truth, or meaning, of ethical statements that when in a particular case someone is (or perhaps merely believes that he is) morally required to do something, it follows that he has a motivation for doing it.” (Nagel 1970, 7) Mele isolates the part in brackets and discerns two distinct internalist theses, one stating that the presence of motivation is entailed by the moral requirement, the other stating that the presence of motivation is entailed by the belief to be morally required. See Mele (2003, 108). 22

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

1.5 J udgment internalism/externalism versus existence internalism/ externalism Although the importance of the distinction referred to by Mele can hardly be overestimated, the distinction was not given much attention (for instance it was neglected by Falk and Frankena) until Stephen Darwall gave it a name. In Impartial Reason Darwall notes that there are two different positions referred to as ‘internalist’. On the one hand, there are internalists holding it “to be a necessary condition of a genuine instance of a certain sort of judgment that the person making the judgment be disposed to act in a way appropriate to it.” (1983, 54) Darwall calls this position judgement internalism. On the other hand, internalism is seen as “placing a constraint on the existence of grounds for an act’s rationality or rightness” by making it a necessary condition for a reason that it is capable of motivating the agent. Darwall calls this position existence internalism. Note that Darwall does not limit the discussion to the moral domain. He speaks about judgements and reasons in general. So the focus shifts from morality (and motivation) to normativity (and motivation). By analogy to the distinction between existence internalism/externalism and judgement internalism/externalism similar distinctions are made by Audi (1997) between ‘reasons internalism’ and ‘motivational internalism’, by Svavarsdóttir (1999) between ‘application internalism’ and ‘motivational internalism’, and by Brink (1989) between ‘agent internalism’ and ‘appraiser internalism’. As Darwall’s distinction is the best known and most widely used, I will adopt his terminology. We define the relevant positions as follows: Judgement internalism: If a person makes a normative judgement (‘I ought to Φ’, ‘I should Φ’, ‘I have a reason to Φ’) it is conceptually necessary that the person is motivated to act in conformity with this judgement. An agent is genuinely judging that he has a reason only if some motivational fact about that agent obtains. Judgement externalists deny this conceptual necessity. 10 Existence internalism: For it to be true that A has a reason to Φ in circumstances C, it is necessary that some motivational fact about A in circumstances C obtains.

10

Well-known judgement internalists are Stevenson (1937), Falk (1948), Hare (1952), Mackie (1977), Blackburn (1984), Korsgaard (1986), Smith (1995b). Judgement externalism is supported by Prichard (1928), Ross (1939), Frankena (1958), Foot (1972), Railton (1986), Brink (1989), Copp (1995), Svavarsdóttir (1999), Mele (2003). 23

The Normativity of What We Care About

By formulating the necessary condition in terms of the obtaining of a motivational fact, one avoids the clearly over-strong condition of actual motivation.11 Existence externalists deny this necessary condition.12 Note that externalists need not deny that reasons are commonly connected to facts about motivation, but in that case they attribute these connections to desires or dispositions that some agents have which others lack. Some think that the discussion between existence internalists and externalists is conceptually prior to or more interesting than the one between judgement internalists and externalists.13 Others think the exact opposite, rejecting existence internalism as “wildly implausible” and therefore concentrating on the more challenging distinction between judgement internalists and externalists.14 Yet others think that judgement internalism and existence internalism actually make the same point (namely that reasons should be able to explain action and that they cannot explain actions unless they are motives) respectively “from the agent’s perspective” and “from the explainer’s perspective.” (Korsgaard 1986, 11) Korsgaard, for instance, refuses to treat the issues separately, as she defines the internalist theory as “a theory according to which the knowledge (or the truth or the acceptance) of a moral judgment implies the existence of a motive (not necessarily overriding) for acting on that judgment.” (1986, 8) In this quotation two different claims are made: claims about the knowledge or acceptance of a moral judgement belong to the debate between judgement internalists and externalists, whereas examining the truth conditions of a moral judgement is part of the discussion between existence internalists and externalists. It need not be surprising, however, that Korsgaard does not separate the claims. As will be explained further in this chapter and in chapter 4, she defends the Kantian idea that reasons are constituted through deliberation. To detect which reasons a person has, one has to imagine what judgements that person, if fully rational, could achieve through practical deliberation. The difference between the reasons that a person has and the reason-judgements that a person makes (if he is fully rational) becomes less important in this approach. I borrow this formulation from Schroeder and Finlay (2008). They distinguish two ways to interpret the relevant motivational fact: one version of internalism connects reasons to counterfactual motivation; another version connects reasons to the actual obtaining of a psychological state that is relevant to motivation but may not actually do any motivating. As we will see, Korsgaard defends a Counterfactual Motivation view. Mark Schroeder himself defends an Actual State view, as does Frankfurt, but with a different understanding of the relevant psychological state. 12 The reason theories of Raz (1998), Parfit (1997) and Scanlon (1998) embody existence externalism. Williams’ internal reason theory serves as a paradigm example of existence internalism. 13 In his illuminating survey article on practical reasons, John Robertson spends most of the article explaining existence internalism and externalism. He considers judgement internalism and externalism to be interesting only in a derivative way (2001, 134-135). 14 We have already referred to Mele’s scepsis with regard to existence internalism (Mele 2003, 108109). Svavarsdóttir limits her attention to judgement internalism and externalism for the same reason (Svavarsdóttir 1999, 172). 11

24

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

Yet I think there is a real difference here that is best kept in mind in order to avoid mistakes in inferences and shifts in argument.

1.6 Other kinds of internalism and externalism As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the terms ‘internal’ and ‘external’ as such are elliptical, they describe a relationship and are empty as long as this relationship is not specified. It is important, therefore, to be aware of the various relationships in the practical domain that are qualified as internal and external. In this study only the relationship between judgement and motivation on the one hand and that between reasons and motivation on the other will be relevant. But other relationships, like that between motivation and the good15 or between moral requirements and reasons16, among others, are described as internal or external.17 Whether the relationship between moral requirements and reasons should be seen as internal or external is an important question in moral philosophy. The existence of categorical imperatives depends on it. Philippa Foot (1972) argues in favour of externalism when she deprives moral judgements of an automatic reason-giving force. She interprets morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives similar to the requirements of etiquette. It is no more irrational to be immoral than to be impolite, in Foot’s view. So there is no necessary relation between moral obligations and reasons. Whether one has a reason to obey moral obligations depends on subjective facts, like one’s desires. Kantian philosophers resist this kind of externalism. If it is morally obligatory that A Φs, A necessarily has reason to Φ. This kind of internalism I will refer to as ‘moral rationalism’ (see Smith 1994, 62). The central issue is whether it is irrational to be immoral. Does the moral wrongness of an action entail that there is decisive reason not to do it? Because this book aims to be about normativity in general and not about morality in particular, the strictly meta-ethical questions (about the nature and authority of moral reasons) are not at its centre, though they are constantly lingering in

S ee Watson 2003, 129: “What I shall call internalist conceptions of agency regard the will as having some kind of necessary connection or concern with the good or choiceworthy.” 16 Audi adds to his distinction between motivational internalism and reason internalism the ‘judgments-as-reasons view’, which takes normative reasons to be internal to moral judgement. Audi thus applies the label ‘internal’ to a third kind of relationship (1997, 221). Smith also distinguishes three internalist claims and calls the internalist claim that moral facts are facts about reasons for action ‘rationalism’ (1994, 62). When James Lenman (2006) defines internalism as the claim that there is a necessary connection between moral facts and normative reasons for action, he also applies the adjective ‘internal’ to the relationship between moral facts and reasons. 17 Reading Darwall’s article ‘Reasons, Motives, and the Demands of Morality: An Introduction’ (1997) gives an idea of how multi-interpretable the labels ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ are. Internalism and externalism are there presented as opposing views with regard to the relationship between moral requirements and reasons, between moral requirements and motivation, between moral judgements and motivation, between reasons and motivation. 15

25

The Normativity of What We Care About

the background and fuelling many of the positions about practical reasons that this book will cover. Summing up, one could differentiate between three kinds of relationships that are subject to the internal–external distinction. There is the relationship between normative (including moral) judgements and motivation, that between normative (including moral) reasons and motivation, and that between moral requirements and normative reasons. I think the delicate issue of the authority of morality deserves its own discussion. I will, therefore, lift the discussion between internalists and externalists out of the moral domain.18 I will focus (almost) exclusively on the relationships between normative judgements in general and motivation, and between normative reasons and motivation. Though the discussion between judgement internalism and externalism came first chronologically – we can now see that the internalism and externalism discussed by Falk and Frankena are judgement internalism and externalism – it seems to me that the opposition beween existence internalism and externalism comes first structurally. Before examining the implications of the normative judgement ‘I have a reason to Φ’ it should be clear what the content of this judgement is: that is, it should be spelled out what is meant by ‘having a reason to Φ’. That is why I will first and foremost concentrate on the debate between existence internalists and externalists. However, judgement internalism and externalism cannot be kept entirely out of the picture in discussing the existence counterparts. Judgement internalism, for instance, is sometimes invoked (and more often tacitly supposed) to plead in favour of existence internalism: what better way to explain that judgements of the kind ‘I have a reason to Φ’ typically motivate than by incorporating motivation into the very definition of what it means to have a reason? In the last section of this chapter, I want to flesh out the opposition between existence internalism and externalism, as I did with judgement internalism and externalism at the beginning.

18

 lfred Mele denies the importance of a discussion between judgement internalism and externalA ism outside the moral sphere (Mele 2003, 109). But other philosophers, like Watson (2003), consider the conception of the relationship between normative judgement and motivation to be interesting and revealing as well. It goes without saying that the philosophical problem of how to explain akrasia, for instance, is deeply intermingled with the discussion on normative judgement internalism and externalism. Since I focus on the existence and constitution of reasons, or, as Korsgaard would say, since I look at the phenomenon of a practical reason ‘from the explainer’s perspective’ rather than ‘from the agent’s perspective’ (Korsgaard 1986, 11), I do not have to deal with the problem of akrasia because it is not relevant at this point. Akrasia becomes a problem at a later point, once the existence of the reason is established and an agent judges ‘I have most reason to Φ’ without adapting his behaviour. 26

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

1.7 Varieties of existence internalism and externalism However helpful the distinction between existence internalism and existence externalism is, authors hardly ever use it to classify their own position. When authors take a stance in the debate on practical reasons, they position themselves as either supporters or critics of ‘Bernard Williams’ reason internalism’ or ‘a Humean theory of reasons’ or ‘a desire-based reason theory’. These terms are often used interchangeably, though the theories they refer to are not fully identical. Let me explain the advantages and disadvantages of each of these three ways to frame the discussion. In the debate on practical reasons, it is widely agreed that Bernard Williams’ internal reason theory is the theory to beat. Williams’ influence on the debate on practical reasons can hardly be overestimated. He provided a standard formulation of the existence internalist view in his article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ which we will study in depth in the next chapter. In this article, Williams investigates two different interpretations of the statement ‘A has a reason to Φ’. On the internal interpretation an agent has a reason to do Φ only if he can come to be motivated to Φ after sound deliberation (which consists, roughly, in correcting errors of fact and reasoning). On the external interpretation, an agent’s reasons to act are not constrained by what an agent could come to be motivated to do, and the statement ‘A has a reason to Φ’ is not falsified by the agent’s failure to be motivated after sound deliberation. Williams opposes what he calls ‘external reason theories’ without mentioning specific theories. Williams’ article has received more attention than any other article in the debate on practical reasons in the last three decades. His formulation of existence internalism became the standard position to be evaluated by everyone who entered the debate. It is almost an unwritten rule that to locate one’s position on the map one must explain how far from or close it is to Williams’ position. He has many supporters (among whom are Finlay 2007b, Hubin 1999, Schroeder 2007a) but even more critics (Smith 2004a, Korsgaard 1986, Parfit 1997, Scanlon 1998, Shafer-Landau 2003, Wallace 1999). Framing the debate in terms of ‘opponents of and adherents to Williams, however, has a major disadvantage: it is possible to reject Williams’ internal reason theory without rejecting existence internalism.19 Christine Korsgaard, for instance,

19

 at is why Wallace, in his state of the art article on practical reasons, describes Williams’ terTh minology as “confusing because both Williams’ internal reason theory and his external reason theory are, in a more conventional sense, internalist accounts” (1990, 376). He refers to Kantian criticism of Williams’ internal reason theory and shows that Kantians, despite their rejection of the internal reason theory, are internalists nevertheless, because they postulate a necessary connection between agents’ reasons for action and their motivational capacities. Wallace mistakenly assumes, however, that critics of Williams’ internal theory are automatically defenders of external theory. Williams embraced some of his critics, especially the Kantians, holding that they were internal reason theorists just like him. But even if Wallace’s proposal to interpret both internal and external reason theories as internalist accounts is off the mark, it is still significant as an indication of the complexity of the debate. 27

The Normativity of What We Care About

underwrites what she calls ‘the internalism requirement’ but resists Williams’ internal reason theory.20 Let me explain how this is possible. Korsgaard, a philosopher in the Kantian tradition, considers reasons to be the outcomes of practical reasoning. She assumes that there is a constraint, which she calls ‘the internalism requirement’, that “Practical Reason claims, if they are really to present us with reasons for action, must be capable of motivating rational persons.” (1986, 11) As an existence internalist, she believes that there is an internal relation between reasons and motivation, so that when a reason motivates that is not due to external factors. But she emphasizes that the necessity of this internal relation is conditioned: internalism does not require reasons to succeed in motivating any given individual every time. All it requires is that in order for a consideration to have the status of a reason, it should succeed in motivating an agent insofar as he is rational. Williams also has a rationality condition built into his formulation of the internal reason theory (the ‘after sound deliberation’ condition), so that cannot be what divides Korsgaard and Williams. But what then does divide them? As we proceed, the subtleties of both Williams’ and Korsgaard’s theories will become clearer, but, roughly, the difference between them is that Williams’ internalism amounts to a motivational constraint on reasons, whereas Korsgaard’s internalism amounts to a rational constraint on motivation. In other words, Williams conceives of the internal relation between reasons and motivation in the following way: A has a reason to Φ only if she is motivated to Φ after sound deliberation, while Korsgaard reverses the relationship: If A has a reason to Φ, she will be motivated to Φ insofar as she is rational. As long as we think of the relationship as indicating a necessary condition, the difference between those two statements is obscure. But Williams’ internalism claims more than that we have reasons only if we have desires – more precisely he holds that we have certain reasons because we have those desires. Korsgaaard reverses the direction of explanation and insists that the existence of reasons explains the facts about motivation rather than vice versa. Now, if being rational means ‘being motivated by one’s reasons’ Korsgaard’s internalism requirement becomes trivial. The challenge for

20

 arwall (1983) offers yet another instantiation of existence internalism different from WilD liams’ internal reason theory. Cohon (1993, 266) sums up Korsgaard, Williams and Darwall as three sample internalisms with incompatible consequences. In an attempt to disentangle different forms of existence internalism John Robertson (2001) introduces the distinction between ‘robust’ and ‘attenuated’ internalism, Korsgaard embodying the former, Williams the latter. Robertson’s choice to call Korsgaard’s internalim more robust than Williams strikes me as odd, because Williams’ internalism is mostly regarded as ‘pur sang’, as the extreme consequence of conceptually tying reason to motivation. Korsgaard sugars the pill by bringing in ‘practical reason’ as the source of reasons, which operates independently of desires. 28

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

counterfactual views like hers is to give a substantial interpretation of rational that yields a non-trivial version of existence internalism. Both Korsgaard and Williams assume that there is a necessary relation between an agent’s reasons for action and his motivational dispositions (this is a conceptual, not a causal or a rational, necessity, as will be explained in chapter 2 and 4), but only Williams derives from this assumption the claim that reasons depend upon antecedent desires. The fact that this derivation seems valid to Williams but not to Korsgaard goes back to a different conception of rational deliberation or rational reasoning. The difference between those two conceptions has been defined as the difference between a procedural versus a substantive conception of rationality.21 I am not sure it is appropriate to ascribe a substantive rationality view to Korsgaard, and so my explanation of the difference between Williams’ and Korsgaard’s conceptions of rationality will be more wordy. As will be explained in chapter 2, when Williams talks about sound deliberation, he talks about deliberation that starts from interests and desires that an agent already has. In his view, reasons are always, even after sound deliberation, contingent upon the desires an agent happens to have. Korsgaard, as a Kantian, believes that there are categorical imperatives besides hypothetical ones: the moral law gives reasons to act to anyone no matter what desires he has. To account for the existence of a categorical imperative she appeals to the faculty of practical reason that can create reasons without deliberating from the desires an agent has. Thus, Korsgaard believes that one can establish that someone has a reason to Φ without appealing to motivational facts at all, but solely by investigating the content of laws of practical reason. The reasons that thus result from practical reasoning put a constraint on the rational agent’s motivation because practical reason is what governs the motivation of a rational person. In this way, Korsgaard’s theory of practical reasons meets the internalism requirement. And so it is explained why both Korsgaard and Williams are existence internalist: both take it to be part of the concept of a reason that it motivates. Existence externalists reject this conceptual connection between reasons and motivations and oppose Korsgaard’s internalism requirement just as well as Williams’ internal reason theory. Derek Parfit is an existence externalist; his criticism of Williams’ and Korsgaard’s internalism will be presented in chapter 4. Smith’s theory of practical 21

S ee Robertson (2001, 131). He believes that Williams interprets rationality procedurally, which means that “rational evaluation does not extend to an agent’s basic motivations, but applies just to how derivative motivations arise from them as the result, for example, of instrumental reasoning.” According to Robertson Korsgaard sees rationality as a substantive matter because in her view rationality extends to an agent’s basic motivations. I believe that the distinction between procedural and substantive rationality is important, but I am not convinced that it coincides with the difference between Williams’ and Korsgaard’s conceptions of rationality. Korsgaard seems to conceive of rationality in procedural terms as well: what is rational is decided by the faculty of practical reason which operates procedures; she makes no substantive claims about irrational behaviour in advance. The notion of substantive rationality will become relevant when I describe Parfit’s existence externalist position in chapter 4. Parfit postulates that some actions and desires, like the desire to be tortured on a Tuesday rather than on another day of the week, are irrational regardless of the outcome of deliberative processes. 29

The Normativity of What We Care About

reasons also arises from a dissatisfaction with Williams’ internal reason theory, but, unlike Parfit, he remains in the internalist camp (be it more on the side of Kantian internalists like Korsgaard, than on the side of Williams and other Humeans). His critique and alternative will be the subject of chapter 3. Another popular way of classifying theories of reasons for action consists in distinguishing Humean theories of rationality from others. Many authors label Williams’ reason theory as a Humean theory of reasons (Hubin 1999, Heuer 2004, Schroeder 2007a). The Humean legacy is obvious: it is a small step from Hume’s claim that “[r] eason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (1739, 415) to the internalist’s belief that reasons depend on the passions. But, on the other hand, this nomenclature is, strictly speaking, inaccurate because Humean theories of practical reasons do not coincide with Hume’s theory – Hume may not even have a theory of reasons for acting. Preceding the question ‘what makes it true that someone has a reason to act?’ there is the more fundamental question whether it makes sense to speak about reasons in the practical domain at all. Though disputed among Hume-scholars, philosophers in the practical reason debate seem to agree nowadays that Hume’s answer to that question is negative. Hume does not believe in practical (ir)rationality, a point he presses in the bold thesis that “’[t]is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” (1739, 416), but for which he also has an argument. Hume understands reason as the faculty of dicovering truth or falsehood. On such an understanding action cannot be reasonable or unreasonable, as it is nonsense to say of an action (or a desire for that matter) that it is true or false.22 Rationality applies only to the domain of beliefs in Hume’s theory. Actions and desires can be called irrational only in a derivative way, that is, if they are based upon irrational beliefs. If desires and actions are never irrational in an underivative sense, there is no practical irrationality. On this reading of Hume – defended by Millgram in his article ‘Was Hume a Humean?’ (1995) – Hume did not limit practical rationality to instrumental or procedural rationality; he rejected practical rationality in its entirety. Millgram’s point is taken by the ‘Humeans’ (for instance, Schroeder 2007b, 197), who label their view ‘Humean’ only to evoke a vague association with Hume’s scepsis about practical reason. Adopting the habits of the debaters in my presentation of the debate, my use of the label ‘Humean’ will also be loose and metaphoric, as, for that matter, will be my use of the adjective ‘Kantian’. Korsgaard’s position can be aptly described as a Kantian position (in opposition to a Humean position) though her arguments, which are unmistakenly Kantian in style and spirit, also incorporate ideas not to be found in Kant. The hallmark of Humean theories of reasons is the assertion that “reasons are based, ultimately, on subjective, contingent, conative states of the agent. Anti-Hu22

 ichael Smith (forthcoming) provides a clear analysis of Hume’s argument. Drawing on arguM ments from Judith Jarvis Thomson he exposes Hume’s failure to consider standards of correctness that do not amount to truth or falsehood. As Smith and Thomson point out, the fact that desires and actions cannot be true or false does not necessarily entail that they cannot be correct or incorrect. 30

Chapter 1: Internalism and externalism: some terminology

mean theories deny this.” (Hubin 1999, 30) Anti-Humean theories comprise Kantian theories, but also Aristotelian (McDowell 1979, 1995) and Platonic approaches to a rational (virtuous) life. By Platonic approaches I mainly have in mind the variety of moral and normative realisms that emerged in the wake of Moore’s Principia Ethica (Parfit 2006, Shafer-Landau 2003, Scanlon 1998, Wallace 2004, Dancy 2000). Since these philosophers explicitly dismiss any metaphysical commitment to a supernatural world, it is not fully appropriate to call them ‘Platonic’. But calling these approaches ‘Platonic’ in opposition to ‘Humean’ and ‘Kantian’ is helpful to a certain extent because it immediately indicates their distinguishing feature: they deny that a ‘Copernican revolution’ should be accomplished on the practical domain, they turn away from the subject and look for the source of reasons in the object. I will focus exclusively on Humean, Kantian and Moorean-realist or ‘Platonic’ approaches because they dominate the debate. The Aristotelian theories of practical reason, however interesting, at this point form a minority (though they enjoy an increasing popularity and importance). McDowell’s criticism of Williams is integrated in chapter 2, but a presentation of his positive alternative falls beyond the scope of this book. I chose to focus on Parfit as a proponent of reason externalism. McDowell’s theory of reasons is intricately tied up with an original but complicated theory of mind and world, and I will postpone a study of his views to another occasion. There is one final terminology that needs some explanation (adopted by Cohon 1993, Parfit 1997, Scanlon 1998, Chang 2004). Instead of talking about the Humean theory of reasons and in an attempt to avoid the multi-interpretable labels of internalism and externalism, some authors prefer to speak about the opposition between desire-based reason theory and value-based reason theory. Desire-based reason theory (DBR theory) holds that “all reasons for acting, intending and desiring are provided by the fact that the agent wants something or would want it under certain conditions.” (Chang 2004, 56) Bernard Williams (1979) and Richard Brandt (1979) are held to defend a DBR theory. Wallace, for instance, writes that internalism in Bernard Williams’ sense is “the thesis that all reasons for action are grounded in an agent’s antecedent desires.” (Wallace 1999, 43) The use of words like ‘providing’ and ‘grounding’ can be vague or misleading. As I said in the introduction, also the image of ‘a source’ makes it sound as if reasons are products. A general but, I believe, non-misleading way to understand DBR theories is to understand them as claiming that an agent’s desires play a necessary and irreplaceable part in an explanation of what makes a certain consideration a reason. In this sense Williams qualifies as a DBR theorist.23 On the value-based reason theory (VBR theory) “reasons for acting, intending and desiring are provided by facts about the value of something, where being valuable 23

It is worth noting that there are fewer card-carrying DBR theorists than one would expect, given that lots of literature is devoted to refuting the DBR theory. The label ‘internalism’ is used more loosely and many proclaim themselves internalists. Matters are complicated by the fact that some internalists like Korsgaard are not DBR theorists; while some DBR theorists like Mark Schroeder (who holds that reasons are desire-dependent) do not subscribe to internalism understood as the idea that reasons must be able to motivate. 31

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is not simply a matter of being desired.” (Chang 2004, 57) Justification is grounded in values conceived of as external facts. On the VBR view, if an agent desires ice cream and goes to the shop to buy some ice cream, his reason for going to the shop is provided not by his desire to eat ice cream but by the fact that eating ice cream is valuable, more precisely pleasurable. Parfit (1997), Raz (1998) and Scanlon (1998) are VBR theorists. Although the distinction between the DBR theory and the VBR theory is clear and useful, it suffers from a major disadvantage: it does not cover the Kantian approach to practical reasons. Kantians, like Korsgaard, Darwall and to a certain extent Smith, endorse neither the DBR nor the VBR theory. They maintain that reasons “are grounded in principles on which one could will, from an impartial perspective, all agents to act.” (Darwall 1983, 61) Kantians do not base reasons upon desires, because they believe that it should not be a contingent and personal fact (dependent on the desires that one has) whether one has a reason to be moral. Neither do they base reasons upon values insofar as values are conceived of as external facts that are to be discovered. As I will explain in chapter 4, Kantians typically defend a constructivist instead of a recognitional view of reasons and values, which means that reasons and values are constructed through rational deliberation rather than discovered. Thus, in the Kantian model reasons are based on neither desires nor values but on principles of practical reason. That is why I will sometimes refer to Kantian reason theories as rationality-based reason theories (RBR theory). The contrast with DBR and VBR theories should help one to see why this is not a mere tautology. To start my presentation of the current debate, I return to the original terminology and use the terms internalism and externalism about practical reasons, thereby focusing on existence internalism/externalism as opposed to judgement internalism/ externalism. Williams’ formulation and defence of internalism about normative reasons will serve as a starting point and a basis for my discussion of the key positions in the contemporary analytical debate on practical reasons.

1.8 Conclusion The labels of ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ are given to various positions in the debate on practical reasons. I will focus on the discussion between existence internalists and externalists, which concerns the existence conditions for normative reasons and, more specifically, the role of motivation and the limits it imposes on normative reasons. Existence internalists believe that there is an internal, that is, necessary connection between motivation and normative reasons. Existence externalists deny that motivation is internally related to the concept of a normative reason. I take Williams’ internal reason theory to be a proto-theory of existence internalism.

32

Chapter 2

Bernard Williams on practical reasons 2.1 Introduction Judgments of the ‘I have a reason to Φ’ sort are normative judgements.1 To assume, as judgement internalists do, that there is a connection between the judgement that one has a reason to Φ and being motivated to Φ is one thing, to explain how it comes about, however, is another. One option is to assure motivation by building it into the very explanation of what it means to have a reason. This strategy amounts to a defence of existence internalism. The most famous formulation of existence internalism was given by Bernard Williams in his article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ of 1979. This agenda-setting article arguably prompted more discussion than any other article or book by Williams. To clarify his position he wrote three follow-up papers: ‘Internal Reasons and the Scope of Blame’ in 1989, ‘Replies’ to the critical articles gathered in Mind, World, Ethics in 1995, and ‘Postscript: Some Further Notes on Internal and External Reasons’ in 2001. I will take all these articles into account in reconstructing Williams’ defence of what he calls ‘the internal reason theory’.

2.2 The internal reason theory The internal reason theory is an account of normative reasons for action. Normative reasons answer the question why a person should Φ, as opposed to motivating reasons which explain why a person Φ-ed. Initially, the internal reason theory is presented as a doctrine about how one should interpret statements about normative reasons for action. Williams (1989) formulates the issue as follows: “[w]hat are the truth conditions for statements of the form ‘A has a reason to Φ’, where A is a person and Φ is some verb of action? What are we saying when we say someone has a reason to

1

By ‘normative judgements’ I mean judgements such as ‘I have a reason to Φ’, ‘I ought to Φ’, ‘I should Φ’. These three expressions are not equivalent. ‘I have a reason to Φ’ is weaker than ‘I ought to Φ’, because having a reason to Φ does not rule out the possibility that you also have a reason to Ψ and that the reason to Ψ is stronger than the reason to Φ. In that case, it makes sense to say that ‘though I have a reason to Φ, I ought to Ψ’. The difference between ‘I have a reason to Φ’ and ‘ I should Φ’ is less clear, because in literature (as in daily language) ‘I should Φ’ is sometimes used as synonymous with ‘I have a reason to Φ’, at other times as synonymous with ‘I ought to Φ’, implying the stronger claim that to Φ is what I have most reason to do. The debate on practical reasons is not about what it means to have most reason to Φ, but about what it means to have a reason to Φ. Therefore ‘the normative judgements’ I will be speaking about should be understood as instances of the judgement ‘I have a reason to Φ’. 33

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do something?”(1989, 35) To answer this question Williams distinguishes two ways of understanding a reason statement, an internal and an external interpretation, of which he thinks only the internal interpretation makes sense. According to the internal interpretation, “the truth of the sentence [that ‘A has a reason to Φ’] implies, very roughly, that A has some motive which will be served or furthered by his Φ-ing.” (1979, 101) Or, in terms of Williams’ most recent and preferred answer, “A has a reason to Φ only if there is a sound deliberative route from A’s subjective motivational set to A’s Φ-ing.”(2001, 91)2 This chapter is devoted to a full explanation of this answer. What is clear from the outset is that Williams connects reasons to agents’ mental states, thereby tying the domain of ethics to the domain of philosophy of mind and action, in a way that is reminiscent of Elizabeth Anscombe’s request at the end of ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ that philosophers should have a psychologically plausible account of action before declaring what morally good actions are. However the precise contours and aim of his fresh perspective on the nature of normativity are not obvious. At some times Williams writes that the internal model gives us the content (1979, 109) or the sense (1989, 40) of a statement in the form of ‘A has a reason to Φ’. This sits well with his truth-conditional approach: he searches for the conditions that make it true that someone has a reason to F, or, in other words, he is concerned with what it is for some consideration to fall under the concept of ‘being a reason for A to do something’. But at other times he stresses that the internal reason theory only aims to argue for a necessary condition of an agent’s having a reason to Φ. He conveys that he thinks this condition is also sufficient, but that his argument does not support this (1989, 35). However I believe that in fact much of what Williams writes amounts to more than an argument in favour of one necessary condition. I find it helpful and adequate to read the internal reason theory as a description of how the concept of ‘having a reason to perform a certain action’ is to be understood, namely in terms of idealized motivation. Therefore I try to avoid descriptions of the theory in terms of constraint, as in “Internalism amounts to a motivational constraint on good reasons.” (Dancy 2000, 16) I do not think that, on Williams’ theory, motivations put a constraint on reasons any more than not being married puts a constraint on being a bachelor. I find it more accurate to say that desires do not constrain true reason claims; rather they are the truth-makers of these claims and they explain why the agent has the reasons he has. In my reading of the internal reason theory, an agent has a reason to Φ only if, but also because, he has a desire that will be served by Φ-ing. The full meaning of Williams’ central thesis that the truth of reason-judgements depends on the agent’s motivational state thus amounts to more than a theory about the necessary conditions of true reason statements, even more than a theory about the meaning of reason 2

 ese two ways of framing the internalist position illustrate what can be thought of as an amTh biguity in Williams’ internal reason theory: initially he presents it as a theory about the truthconditions of reason statements; later he considers it a theory about the existence-conditions of reasons. But truth-conditions of statements can be interpreted as existence-conditions for events or things (depending on one’s metaphysical theory of existence and one’s theory of truth). 34

Chapter 2: Bernard Williams on practical reasons

statements: it is a claim about the source of reasons. All reasons must originate in the agent’s prior motivational state. Williams’ strategy for arriving at the internal reason theory consists of, first, delineating a basic, what he calls sub-Humean model for internal reason statements and then, second, elaborating this model in four steps by clarifying and refining some of its implications. The sub-Humean model offers a straightforward view of the relationship between reasons and desires: A has a reason to Φ only if A has some desire the satisfaction of which will be served by his Φ-ing. (1979, 101) This instrumental approach to practical reasons is often ascribed to Hume. Hume’s doctrine, as expressed in ‘reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’, is often understood to reduce practical reason to purely instrumental reason, although Millgram (1995) famously argued that this instrumentalist interpretation of Hume is wrong. Williams is aware of this interpretational difficulty and cautiously speaks about the sub-Humean model (Hume without the complications). He presents his own doctrine as a modification of this “too simple” sub-Humean model. To work the sub-Humean model up into “something more adequate” (1979, 102), Williams adds several refinements. Thus, as I already said in chapter 1, it is not fully appropriate to label Williams’ existence internalism as ‘a Humean approach to reasons’, first, because there is an excellent case to be made that Hume himself did not defend this ‘Humean’ approach to practical reasons,3 and second because Williams explicitly dissociates himself from the sub-Humean model. The refinements he adds mark important differences between his internal reason theory and the sub-Humean model.

2.3 Refining the sub-Humean model 1. Although Williams sticks to the sub-Humean use of the word ‘desire’ to express what is a necessary condition for reasons, in his view the term ‘desire’ refers to a multitude of conative attitudes, such as dispositions of evaluations, ideals, commitments, patterns of emotional reaction and personal loyalties (1979, 105). To denote this variety of motivating attitudes Williams introduces the notion of an agent’s ‘subjective motivational set’, labelled ‘S’.4 The claim of the internal reason theorist can now 3

4

 onsequently, it is not worth quoting Hume for the purpose of refuting the Humean Theory C of Reasons. This is pointed out by defenders as well as critics of the ‘Humean’ approach. See Schroeder (2007b) and Millgram (1995). Though Williams does not refer to Davidson himself, many take the subjective motivational set to consist of what Davidson calls ‘pro-attitudes’. Pro-attitudes include “desires, wantings, urges, promptings, and a great variety of moral views, aesthetic principles, economic prejudices, social conventions, and public and private goals and values in so far as these can be interpreted as attitudes of an agent directed toward actions of a certain kind.” (Davidson 1963, 4) 35

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be reformulated as: what an agent has reason to do is a function of his S, so that the absence of an appropriate element in an agent’s S falsifies the statement that ‘he has a reason to Φ’.5 2. However, not every element in S provides a reason as such. Williams gives the example of a man who believes the glass on the table to contain gin and tonic, whereas it actually contains petrol. Does the man have a reason to drink the glass, given his desire for a gin and tonic? Williams insists that according to the internal reason theory he has not. If the man drinks the glass, his desire for a gin and tonic combined with his belief that drinking the glass is a way of satisfying the desire certainly could explain the action – that is, Williams writes, “there was a reason why he Φ-ed” (1979, 103; my emphasis) – but the desire to drink a gin and tonic does not give A a reason to drink the glass in front of him, because A’s belief in the contribution of drinking the glass to the satisfaction of his desires is false.6 Williams summarizes, “A member of S, D, will not give A a reason for Φ-ing if either the existence of D is dependent on false belief, or A’s belief in the relevance of Φ-ing to the satisfaction of D is false.” (1979, 103) If we were to legislate that in the case of the agent who wants a gin and tonic, he has an internal reason to drink the stuff that is petrol, we are missing something. Williams explains why: “It looks in the wrong direction, by implying that the internal reason conception is only concerned with explanation, and not at all with the agent’s rationality. … But the internal reasons conception is concerned with the agent’s rationality.” (1979, 102-103) Thus Williams justifies his second addition to the subHumean model by pointing out that the internal reasons conception is concerned not only with explanation of actions, but also with the agent’s rationality. Williams dismisses the suggestion that the agent in our example has a reason to drink the glass because he wants to preserve his concern for the rationality of the agent. At first sight, it may seem unclear why this concern should make us think that the agent has no reason to drink the glass. After all, would it not be rational for the agent to drink the glass? His desire to drink a gin and tonic and his belief that the glass contains a gin and tonic surely would make his decision to drink the glass intelligible and his drinking

5

6

 e meaning of ‘desire’ in contemporary theory of action and reasons is notoriously ambiguous. Th What Michael Smith and other defenders of the Humean Theory of Motivation mean by ‘a desire’, namely a disposition to act in a certain way, seems a lot ‘thinner’ than what Hume himself had in mind when he talked about ‘passions’ and reason being the slave of them. For elaboration of this point see Schueler (1995), Fehige (2001). Williams’ assumption that ‘a reason why’ is different from ‘a reason to’ resonates in the distinction between motivating and normative reasons. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, the internal reason theory is a theory about normative reasons, that is, reasons to Φ. However, in Williams’ philosophy, the distinction between motivating and normative reasons should not be over-emphasized. As will become clear, his arguments against the external reason theory rely on an intimate connection between a normative reason to Φ and an explanation of why A Φ-ed. 36

Chapter 2: Bernard Williams on practical reasons

the glass rational.7 Surprisingly Williams admits this himself, for he writes, “It will, all the same, be true that if he does Φ in these circumstances, there was not only a reason why he Φ-ed, but also that that displays him as, relative to his false belief, acting rationally.” (1979, 103) Is it plausible that Williams contradicts himself so obviously: first claiming that the concern for rationality requires us to deny that the agent with false beliefs has a reason to act on them, and then, a few lines further on, admitting that acting on those false beliefs is rational after all? Mark Jenkins thinks that Williams does contradict himself, that “he went astray.” (Jenkins 2006, 92) Williams confusingly links rationality with the elimination of false belief, he says. For Jenkins, Williams is perfectly justified in distinguishing between explanatory (or motivating) reasons – reasons why – and justificatory reasons – reasons to – by ruling out false beliefs from the motivational set. However, according to Jenkins, it is wrong to link this rejection of false beliefs with a concern for rationality since rationality need not be at odds with false beliefs. Jenkins thinks his criticism is corroborated by Williams shifting his emphasis from ‘rationality’ to ‘sound deliberation’ through the years. Sound deliberation features both rationality and true beliefs (just as sound arguments feature both validity and true premises). Jenkins’ criticism is revealing, and maybe he is right. Yet, since I find it implausible that Williams would blatantly contradict himself within the space of one paragraph, I suspect that in Williams’ terminology there is a clear distinction between the notions of an agent’s rationality and an action being rational. Given an agent’s desires and beliefs, drinking the glass may be the rational thing to do, in the sense that there is a local coherence between the desire to drink a gin and tonic, the belief that this glass contains gin and tonic and the intention to drink from the glass. But to be concerned with an agent’s rationality is to be concerned with more than local coherence. It implies, among other things, taking into account whether the agent has correct beliefs. This interpretation is corroborated by what Williams says about ‘the essence’ of a rational agent. Williams thinks it is obvious to include corrections of fact and reasoning in the very idea of what it is to be a rational agent: “[a]ny rational deliberative agent has in his S a general interest in being factually and rationally correctly informed.” 7

In this context, Davidson aptly describes rationality as ‘an internal affair’: a state of mind can be called rational (or irrational) only in relation to the other contents of the person’s mind (see Davidson 1982, 1985). Davidson devoted several articles to what he calls ‘the paradoxes of irrationality’. He calls the idea of irrational action, intention, emotion or belief paradoxical “[f ] or the irrational is not merely the non-rational, which lies outside the ambit of the rational; irrationality is a failure within the house of reason.” (1982, 169) He further describes this failure as “not the failure of someone else to believe or feel or do what we deem reasonable, but rather the failure, within a single person, of coherence or consistency in the pattern of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, intentions and actions.” (1982, 170) Examples of irrational behaviour are wishful thinking, acting contrary to one’s own best judgement and self-deception. Since it does not display any obvious incoherence, the behaviour of the man who drinks from the glass that he mistakenly believes to contain gin does not qualify as irrational in this sense. Whether an act is rational depends upon the actual beliefs and desires of a person; reasons depend on the beliefs and desires that that person would have if he were a rational agent. 37

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(1989, 37)8 Because the internal reason theory is concerned with an agent’s rationality, it does not ascribe a reason to drink the glass to the man who falsely believes that the glass contains gin and tonic. Carolyn Mason (2006) makes an interesting comment on the gin and tonic example, from which she derives a less restricted view of the reasons of an agent. She believes that, in some cases, it could be that an agent has a reason to drink from the bottle in front of him, given his desire for a gin and tonic and his belief that the bottle contains gin, even if, in reality, the bottle contains petrol. Mason justifies this claim by pointing out that in some cases it would be unreasonable to demand from the agent that he be suspicious about the content of the bottle in front of him. She contrasts two cases to illustrate this: first, the case of a mechanic working in his friend’s garage, who notices a gin bottle containing something that looks like gin, placed next to a rum bottle containing some thick reddish substance which is clearly not rum. The mechanic could be expected to draw the inference that, perhaps, the gin bottle does not contain what is marked on the bottle either. He would be foolish if he failed to check and drank from it. Contrast the mechanic’s case with the situation in which “a blind man with no sense of smell has just received his grocery delivery from his reliable supplier… Unbeknown to him, a prankster at the bottling factory filled three gin bottles with petrol, and he acquired one of these.” (2006, 169) The blind man has no reason to believe that the stuff in the gin bottle is anything other than gin, and we would not think that he is being foolish in drinking from the bottle without checking its contents. Mason summarizes the difference between these two cases as a difference in the agents’ epistemic circumstances. Contrary to what Williams writes, she believes that not only do an agent’s psychological circumstances but also his epistemic circumstances affect what he has reason to do. She therefore concludes that “[t]he mechanic has a reason not to mix the stuff in the bottle with gin [sic] and drink it, while the blind man has a reason to do so.” (2006, 170) Though Mason gives an interesting expansion of the internal reason theory, I believe Williams would object that she pays too much attention to the rationality or intelligibility of the action at the expense of denying that it is in the interest of any rational agent that he has correct factual information. Secondly, whether Mason’s objection works turns on the meaning of ‘epistemic circumstances’. If they simply refer to the agent’s beliefs and perceptions, there may be no difference between the mechanic’s case and that of the grocery-shopper (we do not need to imagine him blind). Presumably, Mason means to connect the epistemic circumstances to a normative expectation: namely that they determine which beliefs an agent should hold. This move makes reasons for action dependent on reasons for beliefs. It is hard to assess the strengths

8

I t is also safe to suppose a desire not to be poisoned present in the man’s subjective motivational set. But adding this desire to the picture does not solve the problem. Why does the reason connected to this desire (a reason not to drink the glass) prevail over the reason that the desire for a gin and tonic gives rise to (a reason to drink the glass)? An answer to this question must refer to a more general interest in correct information which favours one desire over another. 38

Chapter 2: Bernard Williams on practical reasons

of an evidence-based theory of practical reasons without an account of reasons for beliefs.9 To recapitulate the second revision of the sub-Humean model one could say that, in order to eliminate the reason-generating power of desires based upon false beliefs, Williams invokes the regulating idea of rational agency or, to avoid ambiguity, sound deliberation. The internal reason theory then claims that A has a reason to Φ only if an element D in S will be served by Φ-ing and D is not based upon false belief or incorrect reasoning. 3. It follows from the gin and tonic example that, in Williams’ account, it is possible not only to be motivated without having a reason, but also to have a reason without being motivated. A person can have a reason about which he is ignorant because he does not know the right or relevant facts. For example an art-lover’s desire to see the Mona Lisa gives him a reason to go to Paris, although he may not be aware of this reason because he has no idea that the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre. So the claim that A has a reason does not mean that A is presently motivated to act in some way. It means only that A would be motivated to act in some way if she knew the relevant facts. Williams appeals to this addition, together with the former one, to assure us that “even on the internalist view a statement of the form ‘A has a reason to Φ’ has normative force.” (1989, 36) To ensure this ‘A has a reason to Φ’ must mean more than ‘A is presently motivated to Φ’. Williams’ claim that there are only internal reasons is not at all an attempt to eliminate normative claims about reasons in favour of purely descriptive claims about motivation. Therefore, as Scanlon rightly remarks, Williams’ internal reason theory “does not reflect skepticism about reasons in the standard normative sense.” (Scanlon 1998, 365) Williams thinks that the fact that an agent may be mistaken about (or ignorant of ) what he has (internal) reason to do “is essential to preserving the point that statements of what people have reason to do have normative force.” (2001, 92) Sometimes Williams seems convinced that the possibility of being mistaken about the reasons one has is not only essential but enough. He thinks that “[it] is already enough for the notion [of an internal reason] to be normative” (1989, 36) that the internal reason theory allows us to test a reason statement (for instance about the reasons a man has for drinking the glass in front of him) and to reject it when there is no sound deliberative route from the person’s motivational set to drinking the glass in front of 9

 ecently, Star and Kearns (2009) defended an evidence view of practical reasons, according to R which the question whether someone has a reason to Φ is determined not by objective facts nor by beliefs or other internal states of the agent but by the evidence that is available to the agent. Evidence is an epistemic notion. The answer to whether an agent has a reason to perform a certain action thus derives from the answer to whether the agent had a reason to believe that he has a reason to perform that action. I am not sure how helpful this shift from the practical domain to the theoretical domain is in the end. But the idea that practical reasons are evidencedependent is being picked up: see for example Kiesewetter (2011). 39

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him. Critics have denied that the fact that internal reason statements are falsifiable by testing their logical and factual foundations is enough for internal reasons to be normative. Parfit (1997) and McDowell (1995), for instance, object that Williams’ notion of reasons is too psychologistic to preserve normativity. We will return to this criticism in chapter 4. Whether the attempt fails or succeeds, it remains true that the third refinement of the sub-Humean model is intended to assure the normative force of the concept of a reason. Williams interprets the statement ‘A has a reason to Φ’ in such a way that it can play a role in discussions not only about what people are actually disposed to do (that is about what people possibly could be motivated to do) but also in discussions about what people should become disposed to do (about what people should have in their range of motivational possibilities) (1989, 36). The potential distance between factuality and normativity is reflected in the possible divergence between an agent’s actual motivational set and his idealized motivational set, that is his motivational set after sound deliberation. 4. As the former additions make clear, a person A can have more or fewer reasons than he is aware of because his S can contain more or fewer elements than A knows of. Crucial to Williams’ internal reason theory is that this is something A can come to realize himself. The stipulated relation between reasons and an agent’s S must be of a particular kind, namely what Williams calls ‘a sound deliberative route’. Through extending or restricting the contents of the agent’s S, deliberation may bring an agent to realize that he actually has no reason to do something he thought he had a reason to do, or it can lead the agent to new reasons. Deliberation in Williams’ eyes comprises far more than means–end reasoning, and even more than what would strictly count as correcting errors of fact and reasoning. It also includes more complex imaginative processes such as “thinking how the satisfaction of the elements in S can be combined e.g. by time-ordering; where there is irresoluble conflict among the elements of S, considering which one attaches most weight to … or finding constitutive solutions, such as deciding what would make for an entertaining evening, granted that one wants entertainment.” (1979, 104) Exercising one’s imagination forms a substantial part of deliberation because, by imagining what it would be like if a certain state of affairs came about, we may acquire a more concrete sense of what would be involved, and this can create or extinguish a desire for that state of affairs. This addition to the sub-Humean model rules out the existence of reasons based on a certain kind of unconscious desire, namely the desires that cannot bear to be known without disappearing or changing in nature. I will come back to this implication of the internal reason theory, because I find it problematic. But for now it must be clear that the requirement that there must be a sound deliberative route from S to the action for which A has a reason does not require actual deliberation on the part of the agent. It only states that it must be possible for an agent to reach the conclusion to Φ through deliberation. A second implication of the condition that reasons should be 40

Chapter 2: Bernard Williams on practical reasons

accessible through sound deliberation is that it excludes universal reasons. This is due to Williams’ particular understanding of deliberation as reflection on and correction of the desires that an agent already has. Internal reasons are a function of the actual motivational set-up of a particular agent. In Williams’ view, whether someone has a reason to Φ is an empirical question. There is no a priori knowledge of reasons. One cannot stipulate a reason that applies to everybody because nobody has the same S and an agent has a reason to Φ only if he can arrive at Φ through a sound deliberative route which starts from his S.10 Moreover, not only is a person’s S indeterminate, but also what counts as a sound deliberative route. Williams does not give a fully determinate account of a sound deliberative route: “[s]ince there are many ways of deliberative thinking, it is not fully determinate in general what may count as a sound deliberative route; and from this it follows that the question of what the agent has a reason to do is itself not fully determinate.” (1989, 38) Consequently, in the internal reason theory it is impossible to say anything in general or in advance about what an agent should do or about what he would arrive at provided he followed a sound deliberative route. But this is not a disadvantage of his theory, Williams thinks, because it is often vague which reasons one has. “[I]it is unclear what the limits are to what an agent might arrive at by rational deliberation from his existing S … and I regard it as a basically desirable feature of a theory of practical reasoning that it should preserve and account for that unclarity.” (1979, 110) Williams’ broad conception of both the subjective motivational set and the deliberative route makes the internal reason theory more sophisticated, rich and realistic than the strictly instrumentalist, sub-Humean account he started with. After these four amendments the internal reason theory can be formulated as A has a reason to Φ only if there is a sound deliberative route from A’s subjective motivational set S to A’s Φ-ing. This is the formulation Williams explicitly prefers (2001, 91). At other times, he has given other formulations. In ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’, for instance, he formulates it as a necessary condition that “A could reach the conclusion that he should Φ (or a conclusion to Φ) by a sound deliberative route from the motivations he already has in his actual motivational set.” (1989, 35) The problem with the variety of formulations of the internal reason theory is that Williams is not consistent in what he takes to be the terminus of a sound deliberative route: where does the sound deliberative route lead to? Does the deliberation end in Φ-ing? Or in the decision to Φ? Or in the motivation to Φ? Or in the conclusion that one should Φ? Williams’ writing allows for all of these possibilities. I believe it helps to distinguish between the judgement ‘A has a reason to Φ’ being made from a third person’s per10

 fter giving the general formulation of Williams’ internal reason theory, I will comment on his A ambiguity about the terminus of a sound deliberate route: Does A arrive at Φ or does he arrive at a reason to Φ? 41

The Normativity of What We Care About

spective or by A himself. For the internal reason theory the meaning of ‘A has a reason to Φ’ when judged by someone who is not A comes down to the thought that there is a deliberative route from A’s actual S to Φ (or at least to A’s being motivated to Φ).11 From the agential perspective however the judgement that ‘A has a reason to Φ’ is the conclusion of an actual deliberation about the question ‘what should I do?’. After all the goal of first-person deliberation is not a state of motivation but a judgement or decision about what one should do. So from the first-person perspective it does not make sense to say that the terminus of the deliberation is Φ-ing or being motivated to Φ; the terminus is the judgement ‘I have a reason to Φ’. As we will see below, that judgement can be distinctively different from other judgements that the agent could make only if it subsequently motivates the agent. I believe that the strongest and most informative formulation of the internal reason theory takes up the third-person perspective and requires that a sound deliberative route is possible from the agent’s actual motivational set to (a motivation to) Φ rather than to the conclusion that A has a reason to Φ. Let me clarify why I think that ‘the conclusion that A has a reason to Φ’ is certainly not the proper terminus of the deliberative route in the internal reason theory. Consider this characterization of the internal reason theory: “[t]he central idea [of internalism about practical reasons] is that if B can say truly of A that A has a reason to Φ, then (leaving aside the qualifications needed because it may not be his strongest reason) there must be a sound deliberative route to Φ-ing which starts from A’s existing motivations.” (1995b, 186) In this passage, Williams takes Φ-ing to be the terminus of the deliberative route. If one wants to examine what makes B’s statement ‘A has a reason to Φ’ true, it is surely more informative to say that the statement is true only if there is a deliberative route from A’s existing motivations to Φ, than to say that the statement is true only if there is a deliberative route from A’s existing motivations to the statement ‘A has a reason to Φ’. In the latter case one still has no idea what the statement means, because the explanans contains the explanandum. So, in its strongest formulation, the internal reason theory says that an agent A has a reason 11

 ere is a further complication here, which is acknowledged though not solved by Williams. Th He concedes that presenting ‘Φ-ing’ as the terminus of the deliberative route is a simplification “leaving aside the qualifications needed because it [the reason to F] may not be his strongest reason”. (1995b, 186) As pointed out before, the internal reason theory is not an account of what it means to have ‘most reason to Φ’ but to have ‘a reason to Φ’ – a reason that can be overridden by other, stronger reasons to Ψ. Williams fails to incorporate the implications in his theory. I take it that one of the implication is that, on the internal reason theory, it is possible that, though A has a reason to Φ, this leads only to a motivation to Φ but not to actually Φ-ing, because there is a competing, stronger reason to Ψ. Thus, the fact that A does not Φ after sound deliberation does not falsify the statement that A has a reason to Φ; it falsifies only the statement that A has most reason to Φ. But then what would count as a falsification of the statement that A has a reason to Φ? The fact that A is not motivated to Φ after sound deliberation? But why should we expect A to be motivated to Φ if he judges that after all he has most reason to Ψ? I do not know how to account for the difference between ‘a reason’ and ‘most reason’ in the internal reason theory, and I will leave aside ‘qualifications needed’, as Williams does. 42

Chapter 2: Bernard Williams on practical reasons

to Φ when there is a sound deliberative route from A’s subjective motivational set to Φ-ing. One could interpret the most informative formulation as the proper, original formulation from which other formulations of the internal reason statements can be derived. Since the internal reason theory implies that all of ‘the ingredients’ out of which the internal reason statement is constructed are in principle available to the person about whom the internal reason statement is made, the internal reason theory also implies that “internal reason statements can be discovered in [first-personal] deliberative reasoning.” (Williams 1979, 104) Or, as Williams writes elsewhere, “what we can correctly ascribe to [an agent] in a third-personal internal reason statement is also what he can ascribe to himself as a result of deliberation.” (1979, 103) For instance, if an outsider B truly observes that A has a reason to go to the cinema, this reason judgement can also be reached internally by the agent A because what makes the judgement true is the fact that there is a sound deliberative route from A’s desire for an entertaining evening to going to the cinema, and A can ‘walk’ this sound deliberative route from her desires to the act of going to the cinema herself. So A can reach the reason judgement that she has a reason to Φ and act upon it, in which case the terminus of the sound deliberation is the judgement that she should Φ instead of the motivation to Φ. There has been some misunderstanding about the internal reason theory relating to this terminus question. McDowell (1995), for instance, assumes that for Williams (R) A has a reason to Φ and (D) If A deliberated correctly, he would be motivated to Φ are equivalent. This implies that, if (R) is something that can be arrived at by the agent A through deliberation, then (D) can be as well. But Williams objects to this interpretation of his theory. It is true, he admits, that his theory implies that to believe (R) is in some sense to believe (D), from which it follows that “if someone (for instance A) is presented with the statement (R), he must understand it as claiming (roughly) (D).” (Williams 1995b, 188) Yet, Williams emphasizes, “I certainly did not want to say that A would have come to believe the statement (D) though deliberation. That would be a very implausible idea.” (Williams 1995b, 188) Though (R), in a first-personal form, can be the outcome of first-personal deliberation, and though (R) means (D), a first-personal form of (D) cannot be the terminus of the rational deliberative route. Williams explains, “My argument does involve a connection between (R) and (D), and it also uses the idea of A’s arriving at a first-personal form of (R) by deliberation.” But his argument does not contain the idea that “(D) itself could be arrived at, in first-personal form, by correct deliberation.” (Williams 1995b, 188) This shows that (R) and (D) are not equivalent, and that, while (R) can, (D) cannot be the terminus of the agent’s rational deliberative route. Many critics, however, including McDowell, but also Parfit (see chapter 4), understand the internal reason theory as arguing for the equivalence of (R) and (D). I believe that lack of clarity about the terminus of the sound deliberative route is to blame for this misinterpretation.

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Other critics of Williams do not ascribe the wrong view to Williams, but fail to characterize the internal reason theory in its most proper, informative form. Thomas Scanlon, for example, writes, “Williams holds that a claim that an agent has reason to Φ, under the internal interpretation, can be true only if there is a ‘sound deliberative route’ leading from elements in that agent’s S to the conclusion that there is something to be said for Φ-ing.” (Scanlon 1998, 364) Obviously Scanlon is not wrong in ascribing this view to Williams, since Williams (1989, 35) offers this formulation of his theory himself, but I think that this formulation focuses on a derived thesis, not upon the central, most basic idea of the internal reason theory, namely that, for there being a reason to Φ, there must be a sound deliberative route leading from elements in an agent’s S to the agent’s Φ-ing. And when this deliberative route is taken by the agent himself it passes through the stage of forming the judgement ‘I should Φ’. Let me repeat that I do not consider it an implication of the internal reason view that actions done for a reason always need to be preceded by deliberation. The necessary condition is hypothetical: if the agent had deliberated before Φ-ing, he would have formed the judgement that he should Φ. In the next section we will look into Williams’ objections to the alternative for the internal reason theory. Summing up, the internal reason view is the view that: A has a reason to Φ only if there is a sound deliberative route from A’s subjective motivational set S to A’s Φ-ing.

2.4 Objections to external reasons When we ascribe reasons to a person in the internal sense, we assume that through deliberation that person can be brought to be motivated to do what he has reason to do. This internal account implies that a person has no reason to Φ if there is no sound deliberative route from his existing motives to his Φ-ing. Williams gives the example of a sick man who refuses to take medicines, not because of self-deception or incorrect information or anything else that could be influenced through deliberation, but because the man genuinely does not care about his health. To the internal reason theorist it does not make sense to insist that the man has a reason to take his medicines (Williams 1979, 105-106). The external reason theorist denies this and claims that a person’s reasons are defined independently of a person’s motivations. In the case of the sick man, for instance, it does not matter whether he actually cares about his health. The point is that he should care about it. Williams objects that it is not clear what the external reason theorist can mean by claiming that the sick man does have a reason to take the medicines or to care about his health, regardless of what he is motivated to do. In his eyes any model for reason interpretation must display a relativity of the reason statement to the agent’s subjective motivational set. Despite the wide usage of both internal and external statements about reasons, he thinks “external reason statements … are false” 44

Chapter 2: Bernard Williams on practical reasons

(1979, 113) or, moving away from the initial formulation of the issue in terms of truth conditions, he says that “there are only internal reasons for action” (1989, 35). He offers several arguments for this scepsis about external reasons. One can distinguish two main objections in Williams’ crusade against the external reason theory. They go back to two basic features of reasons that Williams discerns: (i) reasons can explain action and (ii) reasons are capable of motivating an agent and must, therefore, be accessible via rational deliberation from the agent’s perspective. Williams’ first objection intends to show that putative external reasons are insufficient to explain action. In his second objection he argues that, even if one finds a way for the external reason to fulfil the explanatory requirement, the external reason theory can never satisfy the further requirement that it should be possible for an agent to reach the reasons that he has through rational deliberation. Let me flesh out these two main objections first. Afterwards, I will add a third objection that can be discerned in Williams’ writings, which does not really offer a new argument but is rather based on the conclusion that, since external reasons do not meet the requirements expressed by features (i) and (ii), external reasons are obscure entities. 2.4.1 The no-explanatory-force objection Williams stipulates that a reason must be capable of explaining action. “If something can be a reason for action, then it could be someone’s reason for acting on a particular occasion, and it would then figure in an explanation of that action.” (1979, 106) Normative and explanatory reasons are interrelated in his opinion. If an agent acts for a reason, then that reason will be the explanation, so “the normative statement ‘He has a reason to Φ’ introduces the possibility of that reason being an explanation.” (1989, 39) However – and this is the crux of the argument – “nothing can explain an agent’s (intentional) actions except something that motivates him so to act.” (1979, 107) What Williams asks for when he requires that reasons can explain action is that reasons can motivate agents.12 His internal reason theory can meet this condition, since it defines a reason for A in terms of something that can motivate A. Yet, to Williams it seems that an external reason theory cannot account for the explanatory force of reasons: “No external reason statement could by itself offer an explanation of anyone’s actions.” (1979, 106) If A has a reason to Φ, and one considers the reason to be external, independent of any motivational fact about A, how could this reason ever explain any action? How could A ever be motivated by the statement that he has a reason to Φ unless there already is a connection between A’s motivation and his Φ-ing?

12

 s we will see below, some philosophers hold that the equation of explanation and motivation is A not justified. Ulrike Heuer (2004) for instance argues that to explain an action it is not sufficient to say, ‘I just desired to do so’; the question then is ‘why did you desire this?’. Rachel Cohon (1986) on the other hand claims that it is not always necessary to refer to motives in order to explain an action. 45

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Williams is quite confident about the connection that he makes between explanation and motivation: “When the reason is an explanation of his action, then of course it will be, in some form, in his S, because certainly – and nobody denies this – what he actually does has to be explained by his S.” (1989, 39) Nevertheless, some critics disagree. Rachel Cohon considers the claim that nothing can explain an agent’s actions other than something that motivates him to be “a controversial claim whose truth is by no means obvious.” (1986, 549) Her argument is interesting, though I believe it fails. She believes that it is not true that nothing can explain an agent’s intentional actions other than something that motivates him so to act, if by this clause Williams means: other than an element of S. She gives examples of intentional actions that cannot be explained by reference to an element of S. She takes S to consist of the desire-like states listed by Williams (dispositions of evaluation, personal loyalties, commitments…): “[f ]or example, on a particular evening a man makes a sack lunch as he does every evening; he knows that tomorrow he plans to lunch in a restaurant with a colleague; but as he performs his routine task he does not happen to make the connection. Or, … someone is swayed by a candidate’s personality and votes for him, without thinking about whether he wants the person to have the job, when in fact he does not.” (1986, 549) These actions are done intentionally, the agent knows what he is doing and would say that he did the thing on purpose. Furthermore, these actions are explicable. Suppose, the man voted for Johnson when he believed Smith would make a better chairman because he was influenced by Johnson’s charming personality. Suppose, the man made a packed lunch out of habit. All actions must be caused by something: in the given examples the actions are caused by emotion and habit. Cohon concludes, “The fact that we must mention a mental cause to explain intentional action does not, however, imply that this ‘whatever it was’ must be a desire, aim, loyalty or other element of S.” (1986, 552) My response to Cohon’s criticism would be that there is no reason why habits or emotions could not be part of S. Any mental cause that can get a person to act can be part of a person’s S. I think of what Williams calls ‘elements of S’ as what Davidson calls ‘pro-attitudes’. Cohon anticipates this rebuttal and vigorously resists the assumption that S can be equivalent to anything that motivates a person: “[f ]or Williams allows that someone who has an internal reason can fail to know about the reason, fail to be impelled to act, and fail to act …[W]hen the agent comes to believe she has a reason and then does act – when the cause of action does come into being – the internal reason gives us a way of explaining the origin of this cause of action by appealing to something that was there all along, an element of S …[So] Williams is really dealing with two different entities here and wants to explain the generation of one (the cause of action) by the presence of the other (the element of S) combined with a belief.” (1986, 552) Cohon is right that causes and elements of S do not always coincide, because, on the basis of an element in S, one can conclude that someone has a reason to Φ even if this element in S does not actually cause action (due to ignorance or faulty reasoning of the agent for instance). Williams insists, as we have seen, that a person can have an (internal) reason to Φ without there actually being something 46

Chapter 2: Bernard Williams on practical reasons

that causes Φ. The existence of an internal reason depends upon the presence of some element in S that would motivate a person after sound deliberation, but not upon elements that actually motivate the person. When Williams writes that a person can have a reason without being motivated to Φ, he introduces a difference between the person’s idealized S and her actual S, not elements of S and mental causes, as Cohon seems to think. There is no reason why habits and emotions may not survive rational deliberation, why, besides being mental causes, they may not also be elements of the idealized subjective motivational set S that determines which reasons an agent has. Let us accept that the explanation of intentional action must happen in terms of what motivates the agent. If the external reason theorist wants to defend his theory, he must take a different line from the one proposed by Cohon. He could reject the assumption that a normative reason must have explanatory force. To Williams, this assumption is basic. The concern with explanation is central in his argument. Not only does he write that “this explanatory dimension is very important… If there are reasons for action, it must be that people sometimes act for those reasons, and if they do, their reasons must figure in some correct explanation of their action” (1979, 102), but he even states that “some writers make a distinction between ‘normative’ and ‘explanatory’ reasons, but this does not seem to me to be helpful, because normative and explanatory considerations are closely involved with one another.”13 (2001, 93) Davidson’s influence is palpable here. In ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’ (1963) Davidson argued that the concept of a reason that justifies action just is a concept of a reason that causally explains it. A justification is simply a rationalizing explanation in terms of the agent’s desires and beliefs. The now common distinction between normative and motivating (or explanatory) reasons was not that common at the time Williams wrote ‘Internal and External Reasons’ (1979). Though most philosophers still accept the idea that normative reasons somehow influence an agent’s actions, some of them radically deny that this means that the concept of a reason is about explanation. This is the line taken by Parfit, as we will see in chapter 4.14 However, for the external  emember that in his description of the gin and tonic example, Williams distinguished between R a reason for drinking the glass, and the reason why the man drank the glass. I fail to see how this is anything other than a distinction between a normative and explanatory reason, and I do not understand why Williams is opposed to making this distinction. Of course, he is right that as such the distinction does not give an answer to the problem he wants to solve: how normative reasons are connected to action. 14 This line is also taken by Patricia Greenspan, among others. At an early stage in her reason theory she explicitly resists Williams’ idea that reasons are ‘potential motivators’; that their function is to explain actions. She believes “there is an alternative conception of practical reasons that loosens the tie to motivation, even granting that the usual point of acknowledging a reason is indeed to motivate.” She suggests ‘a critical conception of reasons’ according to which “a practical reason serves either to offer a criticism – meaning a potential criticism, not necessarily one that is put to the agent – or to answer one, by citing some valuable feature of the act.” (2007, 174) Greenspan calls her conception ‘the critical conception of reasons’. It leads to a reason externalist view. 13

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reason theorists who do accept the explanatory force requirement, together with the assumption that nothing can explain action other than motivation, the option left is the attempt to show that external reasons can motivate. Williams anticipates to this solution and denies its efficacy, which brings us to his second objection to the external reason theory. 2.4.2 The no-motivational-fuel objection Williams regards the possibility of ‘a sound deliberative route from A’s subjective motivational set to A’s Φ-ing’ as a necessary condition for the truth of the statement that A has a reason to Φ. Tying motivation closely to the concept of a reason, Williams has no problem explaining how an internal reason could come to motivate an agent. From his analysis of a reason in terms of the motivations of a rational agent, it also follows that reasons, conceived in the internal way, are accessible via rational deliberation from the agent’s perspective. In order to motivate, reasons must be determined by internal facts, Williams holds. And because they are determined by internal facts, reasons are accessible ‘internally’, that is, by the agent himself through rational deliberation. Thus, by describing the meaning of ‘A has a reason to Φ’ in terms of what A would be motivated to do if he deliberated rationally, the internal reason theorists assure us that reasons are accessible via rational deliberation from the agent’s perspective and that they can motivate an agent to do what he believes he has reason to do. But why should an agent be motivated to do what an external reason statement tells him to do? And how could an agent reach the reasons he has and by which he should be motivated if those reasons were not related to something that was ‘internal’ to the agent? According to Williams, external reason theorists can answer none of these questions adequately. One might think that external reason theorists could easily rebut Williams’ accusation that external reasons cannot motivate by pointing out that external reasons are not based upon motivational facts, but that they can nevertheless induce motivation. External reason theorists could invoke ‘belief ’ as a psychological link, as a way of ‘internalizing’ the external reasons. The idea is then that external reasons can motivate once they are accepted or believed by the agent. But then the question arises how or why a belief about reasons would motivate, if the description of what it means to have a reason lacks any connection to an agent’s motives. In the external reason theory, reasons are conceived of as a sort of external state of affairs – how could they influence an agent’s motivation? Williams supposes that external reason theorists could argue that an external reason statement can motivate an agent if the agent is rational and believes that he has indeed got a reason to Φ, because, they might say, “a rational agent is precisely one who has a general disposition in his S to do what he believes there is reason for him to do.” (1979, 109) But Williams protests that this reply is off the mark: “we were asking how any true proposition could have that content [the content of an external reason statement]. It cannot help, in answering that, to appeal to a supposed desire which is activated by a belief which

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has that very content.” (1979, 110) Williams reminds his opponents that he has no problem with accepting that a belief (for instance that one has a reason) can motivate. He wants to know what makes this a true belief, if it is. He thinks that external reason theorists cannot give an informative answer to that question. In defence of reason internalism he holds that we can tell a true from a false reason-belief if we think of the content of the belief as related to a motivational fact about the agent. Suppose B says that A has a reason to Φ. On the external reason theory it is possible that this reason statement is true, even if, at first, A has no motivation to Φ, nor any motivation that would come about after sound deliberation. If externalists further claim that it is possible that, after believing that B is right, A acquires the motivation to Φ, they owe us an explanation of the nature and possibility of this transition. To say that A was so “persuaded by his [B’s] moving rhetoric that he acquired both the motivation and the belief ” (1979, 108) would not count as a valid explanation, Williams notes. It must be that A acquires the motivation to Φ because he comes to believe that the reason statement is true. A’s motivation to Φ must be arrived at in a rational way; Φ-ing must be an action that A could rationally decide to do. But how could this motivation to Φ, which the agent did not have at first, be rationally arrived at? Externalists cannot appeal to the rational relation that a new motivation bears to earlier motivations, because “ex hypothesi, there is no motivation for the agent to deliberate from, to reach this new motivation.” (1979, 109) But neither can they just postulate that external reason statements motivate an agent if he is rational. They have to explain what the connection is between being rational and being motivated by external reasons, for it is not clear why an agent is rationally required to be motivated by external states of affairs that bear no rational relation to her motivations. What is it that the agent comes to believe in the external reason theory so that it can motivate and, more specifically, that it would be rational to be motivated by it? The ultimate question that Williams poses to the external reason theorists thus is: “[w]hat is it that one comes to believe when he comes to believe that there is a reason for him to Φ, if it is not the proposition ‘if he deliberated rationally, he would be motivated to act appropriately’?”15 (1979, 109) Williams clarifies his objection with an example, which became a standard example in the literature on practical reasons. Williams applies the difference between the internal and the external reason theory to the case of Owen Wingrave. Owen Wingrave is a character in Henry James’ short story of that title. Owen is a young man urged by his grandfather to join the army because all his ancestors have done so.16 Owen does not have the slightest ambition or desire, however, to embark on a  ne can see why McDowell thought that Williams identified (R) A has a reason to Φ with (D) O if A deliberated correctly, he would be motivated to Φ. See section 2.3 for Williams’ explanation of why he does not mean this to be an equivalence. 16 There circulates a small but persistent mistake with regard to this example. Williams, followed by many fellow philosophers, talks about the disagreement between Owen and his father, whereas in James’ story (and in Britten’s opera about the story) it is Owen’s grandfather who wants his grandson to join the army. Owen’s father died as a soldier when Owen was a child. 15

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military career. For the internal reason theorist, it is clear that Owen has no reason to join the army. Yet, an external reason theorist could insist that Owen has a reason despite his initial lack of motivation. Confronted by the requirement that reasons must have explanatory, more precisely motivating, force17 they could insist that, also on the external reason theory, an agent can acquire a motivation namely when he comes to believe the reason statement. Suppose the external reason theorists picture Owen Wingrave as being motivated after all, because he comes to believe that the fact that his family has a tradition of military honour is indeed a reason to join the army. The belief that he has a reason to join the army thus provides Owen with a motivation to act. The belief that his family has a tradition of military honour and that this gives him a reason to join the army can provide motivation, but only, Williams adds, if Owen is a man with a certain disposition in his S: the disposition to accept family honour as relevant to his practical decisions. Beliefs can motivate; that is not an issue between internalists and externalists. What they disagree about concerns the explanation of this possibility: how must the belief be thought so that a rational agent could reach it and subsequently be motivated by it? Scanlon (1998) gives us a good idea of what the external reason theorist must try to convince us of. Suppose someone who has always regarded the idea of personal honour as rather silly or old-fashioned. But then meeting someone who takes the idea seriously and coming to admire him, he comes to share this idea. Having gone through this transformation, he believes that honour is something worth caring about and that he was mistaken before. One could say that through the transformation he came to see things right. He came to see what had been true all along: that he had reason to regard honour as a value. This realization motivates the agent to do things for which he did not have the slightest motivation before. Williams finds this claim mysterious. A process of considering the matter aright cannot provide ‘motivational fuel’, he thinks (I borrow this term from Millgram 1996, 198). Williams does not deny that a person’s S can undergo serious changes and that he can become motivated to do something he was not motivated to do before. However, as Scanlon observes, “[w]hat Williams is denying is just that a change in what one cares about can be brought about in a certain way: by coming to see that one already had a reason for caring about that thing (a reason not grounded in one’s S as it was previously constituted).” (Scanlon 1998, 366) Externalists like Scanlon and Parfit would answer the question ‘How did A become motivated to Φ?’ in precisely that way: A just recognized he had reason to Φ. For them there is nothing puzzling 17

 e requirement for explanatory force is a requirement for motivating force. In the example Th at hand, we would not think that ‘Owen has a reason to join the army’ when it turns out that Owen went into the army under the pressure of his grandfather’s repeated, persistent pleas that his grandson should go into the army. That would not offer the right kind of explanation. What we want is an explanation of Owen’s behaviour that goes back to the fact that Owen joined the army because he himself believed that he had a reason, and this belief motivated him. See Williams (1979, 108-109). 50

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about this answer. But Williams finds it uninformative: it presupposes a notion of reasons and rational motivation without explaining wht the notions stand for. Williams could perfectly agree that through a process of deliberation one can come to see things differently or aright, and certainly this can affect one’s motivations, but only, Williams holds, if the deliberation starts from an element in S. If the external reason theorist presents the belief that one has a reason to Φ as the outcome of deliberation and the source of motivation, he has to confront Williams’ strong conviction that deliberation can motivate only if starting from S. The dividing question then becomes: what is deliberation capable of? The no-motivational-fuel objection thus rests on two claims, both of which are contested, as I will proceed to show. The first claim is the pure internalist claim that R is a reason for A to Φ only if A is capable of being motivated to Φ after deliberation. The second claim concerns Williams’ understanding of rational deliberation. He is an instrumentalist in the sense that he believes no motivation can arise from deliberation unless there is a desire to deliberate from. In other words: our capacity to be moved by beliefs (for example the belief ‘I have a reason to Φ’) rests on their instrumental relation to prior desires. This claim conveys a conception of motivation as much as about rationality: Williams believes not only that all motivation has desires as its source, but also that actions are rational insofar as they are rooted in desires. Korsgaard has argued that there is an asymmetrical dependence of the Humean theory of motivation on a Humean conception of practical rationality as instrumental rationality. I will turn to her objections to Williams’ instrumentalism after I have discussed McDowell’s criticism of Williams’ internalist claim. A first way to criticize Williams’ dismissal of the external reason theory consists in holding that Williams’ request for an explanation of why deliberation can motivate is irrelevant because deliberation does not need to play an important role in motivation. This is McDowell’s point of view (McDowell 1995). The discussion about deliberation becomes irrelevant once one suggests that the ‘transformation’ that Scanlon talks about must not be identified with a process of deliberating. McDowell questions the assumption that the transition from a state in which A is not motivated by the alleged reason to a state in which he is so motivated must be thought of as effected by correct deliberation. He believes that the transition may come down to conversion instead of deliberation. In this way, McDowell’s view entails the externalist statement that one can have a reason even if it does not become effective through deliberation, because maybe what is needed to realize that one has a reason is conversion instead of deliberation. The standard to which reasons correspond is not achieved by correcting factual and reasoning errors through sound deliberation. For McDowell the standard is set by what a wise person would do. Thus he proposes to define what a person has reason to do in terms of what ‘a wise person’ (a phronimos) or someone who has been properly brought up would do. Williams has replied to this objection by warning against moral weight-lifting: if A knows that he falls short of being a phronimos, that he, for instance, is not very temperate, he has good reason not to do some things that a temperate person could properly and safely do (Williams 1995b,

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190).18 By setting aside McDowell’s alternative as an external reason theory, and thus false, Williams overlooks an interesting aspect of McDowell’s criticism that I will take up in section 2.5. McDowell points out an assumption underlying the internal reason theory that is indeed questionable, namely that acting for reasons presupposes deliberation (if not in reality, at least hypothetically). The kind of counter-examples that McDowell thinks of are of the sort where someone acts in imitation of a good example: he is inspired by the good behaviour of someone else. He thereby offers an alternative (no-deliberation-involving) reading of the externalist theory of reasons. I think there may be an alternative within internal reason theory where reasons are determined by subjective states without presupposing the possibility, let alone the necessity, of deliberation on the agent’s part. A second strategy for attacking Williams’ defence of internal reasons is developed by Korsgaard (1986). I will elaborate on her Kantian alternative in chapters 4 and 5. For present purposes the following observations suffice. Korsgaard believes that Williams’ scepticism about the motivational force of rational considerations that are not reached through a deliberating process starting from existing motivations is groundless: “Williams’ argument does not show that if there were unconditional principles of reason applying to action we could not be motivated by them. He only thinks there are none.” (1986, 23) In general terms, Korsgaard argues that motivational scepticism (that is, doubt about the scope of pure reason as a motive) is always based on content scepticism (that is doubt about the possible content of rational requirements). With this argument Korsgaard clears the way for a Kantian approach to ethics: moral requirements can be explained in terms of rational standards that apply directly and unconditionally to deliberation. Contrary to what Williams assumes, Korsgaard believes that there are unconditional principles of practical reason, like the categorical imperative, and because these are principles of practical reason, individual agents can come to accept the principles through reasoning simpliciter. She translates her view in Williams’ terminology as follows: “[i]f we say that the agent comes to accept the principle through reasoning – through having been convinced that the principle admits of some ultimate justification – then there are grounds for saying that this principle is in the subjective motivational set of every rational person.” (Korsgaard 1986, 22) Korsgaard shares Williams’ concern for the motivational force of reasons. She commits herself to what she calls ‘the internalist requirement’, namely that reasons must be capable of motivating. But she points out that the internalist requirement does not support the conclusion that all reasons depend on contingent desires. On the basis of the internalist requirement alone, one cannot argue that reasons are necessarily contingent, since it may be that a disposition to be motivated by certain reasons is necessarily present in all rational agents. Williams does not examine this possibility; he merely assumes that there are no categorical imperatives, no rational requirements that apply to agents independently of their desires. His motivational scepticism de18

 is idea comes very close to the consideration that motivates Smith to prefer the so-called adTh vice model of practical reasons to the so-called exemplar model. See chapter 3 for this difference illustrated by the angry squash player. 52

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pends on a content scepticism that is not warranted according to Korsgaard: she is positive that there are rational principles of action the content of which shows them to be justified. Surprisingly, Williams makes Korsgaard’s critique harmless by avowing that he has “no basic disagreement with Christine Korsgaard’s excellent paper ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’.” (1989, 37) Since he never pretended his description of rational deliberation to be determinate, Williams thinks his theory has no problem adopting a broader conception of what sound deliberation involves, and allowing for rational procedures that reveal reasons that all agents have on the basis of a universally shared disposition. Indeed, he says, one could wonder why a sound deliberative route involves only corrections of errors of fact and reasoning, and not also moral considerations. Williams thinks that there are simple grounds for writing requirements of correct information and reasoning into the notion of a sound deliberation. “In general, the aim of getting things right in such ways [that is, by correcting errors of fact and reasoning] is part of any agent’s interest as a rational deliberator.” (Williams 2001, 92) Someone who also wants the constraints of morality to be built into the notion of what it is to be a rational deliberator is free to argue for that, but, Williams stresses, “[h]e cannot get that conclusion for nothing.” (1989, 37) By enlarging the reach of a sound deliberative route, one does not contradict the internal reason theorist’s claim that reasons must be explicable in terms of what the agent would be motivated to do after deliberation. That is why Williams writes that he has no basic disagreement with Korsgaard. To a certain extent, Williams is right to embrace Korsgaard’s view, because they are united in their rejection of the externalist position. Korsgaard also rejects the external reason theory, which she defines as the view that reasons are somehow just out there, and that we are rational if we respond to these ‘reasons’ the normative force of which comes from outside us. The externalist “take[s] the notion of ‘a reason’ to be the basic notion; then he simply defines rationality as receptivity to those items.” (Korsgaard 2002, 63) She rejects this view for similar reasons to Williams: “[t]he trouble with that position is that it is too blank, it doesn’t explain anything, why we respond that way or what makes the response appropriate.” (Korsgaard 2002, 63) In contrast to externalists, Korsgaard takes the notion of our rational nature as the basic notion and defines reasons in terms of it. Yet in developing her alternative to the externalist’s view she withdraws from Williams, because in his picture of internal reasons the basic notion is that of a desire that survives deliberation. The accompanying instrumentalist conception of rational deliberation is rejected by Korsgaard and a fortiori by the externalists.19 Brad Hooker provides a sharp formulation of this rejection. 19

 ough Korsgaard reformulates the Kantian conviction that pure reason can be practical in HuTh mean terms as: some rational principles are in the subjective motivational set of every person, it would be a mistake to call her conception of rationality therefore instrumental. The idea is precisely the opposite: that reason can bind an agent regardless of the content of his subjective motivational set. At most, Korsgaard could locate the rational principles in formal aspects of this motivational set, but not its content. 53

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Hooker (1987) believes that Williams’ refutation of the external reason theory is question-begging: Williams first deprives reason of any motivating force and then ‘argues’ that practical reasoning cannot motivate without the help of an element in S. On Williams’ own conception, ‘rational deliberation’ has as its starting point the subjective motivational set, but the external reason theorist will be dissatisfied with this conception. As Hooker clarifies: “In contrast to Williams, the external theorist is likely to think that (at least some) rational deliberation about reasons for action starts not from the agent’s own subjective present motivations, but from some objective (‘external’) values or requirements, fixed independently of the agent’s present motivations.” (Hooker 1987, 101) As transpires from his reaction to Korsgaard’s critique, Williams can be open-minded about the range of considerations that can play a role in rational deliberation, yet at one point he cannot give in: deliberation must start from an element in S that is there prior to the deliberation. Hooker concludes that Williams needs to argue for that. Why is it wrong to hold that rational practical deliberation starts from something external to the agent’s present subjective motivational set? Hooker holds that as long as this argument is not provided, Williams has not succeeded in refuting the external reason theory. Williams writes explicitly that we cannot define “a notion of rationality when the action rational for A is in no way relative to A’s existing motivations.” (1979, 112) Therefore he cannot conceive of a rational deliberation independent of the elements in S. But such an independent, ‘pure’ deliberation is exactly what Korsgaard presupposes when she writes that agents come to accept unconditional principles of reason through reasoning. So when Williams asserts that Korsgaard’s concern for rational and moral principles could be integrated into the internal reason theory by extending the reach of a sound deliberative route, I believe he takes her criticism too lightly. Normativity is not ‘transmitted’ by rational principles from desires to reasons, Korsgaard writes (2002, 64). Normativity is constituted by rational principles. On her view, no desires are needed to determine, for instance, that one has a reason to act morally because purely on the basis of our rational nature it is a fact that some rational principles, like the categorical imperative, have normative authority. As Hooker rightly remarks, Williams cannot just postulate that deliberation must start from an element in S. He owes his critics an argument. One argument could be that deliberation must start from an element in S, because otherwise it cannot motivate. But, as Hooker shows, this argument begs the question. Williams can come up with a better argument, however. Coming to believe that one has an external reason through deliberation cannot motivate, not only because deliberation can motivate only if starting from S, but also because, according to Williams, one cannot give an understanding of the notion of ‘a reason’ unless the fact that A has a reason to Φ goes back to the fact that Φ is related to desires of A that would be promoted by Φ. This might seem dogmatic or stubborn, but I believe Williams has a case here, which is, perhaps, better explained by James Dreier (2001) than by himself.

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Dreier (2001) shows how basic the notion of a desire is in defining rationality, by setting up ‘a tortoise argument’, named after Lewis Carroll’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise (Carroll 1895). In this story the tortoise considers an argument in this form: (a) If these two sides are equal to the same, then they are equal to each other (b) These two sides are equal to the same (z) They are equal to each other The tortoise claims to believe (a) and (b) but to be unsure about (z). He asks Achilles to add a premise that assures him that (z) follows from the premises. Achilles adds (c) If (a) and (b) are both true, then (z) must also be true The tortoise is still in doubt and asks if he can add another premise. (d) If (a) and (b) and (c) are all true, then (z) must also be true. But of course adding this premise, and an indefinitely long list of further premises, will not help the tortoise reach the desired conclusion. “His problem is not a lack of premises; clearly (a) and (b) are perfectly sufficient premises for the conclusion to be reached! The Tortoise’s problem, his irrationality, was that he did not draw the logical conclusion of an argument whose premises he accepted and whose reasoning was valid and simple…He did not accept the inference rule, modus ponens.” (Dreier 2001, 41) What the tortoise is missing could not be expressed in a further premise or belief. The modus ponens rule is as basic as one can get in theoretical reasoning. Dreier draws a parallel with the means–end rule in practical reasoning. The means–end rule says that ‘If you desire to Ψ and believe that by Φ-ing, you will Ψ, then you have a reason to Φ.’ Suppose someone fails to be motivated by the acknowledged means to her desired ends, then something is wrong with her. For instance, someone wants to see the Mona Lisa, and we tell her that the only way to get to see the Mona Lisa is to take the train to Paris and visit the Louvre, but she shrugs and asks why she should do that. Something is wrong with that person. It does not make sense to ask for a reason in this context. We cannot justify the means–end rule. If an agent does not accept the means–end rule as offering reasons, then what would count as a reason by his lights? Dreier writes, “Someone who doesn’t accept the means-end principle cannot be given reasons of any sort. That we cannot justify our principle to such a person is no more troubling than our inability to justify principles of deduction.” (2001, 45) Dreier concludes that “Humeans may plausibly claim that instrumental reasons are groundlevel reasons.” (2001, 43) But then it turns out that desires are necessary for reasons, since “instrumental reasons are never independent of our contingent desires.” (2001, 43) An agent can keep asking why he should do something, and sometimes these questions are justified, but at a certain point, reasons have to end. And, according to

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Dreier, they have to end with our instrumental reasons, that is the reasons that emerge from the desires we have. Dreier’s helpful comparison should be slightly modified to fit Williams’ story about reasons, because rational deliberation in the internal reason theory involves more than means–end reasoning (most strikingly, as we have seen, Williams also includes the use of imagination). But this does not change the fact that the rational process that brings an agent to acknowledge something to be a reason and at the same time to be motivated by it, should spring from the subjective motivational set. Now we can see that the no-motivational-fuel objection to the external reason theory not only objects that external reason beliefs cannot motivate, it goes further and claims that external reason beliefs are not about reasons. External reasons are not reasons, not because they cannot motivate – though Williams thinks that that is also the case, it would make a poor, question-begging argument, as Hooker points out – but because there is no way of knowing whether these external facts that are postulated as giving agent A a reason to Φ, have anything to do with him, and with what he should do. The problem with the externalist account of the reason statement (R) ‘A has a reason to Φ’ is, as Williams puts it at one moment, “that (R) does not emerge as a statement distinctively about the person A” (Williams 1995b, 191) – not as a statement about A’s motivations, nor as a statement about A’s reasons. For Williams it is the connection with desires (which are always personal) that makes a reason relevant to a particular agent. And it is their connection to desires that makes reasonstatements different from value-statements. An agent can concede of many things that they are valuable without thereby feeling addressed, bound or guided by those considerations. As will become clear in chapter 5 I am not personally convinced that desires are the best candidate for marking this difference between what is valuable and what is reasonable/rational. Thus I am critical of Williams’ own answer to the request, but I agree that the request is legitimate and not met by the externalist. Of course an externalsit could dig his heels in and repeat that if one holds on to external reasons one accepts that R gives one reasons to do certain things, without further questions. But, like Williams, I want to know more about these reasons and what constitutes them. 2.4.3 The obscurity objection Williams derives the claims both that external reason beliefs cannot motivate and that they are not about reasons from the fact that they do not have a content that is related to the agent’s desires. That is the full extent of the no-motivational-fuel objection. The obscurity objection could be interpreted as an application of the more general claim that, in the externalist account, “(R) [‘A has a reason to Φ’] does not emerge as a statement distinctively about the person A [and] if (R) does say anything about A, this externalist account does not sufficiently distinguish what (R) says about him from other things that might be said about him.” (1995b, 191-192) This objection reflects Williams’ worry that the external reason theorist does not offer any content for external reasons statements or, more precisely, that he does not offer a content that 56

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makes a statement about A’s reasons. In his words, it is not clear whether the external reason theory offers “a distinctive kind of statement about, distinctively, A.” (1995b, 194) Williams wonders how one could distinguish an external reason statement from all the other things that can be said about an action one approves or disapproves of, and why one wants to preserve the notion of an external reason at all if its surplus meaning is not clear. For instance, to make sense of the proposition ‘A has a reason to try 12-tone music’ it must have a content that goes beyond ‘listening to 12 tone music is worthwhile.’ (see Williams 1995b, the example is originally McDowell’s) As we know, this content in Williams’ eyes must have something to do with an element in A’s S such as his present taste in music. But what content do external reason theorists give to the reason statement? The stakes increase when Williams applies this way of thinking to an example in the moral sphere. It is good to remember that the internal reason theory is about practical reasons in general and that it “applies equally well to, say, reasons to go surfing or to get married or to eat Thai food”, as Jenkins puts it (2006, 88). But to many philosophers the implications of Williams’ analysis become truly worrying when applied to reasons for doing the morally right thing. In ‘Internal and External Reasons’ Williams offers the example of a man who maltreats his wife, and whose attitudes and acts would not be altered by deliberation. The internal reason theorist can accuse the man of being ungrateful, brutal, nasty, selfish… but the external reason theorist wants to say more.20 He wants to claim that, despite this man’s motivational state, he has a reason to treat his wife better. But Williams does not see what the externalist might mean by this. What else could he mean but that the man’s behaviour does not accord with what we think it should be? What would be gained by saying that he has a reason to treat his wife better? What would that add to the claim that it would be better if he were nicer to his wife? As he remarks, “Externalism is uninformative about the conditions of saying that A has a reason to act in some desired way, as opposed to other things that may be said to or about A.” (1989, 43) Of course Williams grants that sentences of the form ‘A has a reason to Φ’ are used in the external way. But, according to Williams, these sentences are “false, incoherent or something else misleadingly expressed.” (1979, 111) To make sense of these external reason statements one must interpret them as not strictly saying that A has a reason, but as expressing the speaker’s disapproval, or as a way of saying that 20

In ‘Internal and External Reasons’ Williams writes that the external reason theorist wants to say that the man is irrational, but external reason theorists have objected that that is a defective interpretation of the external reason theory. Not doing what one believes one has an overruling reason to do counts as irrational, but not doing what one has an overruling reason to do is not always irrational – not even according to the externalist. Scanlon, who defends a kind of external reason theory, shows that if a man fails to recognize a reason he has, it does not follow that he is irrational. It might be more appropriate to call him insensitive (note that there remains a kind of failure nonetheless) (Scanlon 1998, 372). In later articles (2001, 93; 1995b, 192) Williams admits that he has put the point too strongly but that the question remains nevertheless: what does the externalist take the claim ‘A has a reason to Φ’ to say? 57

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the speaker wants A to do something else, or as an expression made by an optimistic internal reason theorist who is convinced that somewhere, at a deep level, A must desire to Φ (Williams 1979, 106 and 111). If, however, the speaker insists that he truly means to say that A has a reason, Williams sees no alternative to characterizing the external reason claim as “coercive” (1996, 118), “moralistic” (1989, 44) and mere “bluff and brow-beating” (2001, 95; 1981, 111). In ‘Values, Reasons, and the Theory of Persuasion’ (1996) he argues, in the same vein, that reference to an agent’s subjective motivational set is needed to allow for a distinction between a reason A has but is unaware of and a reason that is forced upon A. He writes, “The failings of an externalist account come out all the more clearly when we reflect on the kind of discussion that might be needed to convince an agent that such a reason applied to him, and how that discussion could hardly fail to be coercive.” (1996, 118) In ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’ (1989) Williams applies this objection to external reasons to an analysis of ‘blame’. One might have thought that moral attitudes suggested the existence of external reasons. But Wiliams subverses the point. The image of blame that can be derived from an external reason account is unappealing because the external reason account “gives us no way of understanding the difference between a blame that might hope to achieve recognition, and the blame that hopes by mere force to focus on the agent’s reasons a judgement that represents in fact only a rejection (perhaps an entirely justified rejection) of what he has done. It leaves us, that is to say, in the condition of moralism.” (1989, 44) The basic idea is that to blame someone is to think that he should have acted otherwise. But to make this blaming appropriate one must suppose that the person could have acted otherwise. Williams does not allude to the metaphysical threat of determinism and free will; he merely wants to make the point that for blame to be appropriate one must suppose that the reason to Φ that one presupposes in blaming someone for not Φ-ing is a reason for which the agent can act, that is, a reason that connects to her motivational states and thus an internal reason. This could be as general as a desire to be respected by other people, for example. In this case the blaming functions as ‘a proleptic mechanism’, Williams says: the blaming (for failing to Φ) anticipates circumstances in which it will be true that the agent has an internal reason to Φ. In practice the difference can be small between, on the one hand, an external reason theorist uttering a reason statement about A without presupposing that there is a motivational state in A that could make A Φ, and on the other an internal reason theorist who launches reason ascriptions in the hope that they may reach someone’s heart. As Williams (1989) puts it, external reason statements may after all be optimistic internal reason statements. What is distinctive of an internalist’s attribution of a reason for action is that he presupposes the ability of the agent to perform that action. The objection that external reason statements are obscure consists of two charges: that they fail to be distinctively about A and that they fail to be distinctively different from other evaluations one could make regarding A. The first charge relates to Williams’ disagreement with McDowell and the question what the phronimos could mean to me. Of course, one can insist on expressing the thought that Φ-ing is what 58

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a decent person would do in terms of reasons for acting. But when nothing more is meant than that a decent person or phronimos would Φ, then nothing is ‘gained’ by claiming that A has a reason to Φ, says Williams (1995b, 215). Now this is an important part of Williams’ argument: he wants to ‘gain’ something, he expects some work to be done by the statement that A has a reason to Φ. This concern reveals itself clearly when he puts his objection to externalism in terms of ‘what difference would external reason statements make?’. He writes, “It would make a difference to ethics if certain kinds of internal reason were generally to hand… But what difference would external reasons make?... Should we suppose that, if genuine external reasons were to be had, morality might get some leverage on a squeamish Jim or priggish George, or even on the fanatical Nazi?.... I cannot see what leverage it would secure, what would these external reasons do to these people or for our relations to them?” (1995b, 216) This is the second charge of obscurity: external reason theorists cannot distinguish between saying ‘Φ-ing is good’ and ‘A has a reason to Φ’. Some externalists have pressed Williams for an explanation of why we would want to distinguish between these two claims. For instance, Scanlon (1998) raises the question whether it makes sense to differentiate between ‘A acts badly’ and ‘A has a reason to act otherwise’ when we look at the example of the man who treats his wife badly and who has nothing in his subjective motivational set that would be served by changing his ways. Scanlon writes, “He is, however, the kind of person about whom Williams would allow us to say that he is inconsiderate, cruel, insensitive, and so on. These criticisms do involve accusing him of a kind of deficiency, namely a failure to be moved by certain considerations that we regard as reasons. (What else is it to be inconsiderate, cruel, insensitive, and so on?) If it is a deficiency for the man to fail to see these considerations as reasons, it would seem that they must be reasons for him. (If they are not, how can it be a deficiency for him to fail to recognize them?) Why not conclude, then, that the man has reason to treat his wife better?” (1998, 367) In answering this question (2001, 96) Williams repeats the importance of the distinction between our believing that it would be better if an agent came to count a consideration as a reason to Φ and saying that this consideration already counts as a reason for A (since it does for us, for instance). Imagine that in the case of the cruel husband who has no desire whatsoever that would be served by treating his wife in a more humane way, we, nevertheless, insist that this man has a reason to treat his wife better. What we mean to say, according to Williams, is that it would be better if the man came to count as a reason a consideration that we, other citizens or human beings in general count as a reason. Williams assures us that this is a perfectly valid and justified reaction. And, moreover, there is certainly a lot of psychological material that can help to turn the statement that ‘A has a reason to Φ’ into a statement about the reasons that A really has, just as there is a lot of psychological material to bridge the gap between externalist claims and internalist claims about reasons. But one cannot deny the principal difference, as Scanlon risks doing, between people saying that A has a reason to Φ and A’s really having a reason to Φ, on pain of muddling the distinction 59

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between bluff and brow-beating (ascribing a reason to someone while he does not have that reason) and describing a true state of affairs.21

2.5 The Tess case: an objection to Williams’ internal reason theory As transpires from the obscurity objection, Williams thinks that reason-statements must be about A in particular, and not about A as an instance of a type (‘agents’). In many places in his work (for example also in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy) he holds it against Kantianism that it overlooks a difference between practical and theoretical reasons: reasons to believe are impersonal, but reasons to act, he thinks, are inescapably connected to the particular desires of an agent. Most of the time this aspect of his work is connected to Williams’ wish to preserve a connection between normativity and motivation in combination with a defence of a Humean Theory of Motivation: desires are an indispensable ingredient of motivation, and thus of an account of normative reasons. But I think that his response to McDowell reveals another rationale for Williams’ preoccupation with desires: he insists on a connection between reasons and an agent’s desires, not only because he thinks that reasons must be able to motivate, but also because reasons must be distinctively about A; and apparently A is distinguished from B, C and others by his psychology. If this interpretation makes sense, Williams obscured it by giving the impression that motivational force, rather than the link to selfhood, was his main concern. Moreover, if the connection between reasons and an agent’s self is crucial, one could wonder whether desires really are that important: do desires take up such an important place in a description of the self? I think that Williams was on to something important with regard to the connection between practical reasons and the agential self, but I am not sure that the focus on ‘desires’ captures what is of essence in this connection.

21

S ome philosophers have objected that there is a tension between Williams’ internalism and his defence of thick concepts (see for example Heuer (2012)). Thick concepts are concepts like ‘chaste’ or ‘kind’ or ‘modest’: Williams defines them as both world-guided (or descriptive) and action-guiding (or prescriptive). The objection goes that if ‘cruel’ is a thick concept, then the statement that a man is cruel implies the ascription of reasons on Williams’ own definition of thick concepts, making it incoherent to say that a man is cruel yet has no reason to change his behavior. Williams anticipates this objection when he writes, “It would also be a misunderstanding to suppose that the force of the internalist view disappears if one grants that some moral statements are themselves factual: that their application is world-guided.” (1989, 38) I think the compatibility of internalism and thick concepts depends on the possibility of conceiving the validity of thick concepts (and the reasons implied) as speaker-dependent. Chastity is a good case to support this interpretation: a speaker who judges that A is unchaste has reasons himself to be chaste but he cannot just assume that an agent who does not use the concept of chastity also has a reason to pursue the courses of action to which the concept of ‘chastity’ applies. Williams writes, “To show this, the speaker would need to show that the agent has reason to use that concept, to structure his or her experience in those terms.” (1989, 38) 60

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For me that is at least a strong incentive to look further and try out other descriptions of what it means to have a reason to Φ. But there is another reason why I am not satisfied with Williams’ account of reasons, and this has to do with the importance he accords to the formation of beliefs in the life of a rational agent. Let me first establish that Williams indeed ascribes an important role to beliefs, before, secondly, addressing my concerns with that. Look again at the requirements of explanatory force and motivational fuel. Williams claims that “[i]f something can be a reason for action, then it could be someone’s reason for acting on a particular occasion, and it would then figure in an explanation of that action.” (1979, 106) The way in which the reason explains an action is through motivation: if R is a reason to Φ then R must be capable of motivating an agent to Φ. How exactly does this motivational force of R establish itself? There must be a psychological link between the fact that is presumed to be a reason (for example that military careers are a family tradition) and the motivation to act (for example to join the military). Williams thinks of this psychological link as a belief, not a belief that is explicitly about reasons (because then the theory would become circular and uninformative) but a belief the content of which is such that the belief motivates the agent after sound deliberation. His whole approach suggests that if we want to know more about the concept of ‘having a reason to Φ’ we have to think about the content of agential beliefs. For example he presses the externalists to say more about what external reasons are by raising the question: what is it that a rational agent comes to believe according to the exernalist? And in order to show that internal reasons, unlike external reasons, meet the explanatory-force requirement, he writes, “the claim that he has a reason to Φ – that is, the normative statement ‘He has a reason to Φ’ – introduces the possibility of that reason being an explanation; namely, if the agent accepts that claim.” (1989, 39) And it is clear that by ‘acceptance of a statement’ he means the belief that the statement is true. But do reasons primarily operate as contents of belief? Can reasons not explain actions unmediated by beliefs? According to the internal reason theory the fact that someone has a reason refers to the fact that the agent has a mental state that can lead to action via a sound deliberative route. My doubts about the role of beliefs have to do with my doubts about how essential to rationality deliberation is. I want to emphasize that I am not sceptical about the importance of rationality and reasons to agency, but about whether deliberation is as important and whether it should be part of the analysis of what it means to have a reason. My doubts are similar, yet not identical, to the doubts of many philosophers who take seriously what experimental psychology tells us about the effects of confabulation and implicit bias and other cognitive mechanisms, ruling the agent’s mind and making his decisions less self-made and less rational than he might think. Though these data from psychology are certainly interesting, I will confine myself to daily-life examples that show the limits of our deliberative capacities. These are examples of agents who act rationally by ignoring the outcome of deliberation, thus challenging Williams’ description of reasons as constituted through sound deliberation. For my counter-argument to work, it is important to realize that deliberation in 61

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Williams’ definition plays more than an epistemological role. He does not think that reasons exist independently of an agent’s mental activity. He says that 1. reasons are not discovered but constructed, and 2. reasons are constructed through deliberation. I agree with the first part of this claim. Yet, I think Williams accords too much weight to deliberation.22 I will develop my criticism with the help of two cases: the Huck Finn case, and what I will call the Tess case. Huckleberry Finn, the character from a novel by Mark Twain, is well known in the debate about rational akrasia. Nomy Arpaly used Huck Finn to challenge the widespread assumption that acting against an all things considered judgement is always irrational. More precisely, she argues that “sometimes an agent is more rational for acting against her best judgment than she would be if she acted in accordance with her best judgment.” (2003, 36) Huck made friends with the slave Jim. When Jim runs away, Huck judges that he ought to inform the police about Jim’s whereabouts, but he fails to act accordingly because he feels unable to do so (and not because something external got in the way). Arpaly makes the claim that though Huck certainly acted against his belief, he also seems to have acted in line with another aspect of his personality, and therefore it makes sense to say that his action, though akratic, was rational in that it cohered better with his overall mental set-up. Another example of Arpaly’s is that of Sam the Hermit, a young student who judges that he should become a hermit, that he should restrict his social life to a bare minimum and devote his time to academic study. He believes that this is what he should do, all things considered. But in fact, given Sam’s overall set of desires and his personality, becoming a hermit would make him miserable. Whenever he is alone for too long he becomes depressed and his productivity decreases instead of increasing. Therefore, also in Sam’s case, as in Huck’s, it is more rational to act akratically than to do what he judges best. When Sam’s desires get the better of him and he fails to become a hermit, he violates all his beliefs, yet ends up doing what he has most reason to do given the general set-up of his personality, taking into account the things that define him besides his beliefs. Arpaly admits that there is always an element of irrationality involved in acting against one’s own judgement (a failure of coherence between one’s intentions and beliefs). But in the cases described acting in accordance with judgement would make matters worse, it would make the action more irrational than when the agent acted against it: Sam has more desires that would be frustrated by reducing social contact than desires that would be fulfilled by it, Huck relies on a deep feeling in him that is in the end more important than the momentary decision that he made. One insight that I take from the debate on rational akrasia and that motivates me to look beyond Williams is the insight that mistrusting your own act of deliberative 22

 ernard Williams’ anti-Kantian philosophy is often criticized for making too little room for reaB son and reflection. It may therefore surprise the reader that my criticism goes in precisely the opposite direction. Setiya’s recent overview of the internalism–externalism debate has reconfirmed me in my intuition that an alternative internal reason theory is possible and needed. He writes “One can be an ‘internal reasons theorist’ while finding Williams’s picture of practical reasoning excessively reflective or intellectual in its appeal to… belief.” (Setiya 2012, 3) 62

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judgement can be as rational as mistrusting your feelings. However, the Huck and Sam cases do not offer me enough, because it is possible to interpret their message epistemologically: apparently, deliberation does not always reveal the reasons we have, and sometimes it is better to rely on our instincts or on our emotions. As such these cases do not cast doubt on the claim that in principle deliberation can always reveal one’s reasons. They only show that sometimes, in practice, feelings are a better guide. If Huck had been born in different times, if Sam had had better self-knowledge, deliberation would have led them to the right conclusion. I want to make a stronger claim than the cases of Huck and Sam allow for, namely the claim that in some cases it is necessarily impossible for deliberation to guide an agent to his reasons. I want to make a point about the nature of reasons rather than our access to them. Therefore, I will turn to another case. Imagine someone, whom I will call Tess, who tends to sabotage herself whenever she forms beliefs about what she should do. This means that it is possible in her case that she has a reason to Φ (let us say move in with her boyfriend) yet no reason to form that judgment upon deliberation. If she deliberated and drew the (right) conclusion that she has a reason to move in with her boyfriend, she would not cope very well with the ‘pressure’ of that judgment, she would panic and start behaving differently thus changing her situation and making it less likely that moving in is what she should do. A good friend of hers knows that moving in would be good for her, he thinks that she has a reason to do so, but he also knows her habits and he advises her to follow her intuitions and not to think too much. The point of this case is not so much to offer a counterexample to Williams’ internal reason theory, though it also does that: Tess has a reason to Φ yet she would not be motivated to Φ after sound deliberation. The point is rather that it shows that the relation between deliberation and reasons should not be conceived as constitutive or necessary in the way Williams does. I do not present this case as a counter-example to the internal reason theory because, as I said before, I do not think that extensional arguments can decide the discussion between internalists and externalists. I present the case as an ‘intuition pump’. To me it reveals something intriguing about human agency and about what it means to have a reason to do something. Tess’ case is crucially different from Sam the Hermit’s case: it is impossible for Tess to be in a state where she both forms the judgement ‘I ought to move in with my boyfriend’ and actually has a reason to do so. From the moment she forms the judgement her feelings change and she no longer has a reason to move in. So this is the challenge Tess presents to Williams’ definition of reasons: Tess’ reasons cannot come out through a process of deliberation, because forming a reason-belief destroys the reason for the action that the situation called for before the belief was formed.23

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 ne could argue that these cases of self-sabotage are exceptions, not to be treated as the standard O for a theory’s correctness. Yet, I think cases in which people are hindered rather than helped by their deliberative mechanisms are not that exceptional. Moreover as I said I see the case as an intuition pump, inviting us to think about the nature of reasons and rational agency in general. 63

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Tess’ case is a variation on what is known as the conditional fallacy objection. Counterfactual analyses of practical reasons are typically vulnerable to this objection. To commit the conditional fallacy objection is “to claim that it is necessary for an agent’s having a reason to do A that he would be motivated under certain conditions to do A, when there are some reasons that the agent can have only if precisely those conditions do not obtain.” (Finlay & Schroeder 2008) Williams’ theory of practical reasons is counterfactual in that he defines reasons in terms of motivations that an agent would have if he deliberated rationally. But sometimes agents have reasons precisely because they are not fully rational. Or sometimes agents are like Tess: they have a reason to Φ as long as they do not deliberate about it. To understand the problem with counterfactual analysis it helps to look at definitions of happiness. Consider the definition of happiness that says that someone is happy if he would answer in the affirmative when asked whether he is happy. But one can easily imagine that some people are quite happy until they are asked that question. The counterfactual definition therefore has a problem. It is ironic that Wiliams falls prey to the conditional fallacy, because he accuses others of it. Remember the objection that he raised against McDowell: McDowell makes reasons depend on what the phronimos would be motivated to do. Williams objects that being less than fully virtuous gives agents reasons that would not motivate the virtuous man. But Williams’ own internalist thesis involves counterfactuals as well, involving sound deliberation. Does he not fail to accommodate the reasons that agents have in circumstances where they are not capable of deliberating soundly? I think he does, as the Tess case illustrates. Therefore I am not satisfied with Williams’ theory of practical reasons and want to examine other models and test them on their ability to accommodate Tess’ reasons.

2.6 Conclusion If reasons are understood in the external sense, it is not clear how they explain action, how they motivate agents, how they are accessible through rational deliberation from the agent’s perspective and how they say something about an agent’s reasons rather than about an outsider’s (dis)approval. Internal reasons have explanatory force, provide motivational fuel when they are arrived at by the agent through rational deliberation and are not obscure. These are the arguments for the internal reason theory that states that A has a reason to Φ only if there is a sound deliberative route from A’s subjective motivational set S to A’s Φ-ing. It is a consequence of the internal reason theory that the statement ‘A is morally required to Φ’ does not necessarily imply that ‘A has a reason to Φ’ or ‘A is rationally required to Φ’. This is a belief that Williams shares with moral anti-rationalists like

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Brink, Svavarsdóttir, Foot and Railton.24 The belief that moral rationalism is true, in other words, that moral duties are always reason-giving, is exactly what prompted the author I will turn to next, Michael Smith, to move away from Williams’ internal reason theory.

24

I will say more about moral rationalism in chapter 3. For moral anti-rationalists it is conceptually possible that someone truly believes that he has a moral obligation to Φ, is fully rational but does not see why this gives him a reason to Φ. Only if he has the appropriate conative attitude has he a reason to do what morality requires him to do. Moral naturalists who think that moral properties are natural properties that obtain independently of human thinking are typically anti-rationalists. For them it may be rational to act morally, but it is never a priori so. For example Railton suggests that a desire to be able to justify one’s conduct from an impartial standpoint, rather than merely from a personal standpoint, is what gives people a reason to engage in moral evaluation and conduct themselves accordingly. (Railton 1986, 156) Foot suggests that one should explain the fact that an agent obeys the moral imperative by his possession of the virtue of charity: that agent wants the good of others. (Foot 1972, 165) And, according to Brink, subjective attitudes like ‘sympathy for others’ are the source of our having a reason to act on the moral principles that we accept. (Brink 1989, 49) The possession of these attitudes is contingent. If an agent lacks the relevant conative attitude, it means that he cannot be reproached with irrationality for being cruel, but it still holds that cruelty is immoral. To use Foot’s analogy, just as somebody’s lack of respect for the rules of etiquette does not alter the fact that he is rude or unmannered, “moral epithets such as ‘dishonest’, ‘unjust’, ‘uncharitable’ do not cease to apply to a man because he is indifferent to the ends of morality.” (Foot 1972, 172) Like Railton, Foot and Brink, also Williams and, as we will see in chapter 5, Harry Frankfurt are moral anti-rationalists. What is different is that, for Williams and Frankfurt, moral antirationalism is a consequence of their view of normative reasons, whereas for moral naturalists like Railton and Brink moral anti-rationalism emerges from the meta-ethical view of moral facts as natural and subject-independent. 65

Chapter 3

Michael Smith on practical reasons 3.1 Introduction Michael Smith’s approach to practical reasons is integrated into an ambitious metaethical project. The project is driven by the ambition to find, develop and corroborate a solution for what Smith calls ‘the moral problem’. The moral problem has to do with the apparent incompatibility of two widely recognized (or, in Smith’s vocabulary, ‘platitudinous’) features of morality: objectivity and practicality. In The Moral Problem, which could be called a philosophical bestseller, Smith presents a way to reconcile morality’s motivational relevance with its claim to objectivity and categorical authority. Smith offers an extraordinarily clear introduction and an engaging contribution to contemporary meta-ethics. Because the debate on normative reasons, which remains the main focus of my research, often takes place against a meta-ethical background, a close look at Smith’s work on the moral problem will prove rewarding. Especially since Smith’s proposed solution for the moral problem rests upon an analysis of normative reasons, a presentation of Smith’s meta-ethical project is relevant to any discussion on practical reasons.

3.2 The moral problem Now, what exactly is the moral problem? It is generated by the apparent inconsistency of the following three separately plausible claims (Smith 1994, 12): 1. Moral judgements of the form ‘it is right to Φ’ express a subject’s belief about an objective matter of fact. 2. If someone judges that it is right to Φ then, ceteris paribus, he is motivated to Φ. 3. An agent is motivated to act in a certain way just in case he has an appropriate desire and means–end belief, where belief and desire are, in Hume’s terms, distinct existences. Proposition (1) states the objectivity of moral judgements and proposition (2) their practical character. (2) captures ‘judgement internalism’, or what Smith calls ‘motivational internalism’ – internalism about moral motivation. Proposition (3) articulates

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the Humean theory of motivation. These three claims are not easily reconciled.1 Smith brings out the apparent inconsistency as follows: “from (1) the state expressed by a moral judgment is a belief which, from (2), is necessarily connected in some way with motivation; that is, from (3), with having a desire. So (1), (2) and (3) together entail that there is some sort of necessary connection between distinct existences: moral belief and desire. But (3) tells us there is no such connection. Believing some state of the world obtains is one thing, what I desire to do given that belief is quite another.” (1994, 12) He then formulates the problem: “[c]an we reconcile the objectivity and the practicality of moral judgment with the standard picture of human psychology that we get from Hume? This is what I call the moral problem.” (1994, 14) The moral problem lies at the heart of the meta-ethical debate and engenders much disagreement.2 Meta-ethicists disagree about the way to solve this problem. The most common solution is a denial of one of the three, apparently inconsistent, propositions. Non-cognitivists reject (1) and conclude that moral judgements express noncognitive attitudes (desire-like states) rather than beliefs (Ayer 1936, Stevenson 1937, Hare 1952, Gibbard 1990, Blackburn 1984). Some cognitivists reject (2), holding it possible to make moral judgements without being motivated to act. In chapter 1 I called this view moral judgement externalism, but Smith calls it ‘motivational externalism’ — externalism about moral motivation (Frankena 1958, Foot 1972, Railton 1986, Brink 1989). Other cognitivists accept internalism and reject (3), the Humean theory of motivation: Thomas Nagel and John McDowell, for instance, think that the recognition of moral duties can be intrinsically motivational without the support of a desire or other pro-attitude; they rely on the existence of beliefs that themselves have the motivating force of desires, which have sometimes been called ‘besires’ — be(liefsde)sires (see Lewis 1988). Now we can see and clarify why the third proposition is a necessary element to complete our understanding of the choices that meta-ethicists face. It would not suffice to describe the moral problem as a dilemma between favouring morality’s objectivity and its practical character. It is possible to have both – objectivity and practicality – for Humean theories of motivation (which hold that belief alone cannot motivate) as well as for anti-Humeans (like Nagel and McDowell), who hold that moral judgements manifest motivating beliefs. Proposition (3) summarizes what divides those two positions. Because there is an anti-Humean answer to the moral problem, it is also wrong to consider the internalist constraint — the second proposition —

1

2

 ven if they are “not strictly speaking inconsistent: no contradiction comes when embracing E them all.” See Sayre-McCord (1997, 56). Others have identified this as the central organizing problem in meta-ethics as well. Smith himself refers to David McNaughton (1988). But clearly, this tension between objectivity and the ‘action-guiding’ character of morality was also what motivated David Brink to defend an externalist moral realism. Brink also represents the founding problem as a tension between moral realism and the practicality of moral requirement, but his solution is, unlike Smith’s, externalist (see Brink (1989)). 68

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as offering conclusive support for non-cognitivism (as is often thought)3. It should be fairly obvious, of course, that the internalist constraint prima facie favours noncognitivism, and it is often used by non-cognitivists in their defence (see e.g. Stevenson (1937, 13) when he invokes the ‘magnetism requirement’ as an argument for his emotivism). But, as Smith’s reconstruction of the moral problem points out, and as Nagel and McDowell defend, the judgement internalist constraint is not incompatible with cognitivism. Smith’s proposed solution to the moral problem does not consist of a rejection of either the Humean assumption about desires and beliefs, or the objectivity, or the practicality of ethics. He holds on to all three claims because he thinks that each of them is supported by compelling arguments. The objectivity thesis is supported by features of the way we think about morality. The practicality requirement is the only way to make sense of the fact that the motivation of a good and strong-willed person tracks his beliefs about what it is right to do. The Humean theory is needed in order to make sense of action as goal-directed and of our explanation of actions as teleological. Hence the problem that Smith faces: although the propositions conflict, we have reasons for holding on to each of them. Smith thinks that to solve the problem he needs an analysis of rightness in the form ‘it is right to Φ’ that captures all these platitudes about morality. He thinks moral rationalism succeeds in this. Moral rationalism is based on the thesis that if it is right to Φ then there is a reason to Φ.4 Crucial to making moral rationalism work is Smith’s distinction between normative and motivational reasons. Normative reasons, conceived in a certain way, can be understood as both objective and practical, whereas motivational reasons make sure that the Humean psychology about motivation is retained. Smith uses his distinction to make the ambiguous use of the term ‘reason’ in daily language explicit. Reference to reasons is sometimes meant to explain (‘his reason for being late was that he missed his train’) and, at other times, to justify (‘when you are sick, you have a good reason to see a doctor’). Smith defines normative reasons as follows: “[n]ormative reasons are considerations, or facts that rationally justify certain sorts of choices or actions on an agent’s behalf. They are propositions of the form ‘acting-in-such-and-such a way in so-and-so circumstances is desirable’.” (1997, 87) Motivating reasons, on the other hand, are “psychological states with the potential to explain an agent’s action teleologically, and perhaps also causally. They are pairs comprising desires and means-ends beliefs.” (1997, 87) Smith’s ambition is to

3 4

S ee Svavarsdóttir (1999, 168) for an explanation of this often made mistake. The thesis that moral obligations entail reasons has also been referred to as ‘internalism’, as I mentioned in chapter 1. To avoid confusion, Smith suggests denoting the internalist claim that moral obligations entail reasons as ‘rationalism’ (1994, 62). The term ‘moral rationalism’ is adopted by other authors. Russ Shafer-Landau, for instance, offers an extensive defence of moral rationalism, defined as the view that “Morality is intrinsically or necessarily normative: moral obligations constitute or entail reasons for action.” (2003, 190) See chapters 7 and 8 of his Moral Realism: A Defence. 69

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offer a conceptual analysis of normative reasons that explains why they are both objective and practical and how they relate to motivating reasons. Moreover he argues that moral judgements express a belief about the normative reasons one has. Thus Smith’s moral rationalism in combination with his analysis of normative reasons enables him to reconcile propositions (1), (2) and (3), and to solve the moral problem. So much for the argument of The Moral Problem in a nutshell. Before reconstructing the whole argument in detail and zooming in on the analysis of normative reasons, one possible misunderstanding should be cleared away. Smith’s calling the problem a moral problem could be misleading. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord for instance has criticized the title of Smith’s book, because he considers the central problem of the book to be meta-ethical and not moral in nature. Sayre-McCord conveys that when he thinks of ‘the moral problem’ he thinks of “rampant cruelty, systematic injustice, moral indifference”, and nothing of this kind features in Smith’s book (Sayre-McCord 1997, 55). Smith takes note of Sayre-McCord’s misgivings but continues to think that The Moral Problem is aptly named (1997, 118). Smith believes that the moral problem, understood as scepticism about morality, which can lead to the cruelty and indifference summed up by Sayre Mc-Cord, is itself “largely fueled by meta-ethical reflection” (1997, 118). One source of moral scepticism is the thought that there are no moral requirements because nothing in the world could be all that a moral requirement purports to be. This is the gist of John Mackie’s queerness argument for an error theory about morality. Countering one argument for the error theory Smith aims to show that there is nothing queer about moral requirements, that they are conceivable and even conceivable in natural terms (I will say more about Smith’s naturalism later). He wants to convince us that there is at least no problem of a meta-ethical nature involved in thinking that there might be some moral requirements, for, if he is right, moral requirements are just normative reasons accessible to any rational creature capable of engaging in rational reflection. This is not to say – and it is important to realize this – that The Moral Problem aims to give any sort of proof of the existence of moral facts. Smith’s main concern in the book is “the more modest one of saying what moral facts would be like if there were any” (1997, 117) and to reassure us that, at least conceptually speaking, there is no reason why there could not be any. His arguments are meant to rebut a very specific kind of moral sceptic (or nihilist), namely the one who doubts (or denies) that there could ever be something like a moral value on the basis that the concept of a moral value is incoherent. Yet, in The Moral Problem Smith does nothing to refute the threatening thought that perhaps we will never find something that instantiates our (perfectly coherent) concept of moral requirement. He is hopeful that we will find such moral values once we have defined what we are looking

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for.5 But providing an argument for the substantial claim on top of the conceptual claim is beyond the scope of The Moral Problem. I will present Smith’s argument as it is gradually built up in The Moral Problem, and I will integrate relevant refinements or explanations he added later. The argument is long, so it can help to keep the following argument scheme in mind. 1. Smith believes that judgements about moral reasons are objective (proposition (1)) and argues that cognitivism captures this platitude best. 2. Smith believes that judgements about moral reasons are practical (proposition (2)) and that motivational judgement internalism captures this platitude best. 3. Smith defends a Humean theory of motivating reasons (proposition (3)) because he argues that a desiderative theory of motivation explains motivated action best. 4. Smith develops an anti-Humean theory of normative reasons because he believes that judgements about normative reasons are objective and practical. He argues that a conceptual analysis of normative reasons in terms of what we would desire if we were fully rational captures these platitudes best. 5. As a final step in the argument, Smith applies his analysis of normative reasons to moral reasons, and thus considers the moral problem solved: a cognitivist and internalist analysis of moral reasons as a kind of normative reasons explains the objectivity (proposition (1)) and practicality (proposition (2)) of moral reason judgements without violating the Humean theory of motivation (proposition (3)).

3.3 Cognitivism, internalism and Humean motivation Before explaining Smith’s solution to the moral problem (in 3.4 and 3.5), let us first probe why he needs that solution (in 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3). Why does Smith want to reconcile the three propositions? Why does he not opt for non-cognitivism, externalism or an anti-Humean theory of motivation?

5

S mith sounds less hopeful in ‘Is that all there is?’. For something to be of value, it should be something that all people desire if their desire set is fully coherent, but in this article he argues that we will never know for sure what would be desired by all if their desire set was fully coherent, because we will never know for sure the rational principles that govern a fully coherent desire set. Not only are we ignorant about which rational principles make a desire set coherent, Smith is also sceptical about whether such principles exist: “[for] I cannot think of any convincing reasons to suppose that there are rational principles capable of delivering anything that we would all desire if we had a maximally informed and coherent desire set.” (2006, 102) The article ends on a sceptical, quiescent note: let’s act without reason and justification. About this ambivalent attitude Smith himself says: “I flip-flop ... about whether there are values ... This is because, over the years, my conviction that our ideally rational selves would converge in their desires has waxed and waned.” (2007, 136) He does not see this as a problem for his position: when a theory goes back and forth between nihilism and realism, that is a good sign, because it reflects how life is. 71

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3.3.1 The objectivity of moral obligations Defending the objectivity of moral requirements, Smith does not want to make any substantive claim about the existence of moral facts. His claim is merely conceptual, involving the fact that moral judgements, if they are true, are made true by matters of fact. Against Blackburn’s expressivism, Ayer’s emotivism and Hare’s prescriptivism, Smith holds that morality concerns matters of fact and, correspondingly, that moral judgements are beliefs about matters of fact. He has a twofold argument for this cognitivist position. On the one hand, he gives an argument against non-cognitivism, concluding that a non-cognitivist analysis of moral judgements is implausible. According to noncognitivists, moral judgements serve to express the judge’s attitudes of approval and disapproval rather than to describe matters of fact in the world. A conceptual analysis, according to Smith, must be able to explain the platitudes about the concept. (This methodological principle plays a very important role throughout the argument of The Moral Problem, and I will say more about it in 3.4.1.) He takes it to be a platitude about moral beliefs that they can be objectively true or false. Cognitivism has no trouble explaining this, as it takes moral judgements to be belief-like states, representing the world in a way which can be true or false. A moral judgement, understood in the non-cognitivist way, however, is not truth-apt: whether the moral judgement is taken to express a disposition, a desire, a preference or an emotion, the expression of an attitude is non-representational and cannot be evaluated as a belief-like state. The non-cognitivist then owes us an account of why we should not take the descriptive and truth-evaluable aspects of moral discourse at face value. On the other hand, Smith rebuts two standard objections made by non-cognitivists against cognitivism. First, it is often objected by non-cognitivists that cognitivism cannot explain the motivating force of moral requirements. But Smith does not believe that that is true. As The Moral Problem intends to show, judgement internalism and moral realism are perfectly consistent. Second, defences of non-cognitivism often rely upon the so-called implausibility of naturalistic as well as non-naturalistic accounts of moral judgements. Ayer’s argument for non-cognitivism illustrates this kind of objection. As Smith reconstructs, “Ayer’s argument has the form of a dilemma. If moral judgments are descriptive then they must either describe a naturalistic or a nonnaturalistic state of affairs. Since it is incoherent to suppose that they describe either, we must conclude that they are not descriptive at all.” (1994, 58) Smith agrees that non-naturalism is implausible. But against Ayer he defends the possibility of identifying the moral features of acts with their natural features. As we will see, Smith’s solution consists in an analysis of moral facts as facts about practical rationality. This allows him to square morality with naturalism, for even though rationality itself may not be definable in natural terms, fully rational creatures are themselves naturalistically realized. Smith explains, “For a fully rational creature is simply someone with a certain psychology and … a natural feature is simply a feature that figures in one of the natural or social sciences, including psychology.” (1994, 186) 72

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The analysis of moral rightness, which Smith offers and which we will explain in detail below, is consistent not only with the platitude that moral beliefs are objective, but also with the platitude that moral judgements are practical. In this way, such an analysis will help to solve the moral problem. But let us first explain why the solution, according to Smith, does not consist in giving up judgement internalism. 3.3.2 The practicality of moral judgements The best way to explain the practicality of moral judgements is by use of the practicality requirement. The practicality requirement goes as follows (1994, 61): If an agent judges that it is right for her to Φ in circumstances C, then either she is motivated to Φ in C or she is practically irrational. The thesis that moral judgements entail motivation (under certain circumstances) defines what I called in chapter 1 judgement internalism or, alternatively, motivational internalism. So Smith’s defence of the practicality requirement is tantamount to a defence of judgement internalism, though he does not use that expression. (As we will see when we look at his analysis of normative reasons, Smith also defends existence internalism.) Why does Smith consider the practicality requirement to be true? Like his argument in favour of cognitivism, his argument for the practicality requirement is an inference to the best explanation: judgement internalism is to be preferred above judgement externalism because it offers a better explanation of the platitude that moral judgements are practical. That platitude should be refined. It is not true that moral judgements motivate every time and on all occasions. Sometimes people judge that it is right for them to Φ but fail to be motivated to Φ, because they suffer from motivational akrasia, depression or any other emotional disturbance. Smith distantiates himself from the line taken by many non-cognitivist internalists like Hare. Hare argues that an agent who judges Φ to be right without being motivated to Φ does not really judge Φ to be right. That person merely used the word ‘right’ in an inverted-comma sense, or “in an offcoloured way.” (Hare 1952, 164) Although Smith believes that Hare’s answer is along the right lines, he also believes that the argument as stated does not work because it begs the question (1994, 68-70). The denial that the person made a real moral judgement results from a tendentious interpretation of the reliable use of moral terms: Hare assumes that moral terms are mastered only when their use in a judgement motivates, but his opponents will argue that that is exactly what has to be shown instead of assumed. Fortunately, says Smith, there is an independent reason why an internalist account of the mastery of moral concepts (or, in other words, an internalist account of moral judgements) is to be preferred. This argument starts from what Smith takes to be a striking fact: namely, that a good and strong-willed person reliably undergoes a change in motivation when she acquires a new belief about what she is morally required to do (1994, 71). For ex-

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ample (the example is Smith’s), when someone convinces me that I should vote for the democrats, whereas before I thought I had to vote for the libertarians and was motivated accordingly, I will change not only my evaluative thoughts (my values) but also my motivation. At least, if I am a good and strong-willed person, then a new motivation will follow in the wake of my new moral judgement. The reliability of this connection needs to be explained. The best explanation available is in terms of the practicality requirement. The only alternative Smith can think of is to explain the reliable connection in terms of the supposition that good people have a de dicto desire to do whatever-ismorally-required. This is an externalist explanation because it implies that the moral judgement alone does not suffice to motivate; an extra, external element, typically a desire of some sort, is required so that a judgement can motivate. By reason of his Humean Theory of Motivation Smith agrees with judgement externalists that motivation indeed requires a desire. And like the externalists Smith rejects non-cognitivism, since he conceives moral judgements as cognitive states and not as expressions of a conative attitude. In addition, like judgement externalists (but unlike McDowell and Nagel, as we will see below), he considers beliefs to be inert. Yet, in contrast to judgement externalism, Smith argues that certain beliefs, due to their content, provoke motivation when agents are rational, even if the agents do not possess the de dicto desire to do whatever-is-morally-required. In other words, Smith rejects judgement externalism in favour of judgement internalism. He favours judgement internalism over externalism on the ground that the latter yields an inaccurate and impoverished psychological view of the good person. Let me explain this objection. According to some forms of judgement externalism agents are motivated to Φ by a general concern to do what is good and not by specific features of Φ that make it right to Φ. They are not motivated to Φ because Φ intrinsically merits this response. They are motivated by a de dicto desire to do what is right, Smith says. Smith calls this kind of motivation fetishistic because the agents in the externalist picture are fixated on something that is not of normative significance at all. As Smith explains, “They seem preciously, overly concerned with the moral standing of their acts when they should instead be concerned with the features in virtue of which their acts have the moral standing that they have.” (1997, 115) Judgement externalism, therefore, fails to give a proper explanation of the reliable connection between moral judgement and motivation in the good and strong-willed person. It turns the good person into a fetishist. To avoid fetishism one has to picture the good person as having a direct and underived desire to Φ once she comes to believe that Φ-ing is the right thing to do. A theory that meets the practicality requirement can offer this picture. In order to clarify the argument a little more, let me refer to an often formulated but misguided critique, which accuses Smith’s argument for internalism of circularity. One version of this critique is the ‘so what’ reaction. One could argue, as has been done by Simon Kirchin (2005), that Smith’s argument can never convert externalists because it only repeats what internalists are convinced of: namely, that moral judgements motivate. Why should externalists care that they cannot explain how a judgement or .

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belief motivates? Externalism consists of the denial of any necessary (internal) connection between moral judgements and motivation. This ‘so what’ critique is misguided, because Smith’s point is not that internalism makes sure that the reliable connection between moral judgement and motivation holds. His point is that internalism gives a better explanation of something that is already in place: the reliable connection is a fact, practicality is a platitude, and judgement internalism can explain why. It can explain it because it adopts the practicality requirement which says that the connection between a person’s judgement that it is right to Φ and her motivation to Φ is due to something internal to the judgement. If Smith’s moral rationalism is meant to solve the moral problem, it must offer an explanation of the practicality requirement. Smith is convinced that this is the case: moral rationalism, combined with a certain analysis of normative reasons, entails the practicality requirement, he believes. Before we turn to Smith’s analysis of normative reasons, let me explain why Smith joins the majority of contemporary action-theorists in honouring a Humean theory of motivation. 3.3.3 The Humean theory of motivation Anti-Humeans complain that the Humean model of beliefs and desires as distinct existences, according to which only desires have motivating force, works as a dogma in philosophical psychology. Yet, it is a dogma we must accept, Smith argues, once we understand its scope. Smith’s defence of the Humean model is based on Donald Davidson’s Humean account of reasons. Davidson argues that (i) the primary reason for an action is its cause and specifies that (ii) such a reason consists of a pro-attitude (desire) and belief pair (Davidson 1963, 5): R is a primary reason why an agent performed the action A under the description d only if R consists of a pro-attitude of the agent towards actions with a certain property, and a belief of the agent that A under the description d has that property. The Humean theory has been challenged by many philosophers offering counterexamples in which people have a reason to perform action A, although they lack any pro-attitude towards A. For example, an agent has a reason to get off a person’s foot if he hurts her, even if he does not desire to get off her foot. Smith undermines these counter-examples by showing that they are irrelevant. He takes Davidson to have been talking about motivating reasons, whereas the counter-example speaks about normative reasons. Smith reformulates Davidson’s principle, therefore, into a new principle, P1 (Smith 1994, 92): P1: R at t constitutes a motivating reason for agent A to Φ iff there is some Ψ such that R at t consists of an appropriately related desire of A to Ψ and a belief that were she to Φ she would Ψ.

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Since many anti-Humeans have failed to distinguish motivating reasons from other sorts of reasons, they have failed to appreciate P1 as an expression of a simple truth about the nature of motivating reasons, according to Smith. Others reject P1 because they do not consider desires to be a necessary element of motivation. Thomas Nagel and John McDowell, for instance, reject the Humean view that motivation is always rooted in desire. According to Nagel, the ascription of a desire to the person who acts on her belief is “merely consequential” on our interpretation of her behaviour as intentional. This does not mean that the action depends upon prior independent conative states (see Nagel 1970, 30). McDowell questions the belief/desire distinction and thinks of a moral judgement as a hybrid state, having both the representational characteristics of beliefs and the motivational characteristics of desires (see McDowell 1978, 19; 1979, 346). Identifying moral judgements as hybrid states – or ‘besires’ in Altham’s and Lewis’ useful terminology – allows McDowell to show how a theory which holds that moral judgements represent moral facts can also make sense of the intuition that moral judgements are inherently motivational. For, while states that are merely descriptive are motivationally inert, besires, by virtue of their directive aspect, are motivationally active. Smith, on the other hand, defends the belief/desire distinction and the Humean picture of motivation. Smith has developed an argument for Hume’s desiderative theory of motivation by making use of Elizabeth Anscombe’s notion of direction of fit (Smith 1994, 111-117; 2004, 136). Hume distinguished desire from belief as something that does not contain “any representative quality” (Hume 1739, 416). Anscombe expressed this distinction in terms of the direction of fit of mental states with the world. Roughly the idea is that beliefs and desires are mental states with a different character, such that beliefs should fit the world, not vice versa, whereas the world should fit our desires, not vice versa. If there is a divergence between a belief and how the world is, the belief has to go. That is not so for desires. Anscombe offers a useful comparison to illustrate this difference between beliefs and desires with regard to their direction of fit. She compares a man shopping with a list to a detective trying to write down what the man buys. She writes that “[i]f the list and the things that the man buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes a mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man’s performances whereas if the detective’s record and what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in the record.” (1957, 56) Beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit: if a belief is false, the mistake is not in the world but in the mind. The detective’s list has the same feature. But the man’s list operates as desires do. Desires have a world-to-mind direction of fit: if a desire is unsatisfied the ‘mistake’ is in the world, not in the mind. Now, a besire would be like a shopping list that comes both before and after the shopping. For Smith such a hybrid concept is incoherent. Moreover, we do not need it. For Smith beliefs alone cannot motivate, and desires are necessary for intentional action. Imagine two agents with the exact same set of means–end beliefs, but one of them also has the desire to, for example, eat juicy fruit and the other has not. The desire is crucial because its presence alone can explain why one agent will act on his 76

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belief that in order to eat juicy fruit he should peel the orange, and the other agent will not touch the orange. Smith’s argument relies on the direction-of-fit idea. Motivated action is goal-oriented, and having a motivating reason is, inter alia, having a goal. The having of a goal is a state with which the world must fit. Being in a state with which the world must fit is desiring. Smith concludes the argument: “only an agent’s desires may constitute her having certain goals, and it follows from this that only her desires may constitute her motivating reasons.” (1994, 125) Thus, P1 is true because only the Humean claim that motivation requires a desire is able to make sense of motivated action as goal-oriented. Smith accepts the Humean claim that motivating reasons are constituted by desires and means–end beliefs (1994, 125). Yet, he rejects a Humean theory of normative reasons. He does not believe that having a reason to Φ requires having a desire to Φ. His dismissal is motivated by the thought that we must remain faithful to the various platitudes about the connection that we find between what we have normative reason to do and what we desire to do. Which analysis of normative reasons does Smith offer so that, in combination with the rationalist thesis that moral obligations provide reasons, he can explain all three propositions: that moral judgements express a subject’s belief about an objective matter of fact, that moral judgements are practical, and that belief and desires are distinct existences?

3.4 The conceptual analysis of normative reasons 3.4.1 Platitudes about normative reasons In Smith’s opinion, the conceptual analysis of normative reasons, as distinguished from motivating reasons, will lead us to a solution of the moral problem. In order to construct this analysis, Smith first traces our ordinary thoughts about reasons and motivation, about what he calls normative and motivating reasons. This ‘ordinary thought research’ plays a crucial part in his method, the method of conceptual analysis, which Smith explains as follows: “[a]s the project of conceptual analysis is being thought of here, then, an analysis of a concept is successful just in case it gives us knowledge of all and only the platitudes which are such that, by coming to treat those platitudes as platitudinous, we come to have mastery of that concept.” (1994, 31) Smith’s point is not that if we have mastery of a term then we are able to produce a long list of platitudes. The point is rather that platitudes capture the inferential and judgemental dispositions the having of which together constitute a competence to use the concept in question. When a philosopher gives a conceptual analysis, he expresses his belief about what people mean by a particular concept they possess. What people mean by the concept ‘reason’ or ‘red’ for instance (which does not always converge with what they believe themselves to mean) is fixed by the role those concepts play in our mental economy. The judgement that one has a reason to Φ or that an object is red is connected with other mental states; it is inferred from something and from that 77

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judgement other judgements are inferred. The meaning of the concepts ‘reason’ and ‘red’ is “simply equivalent to whatever it is that has these inferential potentials” (Smith 1997, 103). An analysis of the concept of being red is an attempt to encapsulate or systematize the platitudes surrounding the concept, such as ‘red is more similar to orange than to blue’, or ‘if you want to teach someone what the word for red means, show her some red objects and say the word for red’ and so on. The same goes for an analysis of the concept of a normative reason. What Smith wants to do when he wants to offer a conceptual analysis of normative reasons is to describe what people mean when they judge that Φ is an action that someone has a normative reason to perform. In order to know what people mean by their reason judgements, Smith has to come up with a description of the inferential dispositions people possess when they master the concept, which are captured in various platitudes about ‘having a reason’. The conceptual analysis consists then in the construal of a content for the reason judgement, whatever content it is which best explains the inferential roles that reason judgements play and which systematizes or encapsulates the platitudes surrounding the concept of ‘being an action someone has a reason to perform’ (see Smith 1994, 29-39; Smith 1997, 102-103). Which platitudes surround the concept of a normative reason? On the one hand, people think that there is a close connection between having a normative reason and being motivated: when we deliberate and decide that we have a reason to do something, that fact sometimes makes a difference to what we actually do (1994, 132). But, on the other hand, we also encounter cases where the two disconnect. Smith gives several examples of deviant cases in which psychological compulsion, physical addiction, emotional disturbance, depression, illness and the like cause agents either to desire to do what they believe they have no normative reason to do, or not to desire to do what they believe they have a normative reason to do. Smith refers to several standard examples from the literature: Harry Frankfurt’s heroin addict who acts upon his desire to take drugs but does not want himself to act upon it (Frankfurt 1971); the mother described by Gary Watson who desires to drown her bawling baby in the bathwater although realizing she has no reason to do this (Watson 1975); and Michael Stocker’s depressives who – as in Alfred Mele’s example of listlessness – know full well that the rational thing for them to do is to get up and get on with their lives but who lack any desire to do that (Stocker 1979). After examining these examples, Smith believes that our ordinary thoughts can be summarized in the following platitude (1994, 143): C1: If an agent accepts that she has a normative reason to Φ then she rationally should desire to Φ. This platitude operates as a constraint upon an adequate account of normative reasons. First of all, we should decide what kind of mental state the acceptance of a normative reason is. As the deviant cases show, accepting that one has a normative reason to Φ – or ‘valuing to Φ’ in Smith’s vocabulary – cannot be reduced to desir78

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ing to Φ. Ordinary thought implies that there must be a distance between an agent’s actual desires and what she has reason to do.6 Normative reasons must be ‘objective’ in the sense that they are true independently of the subject’s actual desires. If valuing is not desiring, there is no alternative but to equate the acceptance of normative reasons with a belief (1994, 147). But then we face a problem because, according to the Humean psychology, beliefs and desires are distinct existences, and it is hard to see how we can desire to do something because of a belief we hold. As Smith says, “The puzzle then is to explain how it can be that accepting normative reason claims can both be bound up with having desires and yet come apart from having desires. In other words, the problem is to explain how deliberation on the basis of our values can be practical in its issue to just the extent that it is.” (1994, 136) This puzzle is just the moral problem all over again, redescribed with regard to normative reasons in general. To solve the problem, one must not reduce valuing to desiring, Smith argues. He sticks to the view that valuing is a matter of believing. As we will see, the solution lies “in finding the right content for the belief; an account of the proposition thus believed.” (1994, 137; my emphasis) Since Smith interprets valuing as a kind of believing, C1 can be refined into C2 (1994, 148): C2: If an agent believes that she has a normative reason to Φ then she rationally should desire to Φ. Once the connection is stated, Smith continues, “And now we have to face the real problem. How are we to demonstrate the possibility of this kind of conceptual connection between our beliefs and desires?” (1994, 148) What is needed is an analysis of the concept of a normative reason that implies that our beliefs about our normative reasons are necessarily connected with our desires in the way expressed by C2. 3.4.2 The advice model (as opposed to the example model) Accepting C2, Smith’s task is to offer an analysis that explains why C2 is true.7 What content explains best the inferential roles played by normative reason judgements as they are captured in C2?

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 nd, according to Smith, even between an agent’s second-order desires and what he has a reason A to do: Smith criticizes Davidson’s characterization of valuing as desiring as well as Lewis’s account of valuing as desiring to desire (Smith 1994, 137-147). As we will see, at the end of the analysis Smith admits that the answer to the question why C2 is true (the answer being that the connection between normative and motivating reasons is mediated by the agent’s disposition to rationality) is not in any way surprising (as the platitude C2 already limits its application to rational agents, thereby indicating the importance of rationality). Yet he reminds us that “[t]he point is simply that now we know why our being rational plays this role. It plays this role because what we have normative reasons to do is a matter of what we would desire that we do if we were fully rational.” (Smith 1994, 180) 79

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Smith’s analysis starts from the equivalence between saying that an action is desirable and saying that we have a normative reason to do it, as was stipulated by his definition of ‘a normative reason’: “[n]ormative reasons are considerations, or facts that rationally justify certain sorts of choices or actions on an agent’s behalf. They are propositions of the form ‘acting-in-such-and-such a way in so-and-so circumstances is desirable’.” (1997, 87)8 He then explains what it means to say that an action is desirable: “now note that we can further explicate this concept, the concept of what we have normative reason to do … For it is a platitude to say that what it is desirable that we do is what we would desire to do if we were fully rational; that what we have normative reason to do is what we would desire that we do if we were fully rational.” (1994, 150) This platitude is close to constituting an analysis already, Smith thinks. He only has to spell out the idea of the ‘if we were fully rational’ condition. To explain the role of full rationality in the constitution of reasons, Smith invokes the metaphor of advice. What we have reason to do is what we would advise ourselves to do if we were perfectly placed to give ourselves advice. The idea is that the person who is best placed to give an agent advice about what is to be done is the agent himself in an idealized situation, that is, the agent being fully rational. In the article ‘Internal Reasons’ (2004), Smith elaborates the metaphor of advice by contrasting it with another metaphor: setting the example. He distinguishes two models to explain reason constitution: the advice model and the example model (1995a, 18). Imagine two possible worlds: the evaluated world in which the agent faces the circumstances in which she has to act, and the evaluating world in which we find the agent’s fully rational self having desires about what is to be done. On the advice model, what I have normative reason to do in my less-than-ideal circumstances (thus in the evaluated world) is a matter of what my idealized self, in his idealized circumstances (in the evaluating world), would desire me to do in my less-than-ideal circumstances. Or, in terms of desirability: on the advice model, the desirability of my Φ-ing in the evaluated world depends on whether my fully rational self in the evaluating world would desire that I Φ in the evaluated world. It is as if my fully rational self in the evaluating world looks at me in the evaluated world and forms a desire about what I should do in my actual circumstances. On the example model, what I have normative reason to do in my less-than-ideal circumstances is a matter of what my 8

 s this definition shows, Smith takes the equivalence between desirability and having normaA tive force for granted. This does not mean that Smith takes the connection between desires and normativity for granted, but it does mean that he takes the connection between rationality and normativity for granted. The property of being desirable is not the same as the mere fact of desiring. ‘X is desirable’ does not mean the same as ‘A desires X’. ‘A desires X’ is a mere psychological fact, whereas when we say that ‘X is desirable’ we suppose that there is a rational justification that warrants a desire for X. The presupposed rational justification is what constitutes the normativity of desirability. As we will see, Smith articulates this rational justification in terms of coherence and unity. Only a systematically justified set of desires constitutes the normativity of some desires. But it remains perfectly possible for a person to desire something – as a brute psychological fact – which is not desirable, namely when the desire is not rationally justified or not part of a coherent and unified set of desires. 80

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idealized self would want himself to do in his ideal circumstances. The desirability of my Φ-ing in my actual circumstances, that is in the evaluated world, thus depends on whether my fully rational self in the evaluating world desires to Φ in the evaluating world. In this picture, the fully rational self does not give advice but sets up her own behaviour in the evaluating world as an example to be followed by the self in the evaluated world. When we act upon reasons, do we follow the advice or the example of our rational self? According to Smith, the advice model of normative reason is the most plausible. On the example model, which he ascribes to Korsgaard, a consideration constitutes a reason just in case it would motivate the fully rational person while losing sight of the limited circumstances in which the actual agent might be. (Smith 1995a, 18) This criticism is reminiscent of Williams’ critique of McDowell’s idea that the phronimos sets the bar. But, as we observed at the end of chapter 2, the internal theory is itself vulnerable to a variation of the conditional fallacy. Since Williams’ own definition of reasons presupposes sound deliberation, the internal reason theory fails to accommodate reasons that agents have precisely because they are not capable of deliberating soundly. Smith’s conceptual model separating the advisor from the advised provides a way to avoid the conditional fallacy. In his argument against the example model Smith adopts an example by Gary Watson about a person who is defeated in a game of squash. The defeat has been so humiliating that, out of anger and frustration, that person desires to smash his opponent in the face with his racket. If that person were fully rational, he would not have this desire. The consideration that would motivate him if he were fully rational is rather that he would show good sportsmanship by shaking hands with his opponent. Does it follow then that what the person has a reason to do in his uncool and uncalm state is to walk up to his opponent and shake hands? According to the example model, the answer is ‘yes’. But Smith is sure that this is wrong. Walking towards his opponent and shaking his hand may even be the last thing the frustrated person has reason to do, “especially if being in such close proximity to [the opponent], given [his] anger and frustration, is the sort of thing that would cause him to smash his opponent in the face.” (1995a, 19) Rather, what the frustrated squash player has reason to do, in Smith’s eyes, is to smile politely and leave the scene as soon as possible, for this is something he can get himself to do. So this means that what the frustrated person has reason to do is what his fully rational self advises him to do in his uncalm, uncool and irrational state. The example model would give us the wrong outcome. Further defending the advice model against the example model, Smith wonders what motivation the example model could engender in a person, given that the circumstances of his ideal self are totally different from his actual circumstances: “[t]he problem with the exemplar model [or example model] is that it is hard to see the normative relevance of [the idealized A’s] desires about what she is to do in her circumstances to what A has reason to do in her own completely different circumstances.” (Smith and Pettit 2006, 148) Implicitly, Smith takes the practicality requirement of normative reason judgements into account. He assumes that it counts in favour of a 81

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theory about normativity if it can explain why normative reason judgements motivate. He believes that advice directed towards an agent is more likely to motivate the agent than an example set by a perfect version of the agent. On the basis of arguments from conditional fallacy and the practicality requirement, he prefers the advice model to the example model. To sum up, according to Smith’s advice model of normative reasons A has a reason to Φ in circumstances C means that if A was fully rational she would desire that in circumstances C she Φs. The ‘if fully rational’ condition applies to the idealized A, the A that is giving advice, the A that is desiring something about what the less-than-fully-rational A should do in the given circumstances. It is crucial to know what Smith understands by the condition ‘if fully rational’. What are the ideal circumstances in which the idealized version of A forms desires about what A in less-than-ideal circumstances is to do? 3.4.3 The ‘if fully rational’ condition: Smith versus Williams What is the fully rational self? What is it to be fully rational? As Smith sees it, the idea of full rationality is a summary notion: it captures, in summary style, a host of platitudes about practical rationality (1994, 156). To give body to the notion of full rationality, Smith refers to Bernard Williams’ account of rationality in his analysis of reasons. Although Smith adopts much of this account, there is a basic disagreement about one of the requirements of rationality which reflects a different perspective on normative reasons: Williams’ theory of reasons is Humean, whereas Smith’s theory of normative reasons is anti-Humean. Smith reformulates the internal reason theory, substituting the ‘after sound deliberation’ condition by the ‘if fully rational’ condition. What Williams then argues for looks, on the surface, to be identical to Smith’s advice model, namely: A has a reason to Φ in circumstances C means that A would desire that she Φs in circumstances C if she were fully rational. To know whether Williams’ and Smith’s views are as similar as they appear to be at first sight, one has to examine their respective conceptions of rationality. Smith reconstructs Williams’ view of rationality as encompassing three conditions (1994, 158). According to Williams, for an agent to be fully rational (i) the agent must have no false beliefs.

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Remember the gin and tonic example where a man lacks the relevant information that the glass in front of him contains petrol. As a consequence, his desire to drink the glass does not give him a reason to drink it. Williams considers the aim of getting things right to be part of any agent’s interest as a rational deliberator. That is also why he adds another condition: (ii) the agent must have all relevant true beliefs. For example, if somebody wants to visit Westminster Abbey she has a reason to go to London, even if she does not actually desire to go to London, given her ignorance concerning the location of Westminster Abbey. She has a reason to go to London because she would desire to do so if she were fully rational: that is, in this case, if she had all the relevant true beliefs. Thirdly, (iii) the agent must deliberate correctly. It is fairly agreed upon that it is rational to desire the means to one’s ends. As we saw in chapter 2, Williams points out that means–end reasoning is only one mode of rational deliberation among many. There is also the possibility of thinking about how the satisfaction of elements in one’s set of desires can be combined by time-ordering; or to consider what desire to attach most weight to in the event of conflicting desires; or to make decisions about what would make for an entertaining evening, granted that one wants entertainment. To solve this practical question imagination is accorded an important role by Williams. For instance, imagining what it would be like if a development came about might influence one’s desires, and thus the reasons one has to promote it. Allowing for such things as the exercise of imagination, the constraints on what counts as ‘deliberating correctly’ are by no means fully determinate. The question whether a person has a reason to act in a certain way may have no determinate answer. Williams welcomes this indeterminacy as to what reasons a person has. That is life, he says. Any realistic account of practical reasons, therefore, should not lock out indeterminacy. Dissatisfied with the indeterminacy built into Williams’ account, Smith thinks that Williams’ third condition requires supplementation. Smith agrees that deliberation can both produce and destroy desires, but Williams omits from his discussion of condition (iii) an account of the most important form of deliberation. According to Smith, by far the most important way in which we create new and destroy old desires is not by using our imagination but by “trying to find out whether our desires are, as a whole, systematically justifiable.” (1994, 59) Smith thinks that our desires, taken together as a set, can make more or less sense depending on which desires we add or subtract. Making more or less sense is articulated by Smith in terms of coherence and unity. Exhibiting coherence and unity is constitutive of having a systematically justified set of desires. In other words, while deliberating on my desire set and trying to find 83

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out whether a particular desire gives me a reason to act, “I try to integrate the object of that desire into a more coherent and unified desiderative profile and evaluative outlook.” (1994, 159) A systematically justified set of desires is also rationally preferable in Smith’s eyes. He believes there is pressure in favour of coherence in the realm of desires, just as there is one in the realm of beliefs. The goal of rational deliberation is to have a systematically justifiable set of desires. The operations of the imagination do not guarantee the achievement of this goal. “In fact”, he writes, “quite the opposite is the case. For the imagination is liable to all sort of distorting influences, influences that it is the role of systematic reasoning to sort out.” (1994, 161) Consider, for example, that one vividly imagines what it would be like to kill someone. Most probably we find ourselves thoroughly averse to this prospect. Yet, in some circumstances, e.g. in a situation of war, we may have a reason to kill someone. Considerations of overall coherence and unity may demand that we have a desire to kill in some circumstances, and such considerations may themselves override the effects of the imagination. Therefore, Williams’ account of full rationality is not adequate in Smith’s opinion. Recapitulating Smith’s account, to be fully rational an agent must “not be suffering from the effects of any physical or emotional disturbance, she must have no false beliefs, she must have all relevant true beliefs, and she must have a systematically justifiable set of desires, that is, a set of desires that is maximally coherent and unified.” (Smith 1997, 89) Their different approach to rationality reflects a difference between Smith’s and Williams’ approaches to normative reasons. The introduction of the requirement of a coherent and unified desire set in particular leads to a fundamental disagreement. Elaborating on this requirement, Smith reveals that part of what we mean when we say that a set of desires is systematically justifiable is that the desires in that set are desires that other people would also have if they had a systematically justifiable set of desires. In other words, part of the task of coming up with a maximally coherent and unified set of desires is to come up with a set that would be converged upon by other rational creatures who are also trying to come up with a maximally coherent and unified set of desires. Smith defends this convergence claim by pointing out that the concept of a normative reason, the concept of what constitutes a rational justification, cannot be relative to the interests or desires of an agent. In his opinion, to suppose that “something completely arbitrary – the mere fact that a particular agent who is making a claim about rational justification happens to have the contingent desires that she happens to have – could in some way constitute a normative fact, a fact about rational justification” is incoherent (1997, 90). This is incoherent, Smith says, because “arbitrarity, as such, always undermines normativity.” (1997, 90) Only when we base facts about rational justification upon desires that fully rational agents would converge upon can we be sure that they are not completely arbitrary. This implies, among other things, that the hypothesis that two fully rational agents could diverge in their desires is simply ruled out by definition. It follows that Smith defends a non-relative account of normative reasons. This is one major respect in which his analysis of normative reasons differs radically from 84

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the Humean analysis. Smith believes that his analysis of normative reasons is antiHumean in four respects. “First, it makes our normative reasons the objects of our beliefs and allows our beliefs about our normative reasons a proper causal role in the production of action. Second, it affords us a critical perspective on even our underived desires, showing us why we may have reason to get rid of them [namely, when that would make our desire set more coherent]. Third, it is a non-relative conception of normative reasons — what is to count as a reason for you in your circumstances must also count as a reason for me in mine if our circumstances are the same — and so claims about our normative reasons are thus categorical rather than hypothetical imperatives. And fourth, it forces us to admit that the epistemology of normative reason claims is itself therefore a social matter: other things being equal, each person is as well placed to come up with an answer to the question ‘What is there normative reason to do?’ as any other person.” (1994, 181) The first claim refers to Smith’s rejection of non-cognitivism. The fourth claim follows from the third. The most interesting ways in which Smith’s analysis differs from a Humean analysis of normative reasons are captured by the second and third claim. I explained the second claim above, and I agree that this is indeed a major difference between his view of normative reasons and the views defended by Schroeder, Williams and Hume himself: Smith makes room for genuine rational criticism of desires: a desire can be irrational in a non-derivative sense, that is, regardless of whether or not it relies on a false belief. I am less sure that the third claim also amounts to a real disagreement between Smith and the Humean theories of normative reasons, but let me first explain why Smith thinks it does. Smith believes that reasons are non-relative. He explicitly opposes his own “antiHumean or Kantian view that under conditions of full rationality we would all reason ourselves towards the same conclusion as regards what is to be done” (1994, 166) to Williams’ Humean view which is “predicated on denying that, through a process of rational deliberation we could ever come to discover reasons that we all share.” (1994, 165) Smith ascribes to Williams a kind of relativism he himself cannot accept. In Williams’ view, the reasons that an agent has are simply functions from her actual desires, where the relevant functions are those described in conditions (i) to (iii). This makes reason statements relative to an agent’s subjective motivational set in such a way, Smith complains, that in Williams’ theory there is no ‘rational justification’ as such, but there are only considerations that ‘rationally-justify-relative-to-this-person’ or ‘rationally-justify-relative-to-that-person’. Smith dismisses this relative conception of a rational justification because it is inconsistent with our use of the concept ‘reason’. When my brother cites a consideration in support of his doing Φ that I think he fails to justify, then I do not conclude that it may justify-relative-to-him, though not justify-relative-to-me; I conclude that it fails to justify simpliciter. Not only does our daily use of the concept of a reason point out that it is “stubbornly non-relative”, but mere reflection also shows that the concept of a reason has to be non-relative: were reasons relative, that would undermine their normative significance (1995, 33). The notion of a consideration that rationally-justifies-relative-to-me, or a reasonme is

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thus incoherent.9 By supplementing Williams’ account of full rationality with a convergence claim, Smith tries to escape from such incoherence and make reasons nonrelative. Smith’s insistence on non-relativity may seem surprising after his defence of the advice model on the basis of the claim that an angry squash player has different reasons from an easy-going one. The advice model seems to picture reasons as precisely relative to an agent’s behavioural dispositions. I will say more about this tension between objectivity and practicality in sections 3.6.6 and 3.6.1, where I will also raise doubts about how substantial the disagreement between Williams and Smith is with regard to reason-relativity.10 3.4.4 The analysis captures the platitudes According to the analysis, to say that we have a normative reason to Φ in C is to say that we would desire to Φ in C if we were fully rational. As Smith says, “One way of testing the plausibility of this analysis, as with any analysis, is by seeing whether it is consistent with various platitudes.” (1996a, 161) Can the offered analysis explain why we think of normative reason judgements as both objective and practical, thus dissolving the apparent tension and paving the way to a solution to the moral problem? And does Smith’s analysis comply with the Humean story about motivation? (1) Can the analysis explain the objectivity of normative reason judgements? Since normative reason judgements in Smith’s analysis represent facts about desires that fully rational agents would converge upon, they are objective. Smith comments: “They are objective in the sense that, via a conversational process involving rational reflection and argument, we are each able to come up with an answer to the question: What do we have normative reason to do if we are in such and such circumstances? And our answers to this question, provided we have each reflected properly, will all be one and the same. We will all converge on an answer of the form ‘It is desirable that we do so-and-so in such-and-such circumstances.’” (1997, 88) Smith’s objectivity claim comes down to the claim that people who face the same circumstances have normative reasons to do the very same thing. In other words, facts about the normative reasons we have in our circumstances reflect no differences S mith’s criticism of a concept of ‘a reason justifying-relative-to-me’ or ‘a reasonme’ is reminiscent of Christine Korsgaard’s criticism of private reasons and her claim that reasons are essentially shareable. See Korsgaard (1993). 10 In an attempt to tell vicious from innocent forms of relativity, it would not help Smith to invoke the difference between analysing a concept and applying the concept to concrete instances. The latter is inevitably an empirical business that must take contingent particularities into account. The former is done a priori, and to Smith’s mind Williams builds an unwarranted relativity into the very concept of a normative reason. But that cannot be the whole of it, because Smith also builds relativity into the concept of a reason: the actual desires of an agent make a difference to the reasons he has because they determine the motivational resources he has. Practicality and objectivity are both aspects of the concept of a reason, and thus relativity to the agent’s contingent motivational possibilities comes into play prior to the application question. 9

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between us apart from the contingency of the fact that our circumstances can be different. As will be explained in detail later, the strength of this objectivity claim depends on the extent of what falls under someone’s ‘circumstances’. Smith calls normative reason claims, including but not limited to moral reason claims, not only objective but also categorical (1994, 175). He thus rejects Philippa Foot’s claim that requirements of practical reason are hypothetical imperatives (Foot 1972). I do not find it obvious to identify the objective character of reason claims with the categorical nature of the imperatives. For, as Smith says, the normative reason claims are objective in the sense that agents all have the same reasons if they face the same circumstances. Hence, normative reason claims are still conditional in a way in which the Kantian moral imperative, for instance, is not. When Kant qualifies the moral imperative as categorical, he wants to emphasize its unconditional application to all people in all circumstances. Therefore, I would (and I will) not call normative reasons in Smith’s analysis categorical, which does not, of course, prevent them from being objective. (2) Can the analysis explain the practicality of normative reason judgements? Normative reason judgements are practical. But in what sense? As stipulated in C2, they are practical “in the sense that someone who believes that she has a normative reason to act in a certain way in certain circumstances will have a motivating reason to act in that way in those circumstances, at least absent weakness of will and the like: that is, absent various forms of practical irrationality.” (1997, 88) Smith is convinced that his analysis ensures this kind of practicality. In a crucial, much discussed passage of The Moral Problem, Smith writes, “Suppose we believe that we would desire to Φ if we were fully rational and yet fail to desire to Φ. Are we irrational? We most certainly are. And by our own lights. For we fail to have a desire that we believe it is rational for us to have.” (1994, 177) If we believe we have a reason to Φ, according to the analysis, we believe that we would desire to Φ if we were fully rational. Thus, if we believe that we have a reason to Φ and we do not desire to Φ we are irrational. If we believe that we have a normative reason to Φ, then we should rationally desire to Φ. And this is just platitude C2. Smith asks us to consider an agent A who believes that he would desire to Φ (say, keep a promise) in circumstances C if he had a maximally informed and coherent and unified set of desires, and who also desires to keep the promise in C. Compare A with an agent B who has the same belief but lacks the desire. It appears to Smith that A has a psychology that exhibits more coherence than B. Exhibiting this sort of coherence is what practical rationality consists of (1997, 100). Thus, if an agent is practically rational, that is, if his psychology tends towards coherence, his desires will match his beliefs about the normative reasons he has – after all, these beliefs are about the desires that we should have! The tendency to have a coherent psychology is what causes agents to have matching desires.

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(3) Does the analysis comply with the Humean story about motivation? The fact that our beliefs and desires may bear normative relations to each other is not inconsistent with the Humean theory of motivating reasons. As Smith observes, “All actions are indeed produced by desires, just as the Humeans say; no actions are produced by beliefs alone or by besires. But, if what we have said here is right, some of these desires are themselves produced by the agent’s beliefs about the reasons she has, beliefs she acquires through rational deliberation.” (1994, 179) It is important that we understand Smith precisely here: the fact that belief plays a role in motivating an agent to action is due to the belief ’s content, not to the fact of believing itself. In believing that he has a reason to Φ, the agent is believing that, were he fully rational, he would desire that he Φ-ed. It is the fact that he believes that that explains why his failure to desire to Φ is irrational. The failure to be motivated by beliefs is not always irrational, because beliefs and desires are distinct existences and motivation requires desire. Smith remains faithful to the Humean psychology and holds on to a clear distinction between the state of believing and the state of desiring. His solution for meeting the practicality requirement consists in claiming that certain beliefs, in particular normative beliefs, entail motivation due to their specific content. Not only does Smith have to respect the Humean psychology (and thus avoid the outcome that having a belief alone could motivate), he must also remain truthful to his own judgement internalism. He must avoid the judgement externalist thesis that desire is the ultimate source of moral motivation. Saying that a belief that X is morally good needs a desire to do what is good in order to motivate would make Smith vulnerable to his own fetishism objection. If motivation is not rooted in the belief about what one has reasons to do, or in a desire to do what one believes one has reason to do, how does it come about? Belief engenders a motivating desire, Smith says, only if one necessary condition is satisfied: the agent should be rational in the sense that his psychology should tend towards coherence. In Smith’s view, when an agent believes he has reason to Φ he is motivated to Φ, not only because he desires to do what he has a reason to do but also because he has a tendency towards a coherent psychology.11 Smith’s version of the Humean Theory of Motivation turns on the claim that desire is necessary for motivation. He does not maintain, as Davidson does, that having a means–end belief and a desire for a particular end are enough, for he thinks that in addition the exercise of rational capacities is required. Neither does his Humean Theory of Motivation imply the claim that all practical rationality is instrumental rationality (and thus that every rational evaluation of a desire or action presupposes a prior desire). Many defenders and opponents of the HTM take it to include at least these two claims (Sinhababu 2009, 265):

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I n a recent presentation entitled ‘Beyond belief and desire’ (2011b) Smith formulates this point in terms of a defence of Carl G. Hempel’s version of the standard belief-desire account against Davidson’s. According to Hempel, three instead of two psychological states are part of the explanation of action: desire, belief but also the agent’s exercise of his capacity to be instrumentally rational. 88

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The Desire-Belief Theory of Action: desire is necessary for action, and no mental states other than a desire and a means–end belief are necessary for action. The Desire Out? Desire In! Principle: forming a desire as the conclusion of reasoning is justified only if a desire is among the premises of the reasoning. Smith accepts the first but rejects the second. The desire-out, desire-in principle was first formulated by Jay Wallace as an objection to Williams’ internal reason theory (Wallace 1990, 370). Wallace accuses Williams (and other proponents of the Humean theory of reasons) of giving no argument for their claim that desires must be the ultimate source of motivation. Even if one accepts that on occasions of motivation a desire must be present, it remains an open question whether the present desires are themselves motivated by a rational consideration. In Wallace’s eyes, it is still possible that at the basis of motivation there lies an evaluative belief that generates a desire. Humeans reply that in that case the basic evaluative principles that the agent holds are fixed by his intrinsic desires, and so at the end of the explanation or justification of a desire there again appears a desire. According to Wallace, the Humeans owe us an argument for this thesis which he calls ‘the desire-out, desire-in principle.’ They cannot just postulate that “processes of thought which give rise to a desire (as ‘output’) can always be traced back to a further desire (‘as input’), one which fixes the basic evaluative principles from which the rational explanation of motivation begins.” (Wallace 1990, 370) Smith does not adhere to this principle, and escapes the objection made by Wallace, for he says, “Beliefs about normative reasons, when combined with an agent’s tendency to have a coherent psychology, can thus cause agents to have matching desires… It is the causal power of the tendency toward coherence that allows us to reject the desire-in desire-out principle.” (Smith 1997, 100) An agent’s belief that he ought to Φ, together with his tendency towards coherence, induces a desire to Φ. This desire as the output of reasoning does not presuppose the presence of a prior desire that would be satisfied by Φ-ing, for instance the desire to do what one ought to do. Summing up, Smith’s non-Humean theory of reasons is compatible with a Humean Theory of Motivation, be it what one might want to call a light version of HTM. Smith accords a role to an agent’s exercise of his rational powers in the production of actions, and he makes desires subject to requirements of rationality that involve more than instrumental rationality. But, nevertheless, the Humean ‘dogma’ that only desires can motivate and the Humean assumption that beliefs and desires are distinct existences are left intact by Smith’s analysis: no belief is necessarily accompanied by a desire; it is still possible to pull belief and desire apart as distinct existences, namely when beliefs have a non-normative content or in agents that lack a tendency to coherence, in other words in irrational agents.

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3.5 Moral rationalism: the solution to the moral problem At the final stage of the argument, Smith uses the analysis of normative reasons to reconcile the three apparently inconsistent propositions that raised the moral problem. To effect the reconciliation only one last thing is needed: a defence that the analysis of normative reasons is applicable also to moral reasons (reasons to comply with moral obligations and act morally). This defence is at the core of Smith’s moral rationalism. When Smith introduces the term ‘normative reason’ in The Moral Problem he conveys, “There may be normative reasons of rationality, prudence, morality and perhaps even normative reasons of other kinds as well.” (1994, 95) There are many different kinds of reasons, insofar as reasons can be of different substantive kinds, having a distinctive content or substance. According to Smith the province of the moral reasons, as opposed to the non-moral reasons, is to be demarcated by explicating their distinctive content (whatever that may be). To find out whether there really are moral reasons, we have to look for normative reasons with a distinctive content. A normative reason to maximize happiness and minimize suffering might be an excellent candidate for a moral reason. There are other candidates: normative reasons that are other-regarding or which require us to promote human flourishing or whatever else might be thought to be distinctive of moral reasons. Smith’s limited point is that facts about normative reasons could, for all we know, have a distinctively moral content. Add this possibility to the analysis of normative reasons and the outcome is Smith’s version of moral rationalism. Moral rationalism defends that “our Φ-ing in circumstances C is right if and only if we would desire that we Φ in C, if we were fully rational, where Φ-ing in C is an act of the appropriate substantive kind.” (1994, 184) Remember that Smith is doing meta-ethics, not first-order normative ethics. His construal of moral reasons as a category of normative reasons enables Smith to explain the objectivity and practicality of moral reason judgements. When moral reasons are defined in terms of facts about the desires that fully rational agents would converge upon, then moral reasons are objective in the sense that they are binding on all rational creatures. The analysis of moral reasons as normative reasons is also consistent with the platitude about practicality because it defines moral rightness in terms of what agents would desire to do if they were fully rational. Thus, if an agent judges it right to Φ, he is motivated to Φ unless he is practically irrational. Smith’s moral rationalism incorporates a judgement internalism: motivation is internally tied to moral judgement, at least in a rational agent, an agent disposed to have a coherent psychology. Smith is assured that we have no choice but to admit that moral rationalism simply gives the best explanation: “[i]t is the excellence of normative reasons, defined in the way I define them [they are practical and objective and they can have moral content], as candidates for moral facts, that should in the end force us to admit that we have really been thinking of moral facts as facts about such normative reasons all along. Once you have glimpsed the rationalist’s heaven you simply can’t bring yourself to look back.” (1997, 117) 90

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If Smith is right, moral scepticism is cut off from its meta-ethical roots: there is nothing queer about moral requirements; they are just a kind of normative reasons, and as such accessible to any creature capable of engaging in rational reflection. Amoralism remains an option, but only at a serious cost: “[t]hose whose moral indifference is fueled by moral scepticism are in danger of giving up on being thinking, reflective rational creatures.” (1997, 119) Now we are also in a position to see why Smith’s argument does not prove that there are moral facts; in other words, why his claim is conceptual and not ontological. The answer to the ontological question whether moral values exist depends upon the question whether there are things that the desires of rational agents converge upon. We do not know, however, whether there really are rational principles organizing our desire set in a converging way. To find out whether there really are moral facts, we have no alternative but to engage in normative debate and look for reasons that we all share. In the concluding words of The Moral Problem, Smith interprets his achievement as follows: “[a]s I see it we are justified in thinking that there are moral facts, and so in engaging in ordinary moral debate, but our justification is defeasible, and may itself be defeated by the outcome of those very debates.” (1994, 202) I should add, on Smith’s behalf, that since the publication of The Moral Problem (1994) Smith has developed his view on moral reasons in the direction of what he calls ‘the constitutivist theory of reasons’. The Moral Problem left the authority of morality hanging in the air. It was made hostage to the outcome of a discussion that was to be held in practice. If convergence was not reached, errortheory would win: it would still be part of the concept of moral facts and properties that they are objective and practical, but nothing in reality would fall under these concepts. Our moral statements would be empty, failing to refer to anything real (like statements about witches), and moral discourse would be a massive systematic error. Unhappy with this open ending, Smith wrote ‘Beyond Error Theory’ (2010), in which he vindicates morality on the basis of a transcendental argument. He argues that the possession of certain desires, desires that entail moral commitments, is constitutive of being fully rational. Against the error-theorist Smith holds that moral objectivity does not require the existence of metaphysically mysterious facts, but only the idea that some desires are constitutive of rationality. The claim that desiring particular things is constitutive of full rationality needs argument but no queer metaphysics. The argument (see Smith forthcoming) starts from capacities that an agent needs to have and exercise in order to be fully rational. There may be more, but at least the capacity to believe for reasons and the capacity to be instrumentally rational (the capacity to put one’s desires together with beliefs about what the world would have to be like in order for the desires to be satisfied) are good candidates. Smith argues that in the absence of certain desires the agent could not reliably fully exercise these rational capacities – the upshot is that certain desires are indeed constitutive of being fully rational. The desire he has in mind is the desire with the following content: not to undermine the exercise of one’s own or anyone else’s capacity to believe for reasons and to be instrumentally rational. Without laying out the details of the argument, the thought is that we have 91

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to presuppose this desire present in an agent in order to explain what is irrational about, for instance, wishful thinking. Otherwise we could imagine an agent whose set of beliefs and desires would be made coherent by adapting his beliefs to his desires, for instance forming the belief that his wife does not cheat on him despite evidence to the contrary. Adding the desire not to interfere with his capacity to believe for reasons upsets the harmony and enables us to explain what is irrational about wishful thinking in terms of incoherence. The next step in Smith’s argument is to show that nothing but an arbitrary distinction could explain why an agent should owe it to himself (his future self ) to allow him to exercise his capacity to believe for reasons, but not to other persons. The argument is very Kantian indeed and works towards a vindication of morality on the basis of the existence of the autonomous will and the respect we necessarily owe it, both in ourselves and in others. This very short summary of a promising and fairly recent step in Smith’s thinking deserves more discussion than I can give it here. But I trust that the logic beyond the evolution is clear. By arguing that the possession of certain desires is constitutive of being fully rational, Smith not only averts the threat of moral nihilism, but also meets Williams’ challenge to Kantians. Smith’s constitutivist approach fits perfectly into the theoretical possibility that Williams sets out for the Kantian. Williams says, “[Kantians] cannot simply assume that moral considerations for instance or longterm prudential concerns must figure in every agent’s S. For many agents, as we well know, they indeed do so, if not altogether securely; but a philosophical claim that they are necessarily part of rational agency needs argument.” (2001, 92) And indeed, that is exactly the argument that Smith provides: certain desires are constitutive of rational agency, and these desires entail moral commitments, thus making it true that all rational agents have reason to be moral.

3.6 Smith’s analysis of normative reasons evaluated Given this book’s topic, my evaluation of Smith’s theory will focus on his analysis of normative reasons. I will bypass critique of his defence of moral cognitivism, as this turns specifically on views about the nature of morality and moral judgements rather than views about the nature of normativity. A critical discussion of the HTM also falls beyond the scope of this book, as it would take us too far into theory of mind and action.12 Of course I do not want to deny that the understanding of action as requiring a desire is highly contentious as well as crucial for Smith’s position. As I pointed

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 et me just mention two interesting evaluations of Smith’s ‘direction of fit’ argument for the L HTM. Copp and Sobel offer counter-examples of desires that do and beliefs that do not disappear when the world appears different from before. They argue that neither belief nor desire can be successfully explicated in terms of direction of fit (Copp and Sobel 2001). Sergio Tenenbaum on the other hand accepts that beliefs and desires have a different direction of fit, but denies that this lends any support to the Humean Theory of Motivation (Tenenbaum 2006). 92

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out, his version of HTM is modest (so not all objections to HTM apply to his case), but it is important that he still hangs on to the idea that motivation requires a desire, and this conviction sets off his quest for a kind of hybrid theory with both Humean and Kantian elements – depicting the possession of some desires as constitutive of rationality. Nor will I look into the reactions concerning Smith’s fetishism objection to judgement externalism, as they presuppose an examination of the concepts of moral virtue and moral motivation which I cannot do justice to.13 Besides the contingent fact that this book has a circumscribed scope, another reason for isolating Smith’s analysis of normative reasons from the rest of the argument is that he himself calls the analysis of normative reasons (and consequently the imminent defence of existence internalism) “the main task of The Moral Problem.” (1996a, 164)14 So it seems justified to concentrate fully on this part of the argument in our critical assessment of Smith’s meta-ethical position. In The Moral Problem, but more in his article ‘Internal Reasons’, Smith argues that his version of existence internalism is superior to those of Williams and Korsgaard. Apparently he believes that his analysis secures the objectivity of reasons better than Williams’ relative internal reason theory and the practicality of reason judgements better than Korsgaard’s example model of internal reasons. I am not convinced of the superiority of Smith’s version of existence internalism. Smith’s analysis of normative reasons is vulnerable to many criticisms, some of which Smith can counter, some of which he cannot. The criticisms deal with the acclaimed consistency of the analysis with objectivity on the one hand (3.6.1, 3.6.2) and practicality on the other (3.6.3), with the analysis of normative reasons in terms of what a person would desire if he were fully rational (3.6.4, 3.6.5) and with the reconciliation of objectivity and practicality that the analysis purports to offer (3.6.6). 3.6.1 The analysis trivializes convergence David Enoch is puzzled by Smith’s assumption that rationality, defined in terms of coherence, leads to convergence. Smith presupposes convergence in the desires of our rational selves, because without such a convergence he believes that the desires that we have would be too arbitrary to be of any normative significance. According to Enoch, the required convergence is incredible, since there are infinitely many coherent sets of beliefs and desires: “[t]here seems nothing in the very idea of coherence to exclude infinitely many coherent sets of beliefs and desires. How is it, then, that all

Wallace (2006a) offers a very good reconstruction as well as critical rejection of externalists’ objections to the fetishism argument. 14 “My main task in The Moral Problem is to analyse the concept of a normative reason in general – that is, the concept of a consideration that can rationally justify our acting in a certain way – in terms which guarantee that normative reasons in general as objects of belief are both objective and practical. Once this task is accomplished I move on to provide an analysis of moral reasons in particular.” (Smith 1996a, 164) 13

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rational agents converge on the same set? Isn’t this an amazing miracle?” (Enoch 2007a, 106)15 In his reply to Enoch, Smith first makes the preliminary remark that “talk about coherence is simply a catch-all term, one which allows us to talk of all of the principles of rationality that there are governing relations among desires and beliefs without being specific about what these principles are.” (2007, 137) Smith cannot be very specific about these principles since he does not know what they are; he does not even know for sure whether there are any. To find out, we must engage in normative debates and see whether agreement can be reached. As the concluding words of The Moral Problem revealed, debate in normative ethics is crucial for the final resolution of meta-ethical questions. In that sense, Enoch may be right: convergence may be too much to ask for, that remains to be seen. Notwithstanding this agreement, Smith suspects Enoch of misunderstanding the convergence thesis. He reminds Enoch that the convergence required is very circumscribed. His claim is this: “[rational agents] will all converge in their desires about what is to be done in highly specific circumstances. Characterize a choice situation in its entirety – ‘what would we desire ourselves to do in a situation in which the external circumstances are thus and such (list them completely) and we have these and those desires and beliefs and other mental states (list them completely)?’ – and, I say, fully rational creatures will all converge on a desire that the very same course of action be pursued.” (1997, 89) I believe this qualification weakens Smith’s claim to such an extent that I am not sure whether there remains any disagreement with Williams (remember that the absence of convergence was part of Smith’s critique of Williams’ internal reason theory). Smith denies that the arbitrary fact of which desires an agent actually has would make a difference to the reasons he has. As the qualification aims to capture, nothing but the circumstances makes a difference to what reasons an agent has. Smith illustrates the implication of this qualification in ‘Internal Reasons’ with the following example: suppose that you and I differ in our preferences for wine over beer. Preferring wine, as you do, you have a reason to go to the local wine bar, whereas I have not. Now, this may look as if our reasons are relative to our desires in the sense Williams has in mind, Smith admits, but actually it is not: “for the crucial point in this case is that a relevant feature of your circumstances is your preference for wine, whereas a relevant feature of my circumstances is my preferences for beer.” (1997, 31) Nothing, Smith goes on, precludes the possibility that I can quite happily agree with you that if I were in your circumstances – if I preferred beer to wine – then the fact that the local wine bar sells good wine would constitute a reason for me to go there as well. Smith believes that in rationally justifying our choices our preferences may be a relevant feature of our

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 ichard Joyce is equally sceptical about the purported convergence of rational agents’ desires: R rational selves’ desires are reached by correction from actual selves’ desires, and these starting points are too diverse to support the kind of convergence that Smith’s theory requires to warrant the universality of moral obligations (Joyce 2001, 89-94). 94

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circumstances, but he denies that this lends any support to Williams’ idea that our reasons are relative. But I doubt whether Williams wants to say any more than precisely that: that our desires and elements in S are relevant to what reasons we have. The wine–beer example illustrates perfectly why reasons depend upon desires in Williams’ theory: what I have reason to do in circumstances C depends on my desires; what you have reason to do in those circumstances is different given your different desires. Smith’s manoeuvre seems to consist in omitting explicit mention of desire-dependence but applying a very broad conception of ‘the circumstances’. But is Smith’s position substantially different from Williams’ position? Are reasons in his view more objective, less relative than in Williams’ view? Would Williams disagree with the convergence thesis once he knew how circumscribed it was? Smith succeeds in suppressing Enoch’s doubts: if they are coherent, agents can converge on the same set of desires. But to make this claim plausible Smith has to add such a strong condition (‘if they are in the same circumstances’) that it makes the convergence thesis trivial. On behalf of Smith I should point out that the convergence thesis is easily misunderstood (and I think this motivated him to look for a new formulation in terms of constitutivism). The convergence that Smith considers part of the concept of a reason should (when we use his model) be located at the level of fully rational agents, who form desires about what their less rational counterparts should do. Smith is not committed to the thought that making a given set of beliefs and desires cohere will result in a set of beliefs and desires shared by all agents. He does not say what many critics have taken him to say, namely that under conditions of full information and the resolution of conflicting desires all agents converge on the same desires. Of course there are desires and beliefs that are personal, and making them coherent does nothing to remove the personified dimension. The convergence thesis says only that convergence will emerge when a fully rational agent A and a fully rational agent B look at the set of desires and beliefs of the less than fully rational A and form a desire about what A should do (which may differ from the desire they would form looking at B). The subsequent question why Smith talks about A* and B* rather than about ‘the fully rational agent’ (being one of its kind) – which is a version of the question why Smith prefers the advice model to the example model – should be answered, I believe, by reference to desires that are permissible but not rationally required. A preference for beer over wine is taken into account and personalizes the fully rational counterpart of an agent. But the same does not go for a desire to torture babies. The convergence thesis aims to capture the thought that an agent A can never have a reason to torture babies because A* and B* and all other fully rational selves would never converge on the desire that A torture babies. It is confusing and perhaps also unwarranted that Smith works with two notions of rationality: there is the notion of rationality that governs the set of beliefs and desires of the actual agent and that explains what is irrational about someone who believes he ought to Φ but does not desire to Φ, and there is the notion of rationality that explains why someone has a reason not to torture babies. The first notion of ra95

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tionality is local; the latter is global. The first is a matter of coherence; the latter seems thicker, although there may be a roundabout way of showing why having a desire not to torture babies makes the whole set of an agent’s mental states more coherent.16 I believe that lots of criticism of the convergence thesis is due to a misunderstanding, but I also believe that there remains a valid question even when we make sure to formulate doubts about convergence at the level of global rationality. The question is why Smith believes that, no matter what contingent circumstances an agent starts out with, his fully rational self would never advise him to do something immoral? Let us imagine Jojo, the son of a cruel dictator in Susan Wolf ’s famous example. Could it not be the case that Jojo* as well as A* and B* converges on the desire that Jojo do something immoral. Could it not be that for some agents some reasons are out of reach, their state of mind so perverted that it would be irrational for them to do what is morally required? Absent a substantial conception of rationality that postulates in advance that killing innocent people is irrational, I am not sure why we have to accept that fully rational agents will always advise one to do what is morally permissible. The concept of convergence, in other words, may not suffice to capture the notion of moral objectivity. Though this is, strictly speaking, a criticism of Smith’s defence of moral rationalism, it is related to his convergence thesis because it questions what Smith hopes to get from convergence, as the following criticism also does. 3.6.2 Why do reasons have to be objective? Apart from whether Smith succeeds in securing the objectivity of reasons, one could wonder why he thinks he needs to secure it. Smith apparently thinks that we have no choice but to conceive of reasons as either objective or depending upon arbitrary facts. Since Smith assumes that “arbitrariness undermines normativity” (1997, 90), reasons have to be thought of as objective, further explicated as non-relative and even categorical. This is why Smith opposes Williams’ internal reason theory, which makes an agent’s reasons relative to the desires he happens to have. The fact that one has a desire to Ψ but not to Φ is an arbitrary fact and therefore lacks any normative significance in Smith’s eyes. I agree that arbitrariness undermines normativity, but I do not see why this commits us to the claim that reasons must be non-relative, objective or categorical. I believe that reasons can depend upon contingent facts and still have normative force. To say that reasons are relative, depending on contingent facts, does not imply the nihilistic thought that it does not matter what people do. Even if a reason is agent-relative, and in that sense subjective, it still appeals to someone and still has some authoritative

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If I understand Smith’s view correctly (see Smith (forthcoming)), he would say that adding a desire not to interfere with anybody’s exercise of his rational capacities would make any set of desires and beliefs more coherent. Having the desire is intrinsically (not instrumentally) rational, and thus its rationality is not derived from the presence of another desire, but its rationality lies in its coherence-enhancing quality. 96

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force for that person. Smith seems to overlook the difference between contingency and up-to-us-ness or arbitrariness. As we will see in detail in chapter 5, Harry Frankfurt relies upon this difference when he argues that love can create reasons (Frankfurt 2004). What we love is a contingent fact: you love your husband, I love mine; you love dancing and I hate it; it does not have to be that way, but that is just the way it is. Still, something contingent like the fact that I happen to love the man I accidentally met at a party some time ago is a source of reasons for me. That contingent fact gives me a reason to see a film I would not want to see if it was not his favourite film, for instance. But even in a stronger way, love forces people to do ‘crazy things’, like risking their lives because they are passionate about their jobs as war journalists. That it is a contingent fact that someone loves war journalism does not undermine the normative force of that love, because, as Frankfurt says, the fact that someone loves war journalism (and not farming, for instance) is not up to him. What we love is not up to us. It is not under our voluntary control. We will see the full meaning of this fact in chapter 5. Up-to-us-ness undermines normativity, but contingency does not. 3.6.3 The analysis does not guarantee practicality David Copp (1997) as well as Geoffry Sayre-McCord (1997) accuses Smith of “violating a rule of intentional logic to the effect that analytic equivalents cannot be substituted inside belief contexts.” (Smith 1997, 101) That is why it is fallacious to move, as Smith does, from a claim about what desirability is (in terms of facts about what he would want if he had a maximally informed and coherent and unified set of desires) to a claim about an agent’s beliefs about what it is desirable to do (identified as a belief about what he would want if he had a maximally informed and coherent and unified set of desires). In other words, Copp and Sayre-McCord protest that the substitution of the conceptual analysis in platitude C2 is not valid. Let me explain this in a little more detail. Smith believes that the substitution of the conceptual analysis of normative reasons in C2 enables him to explain why reason judgements are practical. The explanation proceeds in four steps: 1. An agent has a reason to Φ if his fully rational self would desire him to Φ 2. To believe that one has a reason to Φ is to believe that one would desire to Φ if one were fully rational. 3. Believing one would desire to Φ if one were fully rational without desiring to Φ is irrational by the agent’s own lights. 4. Consequently, believing that one has a reason to Φ without desiring to Φ is irrational by the agent’s own lights as well. This argument is considered invalid by both Copp and Sayre-McCord. Copp argues that the second proposition – what Copp calls ‘the belief identity claim’ – does not

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follow from the first proposition, just as it does not follow from the proposition that ‘Superman is Clark Kent’ that ‘to believe that Clark Kent lives next door is to believe that Superman lives next door.’ To think that the second claim can be derived from the first is to violate a rule of intentional logic: one cannot substitute equivalents in belief contexts. But even if one accepts Smith’s belief identity claim for the sake of the argument, to believe that Clark Kent lives next door while denying that Superman lives next door may be thought of as contradictory, it is certainly not considered to be ‘irrational by Lois Lane’s own lights’. How could a person be ‘irrational by her own lights’ when the contradiction between her beliefs is not accessible to her? (Copp 1997, 41) The same goes for the agent with a normative belief about the reasons he has.17 Copp’s objection comes down to this: even if the analysis of normative reasons is correct, that does not imply that that fact is known by every agent, and an agent can hold the belief that ‘he has a reason to Φ’ together with the belief that ‘he would not desire to Φ if he were fully rational’ without being irrational, because by her own lights there is no contradiction in her beliefs. Sayre-McCord makes the same objection when he writes, “If in fact Smith’s account of reasons is true, then what someone believes when she has reason to Φ in C does entail that her fully rational self would want her to Φ in C. However, it doesn’t entail that she believes that her fully rational self would want her to Φ in C.” (Sayre-McCord 1997, 80) Yet, Smith’s substitution of the conceptual analysis in C2 assumes that everyone who has the first belief has the second as well. This assumption is fallacious. Therefore, Smith fails to show that the practicality requirement is entailed by his conceptual analysis of normative reasons. Smith does not believe this objection is valid: “[w]hat I have provided all along is an account of the content of claims about normative reasons. That is what my analysis purports to be. …If I do succeed in that task then there is no objection to my substituting that content inside belief contexts.” (1997, 101) Smith thinks he has succeeded in showing that the concepts ‘being desirable’ (which is equivalent, in his view, to ‘being an action I have reason to do’) and ‘being something that I would desire if I had a maximally informed and coherent and unified set of desires’ are one and the same. It is important to see how Smith achieved this result: the method of conceptual analysis consists of looking at the role played by the desirability judgements in our mental economy, and then constructing a content for our desirability judgements that can best explain the various inferential roles such judgements have. Attributing the belief that he would desire to Φ if he had a maximally informed and coherent and unified desire set to someone who judges Φ to be desirable is justified because that belief best explains the abilities and sensitivities that follow from and lead to the agent’s desirability judgement.

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 o be precise, Copp directs his critique towards Smith’s identification of the moral belief ‘that T it is right to Φ’ with the belief ‘that one would desire to Φ if one were fully rational’. But the core of the objection appears even sharper if one applies it to the normative belief ‘that I have a reason to Φ’. 98

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Because the analysis of the concept of a normative reason purports to provide the content of a belief about normative reasons, Smith resists the accusation that he violates a rule of intentional logic when he substitutes the analysis in platitude C2. I think his rejection of Copp’s and Sayre-McCord’s objection is valid, besides being very illuminating. It shows how intimately connected Smith’s defence of existence internalism and judgement internalism are. Yet, I think there is another way to bring out what is troublesome about Smith’s identification of the analysis of ‘having a reason to Φ’ and ‘believing that one has a reason to Φ’. Remember that one of Smith’s goals was to avoid the conditional fallacy. His advice model saves the practicality and practical relevance of a reason judgement. Some philosophers (f.e. Johnson 1997) have objected that because of this move Smith’s reason theory no longer qualifies as a reason internalism. After all, the advice model does not connect an agent’s reasons to his desire to Φ but to the advice or the desire of his fully rational self that the agent Φs. The agent’s actual capacities still play a role, but only indirectly as input for the deliberation of the advising rational self. The real reason this advice is binding is that it comes from a fully rational self. So the source of normative reasons is located, so to speak, not in desire or other elements of the motivational set, but in rationality. Whether this means that Smith’s theory about normative reasons is no longer internalist depends on one’s understanding of internalism: Smith still thinks the relationship between normative reasons and motivation is conceptual, even though the agent’s desires do not carry the explanatory weight of why an agent has reason to Φ. The actual agent’s desires are thus removed from the centre stage. The actual agent’s beliefs however play a very important role in Smith’s theory of reasons. After all, he thinks that an agent’s beliefs about what he should do connect the agent’s motivation with the agent’s reasons (at least when the agent is rational). He also thinks that analysing the content of an agent’s beliefs about his reasons gives us an analysis of what it means to have a reason. I personally doubt the assumptions underlying this connection between reasons and reason-beliefs. One of the assumptions is that when an agent has a reason to Φ he also has a reason to believe that he has a reason to Φ. And that seems to me to be false. Remember Tess, who has reason to move in with her boyfriend but no reason to believe that, because forming that belief would freak her out and change her behaviour and the boyfriend situation such that she no longer has a reason to move in. Such cases of self-sabotage do not seem extremely exceptional to me; the point is quite plain: some people tune in with the reasons they have without having to deliberate; actually the deliberation process and belief-formation process would lead them off the right path. Smith avoids the conditional fallacy in one sense by keeping the actual agent’s desires fixed and letting the idealization take place in the advisor’s counterfactual situation. The psychological link between actual agent and fully rational agent is a belief with the content ‘I have reason to Φ’. My point is that adding this belief to the actual agent’s mind might change her circumstances just as idealizing her desires would – thus making the reason-judgement ill-adapted to the situation. So I think that the conditional fallacy reappears in a different guise. Smith wants to respect the limits of an actual 99

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agent’s desires (provided they are compatible with the rationally required desire we talked about in the context of his constitutivism), therefore he lets an idealized version determine what reasons an agent has. The idealized self plays the role of the best friend in the description of the case: they see that Tess has a reason to move in with her boyfriend because she loves him and she will be happy with him. There are elements in her motivational set S that will motivate her to move in with her boyfriend. But the formation of reason-beliefs will hinder this process, and in the end also sabotage it. Tess’s reasons cannot be conscious in her mind as the content of a belief or judgement. But on Smith’s theory beliefs are what connects an agent to his reasons. In Smith’s story of how reasons come about the actual agents’ desires remain untouched, but Smith cannot bypass the actual agent’s beliefs in the same way because the belief ‘I have a reason to Φ’ is the psychological link ensuring actual motivation by reasons. But Tess invites us to raise the question why agents would deal in a more rational way with their beliefs than with their desires. Smith, like Williams, underestimates the distorting influence beliefs can have on motivational capacities and accords, overall, a too prominent role to beliefs in what makes up rational agency. He cannot accommodate the fact that someone can have a reason to Φ without having a reason to form the belief that he has a reason to Φ. He fails the Tess case. 3.6.4 The analysis rests on a false platitude On Smith’s account, a person has a reason to Φ in circumstances C just in case, if she were fully rational, she would desire that she Φed in C. Smith takes this analysis of normative reasons as merely making explicit a ‘platitude’ about reasons, namely the platitude that “what we have normative reason to do is what we would desire that we do if we were fully rational.” (1994, 150; also 62) David Copp thinks this so-called platitude is false: a person may have a reason to Φ in C even if it is not the case that she would desire to Φ in C if she were fully rational.18 Consider a person who has a reason but is unaware of it and fails to have the corresponding desire. If Smith is right, this agent should be less than fully rational. However, it is possible that her lack of knowledge is due to the inaccessibility of some facts. Suppose Lois wants to be with Clarke, but through no fault of her own she does not know that Superman is Clarke and therefore does not want to be with Superman, though she has a reason to want that as well. Would we think that Lois is less than fully rational for not wanting to be with Superman? Copp thinks we would not, at least not if we conceived of rationality in the ordinary sense. It might be suggested that Lois is less than fully rational in Smith’s sense, because rationality in Smith’s theory includes the condition that ‘one has all relevant true beliefs’. Yet Copp rightly remarks that if the so-called platitude is indeed a platitude, it must be understood as a thesis about rationality in an ordinary sense (Copp 1997, 46). Omniscience is not David Copp is an (existence and judgement) externalist; for a defence of his own position see Copp (1995). 18

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thought of as a necessary condition for rationality in the ordinary sense. Or, as Copp further illustrates, a mistake in deliberation due to lack of time or competing priorities can be reasonable, and therefore not a failure of rationality. Copp does not criticize Smith for using a more exigent conception of rationality; his point is that in that case the so-called platitudes upon which Smith’s case rests are no longer platitudes but stipulated truths. In his reply to Copp, Smith admits that his use of the word ‘rationality’ may be misleading. He should not have talked about ‘the fully rational agent’ to denote the agent who is “immune from reasoned criticism.” (1997, 91) But apart from this terminological issue, his point holds, he thinks. The ordinary thought that his analysis tries to capture is the thought that, deliberating on what to do, we would take advice only of someone who is perfectly placed to give advice. Smith explains, “My suggestion is that an agent’s normative reasons are constituted by facts about the desires she would have in a possible world in which she is perfectly placed to give herself advice, and I say that this, in turn, is the possible world in which her desires are beyond reproach from the point of view of reasoned criticism: the evaluating world in which her desires are maximally informed and coherent and unified.” (1997, 91) Someone who is mistaken or ignorant may still be rational in an ordinary sense, but he is not perfectly placed to give advice. It is irrelevant that the ignorance and mistakes are reasonable relative to the agent’s less-than-perfect circumstances. Though Smith’s reply is valid, I believe that Copp’s critique reveals a true weakness in Smith’s argument. His method of conceptual analysis indicates that the ultimate ground for his theory is common sense. His defence of the internalist non-relativist account of normative reasons rests upon ‘what we mean when we say that someone has a reason’. But can one not read “an awful lot” in our daily use of the word ‘reason’? (I quote Simon Kirchin in his review of Smith’s book: see Kirchin 2005) The weakness of this method appears clearly at the point where Smith argues in favour of the advice model on the assumption that we would not say that the angry squash player has a reason to shake hands with his opponent before leaving the court. I think some would say that the angry squash player has a reason to do exactly that. Different opinions about what the squash player should do can be traced back to a different comprehension of ‘having a reason’ and would lead to other theories of practical reason. It shows that intuitions are not always as clear, and ‘platitudes’ not always as platitudinous, as Smith takes them to be. This is especially troublesome since platitudes play a founding role in his analysis. 3.6.5 Normative reasons and what I would desire if I were fully rational Like Copp, both Julie Tannenbaum (2007) and David Enoch (2007a) defend the idea that a person might have a reason to Φ, even if he did not desire to Φ if he were fully rational. In response to Tannenbaum, Smith explains away this possibility by making a distinction between ‘what a person has reason to do’ and ‘what would be good for him to do’. The possibility that is defended by Enoch indicates a deeper disagree101

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ment: Enoch defends a meta-normative realism, whereas Smith’s view of reasons is constructivist. Tannenbaum illustrates her criticism by pointing out that we can tell a friend who is addicted to cigarettes ‘you should buy low tar cigarettes’, but also ‘you should quit smoking’. There are two ‘shoulds’ here she says; the first ‘should’ considers the desire to be healthy as a constraint on how my friend pursues the satisfaction of his desire to smoke, whereas the second ‘should’ considers the desire to be healthy as a competitor with the desire to smoke (see Tannenbaum 2007, 127). People use ‘should’ in both contexts. Tannenbaum wonders which ‘should’ is analysed by Smith and why he did not make this distinction. But Smith resists: if we understand ‘you should’ as equivalent to ‘you have a reason’, it may be false to tell the addict that he should stop smoking. If not smoking is not an option for him, because he is addicted in a very strong sense for example, then it simply is not true that he should not smoke. He should bring about only the best of the outcomes that he can bring about: perhaps he should smoke low-tar cigarettes. This is implied by Smith’s advice model of normative reasons: my normative reasons are “the wants of my fully rational self in the evaluating world … restricted to those he has for outcomes in the evaluated world that can be realized by actions that are among the options I have in the evaluated world.” (2007, 146) But what about the use of ‘should’ in the expression ‘you should quit smoking’? People do say such things, even if they know that the addict is very strongly addicted. Smith accounts for this by drawing a distinction between what a person has reason to do and what would be good for him to do: “[m]y ideally rational self may, of course, desire that I do all sorts of things that aren’t among my options. My doing these things would be good, but I would have no reason to do these things.” (2007, 146) In an article on McDowell’s theory of external reasons, Smith further elaborates on this difference: “[t]he difference between a reason claim and a claim about what it would be good for someone to do is thus, in effect, a difference between a claim about what it would be good-from-the-standpoint-of-reason for someone to do and a claim about what it would be good-from-the-standpoint-of-some-ideal-other-than-reason for someone to do.” (Smith and Pettit 2006, 158) The reasons that a person has are still defined by the desires he would have if he were fully rational. But that does not say anything about what would be good for him to do. In this way, Smith deals with Tannenbaum’s critique (much like WIlliams dealt with Scanlon’s critique). Along the same lines as Tannenbaum, Enoch considers the possibility that there can be a discrepancy between what my fully rational self desires and what I should do. Enoch thinks that an agent can have a reason to Φ, even though his fully rational self would not desire him to Φ. For, “it seems to me rather commonsensical that my ideally rational advisor … must satisfy much more than coherence. It seems to me that he must also have the right views on many matters, including many normative matters. In particular, he must know what really is desirable.” (Enoch 2007a, 100) This remark reveals a disagreement “as deep and complete as disagreements can be,” Smith admits in his reply to Enoch (2007, 136). Enoch seems to think that what a person 102

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would desire if he were fully rational is determined by what is desirable, whereas Smith claims that what a person would desire if he were fully rational constitutes what is desirable.19 Facts about what we have reason to do are constructed facts, in Smith’s view. What my fully rational self would desire is not an identifying rule to detect what is desirable. What my fully rational self desires defines what is desirable. In Smith’s words, “Desirability … isn’t an independent feature to which my ideally rational advisor is sensitive. Desirability is better understood as being constituted by the fact that my ideally rational advisor would desire that those states of affairs obtain if he formed his desires about them in conformity with all of the principles of rationality that there are.” (2007, 141) In this light, Smith’s theory of reasons could be called constructivist, whereas Enoch’s theory embodies a ‘meta-normative realism’ (of which Parfit’s nonnaturalist theory of reasons is another representation). Meta-ethical or, in its generalized form, meta-normative realism is the view that there are response-independent, irreducible moral or normative truths, perfectly universal and objective, that we discover rather than create or construct when we are successful in our moral or normative inquiries. Smith agrees with the meta-normative realist to a certain extent. He seems to admit that, indeed, some normativity is needed from the start, that one cannot ‘bootstrap’ one’s way all the way up from descriptive to normative facts. That is why Smith’s analysis of normative reasons is, in a certain sense, non-reductive: Smith analyses normative reasons in terms of what a fully rational self would desire, but surely ‘rationality’ is a normative notion as well. Smith is the first to admit this: “I am not inclined to think that I have provided a reductive analysis of desirability.” (1997, 98) He adds that he would have loved to, but that he is not sure whether it can be had. But in contrast to a non-reductive meta-normative realism, Smith’s alternative for reductionism exists in building a theory of normative reasons upon the concept of rationality; he does not make normative reasons rest upon values that are supposed to be somehow out there in reality. Roughly put, on Smith’s reason theory, what a person has reason to do is determined by rationality, not by reality. That is why Smith’s view of normative reasons is that of a constructivist, not of a realist.20 3.6.6 The advice model is inconsistent with the convergence thesis As a final critique, I will come back to a problem touched upon earlier, namely the apparent tension between the practicality requirement and the convergence thesis, which strikes me as the hardest knot in Smith’s theory to disentangle. Even after the analysis of normative reasons, something of the moral problem remains, because it  is discussion is a variant of the old dilemma which is sometimes referred to as the Euthyphro Th dilemma because Plato writes about it in the dialogue of that name: “[c]onsider at follows: is the holy, because it is holy, beloved by the Gods; or because it is beloved by them, is it holy?” (Euthyphro 10a) 20 In the literature Christine Korsgaard, more than Smith, is considered to be a typical (metaethical) constructivist. We will see more about her constructivism in chapter 4. 19

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remains difficult to reconcile practicality and objectivity. Whether Smith’s solution works depends on one’s intuitions about what rationality requires. What complicates this appeal to intuitions is that Smith, as it seems to me, invokes two different notions of rationality. Let me first explain what goes wrong when one does not distinguish between these two notions – in that case one might think that Smith’s solution fails because it relies on an ambiguous use of the notion ‘rationality’. This objection is invalid because Smith is explicitly aware of this double meaning of ‘rationality’. But the objection is nevertheless interesting to reconstruct because it reveals premises of Smith’s argument that show the importance of intuitions, even in such a meticulous and systematic construction of arguments. As I interpret him, Smith prefers the advice model to the example model because he is concerned about practicality: what the fully rational self desires must affect the agent. Smith does not see how the desire of a fully rational self A* about what A* would do in her circumstances could engender any motivation in the actual agent A in her actual circumstances. Therefore he rejects the example model. Smith wants to make sure, however, that his concern for the practicality of reason judgements does not bring the objectivity of reason judgements into danger. Therefore, what an agent has reason to do is left to be decided by his fully rational self. At that stage of the argument, it is the belief and desire set of the advising self, the self in the evaluating world that must be maximally coherent and unified, in one word rational, whereas the advised self or self in the evaluated world can be irrational (like the angry squash player). But at a further stage in the argument, Smith argues that reason judgements are practical only on the condition that the agent is practically rational and has a coherent psychology. This time the condition of rationality is imposed upon the advised self, the self in the evaluated world, whose desires must cohere with the beliefs she has about her reasons. But was this advised self not supposed to be less than fully rational? The advice model loses its point if the advised self is as rational as the advising self. And even more than that: the practicality requirement cannot be met. Remember that the advice by A* was formulated under the assumption that A was not fully rational. A* does not set an example by showing how she, being fully rational, would act, but A* gives advice telling A how A must act in her circumstances. Does the advice, then, still apply to A when A rationalizes her belief and desire set? And if A has to rationalize her belief desire set after all, why would we not opt for the example model in the first place, thinking that what A has reason to do is simply what A* would do herself? Why adapt A*’s advice to the uncool, irrational state of the angry squash player when he is expected to behave rationally, after all, and to adjust his desires to his normative beliefs? A tension between the analysis of the objectivity of normative reasons (in which only the advising self is supposed to be rational while the actual self can be irrational) and the analysis of the practicality of normative reasons (in which, after all, the actual agent is supposed to be rational) appears. But note that this tension appears only if one identifies desire-belief coherence with full rationality. Yet, this identification is unwarranted. Nothing in Smith’s view commits him to the strange claim that motiva104

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tion by a reason-judgement presupposes full rationality. The practical rationality that consists in adapting one’s desires to one’s beliefs is local. The objection fails. But it presses the question of what to make of these two ‘kinds’ of rationality. What is full rationality if it is not a function of local rationality, if it is more than or different from making the actual psychology of an agent more coherent? With the constitutivist view Smith gives content to full rationality, namely by identifying the desire not to interfere with anyone’s exercise of his rational capacities as constitutive of full rationality. But why would that be so? And why are there not more desires constitutive of full rationality? Think of the angry squash player: why is the desire to overcome one’s egoistic pre-occupation not constitutive of rationality? If it were, then the squash player could never have had a reason to avoid his opponent and leave the field without congratulating him. Smith would probably feel this is asking too much of a person. But is a feeling enough to make a distinction between what is constitutive of full rationality and what is accidental to it? What the angry squash-player has reason to do depends on contingent factors (like his temper) according to Smith, yet this concession does not entail what Smith thinks of as a vicious sort of relativity and which he finds displayed in Williams’ internal reason theory. But to explain this distinction between two sorts of relativity (one that threatens rational agency and another that does not) it does not help to distinguish between two senses of rationality, local and global, practical and objective. That Smith thinks that the squash-player’s fully rational self would allow the agent to leave the field without shaking hands depends on nothing more than intuitions about what is morally impermissible and what is not. The stability of Smith’s theory is affected not because of the tension between the practicality requirement and the convergence thesis as such, but because there is no principled way to determine the extent to which the counterfactual conditions invoked in his analysis of normative reasons depend on actual desires and motivational capacities of the agent.

3.7 Conclusion Smith’s main reason to depart from Williams’ internal reason theory is that he wants to secure the universal and categorical force of moral obligations. He relies on the universality of rationality to explain the existence of normative reasons that we all share, like the reasons to be moral. However, Smith also wants to account for the fact that reasons can motivate. Therefore he develops a view of normative reasons that starts from a conceptual connection between reasons and desires, while he keeps trying to avoid the conclusion that whether we have a reason to be moral depends upon our desires. In other words, Smith tries to find the right balance between normativity and motivation, between objective facts and subjective mental states, between morality and psychology, or, roughly put, between Kant and Hume. The resulting theory of moral rationalism and his arguments, however, raise questions, some of which are undoubtedly due to the complexity of the matter and the fact that Smith’s constitutiv105

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ism is still under construction. But it is Smith’s denial of the thesis that an agent may have a reason to Φ without having a reason to believe that she has reason to Φ that motivates me to look for a different analysis of normative reasons. It seems to me that beliefs play too prominent a role in many philosophers’ accounts of rational agency. The point is not merely epistemological, because it is not just that I think that agents can track reasons via emotions for instance, instead of via beliefs. The point is that we need a conceptual analysis of practical reasons that can accommodate cases where agents act for reasons without the intervention of beliefs, and where beliefs even hinder acting for reasons. Both Williams and Smith analyse normative reasons in terms of beliefs that motivate the agent under idealized circumstances. In the words of chapter 2, they both fail the Tess case. The next chapter deals with a theory of practical reasons that does not explain reasons in terms of beliefs, because it does not really attempt to give an explanation of reasons at all.

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Derek Parfit on practical reasons 4.1 Introduction Roughly speaking, there are three strands of thinking in the debate on normative reasons which can be qualified as Humean, Kantian and Platonic. With Williams and Smith we illustrated the first two strands. In this chapter I present Derek Parfit as a proponent of what he himself resists calling Platonic thinking, but which is definitely anti-Humean and anti-Kantian in its insistence on the fact that reasons are sui generis, non-reducible to either natural facts or features of rational agency, and knowable through the special faculty of intuitions. Since he considers normative truths to be non-ontological (he compares them to mathematical truths), he insists that his nonnaturalism is non-Platonic. Yet the labels do what they are supposed to do: give us a quick way of mapping positions before studying them in depth. A comprehensive presentation of Parfit’s encompassing theory of value, morality and normativity as set out in his magnum opus On What Matters falls outside the scope of this book. For our purposes, namely understanding Parfit’s view of reasons, it suffices to rely on three articles that Parfit published on the subject: ‘Reasons and Motivation’ (1997), ‘Rationality and Reasons’ (2001) and ‘Normativity’ (2006), complemented by relevant passages from On What Matters (2011). On What Matters was long-awaited (it circulated for many years as a manuscript entitled Climbing the Mountain) and has received a lot of attention, but the central chapters deal with issues of normative ethics. Parfit’s provocative claim that there are no deep disagreements between Kantians, contractualists and consequentialists (they are all climbing the same mountain) will not concern us here. The oecumenical spirit that Parfit displays in the meta-ethical and ethical parts of the book does not transfer to the chapters of the book that concern us and in which he argues that only a value-based theory of reasons can be right, rejecting all rival theories. As we will see, his account of normativity indeed differs in significant and interesting ways from both Williams’ and Smith’s.

4.2 Parfit’s externalism In his dense and thoughtful article ‘Reasons and Motivation’ Parfit argues that we should all be non-reductive normative realists and should regard all reasons as external and value-based. Though they are related, these are three different claims. In this section I start with Parfit’s defence of externalism. Subsequently I turn to his value-based reason theory (4.3). The ground for his external value-based reason theory is his non107

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reductive and non-naturalist normative realism, which is explained and evaluated in the last section (4.4). When Parfit says that all reasons are external he opposes Bernard Williams’ internal reason theory. He defines internalism about reasons in line with Williams as (1997, 100): for it to be true that (R) we have a reason to do something it must be true that (M) if we knew the relevant facts and deliberated rationally, we would be motivated to do this thing According to externalists, at least some reasons for acting are not internal, since they do not require the truth of (M). Parfit argues for a strong externalism that takes all reasons to be external. He writes, “Reasons for acting are all external. When we have a reason to do something, this reason is not provided by, and does not require, the fact that after deliberation, we would want to do this thing.” (1997, 130) His argument in favour of externalism starts with a sceptical analysis of Williams’ objections to externalism. As shown in chapter 2, we can distinguish three arguments in Williams’ case against externalism: the obscurity objection, the no-explanatory-force objection and the no-motivational-fuel objection. Parfit does not use these labels, but he discusses all three of them and concludes that they fail. 4.2.1 The obscurity objection rejected Williams’ basic problem with externalism is that it does not explain what external reasons could be. They do not offer a distinctive content for external reason statements. Williams gives the example of someone who maltreats his wife and whose failure to care about her would survive any amount of informed and rational deliberation. He comments, “There are many things I can say to or about this man: that he is ungrateful, inconsiderate, hard, sexist, nasty, selfish, brutal and many disadvantageous things. I shall presumably say, whatever else I say, that it would be better if he were nicer to her. There is one specific thing that the external reasons theorist wants me to say, that the man has a reason to be nicer. Or rather, the external reason theorist may want me to say this: one of the mysterious things about the denial of internalism lies precisely in the fact that it leaves it quite obscure when this form of words is thought to be appropriate. But if it is thought to be appropriate, what is supposed to make it appropriate, as opposed to (or in addition to) all the other things that may be said?” (1989, 39) Presumably externalists would answer that the wife’s unhappiness makes it appropriate to say that the man has a reason to treat her better. But Williams rejects this claim, since he does not see on the externalist reading “what the difference [is] supposed to be between saying that the agent has a reason to act more considerately, and saying … that it would be better if [he] acted otherwise?” (1989, 40)

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For Parfit, the obscurity objection is evidence that Williams defends an analytically reductive internalism. He distinguishes this from a non-analytically reductive form and a non-reductive form of internalism. Given the general definition of internalism: for it to be true that (R) we have a reason to do something it must be true that (M) if we knew the relevant facts and deliberated rationally, we would be motivated to do this thing Parfit distinguishes three forms of the internalist view (1997, 108): Analytically Reductive: when we assert (R) what we mean is (M). Non-Analytically Reductive: though these claims do not mean the same, when (R) is true, that normative fact is the same as, or consists in, the fact reported by (M). Non-Reductive: the facts reported by (R) and (M) are very different. While (M) is psychological, (R) is an irreducibly normative truth. Since Williams says that he does not understand what the claim ‘this man has a reason to treat his wife better’ could mean other than ‘if he deliberated rationally on the facts, he would be motivated to treat her better’, he seems to adopt the analytically reductive form of internalism.1 Non-analytically reductive and non-reductive internalists would not find it so obscure that those two claims differ in meaning. They believe themselves that in claiming that ‘this man has a reason to treat his wife better’ we mean something other than ‘if he deliberated rationally on the facts, he would be motivated to treat her better’, though they think that the former claim can be true only if the latter is. In answer to Williams’ question what the external reason claim could possibly mean, Parfit digs in his heels: it means what it says. He admits that externalists do not offer any content for external reason statements, but he resists Williams’ deduction that this prohibits external reason statements from being true or being substantially different from other statements we could make about people whose behaviour we disapprove of. With regard to the abovementioned example, Parfit emphasizes that if we merely say that it would be better if the man acted more considerately, we do not claim that he has a reason to do so. But we want to say that the man has a reason to treat his wife better. I will explain later that, despite Parfit’s insistence on the distinctive meaning of ‘having a reason to Φ’, it remains very vague what he takes this concept to mean. He will reformulate it as a fact that counts in favour of some attitude or action, but admits that does not elucidate much. What complicates the fact is that Parfit defends a buck-passing analysis according to which goodness is explained in 1

 s explained in chapter 2 I agree with this interpretation of Williams’ arguments as offering an A analysis. 109

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terms of reasons. The difference between saying that “it would be good if this man did Φ” and “this man has reason to Φ”, disappears, a fact which some philosophers might find desirable but which is unsatisfying when having a reason remains unexplained. 4.2.2 The no-explanatory-force objection rejected Williams’ objection that the meaning of external reason claims is obscure is connected to his objection that he cannot imagine what role external reasons could play if they could not function as an explanation of action. That is the gist of his no-explanatoryforce objection which, applied to moral action, goes as follows: “[i]t would make a difference to ethics if certain kinds of internal reasons were very generally to hands … But what difference would external reasons make? … Should we suppose that, if genuine external reasons were to be had, morality might get some leverage on a squeamish Jim or priggish George, or even on the fanatical nazi? ... I cannot see what leverage it would secure: what would these external reasons do to these people, or for our relations to them?” (Williams 1995, 216) Parfit rejects this objection as irrelevant: our aim in moral discourse is truth, not influence. Even if moral truths do not affect people they can still be true. Actually, Williams would not deny this last claim: internal reason theory makes the truth of reason statements dependent on motivation, not the truth of moral statements. But Parfit continues in the same vein that our discourse about the reasons that a person has for acting, does not aim at influence either. (Parfit 1997, 111) However this answer addresses Williams’ worry only in part: even if the discourse does not aim at influence, it often has influence and competent users of the concept ‘reasons’ do not find it surprising to observe a change in motivation following a reason-judgement. The no-explanatory-force objection demands that if agents act for the reasons they have, a reason theory must be able to explain that. Granted Parfit’s point that external reason claims do not have to influence people’s behaviour, the question is: how could they? Can external reasons play a role in practical life? In order fully to understand Williams’ scepsis we should have a look at one last argument of his, which I have dubbed ‘the no-motivational-fuel objection’. Parfit’s rebuttal of this argument reveals the most interesting and basic disagreement between him and Williams. 4.2.3 The no-motivational-fuel objection rejected Remember Owen Wingrave, who has no desire whatsoever to join the army, though his family wants him to do so. Assume that, after a while, Owen Wingrave comes to believe that indeed he has a reason to join the army and he acts upon this belief. The internal reason theorist could explain this by assuming that, after sound deliberation, Owen Wingrave realizes that he cares about family traditions, which motivates him to join the army after all and which makes it true that he has a reason to join the army. Williams believes it is impossible for externalists to explain the motivational change in Owen Wingrave: if Owen became motivated to go into the army as a result of rational 110

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deliberation, his new motivation must have been reached from some earlier motivation, which shows that the internal reason theory is true. As already mentioned in chapter 2, Williams dwells on a very particular conception of rational deliberation here. Parfit ascribes a procedural interpretation of rationality to Williams, and opposes it to the substantial interpretation that he himself favours. To be procedurally rational, we must deliberate in certain ways, for instance, taking into account all the relevant facts, avoiding errors of fact or reasoning, but we are not required to have any particular desires or aims. Substantial rationality implies more than informed deliberation. As Parfit explains, “To be substantially rational we must care about certain things, such as our own well-being.” (Parfit 1997, 101) Armed with this interpretation of rationality, externalists can offer an account of the motivational force of external reasons. According to externalists, (R) we have a reason to do something entails (E) if we knew the relevant facts, and were fully substantively rational, we would be motivated to do that thing. According to the externalist picture, some things, like our well-being, are just worth achieving in themselves, and if we are fully rational we realize that and are motivated by considerations about our well-being and other intrinsic goods. As a result, reason and motivation appear in a different order in the externalist’s explanation of the motivational force of reasons. “Internalists derive conclusions about reasons from psychological claims about the motivation that, under certain conditions, we would in fact have. Externalists derive, from normative claims about what is worth achieving, conclusions about reasons, and about the motivation that we ought to have.” (Parfit 1997, 102) According to internalists, for a person to have a reason to Φ, first he must be motivated to Φ, so that (R) is true because (M) is true. But, according to externalists, a person becomes motivated to Φ once he realizes that he has a reason to Φ, so (E) is merely a consequence of (R). What makes (R) true according to externalists is not some empirical, psychological fact about motivation but facts about things that are intrinsically valuable. With regard to Owen Wingrave, the externalists might agree that Owen has no reason to join the army unless he develops some kind of military ambition or respect for family traditions through sound deliberation. Desires sometimes play an indirect role in the attribution of reasons to a person. I will come back to this moderation of the external reason theory later (in 4.3.4). But with regard to another example of Williams’ – the man who does not care about his own well-being and is not motivated to take a medicine he knows he needs – externalists affirm what Williams denies, namely that the man has a reason to take the medicine even if, because he is not fully substantively rational, no amount of informed deliberation would motivate him to do so.

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The distinction between procedural and substantive rationality is an important one.2 Since there is no intrinsic limit to what could be required by substantive rationality, the substantive interpretation of rationality offers a way out to those philosophers who refuse to accept one of the most controversial implications of Williams’ internal reason theory, namely the implication that people who do not care about morality even after informed deliberation would have no reason to act morally. One could argue that on a different understanding of rationality moral requirements urge themselves upon us as rational requirements.3

4.3 Parfit’s value-based reason theory By rejecting Williams’ arguments against externalism, Parfit has not yet shown that externalism is true and internalism wrong. Maybe Williams just made the wrong arguments. But Parfit is quite confident that externalists are on the right track and internalists are not. He argues against internalism by showing that reasons are not desire-based. The desire-based reason view is opposed to the value-based reason view, and Parfit identifies this distinction with that between internalism and externalism. Let me first explain what sets desire-based reason views and value-based reason views apart. Subsequently, I will raise the question whether Parfit is right in ascribing a desire-based reason view to Williams and other internalists, before turning to Parfit’s arguments against desire-based reason theories. Finally, I will evaluate Parfit’s arguments in favour of his own value-based reason theory. 4.3.1 Internalism and the desire-based reason theory There has not been an authoritative discussion of the distinction between desire-based and value-based reasons, which makes it hard to find paradigmatic defences of both views. The difference concerns the origin of normative reasons and can, very generally, be put in the following way. According to desire-based reason views (DBR views), all reasons for acting and desiring are provided by the fact that the agent wants some2

3

S ee Hooker and Streumer (2004) for an insightful overview of arguments for proceduralism (as they are offered by Richard Brandt and Williams) and substantivism (as they are found in the writing of Elizabeth Anscombe, Warren Quinn and Parfit). Note that Korsgaard also regards the commitment to the moral law as constitutive of being rational. Yet, I do not want to ascribe a substantive conception of rationality to Korsgaard. In her view, respect for the moral law is just the outcome of practical reasoning if the procedure has been correctly performed. Korsgaard does not postulate a priori values that rational persons have to care about. On the contrary, she believes that things become valuable because they are valued by a rational person. Her view, which she also ascribes to Kant, is “that human beings create value, but we don’t create them from nothing and therefore we can’t value just anything. We create them from the resources of our natural psychology and that is what provides limitations.” (2002, 59) Morality is something that we should all value if we are fully rational and accept the consequences of our human nature. I will say more about Korsgaard in 4.4. 112

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thing or would want it under certain conditions. When someone has a reason to Φ that is so because he desires something that would be served by Φ-ing. For example, an agent’s reason to go to the shop and buy some ice cream is provided by his desire to eat some ice cream. Bernard Williams and William Brandt are thought to defend a DBR view (although they have never explicitly committed themselves to it).4 Mark Schroeder has developed the most thoroughgoing defence of the DBR view that I know of. In his writing we find an important caveat: the DBR view should not be understood, he stresses, as the view that the desire to Φ is a reason to Φ. The agent’s reason to eat ice cream, for instance, is not the fact that he desires to eat ice cream. The desire to eat ice cream explains why an agent has a reason to go to the shop and buy ice cream, but not why he has a reason to eat ice cream. If the agent also has a reason to eat ice cream that must be because of some other desire that he has, such as a desire to eat plenty of dairy products. Because Schroeder believes that the statement that desires provide reasons might give rise to the described misunderstanding, he prefers the formulation that desires explain a person’s reasons (Schroeder 2007a, 28). As long as we realize that the DBR view implies that the reason to Φ is provided by a desire, though not necessarily the desire to Φ, I believe there is no danger in using the word ‘providing’. On value-based reason views (VBR views), no reason is provided by an agent’s desires. All reasons are grounded in evaluative facts instead of desires. Practical reasons are provided by facts about the value of what the agent wants, not by the fact that an agent wants it. Reasons are grounded in values such as the value of achievement, of pleasure, of friendship and other intrinsic values. On this view my reason to go to the shop and buy ice cream is provided by the fact that eating ice cream would be pleasurable. Proponents of VBR views include Joseph Raz, Thomas Scanlon and Derek Parfit. Parfit treats internalism and DBR theory as one and the same position (2001, 18). Internalists and DBR theorists are defined by their belief that reasons are provided by empirical psychological facts about our desires, whereas externalists and VBR theorists ground reasons in normative facts, that is, facts about what is good or worth achieving. Yet, the identification of internalism and desire-based reason theory is not obvious. Internalism is a theory about necessary conditions for something to be a reason for an agent. Desire-based reason views are about the metaphysical grounds for reasons, about what creates or generates them. The grounding relation is surely different from the relation of ‘being a necessary condition’, and as for example Dancy points out, internalists need not claim that desires are the sources of our reasons (Dancy 2000, 17). Yet since it is also a stronger and more interesting relation, it is 4

S ee Ruth Chang (2004). Ulrike Heuer (2004) adds Donald Davidson and Michael Smith to the list of DBR theorists. Heuer does not use the term ‘desire-based reason theory’ but speaks about ‘the Humean approach to reasons’ that is based upon the claim that “all practical reasons are based on a person’s given motives or desires.” (2004, 43) I am not sure about Davidson but I believe that it is wrong to include Smith: while claiming that reasons are based on a person’s given desires, he is talking about motivating reasons (see chapter 3). The DBR view is a theory about normative reasons. 113

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easy to understand why many of Williams’ critics, including Parfit, treat internalism as if it were a DBR theory. Moreover there are reasons to believe that Williams indeed adheres to the DBR theory. He agrees that when we have a reason to do something, that reason not only requires but is also provided by the presence of certain desires in our motivational set. In other words, there are reasons to believe that Williams would accept that (R) and (M) are related not only by ‘only if ’ ((M) being a necessary condition for (R)) but also by ‘because’ ((M) explaining (R)). For one thing, Williams admits that he believes that the fact that “A could reach the conclusion to Φ by a sound deliberative route from the motivations that he has in his motivational set” is a sufficient condition of A’s having a reason to Φ, though he thinks his argument shows only that it is a necessary condition. (1989, 35) Secondly, the obscurity objection suggests not only that the fact that A is motivated to Φ under certain circumstances (after deliberation) is a necessary condition for it to be true that A has a reason, but also that this is actually all that it means. It is a small step from these claims to the desire-based reason view that if A has a reason to Φ this is because A has a desire or other element in his motivational set that would be served by Φ-ing. Sometimes Williams’ formulation of the internal reason theory seems to betray his sympathy for the view expressed by the DBR theory. Talking about the cruel husband, for instance, he writes, “[T]here is nothing in his motivational set that gives him a reason to be nicer to his wife.” (1989, 39; my emphasis) On another occasion he talks about a member of S, D, which “will not give A a reason for Φ-ing if either the existence of D is dependent on false belief, or A’s belief in the relevance of Φ-ing to the satisfaction of D is false.” (1981, 103; my emphasis) Thus, some elements in Williams’ phrasing suggest that Parfit may be right in ascribing to Williams both an internal reason theory and a desire-based reason theory. But Parfit is wrong in identifying these two theories since they are not identical. That said, in my presentation of Parfit’s view of practical reasons I will adopt Parfit’s assumption that they are equivalent. It is useful to distinguish between three different claims that Parfit ascribes to Williams throughout his work: (1) The fact that A desires to Φ after sound deliberation is a necessary condition for A’s having a reason to Φ. (2) The fact that A desires to Φ after sound deliberation provides A with a reason to Φ. (3) The fact that A desires to Φ after sound deliberation is what it means to say that A has a reason to Φ. Claim (1) is the internalist reason theory Williams argues for. Claim (2) is the desirebased reason theory ascribed to Williams. Claim (3) is the core of Williams’ alleged belief in analytically reductive internalism. Parfit does not draw a distinction between (1) and (2), but he gives a separate argument against (3), because analytically reductive internalism is a kind of internalism (or desire-based reason view) that needs to be distinguished from non-reductive kinds of internalism. Parfit rejects (3), and argues against all forms of reductive internalism (analytical and non-analytical) because

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they hold a naturalistic view of reasons in which normativity disappears. But he also believes that “even when they take non-reductive forms, desire-based reason theories are mistaken. On the kind of value-based theory I accept, no reasons are provided by desires.” (2001, 18) And thus he needs an argument against (2). His argument against the desire-based reason view in general is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Parfit believes that DBR views lead to absurd results by attributing to agents reasons they obviously do not have (see 4.3.3). I will first explain Parfit’s argument against reductive DBR views. 4.3.2 Parfit’s argument against reductive desire-based reason views In Parfit’s typology, all internal reason theories are desire-based reason theories. And many, but not all, internal reason theories are reductive. Reductive internalism is a form of naturalism because it reduces the normative concept of ‘reason’ to the natural concept of ‘desire’.5 This reduction can take two forms. “According to analytical naturalists, normative statements mean the same as certain statements about natural facts.” (Parfit 1997, 121) Non-analytical naturalists turn their focus from meaning to reference. “Non-analytical naturalists … claim [that], though normative and naturalistic statements do not mean the same, some pairs of such statements may turn out to refer to the same properties, or report the same facts.” (1997, 122) According to Parfit, we should reject all forms of naturalism because the normative cannot be reduced to the natural (psychological or causal facts). This position resonates a classical argument for the distinction between facts and values to be respected. Georg Edward Moore gave a famous expression of this argument in ‘the open question argument’. He launches it in his Principia Ethica (1903) as an argument against naturalistic conceptions of moral goodness – the utilitarianism of Mill and Sidgwick and hedonism in general were the targets of Moore’s criticism. But in a derived form it argues against a naturalistic conception of any normative or evaluative notion. The open question argument draws on the observation that it is always an open question whether anything that is natural is good (Moore 1903, 5-21). The idea is this: suppose a naturalist proposes to define goodness as N-ness, N expressing the concept of some natural property such as ‘maximally conducing to human welfare’. 5

 e terminological connection between internalism and naturalism can cause confusion, since Th the meta-ethical position known as naturalism is typically accompanied by a rejection of internalism. The theory of the so-called Cornell realists (f.e. David Brink) exemplifies such a typical combination of moral naturalism and externalism. This combination makes sense, as moral naturalism stands for the view that moral facts are reducible to natural facts. If moral judgement is just a belief to the effect that some natural facts obtain, an agent may hold that belief without being motivated by it. That is why internalism is very widely repudiated by moral naturalists (for specific arguments see James Lenman 2006). Confusion should dissolve immediately, however, once it is clear that in the case of Brink and other naturalists we are talking about a rejection of judgement internalism, whereas Parfit exclusively engages with Williams’ internalism and thus existence internalism. 115

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Suppose further that someone knows that an event or action Φ maximally conduces to human welfare but nevertheless asks whether Φ is good. If the naturalists were right that goodness means ‘maximally conducing to human welfare’, that question would be ‘closed’. But Moore urges that it is an open question. The point is, essentially, that it is not a stupid question of the sort that ‘I acknowledge that this man is an unmarried man but is he, I wonder, a bachelor?’ is a stupid question: if you need to ask it, you do not understand it. Thus the open question argument is supposed to show that the concepts of goodness and N-ness, unlike those of bachelorhood and unmarriedmanhood, are not one and the same. A lot of fire has been directed at this little argument since Moore published it.6 A central worry is that Moore failed to consider a crucial possibility: the possibility that ‘good’ and ‘N’ might denote the very same property even though they are not equivalent in meaning. The identity of properties does not necessarily imply the identity of concepts in meaning. For instance, the two terms ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ refer to the same thing without having the same meaning. The question ‘it is water but is it H2O?’ is an open question and a question that makes sense because it is possible though not selfevident that ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ refer to the same property. Hence, the open question argument does not succeed as an argument against non-analytical naturalism. But it has been rejected as an argument against analytical naturalism as well. Critics hold that it did not show that the term ‘good’ and a term ‘N’ which refers to a natural property cannot have the same meaning. The fact that the question ‘this thing is X but is it Y’ is an open question does not imply that X and Y differ in meaning. The question could be a question of clarification, asked by a person who does not know or is not sure about the meaning of X or Y, for instance easily imaginable in the case of mathematical definitions. In a similar way the question that ‘this action is N but is it good?’ makes sense, even if one does not rule out the possibility that ‘N’ and ‘good’ have the same meaning. Parfit mentions the open question argument, but he does not consider it a very good argument (1997, 121). He concedes the validity of the analytical naturalist’s reply that some definitional truths can be intelligibly questioned because they are not obvious. And Parfit also allows for the non-analytical naturalist’s response that even if normative and naturalistic statements do not mean the same, they could refer to the same facts, in the same way as concepts of ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ or ‘heat’ and ‘molecular kinetic energy’ refer to the same fact. But all this is merely true to a certain extent. Parfit claims, “It was conceptually possible that heat should turn out to be molecular kinetic energy. But heat could not have turned out to be a shade of blue, or a medieval king.” (1997, 122) In the same way it is simply impossible, he states, for normative statements to mean the same or report the same properties or facts as naturalistic 6

It is widely agreed that Moore’s argument is what launched meta-ethics in the 20th century. The reception of the open question argument and the influence it had on moral philosophy are well described in Darwall, Gibbard and Railton 1992. See also James Lenman’s entry on ‘Moral Naturalism’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for an extensive overview of the arguments that are raised against the open question argument. 116

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statements because normative concepts and natural concepts are too different. The statement that ‘A is motivated to Φ after deliberation’ is an empirical truth and refers to a natural fact. The statement that ‘A has a reason to Φ’ is a normative truth and refers to a normative fact. The former statement cannot be equivalent to the latter, nor can they report the same fact unless one gives up the thought that the concept of reasons is a normative concept. Parfit writes, “On this view [i.e. reductive internalism], I believe, normativity disappears.” (Parfit 1997, 123; my emphasis) Naturalists would reply that their analysis of normativity sufficiently preserves the intuitive phenomenon of normativity. Williams, for instance, explicitly addresses this point: “[i]t is important that even on the internalist view, a statement of the form ‘A has reason to Φ’ still has what may be called normative force. Unless a claim to the effect that an agent has a reason to Φ can go beyond what that agent is already motivated to do … then certainly the term will have too narrow a definition. ‘A has a reason to Φ’ means more than ‘A is presently disposed to Φ’.” (1989, 36) On Williams’ theory a desire to have a gin and tonic does not give an agent a reason to drink the glass in front of him unless that desire would survive a process of sound deliberation. The sound deliberation increases our knowledge of the facts, eliminates false beliefs, reduces errors of reasoning, and thus serves as a normative test indicating which desires are relevant in determining what reasons a person has. According to Williams, in saying what someone has a reason to do we are allowed to correct that person’s factual beliefs, and “that is already enough for the notion to be normative.” (1989, 36) But Parfit believes that Williams’ conception of normativity is “too weak.” (Parfit 2006, 334) The disagreement obviously rests on what is meant by ‘normativity’. Parfit argues that Williams and many other moral philosophers “mistakenly regard normativity as some kind of motivating force.” (1997, 126) But how then should the claim that ‘A has a reason to Φ’ be conceived according to Parfit? To this question we receive no answer. Parfit believes that the concept of a normative reason (like other normative concepts) cannot be helpfully explained. Asked what reasons are, all Parfit can say is that a reason is a fact that counts in favour of some act. But, as Parfit immediately adds, ‘counting in favour of ’ is just another way of saying ‘giving a reason for’. (1997, 121; 2001, 18) The concept of a reason is fundamental; like all normative concepts it cannot be explained in non-normative terms. To support this view of normative concepts Parfit invokes ‘partners in crime’.7 He explains, “Normative concepts form a fundamental category – like say temporal or logical concepts. We should not expect to explain time, or logic, in non-temporal or non-logical terms. Similarly, normative truths are of a distinctive kind, which we should not expect to be 7

 is is a common strategy in defences of moral or normative objectivity. The partner-in-crime Th argument, also referred to as the companion-in-guilt argument, defends the objectivity of ethical (or normative) claims by comparing them with other claims the objectivity of which is not in doubt, but which share the features of ethical claims (for instance their inexplicability or irreducibility) that lead some philosophers to scepticism about ethical objectivity. Hallvard Lillehammer (2007) offers a careful study of the structure and merits of this pattern of argument in defence of normative and moral realism. 117

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like ordinary, empirical truths. Nor should we expect our knowledge of such truths, if we have any, to be like our knowledge of the world around us.” (1997, 121) I will refer to Parfit’s meta-normative view as a ‘non-naturalist’ view, and I will say more about it in 4.4. Meta-normative non-naturalism is the view that the normative is irreducible to the non-normative, and that normative facts are non-natural, irreducible to natural terms. Thus although Parfit has strong opinions about what normative concepts do not mean, he cannot helpfully explain what they do mean. And this strikes me as a weak point in Parfit’s criticism of naturalism. According to Parfit, ‘A is motivated to Φ after deliberation’ is an empirical truth and refers to a natural fact, while ‘A has a reason to Φ’ is a normative truth and refers to a normative fact. So far, the naturalists agree (in the sense that ‘a normative fact’ is ‘a fact about the reasons one has’). Parfit seems to think that from this stated difference he can derive the impossibility of reducing reason claims to claims about motivation. But that is exactly what has to be argued for. Naturalists believe that normative facts are reducible to natural facts, and one does not argue against naturalism by insisting that the normative is irreducible. As long as no argument for the claim that the normative is irreducible to the non-normative is provided, Parfit’s rejection of the reductive DBR views (including Williams’ internalism) remains groundless. I will give this consideration due attention in 4.4 after I have provided a fuller exposition of Parfit’s non-naturalism. 4.3.3 Parfit’s argument against non-reductive desire-based reason views In Parfit’s typology DBR views could take a non-reductive form: “[o]n such theories, we cannot have some reason for acting unless our act … is something that, after informed deliberation, we would be motivated to do. But the fact that we have a reason, though it depends on such a causal or psychological fact, is irreducibly normative.” (2001, 18) Non-reductive DBR views could accept Parfit’s claim that normative facts are very different from natural facts. Still, Parfit rejects non-reductive DBR views because they take reasons to depend for their existence on the presence of relevant desires. His argument against the DBR theory derives from a counter-example that is supposed to show that desire-based reason views lead to absurd results. The construction of counter-examples is a common strategy among philosophers who want to argue that reasons (and rationality) are much less subject-dependent than a Humean or internal or desire-based or procedural approach to reasons (and rationality) suggests. Three counter-examples in the literature are particulary famous: the man who desires a saucer of mud (introduced by G.E.M. Anscombe), the man with a desire to turn radios on (invoked by Warren Quinn) and the man with Future Tuesday Indifference (Parfit’s example). Basically, Anscombe, Quinn and Parfit invoke the same type of counter-example from which to derive the conclusion that desires, understood as dispositions had for no reason, never provide a reason for action. But their arguments are developed in different ways. Thus, they provide three (slightly) different arguments against the desire-based reason theory. 118

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I start with Anscombe’s argument.8 Suppose that someone who knows all the relevant empirical facts and is reasoning logically says that he wants a saucer of mud. Upon being asked what he wants it for, he replies that he does not want it for anything, he just wants it. (Anscombe 1957, 70) By this example Anscombe aims to show that some things are just not worthy of being desired as ends in their own right. A saucer of mud as such is not desirable. Therefore, desiring a saucer of mud for its own sake does not provide a reason to have a saucer of mud, even if that desire survives informed deliberation. Anscombe goes even further and claims that “[t]o say ‘I merely want this’ without any characterization is to deprive the word of sense.” (1957, 71) By this she means that the absence of a desirability characterization not only prevents a desire to provide a reason, it also prevents us from attributing a desire to the person. Anscombe thinks that ‘the desirable’ imposes some kind of normative constraint on the formation of desires, comparable to the role of truth with respect to the formation of beliefs. We can attribute a desire to a person only if the person could say something that explained why the thing in question appeared desirable to her. This claim about desires encounters a lot of opposition, but it has some famous defenders as well. Joseph Raz, among others, follows Anscombe in thinking that we can desire only something that we conceive to be good. He reformulates this thought as the claim that we can desire something only when we believe we have a reason to desire it: “[w]e cannot want what we see no reason to want any more than we can believe what we think is untrue or contrary to the evidence.” (Raz 1998, 57) In this view a desire does not provide reasons but is itself based upon reasons, and Raz takes these desire-independent reasons to be provided by the value of the desired object. But the key point of Raz’s and Anscombe’s argument, namely that desires depend on the belief that there is a reason to desire their objects, is far from clear. Is it really impossible to desire something which one takes to be bad? Michael Stocker (1979) famously argued that it is not. A teenager may want to play truant because she believes that she has no reason to do so. And sometimes, walking down the pavement, I have a desire to avoid stepping on the cracks between the slabs – the idea just appeals to me. This appeal does not depend on my believing that I have any reason or that it is in any way desirable to avoid stepping on the cracks. I just feel like doing so. These kinds of desires are familiar. And even to some value-based reason theorists Anscombe’s thesis that believing the desired object to be desirable is constitutive of desires goes too far (see for instance Heuer 2004, 51). But there is an alternative route available to VBR theorists, like the one taken by Quinn. Quinn gives the following example of a desire that does not provide a reason. “Suppose I am in a strange functional state that disposes me to turn on radios that I see to be turned off. Given the perception that a radio in my vicinity is off, I try, all other things being equal, to get it turned on. … I do not turn the radios on in order to hear music or get news. It is not that I have an inordinate appetite for entertain8

 nscombe develops this argument as part of a theory of action, but it often figures in metaA ethical and meta-normative discussions as well. 119

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ment or information. Indeed, I do not turn them on in order to hear anything. My disposition is, I am supposing, basic rather than instrumental. In this respect it is like the much more familiar basic dispositions to do philosophy or listen to music. I cannot see how this bizarre functional state in itself gives me even a prima facie reason to turn on radios.” (Quinn 1993, 236) Quinn’s argument does not turn on the question whether desires are simply dispositional states. For the sake of the argument he accepts that the functional state in which radio-man finds himself is a desire, and that having this desire may help to explain, causally, why he turns on radios. But, like Anscombe, Quinn deduces from the bizarre example a general rule: that a desire as such never justifies an action – is never a reason to act. Desire-based reason theorists may object that Quinn misrepresents their view. With his counter-example Quinn shows that a desire to Φ never justifies doing Φ. But DBR theorists could accept this claim. Their view is not that a desire to Φ is a reason to Φ; their view is that a desire to Φ justifies Ψ-ing if Ψ-ing serves the desire to Φ. Quinn admits that desire-based reason theorists indeed “need not regard basic non-cognitive pro-attitudes as rationalizing their objects, but rather as rationalizing actions that are the means to them.” (Quinn 1993, 237) But Quinn believes that this does not change anything in his objection. He writes, “If my basic love of listening to music doesn’t give me a reason to listen, then it doesn’t, I think, give me a reason to take the record down [from the shelf ].” (Quinn 1993, 237) And with regard to the bizarre example he believes that “my basic non-cognitive pro-attitude (conceived as a dispositive functional state) toward turning on radios seems not only to give me no reason to turn on radios but also no reason to take the necessary steps, such a plugging them in. Both seem equally senseless.” (Quinn 1993, 238) It may be that turning on radios for no reason and taking the steps needed to complete that action seem equally senseless (that is ‘unsupported by a reason’) to Quinn, but by merely stating that they are he begs the question against the DBR theorist. Jonathan Dancy, who is himself a critic of the DBR theory, explains why Quinn’s argument fails (Dancy 2000, 32-33). He starts by pointing out that in a DBR theory no criticism is made of intrinsic desires (desires like the non-instrumental desire to turn on radios in Quinn’s example), since these lie outside the realm of reasons. DBR theory claims that there are no reasons for or against intrinsic desires; one just has them or one does not. But which desires one has can make a difference to what it is sensible to do. More precisely, the DBR theory says that by desiring to Φ we convert a prospect into an end, which gives us reasons to do things that promote or subserve that end. So, according to the DBR theory, there is no reason for or against desiring to Φ, and my desire to Φ does not give me a reason to Φ but it does give me reason to do other things. Quinn thinks this is wrong, but he does not show us why. In order to argue against the DBR view it does not suffice to show that a desire to Φ does not give a reason to Φ, and to suppose, like Quinn, that if a desire to Φ gives no reason to Φ it can give us no reasons to do other actions either. One must argue why a desire to Φ gives no reason to do those things that subserve Φ-ing. Dancy thinks that this argument is to be found in the claim that “desires for which there is no reason cannot 120

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create a reason to do what would subserve it.” (Dancy 2000, 39) But, as Dancy has just explained, in the DBR theory no underived desire is held for a reason, and that is what critics have to tackle. Exactly this is the task that Parfit sets himself. Parfit notes that “[i]f we consider only reasons for acting, desire-based theories may seem to cover most of the truth. But the most important practical reasons are not merely, or mainly, reasons for acting. They are also reasons for having the desires on which we act. These are reasons which desire-based theories cannot recognize or explain.” (2001, 19) On DBR theories, all reasons to have some desire must be provided by another desire. Thus there can be no reasons for or against intrinsic desires. Unlike what DBR theorists say, Parfit believes that there are reasons for or against intrinsic desires. What gives us a reason to want something is an intrinsic feature that makes that thing desirable, Parfit thinks. To support this view, he invokes his case of the man with ‘Future Tuesday Indifference’ (Parfit 1984, 124; Parfit 2001, 26). This man cares in the normal way about pains or pleasures he is or will be experiencing, except when they come on any future Tuesday. Parfit supposes that the man has true beliefs about all matters relevant to his desire: he understands that pain hurts, that pain on Tuesdays will be just as much his pain and that Tuesday is merely a conventional calendar division. Yet he is indifferent to his pain on future Tuesdays and consequently would always prefer to undergo excruciating pain on a future Tuesday than to suffer mild pain on any other day of the week. But surely it would be absurd to conclude that therefore the man has more reason to opt for torture on Tuesday instead of mild pain on Wednesday. Parfit argues that this man’s preference gives him no reason because it is irrational. And the preference is irrational because the fact that the torture occurs on a Tuesday is no reason to prefer it. The fact that the torture is intrinsically painful is a reason not to want it and the fact that the torture would be much more painful than the mild pain is a strong reason to prefer the mild pain. The man’s preference to be tortured gives no reason to fulfil this preference, because the man has no reason for his preference. What gives a reason to prefer the mild pain on Wednesday and a reason to have this preference fulfilled is the intrinsic feature of the pain being milder than torture. Parfit extrapolates this example to the general rule that reasons to have what one wants are not provided by the fact that one wants something, but by intrinsic facts about what one wants. Only if that object is intrinsically valuable have we got reason to act upon our desire for that object. This is the core of the value-based reason theory that Parfit defends. Any chain of reasons must end with a feature of an object that makes the object valuable. On DBR theories any chain of reasons must end with some desire that we have no reason to have. Therefore, Parfit believes that “desire based theories are built on sand.” (Parfit 2001, 25) This method of arguing against the DBR view by way of counter-examples is appealing. The counter-examples seem convincing: there is something absurd about eating mud or voluntarily undergoing avoidable excruciating pain. But, as I said before, the debate between internalists and externalists will not be decided by counterexamples. The problem is that many daily-life examples can be redescribed to fit both 121

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theories (and as to the highly artificial examples that Parfit relies on, one can wonder how reliable our natural intuitions are). Thought experiments are intuition pumps. In the end the intuition rather than the example carries the argumentative weight. But intuitions are flexible. And since Parfit does not give a unified account to explain or make plausible why we have certain intuitions, I am suspicious of the responses that he aims to elicit by making up thought experiments as he goes along. The arguments that he aims to derive from these fictitious examples strike me as ad hoc. Let me undergird this sceptical hypothesis with two arguments by internalists who use the so-called crazy examples to build a case for internalism. Sharon Street (2009) calls the Future Tuesday Indifference man and his like (they are alike in that they accept an utterly weird value that coheres perfectly well with their other values and non-evaluative beliefs) ‘ideally coherent eccentrics’. She argues that they do not damage the desire-dependent conception of normative reasons as is commonly assumed. Sharon Street agrees that desire-dependent theories imply that if a person has Future Tuesday Indifference, then the fact that agony will occur on a Tuesday is a reason to choose it over a slight pain on any other day. But she denies that this implication would be so implausible as to constitute a reductio of a desire-dependent theory. To the contrary, she thinks this implication is desirable and a careful discussion of the Future Tuesday Indifference case would bring that out. Her strategy is to flesh out the example, forcing the reader to imagine in vivid depth the kind of thing that would be involved in genuinely possessing a meta-hedonic preference for pain on future Tuesdays. She gives the man a name, sets him in a plausible real life choice at the dentist’s, adds a genealogical story about how he ended up with his strange motivational structure, and distinguishes between several interpretations compatible with the bit of information Parfit gives us. Street’s suspicion is that Parfit’s brevity in describing the case lends force to his conclusion because he appeals simultaneously to intuitions having to do with the nature of pain, the arbitrariness of Tuesdays, personal identity, prudence requirements, and morality itself. She trusts that after tidying up the example, it will appear intuitively plausible that a preference for pain on Tuesdays is not intrinsically irrational, or at least no more than a like or dislike of the sound of nails on a blackboard is. And, as we will see later, Parfit does not think that a dislike of the sound of nails on a blackboard is intrinsically irrational. Street pushes him to say more about why he thinks the greater liking for pain on Tuesday than any other day is. Street’s implicit criticism of Parfit’s reliance on intuitions is that intuitions are messy and confused when the example meant to trigger them is sketchy. Mark Schroeder has a slightly different critique of the appeal to common-sense ethical intuition (see Schroeder 2005; Schroeder 2007, chapter 5). He warns us that our intuitions about what there is (no) reason to do may be misleading, and that they are, therefore, not a trustworthy guide in our search for a reason theory. Schroeder invokes pragmatic presumptions to explain why our intuitions about reasons can be misleading. According to Schroeder, when somebody says that there is a reason to do something, there is a strong pragmatic presumption that she means that this reason is a relatively good one. He refers to Grice’s maxim of quantity that says ‘make your contribution as 122

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informative as is required’. This maxim “predicts that saying only that there is a reason to do something should reinforce the presumption that it is a relatively good one that [the speaker] has in mind – this would make her conversational contribution more informative.” (Schroeder 2005, 15) Schroeder illustrates his view with an example in the saucer-of-mud style. Imagine that somebody says to you that there is a reason for you to eat your car. That sounds crazy. But then he tells you what this reason is: it is the fact that your car contains the recommended daily allowance of iron. Now what he says sounds less crazy. Moreover, by saying that that fact is a reason for you to eat your car he must not think that it is anything like a good reason. Indeed, he may think that “it is as poor as normative reasons could possibly come.” (2005, 15) According to Schroeder, this decreases the unintuitiveness of the original assertion. The distinction between reasons and good reasons protects the DBR theory against the attacks by Parfit, Quinn and Anscombe. It means that the idea that a desire to have a saucer of mud (after it survived sound deliberation) gives a reason to try to find a saucer of mud need not be absurd when it is rightly understood as an assertion about reasons, not necessarily about good reasons. The fact that finding a saucer of mud would satisfy your desire is the right sort of thing to be a reason for you to try to find a saucer of mud. It may be a very poor reason, but it is a reason. 4.3.4 Arguments in favour of the value-based reason theory It is one thing to produce arguments against the DBR theory; it is another to argue in favour of the VBR theory. It counts in favour of a theory when it can explain why people mistakenly adhere to the wrong theory. With regard to the DBR theory, it is especially important to come up with such an explanation because, as Parfit admits, “desire-based reason views are now the ones that are most widely accepted. In economics and other social sciences, rationality is often defined in a desire-based way. If so many people believe that all reasons are provided by desires, how could it be true that, as value-based theories claim, no reasons are so provided? How could all these people be so mistaken?” (Parfit 2001, 19) Parfit gives several explanations of this mistake. First of all, in most cases what we want is worth achieving (Parfit 1997, 128; 2001, 19). So, even on VBR theories, we usually have some reason to fulfil our desires. But VBR and DBR theories make conflicting claims about why this is the case. Parfit writes, “On desire-based theories our reasons to fulfil these desires are provided by these desires. On value-based theories, these reasons are provided, not by the fact that we have these desires, but by the facts that give us reasons to have them. If some aim is worth achieving, we have a reason both to have this aim and to try to achieve it… and we would have this reason even if we didn’t have this desire.” (2001, 19) Second, people are misled by the fact that sometimes reasons are conditional on our desires. Even on value-based theories, there are certain reasons that we would not have if we did not have certain desires. “But”, as Parfit says, “though these reasons depend on our desires, they too are not provided by these desires.” (Parfit 1997, 128; 123

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2001, 19) They are provided by other facts that depend on our having these desires, for instance the fact that fulfilment of these desires would give pleasure (Parfit 2001, 19). Other VBR theorists also allow for the possibility that reasons depend on desires (Dancy 2000, 41; Scanlon 1998, 49). Scanlon illustrates this subtlety in the VBR theory by reference to the case of Owen Wingrave. For it to be true that Owen Wingrave has a reason to join the army he should indeed desire to do it, Scanlon admits, but this fact does not mean that the DBR account is true. “Many of our reasons do have subjective conditions, but these turn out, on closer inspection, to be rather misleadingly described by the terminology of desire and desire fulfilment.” (Scanlon 1998, 49) Scanlon admits that different people have different reasons because they are interested in different things. Owen Wingrave has no reason to join the army if a military career leaves him cold. But this is not because reasons are based upon desires, Scanlon argues. Even if Owen has a desire to go into the army, the fulfilment of his desire will not be why he has a reason to join the army. His most important reason will rather be that it is worthwhile, or exciting, or honourable. There are many worthwhile pursuits to which one may devote one’s life and one has a good reason to choose as a career only one of those to which one is drawn. So the reasons we have can depend on subjective conditions, but this is not to say that reasons are constituted by the desires we have. Another example from Scanlon is that if I desire to buy a new computer and I take myself to have a good reason to buy the computer, “the reason that I have for buying a computer is not that it will satisfy my desire, but rather that I will enjoy having it, or that it will help me with my work, impress my friends and colleagues, or bring some other supposed benefit.” (Scanlon 1998, 44) Subjective conditions may determine whether somebody has a reason but the reason itself is provided by an evaluative fact instead of a desire. It may look as if the distance between VBR and DBR theory is shrinking. Do they not both say that a person’s desires explain why he has certain reasons? Remember that I preferred the characterization of DBR theory as the view that desires provide reasons to Mark Schroeder’s characterization of the DBR theory as the view that normative reasons are in some way explained by the desires of the agent for whom they are reasons. As such, without further information, Schroeder’s criterion does not set DBR and VBR theory apart. If Ronnie has a desire to buy a computer and Bradley does not, then the fact that there is a sale in the computer shop is a reason for Ronnie to go there but not for Bradley. Both VBR and DBR theory will explain this difference in reasons by reference to a difference in desires. But for the VBR theorist a full explanation of Ronnie’s reason to go to the shop has to take into account facts other than Ronnie’s desires: the chain of justification has to end with an evaluative fact, for instance that having a computer is enjoyable. For the DBR theory the desires of an agent suffice to explain his reasons, because all reasons are provided by desires.9 That is what sets VBR and DBR theories apart. 9

 ccording to Schroeder (2007b) this ‘simplicity of explanation’ gives DBR theory a methodoA logical advantage over VBR theory. I am not sure how much argumentative weight should be accorded to simplicity. 124

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Parfit gives a third explanation for the mistake committed by so many people in believing that all reasons are provided by desires: they wrongly extrapolate what is true for a selected class of reasons to all reasons. Besides reasons that depend upon desires but are not provided by them, Parfit concedes that there is a selected class of reasons that are solely provided by a desire of the agent. As a rule, Parfit insists that the fact that one wants something does not provide a reason, because the fact that one wants something does not mean that one has a reason to want it. But there are exceptions to the rule: for some desires it does not make sense to say that one does or does not have reason to have them. They fall out of the realm of reasons. Parfit refers to “instinctive urges as those involved in thirst and hunger” and the large class of “hedonic desires: the likings or dislikings of our own present conscious states that make these states pleasant, painful or unpleasant.” (2001, 26) Hedonic desires are neither rational nor irrational. It is just a fact of nature that some people hate the feeling of touching velvet, and others love it. Some people dislike a cold shower, the sound of squeaking chalk, the taste of boiled eggs; others do not. Since there are no intrinsic features of the sensation that provide a reason to dislike it, those who like it are not making any mistake. The importance of these hedonic desires lies in their being groundless, that is: not grounded in a reason, while they seem to offer reasons for actions nevertheless. To Ruth Chang it is obvious that hedonic desires can provide reasons, and that Parfit will have to come up with a strong argument if he thinks that they cannot. It might be thought that an argument along the following lines would do: it is not the fact that someone dislikes the sound of squeaking chalk that provides a reason to stop having the sensation, but rather the fact that having this sensation is painful. But Chang thinks that Parfit could not have recourse to the value-based explanation of reasons in this case: “[a]s Parfit says, the disliking ‘makes’ the sensation painful, and here the ‘making’ relation is most plausibly one of constitution: the fact that now hearing the squeaking chalk is painful just consists in the fact that I now dislike it. Indeed, since the sensation is not intrinsically painful, it is hard to see in what else its being painful could consist other than the fact that I dislike it.” (Chang 2004, 76) If someone’s reason to flee from the sound of squeaking chalk is provided by the fact that he now dislikes it, there is an exception to Parfit’s claim that no desires can provide reasons. When Chang pressed this point to Parfit in private conversation, Parfit “agreed that he might have to qualify his claim that no desires can provide reasons, but he insisted … that even if he did have to allow an exception for hedonic desires, such desires are peculiar and cannot form the basis of a general argument that desires can provide reasons.” (Chang 2004, 76) Parfit would have to show that hedonic desires are crucially different from non-hedonic desires. Chang is sceptical about this possibility and leaves Parfit with the task of effectively quarantining the exception provided by hedonic desires. I am not sure how forceful Chang’s objection is. After all, it might be just misleading to call ‘liking the touch of velvet’ a desire (and go on from there that apparently some desires provide reasons). True enough, Parfit himself calls these likings and dislikings hedonic desires. And obviously when someone likes the touch of velvet, we may 125

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safely assume that that person desires to feel velvet – but that these things go together does not mean there is no difference between the liking or disliking as such and the metahedonic desire to have the sensation that we like. In order to have a counter-example to Parfit’s claim that no desire provides reasons, we would have to show that the metahedonic desire to feel velvet gives an agent reason to touch a piece of velvet. But Parfit resists the force of this counter-example when he writes, “Our future pleasures or pains are not made to be good or bad by our present desires to have these pleasures and avoid these pains. And when we are in great pain, by having some sensation that we intensely dislike, what makes our conscious state bad is our intense dislike, not our present desire not to be having the sensation that we dislike.” (2011, 55) So even in the hedonic cases, Parfit resists the suggestion that the fact that I desire something is reason-providing. The quoted passage is troubling though in another sense. It states that neither the desire (or aversion) nor the intrinsic features of being in a state of pain is what makes being in a state of pain bad. It is the agent’s dislike of being in pain that does all the work. The point about likings and dislikings indeed generalizes to all cases that invoke pain and pleasure to explain the reasons in play: it is our hedonic likings and dislikings (not our meta-hedonic desires) that make the experience of pleasure or pain good or bad. Parfit writes, “When we are in pain, what is bad is not our sensation but our conscious state of having a sensation that we dislike. If we didn’t dislike this sensation, our conscious state would not be bad, … nor would we be failing to respond to some reason.” (2011, 54) I understand this sentence to imply that whenever Parfit writes that the fact that a state would be painful gives an agent a reason to avoid it, he actually means to say that the fact that an agent dislikes being in that state provides reasons to avoid it. I find this a surprisingly subjective view of reasons for a theory that presents itself as externalist, and I would have thought that on Parfit’s view not the subject’s dissliking it but the experience of its being painful gives reason to avoid it. That is at least the message one gets from the Future Tuesday Indifference case, of which Parfit says, “Suppose, for example, that we must choose which of two possible ordeals we shall later undergo. If one of these ordeals would be much more painful, this fact gives us a strong reason to prefer the other.” (Parfit 2011, 56 – italics added) As we already know from Scanlon’s example of the man who wants to buy a computer, a value-based theory of reasons can still take the desires of a particular agent in a particular case into account. Therefore it is not surprising that Parfit takes the likings and dislikings of an agent into account. But Parfit seems to do more than take them into account. In the quoted passage on pain he says that whether an agent likes a certain sensation or not is what makes it good or bad to be in that state. Parfit seems to think that this is still very different from saying that the satisfaction of an agent’s desires is what makes a certain state good or bad. But I am not sure how more objective and less subjective a theory of reasons becomes by grounding reasons in likings rather than desires.10 10

S treet (2009) also believes that Parfit makes an important concession to attitude-dependent theories of reasons when he concedes that in some cases indeed value and disvalue are conferred upon the world by attitudes (liking and disliking) which, in and of themselves, are neither rational nor irrational. 126

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A fourth explanation mentioned by Parfit for the widespread belief that all reasons are desire-based is the broad appeal of the Humean conception of desires. In the Humean psychology desires cannot be rational or irrational, and it does not make sense to say that one has (no) reason to desire to Φ. Hume’s argument is that desires cannot be supported by or contrary to reason because reasoning is entirely concerned with truth and desires cannot be true or false. But this is a bad argument in defence of the DBR theory, Parfit argues.11 He explains that if this argument were good, it would also show that, since acts cannot be true or false, acts cannot be supported by reason or be contrary to reason. On some interpretation, Hume himself went that far and limited reasons to reasons to believe (see Millgram 1995). But DBR theorists cannot share Hume’s restricted sense of reasons, because DBR theory is a theory about reasons for acting. But then, Parfit wonders, why not also accept that there can be reasons for desiring? “If there can be certain things that we have most reason to believe, and certain things that we have most reason to do, there can also be certain things that we have most reason to want.” (Parfit 2001, 38) To be precise, the DBR theory does allow for the possibility that one has a reason for desiring something: one has a reason to desire Ψ if one desires Φ and Φ-ing can be reached only by desiring to Ψ. In such cases, reasons for desiring something are provided by other desires. But DBR theorists do not believe that there are ‘intrinsically desirable objects or actions’. One evident reason for this denial is that, unlike facts about our desires, facts about intrinsically desirable objects seem inconsistent with a scientific worldview. The DBR theory invokes nothing that cannot be explained in natural, familiar terms. The VBR theorist, who believes that reasons are based upon values, owes us an account of what kind of things these values are, and how we should think of them in order to be consistent with a disenchanted natural world. Perhaps that account can be given, but the advantage of not having to give one is surely an attraction of the DBR view overlooked by Parfit when he wonders why it has been so widely thought that 1) we cannot have reasons to have a desire and 2) these reasons cannot be value-based. Having argued against the DBR theory and having exposed all the mistakes that underlie the popularity of the DBR theory, Parfit seems to consider it ‘proved’ that the VBR theory is true, since he does not give any further reason in favour of it. This conclusion would follow, however, only if the VBR and the DBR theory were logically opposites, which they are not. They could both be false.12 Parfit neglects this possibility. He argues that DBR views do not capture the whole truth because they focus exclusively on reasons for actions and cannot account for reasons for desires. He believes that “reasons for having the desires on which we act … are reasons to want some thing, for its own sake, which are provided by facts about this thing.” (1997, J udith Jarvis Thomson (2008) makes the same objection to Hume; there may be standards other than truth and falsehood by which an attitude can be measured. 12 They need not be inconsistent either. They could both be true, in the sense that some practical reasons are provided by the fact that the agent wants something, while others are provided by the fact that what she wants is of value. Ruth Chang, for instance, believes that “desires and evaluative facts each provide a large and important class of practical reasons.” (Chang 2004, 57) 11

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128) And subsequently he declares, “Such reasons we can call value-based.” This declaration betrays a false assumption in Parfit’s mind: if reasons are not based on desires, they must rest on values. The hastiness of this assumption is shown by Dancy, in the course of his own search for a defence of the VBR theory: “[w]e should not allow ourselves to move immediately from the sound thought that some of our reasons are the reasons they are because of their content rather than because of any desire of ours, to the more contentious claim that such reasons are value-based.” (Dancy 2000, 30) There is an additional reason for questioning Parfit’s insistence that reasons are based on values. This has to do with Parfit’s combination of a VBR theory with a buck-passing account of values. Once it is established that he defends a value-based theory of reasons, another choice has to be made according to Parfit: “[w]ithin the group of value-based theories, we have a further choice. There are two views about what it is for something to be good. On one view, suggested by G.E. Moore, if some thing – such as some event – would have certain natural properties, these give it the non-natural property of being good, and its being good may then give us reasons to want or to try to achieve this thing. On a second view, goodness is not itself a reasongiving property, but is the property of having such properties. Something’s being good is the same as its having certain natural properties that would, in certain contexts, give us reasons to want this thing.” (Parfit 2001, 19-20) The first view imposes a kind of ‘layer-cake structure’ to the normative. The second view is the so-called ‘buck-passing account’ (BPA) introduced and defended by Scanlon (1998), and supported by Parfit. The BPA is an account of values. It analyses value in terms of the non-evaluative normative notion of ‘a reason’. Being good or valuable is the purely formal, higher-order property of having some lower-order properties that provide reasons to respond to the bearers of these properties in favourable ways. But, correspondingly, the BPA also conveys an important account of reasons. This is clearest in its negative formulation: being good, or valuable, is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond in certain favourable way. Value passes the buck to subvenient natural properties. Thus, on the buck-passing account of values, the reason to favour something is provided not by the object’s value but by the natural properties that make that object valuable.13 13

S o BPA rests on the negative thesis that reasons are provided not by goodness but by the lowerorder properties. For example, the fact that a resort is pleasant provides a complete explanation of the reason to visit it, and “[i]t is not clear what further work could be done by special reasonproviding properties of goodness and value, and even less clear how these properties could provide reasons” (Scanlon 1998, 97). Pressed by critics Scanlon has admitted in later writings that the lower-order properties in question (such as pleasantness) may be evaluative. This blurs the difference between BPA and the Moorean layer-cake structure according to which goodness provides reasons. Crisp (2008) has suggested that the solution for BPA lies in holding on to the negative claim that goodness is not reason-providing, but giving up on the positive claim that says that goodness is merely the higher-order property of having lower-order reason-providing properties. Crisp’s thought is that evaluative properties like being pleasant make an action good as well as providing one with a reason to do it, whereby goodness is a stand-alone, non-reasongiving property. I find this version of the BPA confusing because it says that there are evaluative properties in the world that provide reasons, and this means that reason is no longer the basic concept, but value is. 128

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The combination of the buck-passing account of values with a value-based reason theory has the odd result that reasons are based on values, which are in their turn defined as reason-giving properties. The notion of ‘value’ is invoked to be explained away. Parfit draws the conclusion himself: “[i]f [the buck-passing view] is true, as I am inclined to believe, value-based theories needn’t even use the concepts good, bad, or value. … When some object has reason-giving properties, we can call it good, but that is merely an abbreviation: a way of implying that it has such features.” (2001, 20) Apart from the terminological point that it is strange to call reasons ‘value-based’ when value does not provide a firm basis at all, one could also worry whether the adoption of BPA does not turn the VBR theory into a reductive theory. If reasons are based on values and values supervene on natural properties that are reason-giving, are reasons then not eventually based on natural properties? Parfit anticipates this criticism and warns the reader that “when I say that value-based theories need not appeal to a non-natural property of goodness, I do not mean that such theories need not appeal to any non-natural properties or truths. Truths about reasons are, I believe, irreducibly normative, and hence non-natural. My point is only that such theories need not include, among these normative truths, truths about what is good or bad.” (2001, 20) The reference to BPA enables us to appreciate the full meaning of Parfit’s thesis that reasons constitute a fundamental category. The notion of a reason cannot be explained in non-normative terms, but neither can it in normative terms, since there is no normative notion more basic than reason. To the contrary, evaluative notions like value must be explained in terms of reasons. The whole construction rests on the irreducible notion of a reason.

4.4 Parfit’s normative non-naturalism As I indicated in chapter 1, framing the discussion in terms of value-based and desirebased theories leaves out an important player: the Kantian theorist. On the Kantian account, practical reasons are based neither on psychological facts nor on values built into reality. On the Kantian account of normativity, reasons are not discovered but created in the process of practical reasoning. Through practical reasoning, the agent constructs his reasons. Kantian meta-normative constructivism is exemplified by Christine Korsgaard’s theory of reasons set out in The Sources of Normativity (1996). Parfit’s non-naturalist view of normativity opposes not only the DBR view, but also Kantian constructivism (which does not base reasons on desires or on objective, neutral values). There is a lively and interesting discussion between Korsgaard and Parfit, which I cover in this section. Parfit’s defence of externalism and value-based reason theory is embedded in a meta-normative theory which could be roughly characterized as ‘realistic’. Normative facts, properties and relations are ‘part of reality’, they are ‘out there’, their existence and their authority are independent of agents’ desires, dispositions, deliberations or decisions. Parfit calls his position ‘non-reductive practical realism’ (2006) or ‘non129

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reductive normative realism’ (1997). David Enoch gives this kind of position the name of ‘robust meta-normative realism’ (Enoch 2007b), but since realism is such an ambiguous term in meta-ethics and meta-normative theory, picking out very different positions, I will call Parfit’s position ‘normative non-naturalism’. Normative non-naturalism is the view that “there are response-independent, nonnatural, irreducibly normative truths, perfectly universal and objective ones, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct”. (Enoch 2007b, 21) The fact that Parfit does not give a definition of what ‘a natural term’ is, and does not map out a non-natural realm, does not need to distract us. It suffices that he regards reasons as sui generis. Non-naturalism, although considered an absurd Platonism during the heyday of non-cognitivism, today enjoys a renaissance. Distinguished contemporary philosophers who defend non-naturalism, although not all under that label, include Thomas Nagel, Thomas Scanlon, Roger Crisp, R.Jay Wallace, David Enoch, Russ ShaferLandau, Jonathan Dancy, Joseph Raz, Jean Hampton and Derek Parfit. Non-naturalism will always be associated with Moore’s intuitionism, which was a meta-ethical view about the nature of moral properties: ‘being good’ is a non-natural property which cannot be explained in natural language; neither can we explain why moral truths hold; we just know the most basic moral fact (for instance that cruelty is wrong) by a species of a priori intellectual intuition. It might seem misleading to use the term ‘non-naturalism’ also for a meta-normative theory, as the ethical is only a subspecies of the normative. However, ethical non-naturalists are mostly normative non-naturalists as well, the latter realism being “the natural generalization” of the former (Enoch 2007b, 21).14 In his quest for robustness Parfit attacks not only naturalistic views of normativity (as for instance the reductive desire-based view: see 4.3.2), but also constructivist views. He finds Korsgaard’s constructivist approach to normativity deeply unsatisfying. Michael Smith’s view of reasons is also vulnerable to Parfit’s criticism, since it also exhibits a form of constructivism. Although Smith gives his position the name of dispositionalism and Korsgaard refers to her own view as a form of constructivism, their accounts of reasons are often mentioned together as both being versions of constructivism (see, for instance, Mark Timmons 2003) or dispositionalism (see, for instance, Lillehammer 1999).

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 arfit and Scanlon may be exceptions though. Scanlon is a realist (non-naturalist) about normaP tive reasons, but a constructivist about moral obligations. Scanlon sees moral principles as constructed in a process of eliminating principles that people might reasonably reject. The notion of ‘a reason’ is, however, not constructed, he thinks. Reason is a primitive idea, paraphrased as “a consideration that counts in favour of [something].” (Scanlon 1998, 17) Parfit’s Triple Theory (explained in Parfit 2011) implies that moral principles can be given a contractualist reading: they are those principles that turn out to be acceptable to agents in a certain contractualist setting, which means that they are not given or primitive. 130

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What dispositionalists/constructivists like Smith and Korsgaard have in common is the view that reasons do not obtain independently of an agent’s counterfactual response to a situation. Lillehammer gives the following description of the dispositionalist’s credo: “[t]ruths about agents’ normative reasons are response dependent in the sense that the truth of normative reason attributions is determined by how agents would respond to given ends in some set of favourable circumstances, where the notion of a favourable circumstance is not cashed out trivially as a circumstance conducive to the endorsement of independently reason-giving ends. Thus, normative reason attributions can be true or false, depending on whether their content matches that of the beliefs or desires of agents in favourable circumstances.” (Lillehammer 1999, 118) In Smith’s theory what a person has reason to do is determined by what his fully rational self would desire him to do, whatever that may be. The fully rational self determines what is desirable, in the sense that it creates and does not discover reasons. At the end of chapter 3 we saw that this was a fundamental point of discussion between Smith and Enoch, the latter being a committed non-naturalist. Also, in Korsgaard’s view, reasons are constructed by the subject under favourable circumstances (specified in terms of autonomy). Thus, what binds Korsgaard and Smith is their scepsis with regard to the existence of ‘response-independent, non-natural, irreducibly normative truths’. Smith and Korsgaard start from different points though, and whereas Smith builds his Kantian view of normative reasons as he distances himself from Humean theories, Korsgaard explicitly presents her constructivist view as an alternative to the non-naturalist view. Parfit thinks that her criticism of realism reveals a wrong conception of normativity, and he firmly rejects her alternative, of which he says, “Of reductive accounts of normativity, Korsgaard gives the fullest.” (2006, 351) Let me first explain what Korsgaard’s critique on realism consists of, before turning to her constructivist alternative and Parfit’s rejection of it. 4.4.1 Korsgaard’s criticism of realism Korsgaard develops her account of normativity as part of a development of a moral theory. What launches Korsgaard’s examination of moral theory is what she calls ‘the normative question’: “[w]e are asking what justifies the claims that morality makes on us.” (Korsgaard 1994, 28) According to Korsgaard, the normative question arises when an agent acknowledges the truth of a moral claim but fails to feel the force of that claim. Agents who do not feel the force of their duty fail to recognize the normativity (or authority) of morality. She puts the problem of normativity at the centre of moral philosophy. The ultimate test for deciding on the plausibility of a moral theory is whether it offers an answer to the normative question. Korsgaard holds that moral realism does not come to grips with the fundamental philosophical problem of normativity, and that in this respect constructivism is distinctly superior. By moral realism Korsgaard does not mean the view that propositions employing moral concepts may have truth values. This view is shared by moral realists and constructivists alike, and Korsgaard calls it ‘procedural realism’ (1996, 131

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35). Moral realism for her is a view about why propositions employing moral concepts have truth values. It is “the view that propositions employing moral concepts may have truth values because moral concepts describe or refer to normative entities or facts that exist independently of those concepts themselves.” (Korsgaard 2003a, 100) This view is ‘substantive realism’ in Korsgaard’s terminology. Procedural realism does not require the existence of normative entities. As long as there is some correct or best procedure for answering moral or normative questions, there is some way of applying the concepts of the right and the good. When concepts are applied correctly, statements will be true, “[b]ut the substantive moral realist thinks that there are correct procedures for answering moral questions because there are moral truths or facts which exist independently of those procedures and which those procedures track.” (Korsgaard 1996, 36) The moral entities upon which the substantive realist relies are intrinsically normative: some actions are ‘intrinsically right’ or ‘obligatory in themselves’. This is expressed in the realist’s conviction that “the notion of normativity is an irreducible one [and] it is a mistake to try to explain it.” (Korsgaard 1996, 30) Parfit’s non-naturalism clearly fits this description. So Korsgaard’s criticism of realism applies to Parfit, among others. Korsgaard believes that realists fail to offer a satisfying answer to the normative question. This is why she thinks so: “[suppose] you are being asked to face death rather than to do a certain action. You ask the normative question: you want to know whether this terrible claim on you is justified. Is it really true that this is what you must do? The realist’s answer to this question is simply ‘Yes’. That is, all he can say is that it is true that this is what you ought to do.” (1996, 38) But this is not a helpful answer. Korsgaard explains, “If someone falls into doubt about whether obligations really exist, it doesn’t help to say ‘ah, but indeed they do. They are real things.’ Just now he doesn’t see this, and therein lies his problem.” (1996, 38) In fact, the realist’s declaration that obligation is simply there is no answer at all. Realism refuses to answer the normative question, and that is why it is defective, according to Korsgaard. That realists cannot answer the normative question shows that they have a wrong view about the source of normativity, and consequently a wrong view of morality. According to the realist, the source of normativity is an intrinsically normative part of reality and we have normative concepts like ‘reason’ and ‘obligation’ because we grasp that there are intrinsically normative entities. From this observation Korsgaard derives that on the realist view “ethics is really a theoretical or epistemological subject. When we ask ethical questions, or practical normative questions more generally, there is something about the world that we are trying to find out.” (1996, 44) The world contains intrinsically normative entities or truths, and the business of practical philosophy is to investigate these entities or truths. Thus they make all reasoning theoretical. But, according to Korsgaard, answering ethical or practical questions requires practical reasoning. Ethics is not a matter of finding knowledge but of solving practical problems. Her anti-realist alternative consists of a Kantian conception of moral obligation, which she embeds in a constructivist approach to reasons: the reasons an agent has for acting are constructed through his deliberative agency. Because 132

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Korsgaard is such an important participant in the debate on practical reasons, I will give some more details about her view, which will also enable us better to understand Parfit’s dissension with Korsgaard. 4.4.2 Korsgaard’s constructivism According to Korsgaard, the answer to the normative question must “spring from the position from which the normative question arises, the first-person position of the agent who demands justification of the claims which morality makes upon him.” (1996, 17)15 In a Kantian-style argument Korsgaard investigates the conditions which make it possible for an agent to ask why he must do what morality requires. He can ask this, Korsgaard’s thinks, only because the human mind is self-conscious. The human mind is self-conscious in the sense that it is essentially reflective. In our practical lives, this gives us the capacity to distance ourselves from our desires and to ask ourselves, when we feel a powerful impulse to act, ‘[i]s this desire really a reason to act?’. The desire needs to pass a test. But this test “isn’t an exercise of intuition, or a discovery about what is out there in the world. The test of determining whether an impulse is a reason is whether we can will acting on that impulse… So the test is a test of endorsement.” (1996, 108) Thus Korsgaard’s constructivism reveals itself: the normative force of reasons is ‘constituted’ by our endorsement; we lend reasons their authority by endorsing them. In Kant’s terms, we must ‘make it our maxim’ to act on the desire, for only then do we freely do what the desire bids us to. Korsgaard follows Kant further in thinking that freedom involves conformity to a law, and thus that for the will to be free it must not only determine itself but it must do so according to a law. When you deliberate which desire to act on, you determine your actions by a law that you freely impose upon yourself. But how do you determine which laws you want to impose upon yourself? Korsgaard’s answer to this question is that the law must be expressive of you. She articulates this answer by invoking a distinctly un-Kantian and rather existentialist idea: the idea that we have a conception of ourselves, understood as a description under which we find our lives worth living and our actions worth undertaking. As she herself elucidates, “An agent might think of herself as a Citizen of the Kingdom of Ends. Or she might think of herself as someone’s friend or lover, or as a member of a family or an ethnic group or a nation. She might think of herself as the steward of her own interest, and then she will be an egoist. Or she might think of herself as the slave of her passions, and then she will be a wanton. And how she thinks of herself will determine whether it is the law of the Kingdom of Ends, or the law of some smaller group, or the law of egoism, or the law of the wanton that will be the law to 15

 orsgaard’s demand that moral theories should be able to answer the normative question thus K must not be seen as a demand that moral theories should be able to convert or motivate the psychopath. Psychopaths would never raise the question from their own perspective. The sceptic that Korsgaard is thinking of is the moral agent who asks for a justification from within his experience that the moral law is binding. 133

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herself.” (1996, 101) All these ‘practical identities’, as Korsgaard calls these conceptions of oneself, give rise to reasons and obligations. So, by identifying with a certain self-conception, you yourself determine what reasons you have. This explains their authority, their normative force, their ‘hold on us’. To answer the normative question, namely why moral obligations have a hold on us, Korsgaard has to take one last step: “[g]uided by reflection, we may be led to see that our tendency to treat our contingent practical identities as the sources of reasons implies that we set a value on our own humanity and so on humanity in general. This realization leads us to the moral principle of valuing humanity as an end in itself. In the absence of such reflection, the tendency to treat our contingent practical identities as the sources of reasons may be condemned as insufficiently reflective.” (1996, 250) She argues that an action’s being morally required is not a matter of its having a certain kind of property but of the action’s being required by our ‘practical identity’ as rationally reflective agents (1996, 101). No matter what practical identity we adopt, no matter what things we value in life, reflective agency is something that we cannot but value having, if we are to value anything. Valuing reflective agency is Korsgaard’s way of speaking about valuing humanity. Her answer to the moral sceptic thus is: if he values anything, consistency requires him to obey the moral law. Moral obligation has its origin in the nature of being an agent, more precisely in the agent’s will. There is a passage in which Korsgaard describes this view clearly: “[t]he source of the normativity of moral claims must be found in the agent’s own will, in particular in the fact that the laws of morality are the laws of the agent’s own will and that its claims are ones she is prepared to make on herself. The capacity for self-conscious reflection about our actions confers on us a kind of authority over ourselves, and it is this authority which gives normativity to moral claims.” (1996, 19-20) So moral laws are laws that the agent imposes upon herself. The moral requirement that we should value humanity for itself is not embedded in reality, to be discovered by us, but it emerges from our nature as human beings with practical identities. Korsgaard’s view of morality is therefore constructivist. But her notion of ‘a reason’ is also a constructivist notion.16 Reasons and obligations have their origin in the agent’s own will. Or, in her own words, “when an agent determines whether she can will a maxim as a universal law, she is determining that she can endorse a certain consideration in favour of doing something and therefore can treat it as a reason.” (2003a, 118) An agent constructs practical reasons by deliberating which considerations justify an action from her point of view. When she started her search for an answer to the normative question, Korsgaard decided that a good answer had to “explain why the person finds it necessary to act on those normative facts, or what it is about her that makes them normative for her. [It] must explain how these reasons get a grip on the agent.” (Korsgaard 1997, 240) Korsgaard believes she has answered 16

I n this perspective Korsgaard’s constructivism goes further (or ‘deeper’) than Scanlon’s. In Scanlon’s theory, moral principles are constructed in answer to the question which principles people might reasonably reject. But he does not consider the notion of ‘a reason’ to be a constructed notion. According to Korsgaard, constructivism can go “all the way down.” (2003a, 118) 134

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the normative question by showing that it is our own free will which is the source of normativity.17 4.4.3 Parfit’s criticism of constructivism The problem that many philosophers have with Korsgaard’s approach is that it is too subjective. It seems that for Korsgaard normativity is all about first-person justification: it is about whether I can treat a consideration as a reason. G.A. Cohen argued that Korsgaard fails to make a distinction between what looks justified from one’s own point of view and what actually is justified. He concludes that “it looks as though what she has investigated is the experience or phenomenology of obligation, not its ground or authenticating source.” (Cohen 1996, 183) Rachel Cohon argues in the same vein that Korsgaard confuses having a reason with merely taking something to be a reason. (Cohon 2000) Thomas Nagel holds against Korsgaard that “giving the last word to the first person is a mistake.” (Nagel 1996, 204) He believes it is wrong to derive normativity from an agent’s self-conception. In order to decide what you have reason to do, you have to stop thinking about yourself: “[i]f someone accepts death rather than betraying a number of other people to the killers, it might be unappreciative to explain this in terms of the conception he had of himself. Of course if he cares about the survival of others, and is unwilling to save his own life by betraying those others, then that is in fact an important aspect of his conception of himself. But to explain the grip on him of those reasons in terms of self-conception would be to get things backwards, and incidentally to cheapen the motive.” (Nagel 1996, 206) The real explanation of this man’s altruistic behaviour is not that the man thought that he could not live with himself if he betrayed innocent people to killers: “[t]he real explanation is whatever would make it impossible for him to live with himself, and that is the non-first-personal reason against the betrayal.” (Nagel 1996, 206) Parfit shares Nagel’s worries, in that he also believes that there must be something deeply non-first-personal about reasons for them to be real reasons. As we saw, Korsgaard criticizes realists for believing that our relation to reasons is one of knowing truths about them, as if when we ask “practical normative questions… there is something about the world that we are trying to find out.” (Korsgaard 1996, 44) Parfit concedes that our relation to practical reasons is not only one of knowing truths about them: “[t]o be practically rational, it isn’t enough to respond to our epistemic reasons for believing that we have certain practical reasons, since we should also respond to these practical reasons in our desires and acts.” (Parfit 2001, 32) But contrary to what Korsgaard believes, Parfit thinks that, when we ask what we have most reason to do, 17

 ere are some gaps in my reconstruction of Korsgaard’s argument. For instance, I did not give Th her reasons for claiming that the free will must not only be self-determining, but must also choose maxims in conformity with a law. Neither did I explain why she believes that from the value of one’s own humanity the value of humanity in general follows. These are steps in her argument that I find particularly hard to grasp. However, we do not have to go into the details of Korsgaard’s theory to understand the constructivist nature of it. 135

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there is something that we are trying to find out: “[i]f there was nothing to find out, because there were no truths about what we had reason to want or to do, this would be another way in which our belief in normative reasons would be an illusion.” (2001, 32) But this argument of Parfit wrongly assumes that there are only two options: either there are normative truths that we can find out about, or there are no normative truths. Korsgaard’s position presents a third possibility. Against realists Korsgaard holds that there is nothing to find out, not because there are no truths about what we had reason to want or to do, but because those truths are not such that we can find out about them. Korsgaard articulated this idea by drawing a distinction between procedural and substantive realism. As a procedural realist, she believes that claims about what we have reason to want or to do can be true, but she denies that the truth of these claims lies in their correspondence to certain matters of fact which would be there regardless of whether someone was raising the question of how to act. Yet, Parfit’s main problem with Korsgaard’s theory still stands. He rejects Korsgaard’s conception of normativity because it is reductive. He believes this is eminent in Korsgaard’s use of the notion ‘the normative force’. According to Korsgaard, what makes something normative for us is its power to exert a kind of force on us. She describes the normative force of reasons, obligations and values as “a force that is felt by a deliberating agent and is imperceptible from outside of the deliberative perspective.” (Korsgaard 1996, 124) This force is something that reasons have in common with causes, she says: “[w]hat the normativity of reasons and the power of causes seem to have in common is that they are forms of necessitation: a cause makes its effects happen, and necessitates it (all else equal); a reason for action or belief necessitates that for which it is a reason in another way, namely, it necessitates a person to act or believe as it directs.” (Korsgaard 1996, 226) It is the conception of normativity as a force that moves Korsgaard towards a constructivist instead of a realist theory of reasons. If normative facts were independent of our will, Korsgaard believes it could not be explained why we find it necessary to act on those facts, why we feel their normative force. Parfit objects to Korsgaard’s conception of normativity “Normativity, so understood, is a kind of unavoidable and irresistible motivation.” (2006, 373) He believes that Korsgaard identifies normativity with “the ‘motivational necessity’ of normative beliefs.” (2006, 370) But normativity and motivation must not be confused, Parfit insists. A reason can still be normative, even if the agent does not feel its motivating force. A reason can still have authority, even if the agent does not feel any motivational necessity to act upon that reason. Thus Korsgaard’s suggestion that to answer the normative question we must appeal to the motivational necessity of normative beliefs is rejected by Parfit because motivational necessities are not normative. One problem with Parfit’s criticism is that it is not altogether clear that Korsgaard identifies normative force or necessity with motivational force or necessity. It is true that, as she is an internalist, she thinks that reasons ought to motivate – but this connection is established through reflection on rational agency: thinking from within the context of first-personal deliberation Korsgaard connects an agent’s reasons with 136

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what motivates him. This connection is not contrary to common sense, and should not be hard for Parfit to accept. The key mark of Korsgaard’s thinking is that she then goes on to look for an explanation of the concepts of normativity and motivation such that the connection does not appear contingent. But her explanation does not make normativity hostage to motivation. And she nowhere denies that a reason could still have authority, even if a particular agent does not feel its motivating force. Her question is why this particular consideration which is labelled ‘a reason’ has a hold on us? The most basic formulation of her criticism on the address of realism is not that it does not explain the motivational force of normative reasons. What is missing is an explanation of the reasons being normative, that is, of their having authority over us. According to the realist, there are certain things that we ought to do and ought to want simply because these things have the normative property that we ought to do or to want them. But how do these external facts relate to us? How do they give us a reason to act? The connection between the agent and the built-in property of ‘oughtness’ is not explained in the realist picture. As long as Parfit does not fill this gap, he faces the critique that he has no account of normativity (whereas Parfit himself rather believes that his account protects normativity from disappearing by not explaining it). Parfit’s representation of Korsgaard’s argument is tendentious in the same way as Nagel’s representation of it is when Nagel accuses Korsgaard of cheapening the motive of an altruistic agent. Nagel’s complaint is that Korsgaard misrepresents what morality is about, because it seems as if she is saying that one should be moral in order to be true to oneself and one’s practical identities, whereas, arguably, morality is not about oneself but about others. Parfit’s complaint has the same structure in that it accuses Korsgaard of misrepresenting what normativity is about by turning attention to the subject instead of away from it. But both Parfit and Nagel are wrong in describing the relationship between morality/reasons and the subject’s valuing of himself as instrumental. Korsgaard does not say that one is moral in order to anything! She does not say that one adopts moral laws or reasons for a purpose, but she claims that the adoption of purposes should be guided by moral and other rational principles. Unlike Parfit, she believes that these principles which give us reasons need to be grounded, and that a philosopher cannot accept them as given, but must seek for a justifying understanding of them. In the end her argument is that these principles are the constitutive principles of action. Thus the relationship between morality/reasons and a subject’s motives or maxims is not instrumental but constitutive. Or, in other words, we do not act out of duty or for reasons in order to be true to ourselves, but reasons and the moral law have a hold on us by virtue of something that is true about us as agents. In order to evaluate Parfit’s critique of Korsgaard, it is also relevant that though Korsgaard embraces the constructivist implications of her approach to reasons, she explicitly resists the suggestion that it would be reductive. She thinks that Kantian theory offers us an account of normativity that is neither reductive nor dependent on the existence of non-natural properties. According to her, “Parfit fails to grasp this option, because he is operating with an essentially Humean conception of the mind – a passive or even visualistic conception.” (Korsgaard 2003b, 10) In Parfit’s theory 137

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the intuition that enables us to make normative judgements functions like a sense or a seeing. He assumes that reason is exclusively a capacity to know what reality is like. But reason can also tell us how to shape reality, Korsgaard adds. Parfit “theorizes practical reason”, but practical reason should be distinguished from theoretical reason. (2003b, 9) Practical reason answers practical questions by telling us which actions we should perform and how to solve certain problems. By solving practical problems we arrive at normative truths – but this, Korsgaard insists, does not make her theory reductive: “[my account] appeals to the natural fact of self-consciousness, the need for reasons to which self-consciousness gives rise, and the principles of reason we formulate in response to that need. But I do not believe that normative concepts are reducible to any of those facts.” (2003b, 8) And, indeed, it would not make sense if Korsgaard reduced normativity to natural facts, because then she could not answer the normative question either: natural facts are objective and ‘third-personal’ facts accessible from the outside, and can therefore not figure in the answer to a question that is raised from the first-person perspective. So perhaps Korsgaard is right in dismissing Parfit’s accusation that she reduces normativity. But what she could not, and probably would not, want to dismiss is the characterization of her account as making normativity a ‘subjective’ or subject-related issue: normativity is a necessity the agent is confronted with in deliberation. As she herself admits, this kind of necessity is essentially first-personal: it “cannot be translated without loss into anything third-personally describable.” (2003b, 7) It follows that Korsgaard does not reduce normativity to natural facts. But she exerts some kind of reduction nevertheless. By constructing the realm of the normative through our deliberative activity, she analyses normativity in terms of justification from the agent’s own, first-person perspective. Parfit perceives the analysis as a reductive move and concludes that Korsgaard loses normativity in her attempt to discover its source.18 One way to describe the dispute between Korsgaard and Parfit is to regard it as an opposition between two different conceptions of normativity. For Parfit, normativity is a matter of objective justification. For Korsgaard, normativity is a matter of deliberative guidance and self-imposed authority. Yet, granting that Parfit and Korsgaard are operating with two different conceptions of normativity does not end the debate. For what we want to know next is how we are to choose between these two conceptions of normativity. By way of conclusion I will investigate whether Parfit gives 18

 . Jay Wallace’s objections to Korsgaard’s constructivism are partly similar to Parfit’s. Wallace R (2004 and 2001) formulates his disagreement with Korsgaard in terms of a disagreement about ‘the work that is done by the notion of the will’. On the constructivist position that Korsgaard favours, “the primary role for the will in understanding rational action is to serve as what she calls ‘the source’ of normativity, providing an account of what makes principles binding on us in the first place, as reasons for action.” (Wallace 2004, 71) According to Wallace’s realist approach, such considerations are not made normative for us by our commitment to comply with them. Their normative force is prior to and independent of our particular decisions about what to do. The distinctive role for the will, on this realist approach, is “to explain the striking capacity of rational agents to be guided in their activity by their conception of what they have reason to do.” (Wallace 2004, 71) 138

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us a good reason to prefer his conception of normativity above Korsgaard’s and all others’. 4.4.4 The non-naturalist account of normativity evaluated According to Parfit, normativity is an irreducible, non-natural property that exists in reality independently of features or acts of the human mind. There are normative truths – truths about what we ought to do and want, and they are accessible by rational intuition. That is about all that he positively says, because he thinks that it is all that can be said: one cannot explain normativity, on pain of losing it. Parfit digs in his heels: “normative concepts cannot be explained in non-normative terms. Nor can we say much to explain how we understand these concepts, or how we recognize normative truths. And, when we ask why there are such truths, or what makes them true, the most that we can do is explain some of these truths by appealing to others. We soon reach truths for which we can give no further explanation. Many diseases are bad, for example, because they cause suffering; but we cannot say what makes suffering bad.” (Parfit 2006, 331) Authors have expressed several worries about normative non-naturalism. Following Mackie, some argue that non-natural entities in which ‘to-be-pursuedness’ is built in are queer or mysterious and cannot exist.19 And, indeed, it might look as if non-naturalism mystifies normativity by refusing to explain it. But, according to Finlay, “the charge of queerness is misguided.” (Finlay 2007a, 842) Non-naturalism is the thesis that normative reality cannot be explained in other terms or identified with some part of the natural world. The demand for an explanation of what kind of facts normative facts are could be met only if non-naturalism were false. If one holds it against non-naturalism that it cannot meet the demand for an explanation one begs the question. So it might be fairer to say, as Finlay does, that the non-naturalist’s insistence on unproblematic inexplicability counts both for and against non-naturalism. Non-naturalists believe that normative reasons and facts exist and that we are directly acquainted with them. We cannot explain this, but neither can we seriously doubt it. This counts in favour of it because, as Finlay remarks, “[a] doctrine making such minimal claims is difficult to refute.” (2007a, 844) And yet I find there is something unsatisfying about Parfit’s end-product. I grant that non-naturalism is not so much an explanation of normativity as a denial of the supposition that an explanation is possible or required. But I find his objections to theories that do try to explain normativity question-begging in turn. His objections (against analytical and non-analytical naturalism and constructivism) come down to the charge that these theories are inconsistent with normativity because they reduce normativity and normativity is irreducible. Any meta-normative theory other than non-naturalism is wrong, not because it gives a wrong explanation of normativity, but because it attempts to explain normativity. Hence the complaint that Parfit does 19

See for example Alan Goldman (2009). 139

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not investigate whether a reductive theory can account for the normativity of reasons, but just assumes their inadequacy by setting out in advance that ‘normative’ means ‘irreducibly normative’. Schroeder, who defends a naturalistic, Humean, desire-based reason theory, refutes Parfit’s objection to naturalism with the simple statement that he does not accept that the normative implies irreducibility (see Schroeder 2005). He believes that normative properties and relations are reducible to non-normative ones. And he argues for it in two steps: first, he establishes that normative properties and relations are reducible to reasons (a thesis which is shared by many non-naturalists and naturalists alike) and, second, he argues that reasons are reducible in non-normative terms via a desire-based theory (claims about reasons are made true by facts about the agent’s psychology). Schroeder insists that if Parfit wants to undermine this naturalistic strategy, he must argue instead of stipulate that the normative implies irreducibility. It would be unfair to say that Parfit gives us no argument at all for why he believes that normativity is irreducible. He does motivate his choice for a non-naturalist account of normativity by pointing out what he takes to be counterintuitive implications of the alternative accounts. One might find these arguments lacking (as Schroeder no doubts thinks), but that is different from saying that Parfit argues by stipulation. His conception of normativity as irreducible does not come out of the blue. Yet in another sense his defence of irreducible normativity has a stipulative character due to a failure to give a principled understanding of his conception of normativity. The request for a principled understanding is not at all the same as a request for a reductive explanation (the term ‘explanation’ is, by the way, very ambiguous and unhelpful in this regard). So the problems I have with Parfit’s theory are not, I think, of the question-begging kind. When Parfit says that reasons are non-natural facts, I do not object that this is too queer to be true. My criticism does not presuppose bald naturalism, but derives from an expectation about what philosophical theory should aspire to achieve. Philosophers like Smith and Korsgaard have metaphysical commitments just like Parfit, in the sense that they believe there are facts that are not part of the physical world, or truths that cannot be captured by natural laws. However their philosophical inquiry does not end with that commitment, but starts with it as they try to explain how such entities as values and obligations and reasons can exist. They look for principles that unite the various reasons and values that govern agency. As Smith (2011a) rightly points out: when one asks Parfit why one’s future well-being is desirable, he will say that some things are intrinsically desirable because of the nature they have; but of course that does not tell much because one wants to know what is so special about that nature that there are reasons to desire intrinsically things with that nature, and not other things that also have a nature! Without a principled understanding or unifying explanation the list of valuable things risks appearing arbitrary. The fact that Parfit is vague also about the way in which we come to know our reasons enforces the sense of elusiveness and obscurity. He compares the ability to grasp moral truth via intuition with the acquisition of mathematical knowledge, but without further nuance the comparison falls short, since at first sight moral intuitions 140

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seem to depend a lot more on cultural upbringing than mathematical ones. And, as Philip Kitcher remarks in his review of On What Matters,“many things mathematicians once took to be selfevident were later rejected by their successors, and principles now judged basic emerged from a complicated history of mathematical exploration. In mathematics, self-evidence is achieved, not given.” (Kitcher 2012) In defence of Parfit one could object that epistemology is another matter altogether, and the fact (if it were a fact) that the epistemology of internal reasons is less problematic than the epistemology of external reasons does not lend direct support to an internal theory of normative reasons. But the point is not strictly epistemological. It is about determinacy. Even if it is true that no explanation can be given of what it means that ‘R is a reason for A to Φ’, or of how one comes to know that fact, someone who aims to give a theory of reasons still has to investigate the problem of how to determine that ‘R is a reason for A to Φ’ (as opposed to reasons for B, or facts about states of affairs the realization of which would be good for A without therefore providing A with reasons to do something). Remember that Williams also did not make an epistemological objection to exernal theorists. He was not concerned about the difficulty of explaining how an agent comes to know his reasons (he pointed out that in real life this is often and inevitably difficult). His concern was that philosophers, in trying to provide a theory, should have a clear grasp of the thing they mean to talk about. They need a clear conceptual story, regardless of the difficulties that arise once we try to apply the concept in particular empirical contexts. I have not said anything so far about whether Parfit can deal with the Tess case. I am not sure what to say about it because the outcome turns on the question of how important beliefs are for Parfit either to the construction of reasons or to the generation of rational agency. Answering the question’s first part looks easy: Parfit thinks of reasons as mind-independent, not as constructed in any way. For Parfit reasons come first and rational agency is a matter of performing actions that are based on beliefs that, if they were true, would give us reason to act in that way. About rational actions he writes, “Our desires and acts are rational when, if our beliefs were true, we would have sufficient reasons to have these desires, and to act in these ways. Some people add that, for our desires or acts to be rational, they must depend on rational beliefs. This claim is misleading and not worth making.” (2011, 6) He gives the example of smoking: smoking a cigarette is rational when the agent believes that smoking will protect his health, because he is doing what, if his belief were true, he would have strong reasons to do. So what makes the act rational is the consistency with the content of what we believe, not the rationality of the belief (2011, 113). This means that Parfit would deny that Huck Finn acts rationally: Huck does not act in line with the content of his belief; it does not matter whether this belief was rational in the first place. I am less sure what Parfit would say about Tess. If reasons are there anyway and nothing about their nature can be said, Parfit does not need to assume that we access them via beliefs. Emotions or desires could put an agent in touch with what there is reason for him to do (Döring pursues this thought in Döring 2009). Parfit’s description of reason-knowledge in terms of ‘being aware of facts that give us reasons’ 141

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or ‘taking something to be a reason’ seems to suggest openness about the ways in which agents obtain access to reasons. Yet whenever he becomes explicit or develops an example he talks about belief as the royal route to reasons. Does this suggest that there is something in the structure of reasons that can be tracked only cognitively? But if that is so, then it turns out that more can be said about the nature of reasons after all, for example in the way that Smith does. In other words, I do not know what Parfit would say about Tess: whether he could accommodate the fact that Tess acts rationally or does what she has reason to do when she does not form the belief that she has reason to do what she is doing. Only the author to whom we will turn next gives a clear account of Tess’ reasons.

4.5 Conclusion Parfit’s account of practical reasons is external and value-based. His main argument is that facts about reasons are, like all normative facts, irreducible to facts about desires or natural properties. His argument is grounded in a non-natural account of normativity, which states that the normative is not reducible to the non-normative, and thus non-natural. Naturalists like Mark Schroeder disagree with the alleged irreducibility; they are convinced that nothing essential is lost in a naturalist account of normativity. The point made by constructivists like Korsgaard is that normative facts may be irreducible to natural, psychological facts without therefore being external, non-natural facts about which nothing can be said. It seems to me that Parfit has not met Williams’ request. On the contrary, Williams’ point that ‘external reason’ is an obscure notion is invigorated by Parfit’s quietism and his conception of normative concepts as irreducibly non-natural.

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Harry Frankfurt on practical reasons 5.1 Introduction In this chapter I would like to propose a reason theory which adopts the positive elements but avoids the difficulties of Williams’ internal reason theory. Smith and Parfit offer alternatives for the internal reason theory that suffer from their own problems, and I am not convinced that they are doing a better job than Williams in their attempt to explain normative reasons. I agree with them, however, that Williams’ theory also suffers from some flaws. Therefore, I will outline yet another reason theory, based on the philosophy of Harry Frankfurt.

5.2. Frankfurt’s theory of care and love According to Frankfurt, the distinguishing feature of our species is our self-consciousness, which he defines as the fact that we are capable of taking ourselves seriously: “[t] aking ourselves seriously means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just as we come. We want our thoughts, our feelings, our choices, and our behaviour to make sense.” (2006, 1) Frankfurt’s reflection upon this distinguishing feature resulted in several thoughtful and original contributions to the debate on autonomy, the identity of the self and the meaning of life. There has been an evolution in his thinking about these issues: while his view of identity and freedom, as set out in ‘Freedom of the Will and The Concept of a Person’ (1971), stresses the importance of deliberate identification and choice, and can therefore be called ‘voluntaristic’, he has laid emphasis on care and love as being central to a person’s identity since ‘The Importance of What We Care About’ (1982).1 This approach is non-voluntaristic for reasons which I will explain. The non-voluntaristic approach is of greater interest to the debate on practical reasons than the voluntaristic one. But, since the approaches are related, I will explain both. 5.2.1 The hierarchical model The capacity to take ourselves seriously is the capacity to compartmentalize our consciousness and objectify our mental life. We are capable of self-objectification, which is a curious capacity when one comes to think of it. Frankfurt writes, “We are unique 1

 or a full explanation of the difference between what can be called ‘Frankfurt-1’ and ‘FrankF furt-2’ see Cuypers 2000. 143

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(probably) in being able simultaneously to be engaged in whatever is going on in our conscious minds, to detach ourselves from it, and to observe it – as it were – from a distance. We are then in a position to form a reflexive or higher-order response to it.” (2006, 4) What we spontaneously feel and desire, in other words, our first-order desire, is “psychic raw material.” (2006, 6) Animals and small children remain passively indifferent to these materials in so far as they wantonly act on their impulses. But to achieve the status of a responsible person, it is fundamental that we develop higherorder attitudes and responses to these first-order desires. That is the basic idea behind Frankfurt’s hierarchical model of autonomy. When an agent desires for example to take another cigarette, he can do two things: resist the desire or identify with it. When a person forms a second-order desire with regard to a first-order desire, he desires to have the desire. When he forms a secondorder volition, he wants this first-order desire to become effective, that is, moving him all the way to action. Frankfurt stresses repeatedly that to identify with a desire does not mean that one actively embraces or endorses the psychic raw material with which nature provides us, it only means that one just accepts this material as one’s own desires or feelings. Though Frankfurt sometimes used the notion of ‘endorsement’ in this context, he later regrets his use of this notion, because it gives the false impression that the reflective attitudes of identification need to be grounded in evaluations of desirability, while Frankfurt thinks that “[a] person may identify himself with (or withhold himself from) a certain desire or motivation for reasons that are unrelated to any such assessment, or for no reason at all. What I have in mind when I have employed the notion of endorsement is something that makes no claim or judgment whatever, and that is more accurately specified as the altogether neutral attitude of acceptance. A person may be led to accept something about himself in resignation, as well as in approval… The fact that he accepts it entails nothing, in other words, concerning what to think of it.” (2002a, 160) As we will see, resistance to over-rationalizing the constitution of personal identity and autonomy is a recurrent theme in Frankfurt’s philosophy. Identification involves acceptance, not necessarily approval or rational assessment. By accepting a desire, a person makes it more his own, in the sense that it is no longer an item that just happens to appear in his psychic history. He does not regard the desire as an alien intruder, but as his own. When the desire moves him to action, he is active, since he is moved by himself. Most of the time identification with our desires is second nature to us, to the extent that we do not notice that it takes place. But sometimes we have desires that we do not identify with. Those desires are less ‘our own’. Of course, they take place in us, and in a gross literal sense they are ‘our desires’, but we dissociate ourselves from them and want them to be ineffective. Instead of incorporating them, we reject and thereby externalize them.2 Frankfurt invokes the example of a man who, in the course of an animated though amiable conversation, suddenly loses his temper and starts to 2

 rankfurt (1977) compares external desires to spasms of the body, and urges that a person is no F more to be identified with everything that goes on in his mind than with everything that goes on in his body. 144

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yell and fling dishes and books at his friends. Afterwards he regrets this incident and says that the feeling just came over him out of nowhere, that he could not help it and that he was not himself. Frankfurt believes that it is possible for these disclaimers to be genuinely descriptive: “[w]hat the man says may appropriately convey his sense that the rise of passion represented in some way an intrusion upon him, that it violated him, that when he was possessed by the anger he was not in possession of himself.” (1977, 63) He thinks that we might all intuitively recognize this feeling of alienation; it indicates the ‘externality’ of some of our desires and feelings. He also gives the example of the addict who desperately wants to stop taking drugs (1971, 17). The unwilling addict does not want to give in to his craving for heroin and does not want his first-order desire for heroin to become effective. Although the rejected desire may persist as an element of a person’s mental history, it is expressive of the agent’s real self. When a desire moves us to action despite the fact that we do not want it to move us to action, we act against our will and do not act autonomously. The hierarchical approach grants special status to second-order attitudes. They are considered to express what a person really wants, to be expressive of ‘the real self ’. But why are second-order desires more a person’s own than first-order desires? Why are they considered to have authority? After all, second-order desires are nothing but desires, just like first-order ones. Watson (1975) makes this point when he writes that “the notion of orders of desires or volitions does not do the work that Frankfurt wants it to do. It does not tell us why or how a particular want can have, among all of a person’s desires, the special property of being peculiarly ‘his own’.” (1975, 29) It is indeed unclear why higher-order desires would have any special connection with the real self. Considered in itself, a person’s higher-order desire is just another desire. Frankfurt himself admits that there is a problem: “[h]ow can [the second-order desire] claim to be constitutive of what [the agent] really wants? The mere fact that it is a second-order desire surely gives it no particular authority. And it will not help to look for a third-order desire that serves to identify the person with this second-order preference. Obviously, the same question would arise concerning the authority of that desire.” (1992b, 105) Infinite regress looms, the whole hierarchical approach appears to be doomed. Frankfurt comes up with several solutions. First, he proposes to block the threatening regress by interpreting identifications as decisions. “When a person identifies himself decisively with one of his first-order desires, this commitment ‘resounds’ throughout the potential array of higher-orders… The fact that his second-order volition to be moved by this desire is a decisive one means that there is no room for questions concerning the pertinence of volitions of higher orders… The decisiveness of the commitment he has made means that he has decided that no further questions about his second-order volition, at any higher order, remain to be asked.” (1971, 21) A decisive commitment avoids an infinite regress without being arbitrary, as becomes clear from looking at a mathematician’s decision that he has found the solution to an arithmetical problem. The mathematician’s every calculation can be checked by the performance of another calculation. But at a certain point he can decide to stop the 145

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sequence of calculations and decide to adopt the result. It is not arbitrary to terminate the sequence when that is done at a point where there is no conflict left to be avoided or resolved. The decisive commitment to an arithmetic result, or to a desire, means that one is convinced that no further accurate inquiry would require one to change one’s mind. In that sense, decisive commitments resound endlessly and block the looming infinite regress. Apart from avoiding an infinite regress, decisive commitments solve another problem of the hierarchical account. The assignment of desires to different hierarchical levels does not by itself provide an explanation of what it is to be identified with a desire. A higher-order desire could be no more one’s own than a first-order desire. But a decision to identify with a first-order desire is one’s own; it is impossible to doubt that. One cannot discover a decision in oneself and wonder whether it is internal to oneself. A decision always is internal; in that sense it differs essentially from a desire. The trouble with this solution is the extremely voluntaristic picture emerging from it: the agent actively decides which desire he identifies with. This picture conveys the idea that we get up, look back at ourselves, decide whether we like what we see, and thus decide ‘on the spot’ what kind of person we are. This does not seem realistic. At least, Frankfurt himself, as we will see, does not think it is right to accord such a major role to free choice and decision in the constitution of the self. Moreover, the notion of a decision does not seem to make sense if there is no self to make the decision. If decisions are self-determining, what determines the decision? Who makes the decision if the self is still to be determined? In other words, it seems that there must be ‘something’ there already to make a decision possible. The notion of a decision is therefore not really helpful in an explanation of the constitution of the self.3 Frankfurt offers a second solution to the problem of the authority of second-order desires. He writes, “Hierarchical accounts of the identity of the self do not presume that a person’s identification with some desire consists simply in the fact that he has a higher-order desire by which the first order is endorsed. The endorsing higher-order desire must be, in addition, a desire with which the person is satisfied.” (1992b, 105) A person’s second-order desire is constitutive of what he really wants when it is a desire with which the person is satisfied. Frankfurt does not define this state of satisfaction in terms of a belief or a feeling about which it could be doubted whether it is the agent’s own. Instead, he defines satisfaction as “an absence of restlessness or resistance.” (1992b, 103) If identification with a desire is nothing more than being satisfied with this desire, it does not require an act: it is a state of mind. Because satisfaction does not require an act of endorsement, there is no regress. This attempt to avoid the infinite regress certainly does not lead to an overly voluntaristic picture of self-constitution. Self-satisfaction is a state in which a person finds himself; it does not require any decision or deliberate action. But there is another problem with this solution: it is not clear why being in a state of mind that can be characterized as 3

 or a systematic explanation of what is problematic about the picture of self-identity and autoF nomy in terms of decisions see Cuypers (1998, 48). 146

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satisfaction would confer authority on the identifications that arise from it. As some critics have observed, the absence of restlessness can result from apathy, fatigue or disinterestedness rather than from the acceptance of oneself.4 To solve the problems with this hierarchical model Frankfurt has to go beyond voluntarism. He develops a less voluntaristic picture of identity and autonomy based on the notions of care and love. Though he never explicitly acknowledged the evolution in his thinking, he implicitly indicates his turn to non-voluntarism when he writes, “An exaggerated significance is sometimes ascribed to decisions, as well as to choices and to other similar ‘acts of will’. If we consider that a person’s will is that by which he moves himself, then what he cares about is far more germane to the character of his will than the decisions or choices he makes.” (1982, 84)5 Frankfurt developed a full theory around the notion of care, and the related notion of love. By explaining these notions, their meaning and their importance, it will become clear why they are useful not only in an explanation of self-constitution and autonomy, but also in an account of practical reasons. In section 5.3, I will articulate a theory of reasons based upon love and care (the love-based reason theory). But let me first explain the meaning and role of these concepts in Frankfurt’s theory. 5.2.2 Care Frankfurt describes the phenomenon of caring about something in terms of two characteristics which, at first sight, seem to contradict each other: (i) what we care about expresses a personal identification with someone or something; yet, (ii) what we care about is not under our personal, voluntary control. Let us start with the former: what does care as a personal identification amount to? If a person cares about something, he identifies with that object in the sense that he makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending upon 4

5

S chroeder & Arpaly (1999) and Waddell Ekstrom (2005) provide an insightful survey of the problems that plague Frankfurt’s attempts to define external desires as desires that one feels alienated from or that one feels dissatisfied about. Our feelings do not always reflect the role that a desire really plays in the structure of our will. Frankfurt introduces this thought as a criticism of Sartre’s notion of the radically free choice. He illustrates this statement with a correction of Sartre’s example of the young man who has to choose between remaining at home to take care of his mother and joining the fight against the enemy. “The young man in Sartre’s famous example is sometimes understood to have resolved this dilemma…by making a radically free choice. But how significant is the fact that the young man chooses to pursue one rather than the other of his alternatives, even if we understand this choice to entail a decision on his part concerning what sort of person to be and not merely concerning what to do? It surely gives us no particular reason for thinking that he will actually become the sort of person he decides to be, nor does it even entitle us to assume that he will actually pursue the alternative he chooses…The resolution of the young man’s dilemma does not merely require that he decide what to do. It requires that he really care more about one of the alternatives confronting him than about the other; and…that he understand which of those alternatives it is that he really cares about more.” (1982, 84-85) However, Frankfurt-1 seems as guilty as Sartre in overrating the impact of a person’s decisions. 147

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whether his cared-about object is harmed or benefited. When the cared-about object is affected, he himself is affected accordingly. Or, as Frankfurt also writes, to care about something is to be ‘invested’ in it (1982, 83). When a person cares about a football team, he is disappointed when they lose and happy when they win. His happiness depends on the good or bad fortune of the team. Caring about something ordinarily involves feelings and beliefs that express and support a person’s cares. When a person cares about a football team, he desires to watch the game, he feels happy when the team is playing well and he believes that that team is the best. However, these desires, feelings and beliefs are of only secondary importance in characterizing the phenomenon of care, which essentially consists in volitional identification. Frankfurt writes, “The heart of the matter, however, is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional. That a person cares about … something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.” (1994, 129) Cares are configurations of the will, and we will see below how exactly it is that they guide and limit our conduct. For now, it is important to understand why they should not be conflated with value judgements or with desires. Caring about something is not equivalent to judging it to be valuable: “[a] person who acknowledges that something has considerable intrinsic value does not thereby commit himself to caring about it.” (1999a, 158) We can agree that something is worth doing or having without being drawn to it. Caring does not spring from impersonal values; it is a personal matter. It is equivalent to regarding something as important to oneself: “[t]he fact that a person cares about something and the fact that he regards it as important to himself are to be construed as substantially equivalent.” (1999a, 155) Yet, to regard something as important to yourself does not entail that you judge it to be valuable in general. Although desires are a personal matter as well, they still differ from cares. First, caring can only exist over some extended period of time, because “the notion … of caring implies a certain consistency or steadiness of behavior.” (1982, 83) Nothing in the nature of a desire, however, requires that it must endure. Second, caring about something implies an ‘investment’. People desire things they do not really care about. It cannot be inferred from the fact that I desire some ice cream that I care about ice cream or that ice cream is something I consider to be important to me. How can one tell whether the felt motivation relies upon desire or care? For Frankfurt the difference shows itself phenomenologically. He gives the example of someone who has tickets for a concert and who desires to attend the concert, but who simultaneously is asked by a close friend for an important favour (see Frankfurt 1999a, 159-161). Though it will make it impossible for him to go to the concert, he gladly agrees to do the favour, because he says to himself that going to the concert is not all that important to him. He may sincerely believe this. But when it turns out that, unexpectedly, he suffers an uncomfortable sense of loss or disappointment, this means that he did care about going to the concert. Even after deciding to help his 148

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friend, he still wants to go to the concert, and missing it hurts. The desire to attend the concert persists - that is partly what it means to care about something: “[h]is caring about the concert essentially consists in having and identifying with a higherorder desire … that this first-order desire [would] not be extinguished or abandoned.” (1999a, 161) To desire something does not mean that one cares about it. But caring about something does involve desires; more specifically, it involves commitment to a desire. In this sense, caring about something resembles the phenomenon of secondorder volition. There is, however, an important qualification: the commitment implied by caring about something is not freely chosen; the identification is involuntary. This is the second main characteristic of care. The non-voluntaristic character of Frankfurt’s approach to the identity of the self in terms of cares reveals itself in the fact that he construes care as something that does not fall under the voluntary control of the subject. Cares are non-voluntarily imposed. This shows itself in two ways. First, the process of caring cannot be initiated at will. We do not decide what we are going to care about, but we find ourselves caring about something. Accordingly, we can also not change what we care about by a decision. Second, once cares are installed, their impact on us remains outside our immediate voluntary control and we are subject to what Frankfurt calls ‘volitional necessities’. Let me elaborate further on these two important features of care. What we care about is not for us to decide. Frankfurt explains that cares are not under our control by pointing out that they are part of reality: “[t]he concept of reality is fundamentally the concept of something which is independent of our wishes and by which we are therefore constrained. Thus, reality cannot be under our absolute and unmediated volitional control. The existence and the character of what is real are necessarily indifferent to mere acts of our will. Now this must hold as well for the reality of the will itself. A person’s will is real only if its character is not absolutely up to him.” (1992b, 100) Frankfurt does not provide a full theory of the mental state of caring. The claim that our will is independent of our wishes has some intuitive support, but it is not obvious that from that we can conclude that the will is independent of the subject’s rational and self-conscious engagement with it. While Frankfurt is keen to avoid the metaphysical extreme of idealism, he seems less worried about falling into the trap of ‘the myth of the given’. It is a real question – and one that troubles many philosophers of mind – in what sense mental states are independent of the subject’s interpretation.6 Frankfurt sets this question aside, and concentrates on what he means (thereby giving the contours of what he does not want to talk about) by the claim that cares are not constituted by the subject but part of reality. First, “the person may care about something even though he wishes that he didn’t and despite strenuous efforts to stop.” (1999a, 161) In such a case, the person cannot help caring about what he cares about. 6

I n so far as a plausible account of mental states must strike a balance between according an active role to a person making up his mind and allowing for the possibility of introspective mistakes, Richard Moran (2001) seems to me to do a better job than Frankfurt. I will say more about this in the conclusion, when I suggest directions for future follow-up research. 149

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Second, it may be that a person is in doubt about what he cares about. It may even be that it is impossible to remove the doubt because he cannot choose between two incompatible cares. In this case, Frankfurt speaks about a divided will or ambivalence (see 1987a; 1992b). A person is ambivalent if he is indecisive concerning whether to be for or against a certain disposition. The cure for ambivalence is wholeheartedness, Frankfurt says (see 1987a; 1992b). A person wholeheartedly cares about something when he cares about it without doubt or conflict. Unfortunately, even whether our will is divided or undivided is not under our control. A person cannot make himself wholehearted just by a psychic movement that is under his immediate voluntary control. Ambivalence cannot be overcome voluntarily. Certainly a person may attempt to resolve his ambivalence and decide to adhere unequivocally to one alternative rather than another. He may manipulate conditions in his environment or in himself so as to bring about that he begins or ceases to care about a certain object (1994, 136). But whether the division in his will is factually eliminated is another matter. This aspect of Frankfurt’s theory seems to encourage a fatalistic attitude. Why should a person try to be wholehearted in what he cares about if this is not under his control? Frankfurt would reply that he is just being realistic. There are people who are never able to make up their minds, who never find a way to be satisfied with themselves, who never fully accept the way they are, the way they care. Frankfurt’s advice to these people is “if your will is utterly divided and volitional unity is really out of the question, be sure at least to hang on to your sense of humor.” (1992b, 107) A third consequence of the fact that our will is real is that people may be mistaken about their cares (1994, 130). According to Frankfurt, “a person may care about things a great deal without realizing that he cares about them at all, and he may not really care at all about things that he believes he considers to be very important to him.” (1999a, 162) What is real is not always easy to discover. What we care about is a fact caused by various factors (like our upbringing, or our character, or our genetic material); it is not a construction of the self. Not only is what we care about beyond the range of immediate control according to Frankfurt, but also how our cares affect us. About certain things that are important to him a person may care so much or in such a way that he is subject to “a familiar but nonetheless somewhat obscure kind of necessity.” (1982, 86) Sometimes a person cares about something so much or in such a way that he feels he must perform a certain act. Martin Luther’s state of mind when he declared ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’ serves Frankfurt as an illustration of this kind of necessity. Luther feels necessitated to act as he does, but this necessity is logical, nor causal. After all, Luther had the chance and the physical capacity to do the thing he said he could not do. Nor is the constraining force purely psychological as in cases of addiction or compulsive behaviour. The necessity he is subjected to is volitional. Frankfurt explains, “Unlike the addict, [Luther] does not accede to the constraining force because he lacks sufficient strength of will to defeat it. He accedes to it because he is unwilling to oppose it and because, furthermore, his unwillingness is itself something which he is unwilling to alter.” (1982, 87) The persistence of Luther’s desire ‘to stand there’ is not due to an 150

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inability to revise his inclinations, but to the fact that he is unwilling to give up this inclination. Furthermore, this feature of his will is something that Luther does not want to change. He cannot bring himself to renounce his faith, because his will makes it impossible to do so and because he is unwilling to alter his will. Because the volitional necessity indicates something that the agent himself does not want to change, the constraints imposed by volitional necessity are constraints that the agent imposes upon himself. The fact that volitional necessities are self-imposed helps to account for the fact that they are not coercive, but rather liberating. When Luther felt that he could not help but stand there, affirming his faith, he did not feel dominated by an alien, coercive force. He felt as if he was doing something that he very much wanted himself, and in this sense he acted autonomously. But volitional necessities are not only self-imposed, they are also imposed involuntarily. Luther felt it was a fact that he could not want to want anything else. He did not choose this volitional necessity. The paradox that necessities of the will are both self-imposed and non-voluntarily imposed is solved when one realizes that a person’s will need not be under a person’s own control for it to be truly his own will: “[t]hus volitional necessity may be both self-imposed in virtue of being imposed by the person’s own will and, at the same time, imposed involuntarily in virtue of the fact that it is not by his own voluntary act that his will is what it is.” (1982, 88) Frankfurt also describes the counterpart of volitional necessity, which he calls unthinkability. In a case of volitional necessity, a person is unable to refrain from Φ-ing. Conversely, in a case of unthinkability, a person is unable to Φ. Frankfurt gives the example of a mother who reaches the conclusion that it would be best to give up her child for adoption, but who finds that she simply cannot do it (1982, 90). Another example of Frankfurt’s is the military officer who is well-trained and who willingly joined the army, but refuses at the critical moment to carry out the order to launch nuclear weapons. He discovers that participating in the initiation of a nuclear assault is for him unthinkable. (1987b, 182) Again, being unable to bring oneself to perform an action is not the same as being overwhelmed by an aversion to performing it. It is not against his will that the officer is unable to carry out the order. The repugnance he feels is fully his own. He would not want to shape his will in any other way so that it would be possible for him to want to carry out the order. He is unwilling to want to launch nuclear weapons. Though this example may give that impression, the category of the unthinkable is not essentially a moral category. Moral judgements are impersonal, whereas volitional necessity and its counterpart emerge from what we love, which is a personal matter. What is at stake, in a case like Luther’s or the officer’s, is not his obedience to morality but his personal integrity. Volitional necessities prevent us from betraying the things that we care about and with which we are closely identified. What they keep us from violating are not our moral duties but ourselves. Of course, moral ideals can be among the things that a person cares about. But even then, the volitional necessity that the ideal of world peace, for instance, imposes upon a person, should not be explained as the force of a moral ideal simpliciter, but as the force of a 151

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moral ideal that someone cares about and in which he has personally invested himself (Frankfurt 1982, 91). What is unthinkable for someone depends on what he cares about, and this varies from person to person. Something may be unthinkable for me, while it is not and does not need to be for you. However, there is room in Frankfurt’s philosophy for a kind of unthinkability that stretches over all beings capable of caring and establishes a form of irrationality. Frankfurt introduces this thought in opposition to Hume’s assumption that a desire can be irrational only when it is based on a false belief. 7 According to Frankfurt, Hume neglects an important way in which the notion of rationality can be construed and which prevents him from seeing that desires can be irrational in themselves. Frankfurt does not agree with Hume’s remarkable opinion that “’[t]is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” (1739, 416) Frankfurt admits that “[p]references such as those Hume describes here may be quite independent of any factual error.” (1987b, 185) However, he adds, “There is a well-established and valuable usage… according to which the passions and preferences to which Hume refers are emphatically not reasonable. [They are] lunatic.” (1987b, 185) Some desires are irrational in the sense that they can never be willed by a mentally healthy adult. It is not that they are inconsistent or illogical, but they are insane or, as Frankfurt says, they are unthinkable. They do not violate logical rules, but rules that are set by the necessities of our will. Therefore, they are volitionally irrational: “[t]here is a mode of rationality that pertains to the will itself. Like the mode of rationality that is articulated in the necessary truths of logic, it has to do with the inviolability of certain limits. Logical necessities define what it is impossible for us to conceive. The necessities of the will concern what we are unable to bring ourselves to do.” (1987b, 190) Hume’s example reveals a sense in which we take what we find unthinkable as defining a criterion of normality. The unthinkability of the preference to destroy the world rather than to scratch one’s finger does not seem merely personal to us. To some instances of unthinkability we accord a universal validity. Frankfurt’s distinction between actions that are inconceivable (that cannot be thought) and actions that cannot be willed is reminiscent of Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. Yet the Kantian affinity disappears when we look into the nature of the unthinkability. Though Frankfurt denies that it is merely a psychological impossibility, it certainly keeps an empirical or a posteriori character. What is unthinkable has to be identified empirically. In other words, that some things are universally unthinkable is meant to be a descriptive statement. Frankfurt gives a list of things that all people care about: “[f ]or instance, we cannot help caring about avoiding crippling injury and illness, about maintaining at least some minimal contact with other human beings, about being free from chronic suffering and endlessly stupefying boredom.” (2006, 38) Our concerns for these things give rise to more detailed inter7

 ume writes, “Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chooses means H insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it.” (1739, 416) 152

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ests and concerns, which all generate reasons for acting. These fundamental necessities are “the elementary constituents of volitional reason.” (2006, 38; my emphasis) These provide reasons but also a basis for evaluation: people who do not care about these things, like someone who likes to be in pain for sheer pleasure, are hard to make sense of, and in that sense irrational for Frankfurt. He is explicit about the source of these universal instances of care: “[they] are not transient creatures of social prescription or of cultural habit. Nor are they constituted by peculiarities of individual taste or judgment. They are solidly entrenched in our human nature from the start.” (2006, 38) It should not be surprising in this context that Frankfurt declares that, according to him, the terms ‘unnatural’ and ‘irrational’ are convergent. (1987b, 186) Hume’s lunatic is irrational as in crazy, not because he violates rules of logic, but in the sense that he transgresses volitional limits by caring about something that we, due to our human nature, could not possibly care about. The naturalistic basis of volitional necessities in Frankfurt’s theory is alleviated by his concession that what is unthinkable for many people may for others be not only reasonable but even exquisitely correct: “[w]e know that preferences or types of conduct that are irrational in one cultural locale may often be entirely rational in another.” (1987b, 186) He gives the example of a member of the Fratellini family of clowns who, in an interview, thanks his father for showing his love in a way that many of us would find, to say the least, remarkable. The old man said: “When I was a child, my father, bless him, broke my legs, so that I would walk comically, as a clown should. … Now there are people who would take a poor view of that sort of thing.” (A.J. Liebling quoted in Frankfurt 1987b, 187) Frankfurt does not draw a clear lesson from this example, leaving it open to interpretation why he mentions the story, leaving it open how culturally dependent our and his own notion of ´being reasonable´ or ´being sane´ is.8 But whether the source of the unthinkable is culture or nature, it is not reason as such, and the difference between Frankfurt and Kant remains: for Frankfurt the will is to be identified at a psychological level. The fact that volitional necessity is self-imposed is related to the fact that volitional necessities define the identity of the self. Unthinkability and volitional necessity set the limits of a person’s will and thereby shape the boundaries of his volitional identity. Personal identity is construed by Frankfurt as a matter of having a volitional essence. A person would not have an identity if he had no will.9 The fact that some things are unthinkable or necessary shows that the will is constrained. Volitional necessities thus denote the contours of a person’s identity. The idea that constraints are necessary for 8

9

 ost likely Frankfurt would explain away the apparent tension by conceding that the things M human beings care about may conflict. On this view, the Fratellini father forsakes one concern in an attempt to serve another, namely securing a successful future for his child. To talk about a volitional essence makes sense only on a substantial conception of the will. In Frankfurt’s writing three conceptions of the will can be discerned: the will as an effective desire, that is, a desire that moves a person all the way to action; the will as activity, that is, a faculty that makes choices and decisions; and the will with a particular content or a specific character. In his non-voluntaristic approach only the ‘substantial’ conception is prominent, according to which the will has a content of its own, different from desires and reason. See Cuypers (2001). 153

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identity is fairly plausible, although one may find that Frankfurt ‘overdoes’ it by comparing the identity of a self with the identity of a triangle. In order for an object to be a triangle it must possess, among other things, the characteristic that its interior angles equal 180 degrees. Under no circumstances will a triangle have interior angles that equal more than 180 degrees. In the same way, Frankfurt says, the set of actions that are unthinkable for a person specifies the limits of what the person can will himself to do. Frankfurt writes, “Just as the essence of a triangle consists in what it must be, so the essential nature of a person consists in what he must will. The boundaries of his will define his shape as a person.” (1993, 114) The comparison between personal identity and the identity of a triangle may sound overly dramatizing. There clearly is a difference between the a priori necessities that define a triangle and the a posteriori constraints that define a person: it is just not true that under no circumstances could Luther have done otherwise, while it is true that in no possible world can the angles of a triangle equal more than 180 degrees. As Frankfurt himself says, volitional necessitites are contingent. Yet, the point he wants to make, in my view, is that these volitional constraints, being what they are, define a person’s self (even if only at a specific time, since identities develop) by binding his will. More controversial than the connection between necessity and identity is the connection made by Frankfurt between necessity and freedom. The discussion between compatibilists and incompatibilists on the question whether or not determinism is compatible with freedom falls outside the confines of this book. Far from offering a full analysis of Frankfurt’s view that constraints are not only compatible with freedom but even required, I would just like to articulate the concept of volitional necessity a little further in relation to freedom. A person subjected to the volitional necessity of what he cares about is ‘captivated’ by the cared-about object. Frankfurt emphasizes that this captivation does not enslave the person but sets him free: it is a mistake to think that the unbounded enlargement of freedom of choice and decision always enhances personal freedom and self-realization (see Frankfurt 1987b and 1993). Enlargements of our freedom enrich us only up to a point. When the restrictions upon a person’s choices are relaxed too far, he becomes disoriented and uncertain. Too much liberty becomes anarchy, undermining autonomy. In Frankfurt’s terminology this means that when a person cares about nothing, he is slave to his passions. Going wherever his desires lead him, his motivational and emotional life is in tatters and utterly chaotic. But once a person starts to care about something, he has a purpose that guides his motivational and emotional life. Anarchic liberty is replaced by unity, stability and authentic freedom. As one of Frankfurt’s interpreters writes, “By providing guidance, the cared-about object liberates the person from his natural inner chaos and frees him for the pursuit of what he most deeply cares about.” (Cuypers 2000, 246) Moreover, when a person cares about nothing his choices or decisions are arbitrary. They do not confer what the person really wants, because as long as a person does not care about something, he has no volitional essence and there is nothing that he really wants. There need to be limits to what a person can choose in order to make this choice really personal and 154

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autonomous. These limits must be fixed. If they were themselves among the options to choose from, a person’s will would lose all substance needed to guide his choices and decisions. Volitional necessities provide these limits. The paradoxical idea that genuine freedom requires subjection to constraints has a Kantian flavour.10 In ‘Autonomy, Necessity and Love’ Frankfurt describes his relationship to Kant as follows: “I believe that the most genuine freedom is not only compatible with being necessitated; as Kant suggests, it actually requires necessity.” (1994, 131) He quotes Kant, who wrote that “a person proves his freedom in the highest degree by being unable to resist the call of duty.” (Kant in Frankfurt 1994, 130) Frankfurt also believes that freedom essentially consists of an obedience, an inability to resist. But this Kantian affinity comes to an end when it is specified what has to be obeyed in order for one to be free. Frankfurt does not share Kant’s view “that autonomy consists essentially and exclusively in the submission to the requirements of duty.” (1994, 131) He adds that “[it] cannot simply be taken for granted that any commands by which people govern themselves must be commands that are derived by the rational application of general principles.” (1994, 131) Kant accords too much weight to morality and rationality in defining autonomy. According to Frankfurt, it is not reason or morality that we should obey in order to act autonomously but the constraints of our will. Real freedom is not tantamount to an anarchic state of mind, to a situation where everything is possible and anything goes. Agents should care about something before they can make autonomous choices and decisions. This explains why the hierarchical model with its emphasis on identification and decision is incomplete as it stands. The notions of care and volitional necessity complete the hierarchical model. More precisely, the voluntaristic conception of autonomy and self-realization in terms of second-order volitions and identification asymmetrically depends upon the nonvoluntaristic conception of autonomy and self-identity in terms of caring. Frankfurt himself offers an argument that supports the asymmetrical dependency thesis: “[u] nless a person makes choices within restrictions from which he cannot escape by merely choosing to do so, the notion of self-direction, of autonomy, cannot find a grip. Someone free of all such restrictions is so vacant of identifiable and stable volitional tendencies and constraints that he cannot deliberate or make decisions in any conscientious way. If he nonetheless does remain in some way capable of choice, the decisions and choices he makes will be altogether arbitrary. They cannot possess authentically personal significance or authority, for his will has no determinate character.” (1993, 110) Caring about something establishes the necessary identity and the necessary restrictions within which a person can voluntarily and autonomously 10

 ant’s view is not exceptional. As Frankfurt remarks, it is a persistent theme in our moral and K religious tradition that “a person may be in some sense liberated through acceding to a power which is not subject to his immediate voluntary control.” (1982, 89) Frankfurt quotes Dante, for instance, who wrote “In His Will is our peace”, expressing the idea that the escape from inner disturbance is reached through faith and the acceptance of God’s will as one’s own (2004, 66). 155

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decide with which desires he will identify. In this sense the voluntaristic conception of autonomy and self-identity depends asymmetrically upon the non-voluntaristic conception.11 Caring about something is of great importance to us. Without volitional necessities we would not have a volitional essence. Caring provides us with a volitional essence by doing two things: it gives content to our will and it guarantees unity over time. It can do this because “[c]aring about something implies a diachronic coherence, which integrates the self across time.” (2006, 19) Suppose we cared about nothing. “In that case, we would be creatures with no active interest in establishing or sustaining any thematic continuity in our volitional lives.” (1999a, 162) We would still have desires, but we would no longer be engaged in guiding the course of our desires along a path. The objects that a person cares about capture his attention and direct his desires towards a stable goal. Frankfurt concludes that “[c]aring is important to us for its own sake, insofar as it is the indispensably foundational activity through which we provide continuity and coherence to our volitional lives.” (1999a, 162) This is important because it follows that “[t]he fact that there are things that we do care about is plainly more basic to us – more constitutive of our essential nature – than what those things are.” (2006, 19) Because of the intrinsic importance of care, the fact that it is possible to care about something, regardless of what it is, already counts in favour of caring about it. As should be clear by now, Frankfurt interprets the concept of ‘care’ in a specific, limited way. His construing of the concept of ‘care’ differs, for instance, from its construing in care-ethics. It is significant that Frankfurt talks about ‘caring about’ and not ‘caring for’. He uses care as an anthropological concept, not an ethical one. The same remark goes for another key concept of Frankfurt’s anthropology, namely ‘love’. Frankfurt’s discourse on love is sometimes misunderstood, because his use of the word ‘love’ differs from many other, maybe more common uses.12 His discourse on love should not be read as part of a theory about emotions. But how, then, should it be understood? 5.2.3 Love Related to the importance of what we care about is the importance of what we love. Love is a mode or a species of caring. Frankfurt does not say more about the relation or a more detailed analysis of the asymmetrical dependency thesis and the solutions that it ofF fers to the problem of infinite regression and other difficulties of the hierarchical model I refer to Cuypers (2000). 12 This makes Frankfurt’s theory a bit evasive. What are we to think for instance of Eleanor Stump’s criticism that Frankfurt gives an impoverished account of the phenomenon of love? (Stump 2006) She favours another definition from which it becomes clear that she confines love to a relationship between people, more precisely to the romantic type of love. But Frankfurt means to talk about more than romantic love. Frankfurt anticipated these possible misunderstandings when he admitted that ‘love’ might not be the best name for the phenomenon he is interested in (see Frankfurt 1999c, 31). 11

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ship between care and love. He just states, “Among the things that we care about there are some that we cannot help caring about, and among the things that we cannot help caring about are those that we love.” (1999a, 165) The love to which Frankfurt refers encompasses more than the love of one person for another, as in romantic or parental or filial relationships. It also includes the love that someone has for his country, or for an institution, or for a tradition or culture. It further includes the love manifested by someone’s devotion to an ideal such as social justice, scientific understanding or beauty in the arts. On Frankfurt’s conception, the range of love’s possible objects is very wide. Moreover, he does not consider the romantic relationship as the most authentic paradigm of love: “[a]mong human relationships, it seems to me that the loving concern of parents for their infants or small children is the mode of caring that comes closest – much closer than romantic or erotically based devotion – to providing pure instances of what I have in mind in speaking of love.” (1999a, 165) Loving, as Frankfurt construes it, differs from having feelings, such as being attracted or being delighted or being ‘in love’. Though love can (and typically does) involve having certain emotions, holding certain judgements, showing affectionate behaviour, in essence love is a volitional matter for Frankfurt, not a cognitive or affective one. It is “a configuration of the will.” (1994, 42) All the instances of the type of love with which Frankfurt is concerned possess the following essential features (Frankfurt 1982, 1999a, 2004, 2006): (i) Love is a concern for the well-being or flourishing of the beloved object. The lover is devoted to the flourishing of his beloved to the extent that he is invested in his beloved. (2006, 41) He benefits when his beloved flourishes; he suffers when it is harmed. (ii) The lover desires the well-being of his beloved for its own sake rather than for the sake of other interests that may be promoted by it. For the lover, the condition of his beloved is important in itself, apart from any bearing it may have on other matters. That is why Frankfurt qualifies love as ‘disinterested’, or, at one point, ‘nonutilitarian’ (2006, 40). (iii) Love differs from other kinds of disinterested concern for the existence and the well-being of what is loved, like benevolence, because love is personal: “[t]he lover’s concern is rigidly focused in that there can be no equivalent substitute for its object, which he loves in its sheer particularity and not as an exemplar of some general type.” (2006, 40) (iv) The devotion is to some degree involuntary. We cannot love – or stop loving – merely by deciding to do so. Of course, the objects of a person’ s love may vary over the course of time (1994, 136). Love appears and disappears; one beloved object is replaced by another. Changes of these kinds alter the configuration of the will. But the fact that these are changes in the will does not mean that they are up to us. On 157

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the contrary, as we have already adumbrated, our will is not under our deliberate volitional control. Neither can we change the fact that the things that we love command us. When we love, we are subject to volitional necessities: “[w]e cannot escape the impact upon us of its [love’s] commands by merely deciding to refuse them. With respect to what we love, there are necessarily things that we feel we must do. We cannot freely choose just to ignore the interests of our beloved. Love demands that we serve those interests.” (1998a, 5) Of course we can remain indifferent to the demands of love, but only at a certain price: the betrayal of our love. And since the necessities of love are necessities that a person is fully identified with, if he betrays his love he betrays himself. The necessity of love is therefore very different from the irresistibility of a desire: “[t]he necessities of love are imposed upon him by himself. It is by his own will that he does what they require. That is why love is not coercive. The lover may be unable to resist the power it exerts, but it is his own power.” (2006, 45) Just as with care, it is also true with love that it should not be understood as a response to a perceived value. Love need not be grounded upon the awareness of the inherent value of an object. Parents do not love their children because they believe that their children possess particular virtues and merits. Rather, the relationship between love and the value of the beloved is the opposite: “the children seem to the parents to be valuable, and they are valuable to the parents, only because the parents love them.” (2006, 25) Frankfurt himself testifies that “[t]he particular value that I attribute to my children is not inherent in them but depends upon my love for them. The reason they are so precious to me is simply that I love them so much.” (2004, 40) This counts for every instance of love, Frankfurt thinks: what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it. Like our cares, our loves save us from disruptive psychological anarchy. Without the guidance of what he loves a person is ‘the slave of his passions’. His motivational and emotional life is chaotic, following no pattern. However, when he begins to love a certain object he will steer his motivational and emotional life in the light of it. His life will improve thanks to the fact that he loves, no matter what he loves. But by loving we achieve something even more than stable and unified goals: the goals that love provides are final. Final goals are “goals that we consider to be worth attaining for their own sake and not only for the sake of other things.” (2004, 52) Insofar as we care about things, we make things important to us, thereby creating aims that yield purposeful activity. “However”, Frankfurt remarks, “activity that is meaningful only in this very limited sense cannot be fully satisfying. … We cannot make sense of what we are doing if none of our goals has any importance except in virtue of enabling us to reach other goals. There must be ‘some end of the things we do which we desire for its own sake.’” (2004, 52) Locally purposeful activity does not suffice to make our lives meaningful. We need more. We need final ends, because without them we would find nothing truly important. In a characteristically original passage, Frankfurt associates the importance of final ends with the dread of being bored. Our urge to avoid boredom, which Frankfurt considers to be a variant of the elemental instinct for self-preservation (2004, 55), expresses our need for final ends. Love meets this need. 158

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“Love is the originating source of terminal value. If we loved nothing, then nothing would possess for us any definitive or inherent worth.” (2004, 55) As the creator of inherent or terminal value, love is the ultimate ground of our personal identity. In the end, it is not voluntary identification nor care in general, but a particular mode of care, love, that grounds Frankfurt’s account of autonomy and self-identity. And as I will argue in the next section, love is also the ultimate ground of our practical reasons.

5.3 The love-based reason theory The notions of love and care are first and foremost introduced as pivotal elements of a theory about autonomy and identity. But as the theory develops, it becomes clear that Frankfurt’s theory of love and care also has very interesting repercussions on the debate on practical reasons. Frankfurt realizes this himself, and in The Reasons of Love he explicitly presents his theory on love and care as a contribution to the debate on practical reasons: “[i]n proposing to expand the repertoire upon which the theory of practical reason relies, these are the additional concepts that I have in mind: what we care about, what is important to us, and what we love.” (2004, 11) In an attempt to make room for his theory in the broader discussion, Frankfurt distinguishes between two standard approaches in the literature on practical reason which could be identified with the Humean and the Kantian approach to reasons. He rejects both and presents his own account as ‘a third way’. Frankfurt’s theory is meant to replace these two classic accounts, as he tells us in the following key passage: “[t]he origins of normativity do not lie either in the transient incitements of personal feeling, or in the severely anonymous requirements of reason. They lie in the contingent necessities of love.” (2004, 48) The scope and nature of this claim (that all reasons are grounded in love) make this a bold statement. Frankfurt also seems to hold a weaker claim, namely that love is a source of reasons. While the first claim requires a good deal of conceptual argument, the latter seems suggested by everyday phenomenology. We feel the reason-giving force of love on a daily basis, whenever the people that we love need help. In Frankfurt’s phenomenological analysis, the fact that one’s beloved needs help is in itself a reason for one to provide that help. If one does not recognize the distress of a beloved one as a reason for helping him, one does not genuinely love him at all: “[l]oving someone or something essentially means or consists in, among other things, taking its interests as reasons for acting to serve those interests.” (2004, 37) The stronger and, for our purposes, more interesting claim that love is the ultimate foundation of all practical reasons is not fully developed by Frankfurt. I will reconstruct what I take him to mean, and also suggest directions in which his ideas can be developed and embedded in a systematic approach. By analogy with the desire-based reason theory (DBR theory) and value-based reason theory (VBR theory), I will call the reason theory to which Frankfurt’s notion of love gives rise a love-based reason theory (LBR theory). It says that when someone 159

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has a reason to Φ, that is because Φ-ing serves an interest of something/someone that he loves. According to the love-based reason theory, A has a reason to Φ only if and because A cares about someone or something that will benefit from his Φ-ing.13 As we have seen, volitional necessities are grounded in our own will but outside our direct voluntary control. In that sense, the reasons emerging from love are ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ at the same time (see Frankfurt 2006, 46). Desires are also outside an agent’s voluntary control, so objectivity (understood in this way) cannot be what distinguishes desire-based reasons from love-based reasons. And indeed, the problem with desires, according to Frankfurt, is that they are not ‘subjective’ in the right way: they are arbitrary and not expressive of a person’s identity. The disconnection of personal identity is also what disqualifies the faculty of reason as the source of practical reasons in Frankfurt’s eyes: reason is too impersonal, and not subjective enough. Values, being located in the world outside, are not subjective at all. But Frankfurt wants practical reasons to have normative force and meaning for concrete agents. For him, the attitude of loving gets the balance between objectivity and subjectivity just right. This is how Frankfurt captures the differences and similarities between love, desires and reason: “[love] move[s] us, as feelings and desires do; but the motivations that love engenders are not merely adventitious or heteronomous. Rather, like the universal laws of pure reason, they express something that belongs to our most intimate and most fundamental nature. Unlike the necessities of reason, however, those of love are not impersonal. They are constituted by and embedded in structures of the will through which the specific identity of the individual is most particularly defined.” (1994, 48) Let us look more closely at these differences in order fully to understand the merits of the love-based reason theory. First, love differs from desires (passions), in that love expresses our deepest essence whereas desires are adventitious or sometimes even alien, that is, external to our identity. Frankfurt writes, “Having a goal is not the same … as simply being moved by a desire.” (2006, 11-12) The fact that someone has a desire, for instance, to kill someone else and the fact that firing his pistol at him would be an effective way to accomplish this, might give him a reason to fire his pistol at the other man, but “only”, Frankfurt points out, “if killing the man is not just an outcome for which a desire happens to be occurring in [him].” (2006, 12) The desire must be one with which the agent identifies; the outcome must be something that he really wants. Next, imagine a father who feels the desire to kill his son out of “God knows what unconscious fantasy.” (2006, 13

 e LBR theory expresses more than a necessary condition. It claims not only that cares are a Th necessary condition for reasons, but also that cares produce reasons. The LBR theory, however, does not pretend to offer a full analysis of practical reasons in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. To denote this limited scope of the LBR theory I use the somewhat awkward formulation that A has a reason to Φ only if and because A cares about someone or something that will benefit from his Φ-ing. 160

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12) Does this desire give him a reason? Of course not, Frankfurt says. The father does not really want to kill his son. The desire is not one that he accepts and with which he identifies. Since the desire is one with which he does not identify, his having it does not mean that killing his son is among his goals. As we saw in chapter 4, Schroeder (2005; 2007) tries to save the DBR model by saying that the father’s desire to kill his son gives him only a poor reason to kill him which is overridden by a stronger reason not to. But Frankfurt resists this way out and says, “It would be preposterous to insist that I do have at least a weak reason to shoot him – a reason upon which I refrain from acting only because it is overridden by much stronger reasons for wanting him to remain alive.” (2006, 12) This counter-example against the DBR theory shows that desires are not in themselves authoritative; they become authoritative and provide us with a reason when we identify with them. So, they are rendered normative by the grounding love or care. If we do not identify with a desire, for instance, because it conflicts with all that we care about, we thereby externalize it. Because an externalized desire is not supported by our love, it does not have authority. It can still be irresistible, though: “[e]ven if an externalized desire turns out to be irresistible, its dominion is merely that of a tyrant. It has, for us, no legitimate authority.” (2006, 10) Williams pays no attention to the phenomenon of alien desires. The importance of self-identification for reasonconstitution is overlooked in his internal reason theory.14 I do not want to deny, of course, that Williams acknowledges the fact that having a desire is not ipso facto having a reason. It would not be fair to ascribe to Williams the view that the mere instantaneous desire of a father to kill his own son gives him a reason to do so. Williams holds that only a conative state can ground a reason for action, but he does not hold that all of an agent’s actual conative states ground reasons for acting. There are corrective measures that separate the reason-giving desires from the non-reason-giving desires: desires that do not survive sound deliberation are discounted. However, to Frankfurt’s mind, rational deliberation does not suffice to turn a desire into something authoritative. Rational deliberation does not make a desire more mine, he would reply to Williams. Rational deliberation ensures that a desire is not based on a factual or logical error, but it does not imply an identification of the person with this desire. Whether a desire is rational is a matter of impersonal principles. Whether a desire is mine depends on a personal commitment. Although Williams’ theory leaves room for denying irrational desires any reason-giving force, it is impossible for him and other DBR theorist to deny the reason-giving force of a desire on the basis of its ‘being alien’. Another difference between an LBR theory and a DBR theory is that the former incorporates a special kind of irrationality that is absent from the latter. On a DBR theory, there is nothing irrational about preferring the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of one’s finger, as long as the preference does not involve any logical 14

 ubin (2003) formulates a criticism of the DBR theory that is very similar to this criticism, H though he does not refer to Frankfurt’s theory. He argues that the existence of alien desires creates a problem for standard forms of neo-Humeanism. 161

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or factual mistake. But Frankfurt’s analysis of Hume’s famous provocative example is meant to show that even if a man with such a preference does not suffer from any cognitive deficiency, he definitely suffers from a defect of the will. He violates a limit, not the limit of what is ‘conceivable’ (he does not violate a priori, formal truths) but of what is ‘thinkable’. People recognize this kind of irrationality when they characterize the person in Hume’s example as ‘crazy’ or ‘lunatic’. ‘Unthinkability’, as a mode of irrationality that pertains to the will, is an important amendment to the limited conception of rationality on the DBR theory. It means that a desire can be irrational even if it is not based on a false belief or a logical error. Volitionally irrational desires, as well as alien desires, are exposed by Frankfurt as desires that do not give rise to reasons. This indicates two important ways in which an LBR theory differs from a DBR theory. As I have already explained, Frankfurt’s notion of volitional irrationality bears only a superficial similarity to the Kantian identification of practical reason and the will. The most important difference between love and reason, as sources of normativity, is that love is personal, whereas reason operates along impersonal, universal principles. Love is a volitional matter constituted by desires, intentions, commitments and the like. This makes it a lot easier for the LBR theory than for rationality-based theories to explain how normative reasons relate to a particular person and how they are able to influence what that person is motivated to do. Nevertheless, the majority of philosophers ascribe normative authority to reason rather than to love. Following a philosophical tradition as old as Plato, they suspect love as a counsel and believe that only reason is a trustworthy guide. Because love is a personal matter, many philosophers, like Kant for instance, believe that it is fortuitous and can lead only to arbitrary actions. Frankfurt reminds these philosophers that “[t]he volitional necessity that constrains us in what we love may be as rigorously unyielding to personal inclination or choice as the more austere necessities of reason.” (2004, 49) Love is a personal matter. And yet, Frankfurt says, devoted love and its commands are unconditional, by which he means that the imperatives of love leave no room for compromises or negotiation. To describe the intense and stringent nature of lovebased imperatives Frankfurt even uses the term ‘categorical’, although obviously the validity of love’s laws is not independent of subjective conditions (they are not categorical in that sense). The claims that are made upon us by the love for our children, or for our countries, or for our ideals are categorical in the sense that we simply must not betray what we love: “[t]he claims that are made upon us by our ideals or by our children, or by whatever we may love disinterestedly and without conditions, are as unconditional and as unyielding as those of morality and reason.” (1994, 136) Kant and other philosophers who distrust love as a counsel are right that love is contingent: “[t]here are no necessary truths or a priori principles by which it can be established what we are to love; nor do the constraints that bind the lover to his beloved also impartially and indifferently bind everyone else to it as well.” (1994, 130) But they are wrong to derive from this fact the conclusion that love is arbitrary: “[w]hat people love is, no doubt, a logically contingent matter. Nevertheless, it would hardly be ap162

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posite to characterize it as fortuitous. Love is not a mere transient inclination or affect, which may adventitiously or frivolously come and go. Genuine love is inspired and constrained by the deepest and most essential aspects of personal character and constitution.” (2000, 272) Moreover, the grip of love upon us cannot be imposed or terminated by our own deliberate choice. What we love is not under our immediate voluntary control: “[w]hat we love is not up to us. We cannot help it that the direction of our practical reasoning is in fact governed by the specific final ends that our love has defined for us. We cannot fairly be charged with reprehensible arbitrariness, not with a willful or negligent lack of objectivity, since these things are not under our immediate control at all.” (2004, 49) Frankfurt opposes Kantian approaches to agency and practical reasons which, in his eyes, overestimate the importance of reason. He claims that “the ultimate source of practical normative authority lies not in reason but in the will.” (2006, 3) Though Frankfurt does not deny the faculty of reason any role in the process of determining what reasons an agent has, he is clear that the authority of practical reason is less fundamental than, and even depends on, the authority of love (2006, 3). What seems to drive Frankfurt’s opposition to Kant is his denial that pure reason can be practical. As Korsgaard (1986) explained in her illuminating discussion of Humean scepticism about the motivational force of reason, this motivation scepticism rests upon a content scepticism: doubts about whether reason could by itself rule out or prescribe anything. Frankfurt takes sides with the Humeans, ascribing reason a servant’s role. Love determines what ultimately matters to us; it defines our final ends. Without these final ends practical reasoning would be guideless and pointless. In addition to desires and rational principles, something else is sometimes taken to be the source of normativity: reality itself. Normative realism, as it is, for instance, embodied by Parfit’s VBR theory, is overlooked by Frankfurt when he juxtaposes love with desires and reason. Normative realism assumes that values and reasons exist independently of agents’ feelings or reasoning processes. This assumption must also be rejected by Frankfurt because he believes that “love is the originating source of terminal value.” (2004, 55) This means that nothing is inherently valuable, that all value is engendered by our love. Accordingly, nothing can provide reasons independently of what we love. The authority of reasons depends on love. A normative realist may want to reconcile his metaphysical story with what Frankfurt says by interpreting Frankfurt as offering merely a phenomenological description: surely it feels as if our loves dictate what we should do, but that does not answer the question what really justifies our actions. Frankfurt himself never hints at this limited interpretation of his claims, nor do I think that this way of reading Frankfurt is obviously correct. It seems much more in line with his general opposition to Kantian and Platonic philosophical frameworks to interpret him as offering a different way of understanding reality, not just our experience of reality. And in any case, in his attempt to reconcile Frankfurt with realism, the normative realist already accepts one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, whereas this dilemma is exactly at the root of the disagreement between Frankfurt and realists. Frankfurt writes, “In my judgment, normativity is not a feature of reality that is 163

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independent of us. The standards of volitional rationality and of practical reasons are grounded, so far as I can see, only in ourselves. More particularly, they are grounded only in what we cannot help caring about and cannot help considering important.” (2006, 33) Frankfurt concedes that our judgements about the reasons that we have can be wrong, and that, in this sense, there must be an ‘objective normative reality’ against which our judgements can be measured. “However”, he explains, “this reality is not objective in the sense of being entirely outside of our minds. Its objectivity consists just in the fact that it is outside the scope of our voluntary control … In matters concerning practical normativity, the demanding objective reality that requires us to keep an eye out for possible correction of our views is a reality that is within ourselves.” (2006, 34) This is the reality of our own will. Reasons for actions are based on what we love. But the fact that what we love is for us to find out, rather than to create, implies that we may be mistaken in what we believe our reasons to be. When Frankfurt designates love as the source of normativity, he does not speak about love as an emotion, but as a configuration of the will, which defines the essence of a person’s identity. Thus, central to the LBR theory is the idea that reasons for action are closely related to a person’s identity. Frankfurt writes, “Reflexivity and identification have fundamental roles in the constitution of practical reason. Indeed, it is only by virtue of these elementary maneuvers that we have such a thing as practical reason. Without their intervention, we could not regard any fact as giving us a reason for performing any action.” (2006, 11) Sub-human animals are not able to decide what they have reason to do, not so much because they lack the faculty of reason but because they do not have a hierarchical will. Non-reflective animals act upon whatever impulse happens to be most intense. They do not divide their consciousness to reflect upon their motives. On the other hand people do not take themselves as they come. They ask themselves whether they should act as they are inclined to; they examine their own motives; they take themselves seriously; they take themselves apart. Because of this capacity to identify with desires, human beings can make sense of, and even need, reasons for action. Thus Frankfurt is part of a large tradition (inhabited by a lot of Kantians, ironically) that connects the feature of normativity with self-consciousness as the defining property of human agents. But after Frankfurt has established that the hierarchical or self-reflective structure of our will is the reason we need reasons, he wants to say something more about where these reasons are supposed to come from. Therefore, he complements the hierarchical model of identification with the non-voluntaristic idea of a volitional identity determined by love and care. Love defines our individual identity and determines our practical reasons. More precisely, through defining our identity and constraining our will, love determines what we have reason to do: “[t]he necessities of a person’s will guide and limit his agency. They determine what he may be willing to do, what he cannot help doing, and what he cannot bring himself to do. They determine as well what he may be willing to accept as a reason for acting, what he cannot help considering to be a reason for acting, and what he cannot bring himself to count as a reason for acting. In these ways, they set the boundaries of his practical life; and thus they fix 164

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his shape as an active being.” (2004, 50) So, while the manoeuvres of reflexivity and identification make it the case that we need practical reasons, it is love that determines which reasons we have. At this juncture it is instructive briefly to compare Frankfurt’s LBR theory with Korsgaard’s reasons theory. The constitutive relationship between practical reasons and ‘practical identity’ is also at the centre of Korsgaard’s reason theory.15 To answer the founding question of her research, namely how to justify the claims that morality makes on us, Korsgaard starts from the reflective structure of the human mind. When a person finds himself faced with a certain desire, as a reflective being he can always ask, ‘[s]hould I act in the way this desire indicates?’ To know which desire to identify with a person needs a conception of himself: being a woman or a man, being a sportsman or a musician, being someone’s lover or his neighbour, etc. All these ‘practical identities’ give rise to different reasons and obligations to act on. It is a basic belief of Korsgaard’s that a person’s identity comes together with a set of obligations. She writes, “We do not go through our days doing what we please, following the beckoning of desire. Human life, or any way, adult human life, is pervaded through and through with obligation. It consists of things like doing our jobs, helping our friends, and living up to our roles as teachers, citizens, neighbours, parents and so forth. Being obligated is a part of our everyday business.” (1996, 255) Korsgaard stresses this point with her ultimate goal (justifying morality’s normativity) in mind. As soon as possible she wants to root out the prejudice about morality that pretends that moral obligations suddenly stride into our cosy lives, crush our desires and spoil all the fun. To Korsgaard this is a false picture of morality because it conveys a false picture of human life: “[f ]or human beings, obligation is as normal as desire, something we experience every morning when the alarm goes off.” (1996, 255) Obligations are part of our lives because we have practical identities that demand things of us. As Korsgaard writes, our ordinary way of talking about obligation sometimes reflects this connection to identity (1996, 101). For instance, we say things such as ‘be a man’, by which we mean: if your identity is male, you ought to act courageously. Or we utter the thought ‘I could not live with myself if I did that’, by which we refer to the constraints that our identity puts on us. All this talk about practical identities, as well as the reasons and obligations they give rise to, sounds very similar to Frankfurt’s discourse on the identity of the self, volitional necessity and the requirements that emerge from it. But at one particular, crucial point, the views diverge, namely when morality comes in. According to Korsgaard, practical identities are contingent, except for one. There is one way in which a person has to conceive himself. Whatever else he thinks himself to be, he must conceive himself as a citizen of the Kingdom of Ends, submitted to the moral law. This requirement is of a rational kind, giving rise to a moral requirement: 15

 lthough, at first sight, a love-based reason theory comes very close to a desire-based reason A theory, once it is understood that ‘love’ refers to a configuration of the will rather than a passion it turns out that the LBR theory also has a lot in common with Korsgaard’s account of practical reasons. Korsgaard explicitly mentions the affinity of her account with Frankfurt’s (Korsgaard 1996, 99). 165

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“[e]veryone who reflects must ultimately come to see her humanity itself as an essential and foundational feature of her practical identity. And it is this form of practical identity that is supposed to give us moral obligations in the strict sense, things we owe to other beings simply as human beings. This is a conception of ourselves that we should be able to reach, reasoning backwards from any particular conception of practical identity and asking why it is normative for us.” (2002, 59) Korsgaard’s argument for the normativity of morality is a transcendental one. She starts from the observation that acting for a reason is possible and examines the conditions of that possibility. Through reflection she reaches the conclusion that the human identity of agents is the ultimate condition for their ability to act for a reason and, correspondingly, that respect for humanity is the ultimate obligation of all agents. In her comment on Frankfurt’s Tanner Lectures, Korsgaard applies this transcendental argument to Frankfurt’s theory about care and, against Frankfurt, she argues that “it does not follow from the fact that all normativity arises from caring, if that is a fact, that the normativity of morality depends only on whether one contingently cares about it. Caring has a logic of its own, and it may be that caring about things in general commits one to morality.” (2006, 76) By analogy with the transcendental argument from The Sources of Normativity that I have just sketched, Korsgaard argues that even if a person does not happen to care directly about morality, the fact that he cares about something may commit him to the existence of universal values and shared reasons, and following that path will take him to morality. In particular, Korsgaard suggests that “caring cannot fulfill its role in constituting personal identity unless the reasons to which it gives rise are to some extent regarded as universal and public by the person who has them.” (2006, 76) Underlying this suggestion is Korsgaard’s idea that reasons are by their very nature shareable. I understand reasons of love to put pressure on precisely this thought. It is not clear at all, I find, that reasons of love are shareable. Shareability in this context certainly cannot mean that for a lover to have a reason to go to see his beloved’s favourite film it must be true that everyone else who loves that person has a reason to see that film. Nor must it be true that every lover has a reason to see his beloved’s favourite film. I am not even sure that it must be true that everybody has a reason at least to help that lover in his attempt to go and see the film (as Korsgaard would say, I think, by analogy with her claim that, when we admit that someone has a reason to climb to the top of Kilimanjaro if he cares about that sort of thing, we share that person’s ends and must therefore also help him to pursue his ambition (Korsgaard 1996)). To stave off Korsgaard’s criticism Frankfurt has to establish more than the claim that there are no reasons for love. He also needs to defend the claim that love has no rational structure, or at least not a structure that commits lovers to moral requirements as implied by their acceptance of the duties of love. The idea that there are norms that determine what we should love probably strikes many people as overly rationalistic and not realistic. We do not go about deliberating about what we should direct our loving capacities towards. Yet Frankfurt might find less support for the different claim that there are no normative limits to what we should care about. Ac166

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cording to Frankfurt there is no ‘deeper’ source of normativity than love. In addition he seems to hold that love is a psychological condition, not governed by any rational, let alone moral, norm (although the role of the unthinkable as a constraint of love is rather unclear). It follows that, contra Korsgaard, he cannot make sense of the claim that we should care about morality. The implications of Frankfurt’s theory that (i) there are no normative reasons that constrain what we should love, and that (ii) it is not required that people care about morality are for many philosophers hard to accept. These two implications need thorough justification if one wants to defend an LBR theory. I will make a start in the next section.

5.4 The love-based reason theory evaluated After distinguishing an LBR theory from alternative accounts of practical reasons, we must evaluate the LBR theory on its merits and ask what is gained by it. The best way to do this is by examining the advantages that the LBR theory has over the DBR theory. First, there are some merits that the DBR theory and the LBR theory share. One could say that Frankfurt’s reason theory adopts the good aspects of Williams’ internal reason theory without being vulnerable to the criticisms that Williams’ theory is vulnerable to. The good aspects that I have in mind are both the fact that Williams’ reason theory can easily explain why people act on their reasons and the fact that Williams’ theory does not rely on metaphysically queer entities. Those two strong points of the DBR theory are adopted by the LBR theory. 5.4.1 Love and desire: both motivating, both natural Both the DBR and the LBR theory preserve the link between reasons and motivations. What attracts many, even if only to a certain degree, to the DBR theory is a motivational argument (see Hubin 1999, 31). Reasons for action should turn out to be able to motivate people – this is even accepted by critics like the VBR theorists who aim to tie an agent’s reasons to her motivation in their own way. The DBR theory offers the most appealing strategy for connecting reasons for action with motivation. The connection is obvious and simple: reasons are connected to motivation because they are grounded in (or depend on) the agent’s desires, and desires are motivating states. Because love and care are configurations of the will, they are naturally capable of motivating an agent as well. The relationship between love, care and motivation does not need special explanation. Therefore, the link between a reason, conceived of as based upon love, and action is secured. At this juncture, I should point out that Frankfurt does not use the motivationalfuel argument (or the other arguments used by Williams). Frankfurt is less concerned about the motivational efficacy of reasons – or at least his argument is not that rea-

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sons have to be derived from love because otherwise they could not motivate.16 The connection Frankfurt makes between love and reasons goes via a theory of personal identity and autonomy; it does not go via action theory and a belief-desire theory of motivation. In fact Frankfurt is sceptical about the Humean theory of motivation. He never developed a positive view in action theory, but he explicitly criticizes Davidson’s causal theory of action. In Frankfurt (1978) he argues that intentional action requires that movement is under the agent’s guidance, but this control need not be causal control. It remains open how the connection to the self should be conceived otherwise. It is clear that Frankfurt sees an intrinsic connection between love, selfhood and agency, but he does not work out the theory of action that supports this theoretical construction. Unlike the VBR theory, neither a DBR theory nor a LBR theory needs to invoke metaphysical entities like non-natural values that have the queer property of ‘to-bepursuedness’ built in. Proponents of the DBR theory and the LBR theory deny that we must suppose that there are inherently valuable objects ‘out there’ in order to explain normativity. Explaining reasons for telling the truth, for example, Frankfurt writes, “There is no need to resort to values that are – in some metaphysically substantive sense – inherent in the things that it makes sense for us to value. Rather, the explanation derives from facts concerning what we care about.” (2002d, 275) Normativity can be explained in natural terms, like desires, according to DBR theory, or cares, according to the LBR theory. Of course, one could wonder why ‘desire’ (or ‘cares’) should be thought to be natural. However, I will not go into the messy business of trying to define ‘a desire’17. Within the confines of this book I take it for granted that ‘a desire’ is a natural phenomenon, and that it is possible to give a definition that contains no non-natural elements, that it does not refer to something that cannot be studied in the empirical sciences. Frankfurt explicitly affirms this ‘natural’ understanding of a desire when he protests against Scanlon’s description of a desire as something that involves “a tendency to see some consideration as a reason.” Frankfurt calls Scanlon’s account of desire “excessively intellectualized or rationalistic.” (2002b, 184) He argues that “[a]nimals of many species have desires, but only animals of our species are capable of seeing anything as a reason.” (2002b, 184) Less clear is whether Frankfurt also has a purely naturalistic understanding of cares. After all, Frankfurt considers desires to be urges or impulses, or “merely psychic raw material” (2002b, 184) that never as such provide a reason for action. Cares are precisely different in this aspect: they provide reasons.  ccording to the distinction made by Finlay and Schroeder (2008) I believe that the LBR theory A qualifies as a State view, whereas Williams defends a Motivation view. Both views are internalist because they see a conceptual link between reasons and a motivational fact. According to Motivation views, the motivational fact required is just the fact that the agent is or can be motivated to perform the relevant action. According to State views, the kind of motivational fact that reasons require is not a fact directly about motivation, but a fact about the agent’s motivational attitudes, psychological states that play a role in motivation. 17 I refer to Schueler (1995) for an extensive analysis of the different conceptions of desire that play a role in the explanation of reasons and action. 16

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Therefore they cannot be psychic raw material. There is structure to cares. The question is whether this structure can be explained in non-normative, naturalistic terms: is it merely a matter of duration, intensity, stability? Or is the subject, his self-consciousness and rational capacities somehow involved in converting an urge or inkling into a mental attitude worth calling love? Frankfurt leaves unanswered important questions about the nature of love, possibly because he transfers those to philosophy of mind, which is not his domain. He thinks his theory of reasons does not need to treat love as anything other than a natural phenomenon. And surely he is right that love comes naturally, its existence can be traced back to natural causes. But I suspect that when one turns away from the historical story and looks at the conceptual structure of love, and in what way this is different from the structure of desires, one may need to invoke references to rationality and self-consciousness, capacities that animals lack (note that Frankfurt ascribes desires, but not love, to animals). I think that theories about self-consciousness and self-knowledge (understood as knowledge of one’s mental states) provide interesting possibilities for checking whether love really can be identified as a natural event. Within the scope of this book I cannot integrate insights from work by, among others, Richard Moran (2001) and Elizabeth Anscombe (1957) about the relevance of the game of reason-giving for the existence of mental states. But as long as we understand non-naturalism in connection with Parfit’s idea that rational agents latch onto reasons that have a mind-independent reality, we can agree with Frankfurt for the remainder of this book and confirm that his theory of reasons is naturalistic because neither his conception of desires, nor his concepts of care and love, commits him to the existence of non-natural entities. Besides the features that the DBR and LBR theories share, there are also important differences which, I will argue, count in favour of the LBR theory. I will argue for this claim by showing that, because the basic notion of LBR theory is ‘love’ and not ‘desire’, the LBR theory is better armed against the criticisms of (i) groundlessness and (ii) lack of authority. 5.4.2 The groundlessness objection A major critique directed at DBR theories is that they do not account for the fact that sometimes we do not have a reason to desire what we desire, or that there may even be a reason against desiring what we desire. In such a case – remember the saucer of mud and other counter-examples – the fact that we desire something, even if the desire survives rational deliberation, does not give rise to a reason for action. Borrowing a term from Hubin, I call this criticism ‘the groundlessness objection’. Hubin summarizes the complaint of groundlessness as follows: “[c]ritics have thought that, at best, the Humean could offer an account of the transmission of practical reasons, never of their origin. So long as the Humean tells us that practical reasons are transmitted from ends to means, she is an instrumentalist. For reasons to be transmitted, however, they must exist in the first place. There must be reasons for the ends – at least 169

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those which are ‘ultimate’ ends. And, to justify the claim that there are such reasons, the Humean must ‘go beyond’ instrumentalism – she must commit herself to the existence of reasons that are not conditioned on the subjective, contingent, conative states of the agent.” (2001, 447; my emphasis) To answer the groundlessness objection, the Humean or DBR theorist should argue that there is a reason to bring about the ends that one has. Without this reason the desire-based model of reasons is groundless. Critics thus resist the suggestion that a chain of reasons could end in some desire that one happens to have. Wallace’s criticism of Williams’ internal reason theory that it postulates rather than argues for ‘the desire-in desire-out’ principle (see chapter 3) is related to the groundlessness objection. Wallace believes that reasons are ultimately based on values. As a non-natural realist he assumes that there are values in reality that form the ultimate basis of reasons. But not only non-naturalist realists make the groundlessness objection. Also Smith and Korsgaard refuse to give the last word to desires. They consider reason, or rational principles, to be the ground for reasons for action. Frankfurt received similar criticism, for instance from Susan Wolf (2002). She objects to Frankfurt’s thesis that love is the source of reasons by arguing that love does not give a reason to act if one has no reason to love what one loves. She has two different situations in mind: the situation in which a person cares about something trivial and the situation in which a person cares about an immoral ideal. The latter situation will be discussed in section 5.4.6. For now, let us look at the objection that love does not give a reason to act if what is loved is trivial In a critical review of Frankfurt’s theory of love and care, Wolf (2002) agrees with Frankfurt that a meaningful life is indeed not open to us when there is nothing we love. But, Wolf adds, if what we love is worthless our lives lack meaning as well. She gives the example of someone who cares about not walking on the cracks in the pavement. This kind of care does not make one’s life meaningful, because the attempt not to walk on the cracks in the pavement is not worth caring about. We should look for reasons that support our loves and cares, that is, we should ask whether they meet some standard of objective value. After all, Wolf says, it is in our own interest that we care about what is worth caring about.18 In reply to this critique, Frankfurt reminds us, first, that there is no standard of objective value prior to what we care about to which we could measure our cares, and, second, that caring about something has inherent value. I will come back to the first claim below. For now, consider the second claim, namely that “[t]he significance to us of caring is more basic than the importance to us of what we care about. …Caring is important to us for its own sake, insofar as it is the indispensably foundational activity through which we provide continuity and coherence to our volitional lives.” (1999a, 162) The fact that there are things that a person cares about is more basic to him – more constitutive of his essential nature – than what those things are. Without the activity of love, our lives would be intolerably unshaped and empty. That is why to 18

Wolf (2010) develops this idea further. 170

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love is valuable in itself, and not just by virtue of the value of what is loved. It follows from this that one good reason in favour of a certain prospective object of love is simply that it is possible for us to love it (that we are capable of loving it). This reason may not be decisive, but it is a good reason. Because whatever it is that we love, we will benefit at least from the inherent value of loving. Frankfurt’s motto ‘care about those things about which you can care’ should be understood in this light. As for the example of the person who cares about the cracks in the pavement, Frankfurt concedes that “[i]t is indeed a pity if someone wastes his life on inconsequential matters.” “But”, he goes on, “if there were someone so limited that he could really do nothing better with his life than devote it to avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk, then it would be better for him to care about that than to care about nothing.” (2002c, 252) Because it is important to have things that matter to you, caring about something is valuable on its own. Even caring about meaningless things therefore provides an agent with a reason for retaining that care and listening to its dictates. Anscombe’s saucer of mud example and Quinn’s radio example would be treated by Frankfurt in the same way, I believe, as the example of the cracks in the pavement. The mere desire to get a saucer of mud or to turn on radios does not give a person a reason, Frankfurt would emphasize. But suppose, if it makes sense to say this, that the person cares about the saucer of mud or about turning on the radio – after all, people do care about trivial things sometimes – these cares provide reasons. They do so because they indicate something that matters to the person who cares about it. Because it is important for people to have something that matters to them, they have a reason to do what benefits and serves the things they care about. Notwithstanding his belief that caring about something is important for its own sake, Frankfurt recognizes the fact that people ask the question what they should care about. People want to know whether they care about the right things. He writes, “what we care about – that is, what we consider important to ourselves – is obviously critical to the particular course and to the particular quality of our lives. This naturally leads people who take themselves seriously to wonder how to get it right. It leads them to confront fundamental issues of normativity. How are we to determine what, if anything, we should care about? What makes something genuinely important to us?” (2006, 19) Frankfurt acknowledges the need to know whether we care about the right things. Yet, he emphasizes that the answer to this need does not lie in the suggestion that Wolf gives, namely that we should think hard and try to find out which things in reality are inherently valuable or intrinsically important. Frankfurt writes, “[N]othing is inherently either worthy or unworthy of being loved, independently of what we are.” (2006, 48) It is impossible to find out whether something is ‘objectively’ worth caring about. According to Frankfurt, the value of things derives from the fact that we care about them. In some cases this is obviously so. Who wins the football competition is important to a person only if he cares about football. Someone’s friends are important to him because he cares about them. Someone’s children are valuable to him, not because he distinguishes some intrinsic valuable properties in them, but because he 171

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cares about them. In other cases, it could seem as if things are intrinsically important, because it seems as if they are important even if people do not care about them. Frankfurt gives the following example: “[v]itamins were important to the ancient Greeks, who could not have cared about them since they had no idea that there were such things.” (2006, 20) But even then, Frankfurt believes, the importance of vitamins is derivative, because vitamins are indispensable to health and the Greeks did care about their health. Some things are important because we care about them just for themselves; others are important because they stand in an instrumental relationship to those things. Thus Frankfurt holds on to his view that “it is only in virtue of what we actually care about that anything is important to us.” (2006, 20)19 Frankfurt compares the question what one should care about to the question of an 18-year-old who wants to know what profession he should choose (Frankfurt 1998b, 26). The decision is not made by ‘objectively’ evaluating the various possibilities, for instance by investigating whether arts are more important than science. The basis for the decision lies in what that adolescent thinks will bring out the best in him, which life will be most fulfilling and rewarding for him. So the advice to look for what is intrinsically valuable is not the appropriate response to someone who asks what he should care about. Because he believes it is neither appropriate nor possible to find out what is intrinsically valuable, Frankfurt does not have recourse to normative realism as a way to avoid the groundlessness objection. Neither does he rely on a rational justification for our loves. There are no rational principles that could help us to pick out or evaluate loves and cares. Frankfurt argues extensively against what he calls ‘pan-rationalism’. He resists the pan-rationalistic idea that the answer to normative questions such as what we should love, what we should do or how we should live is determined by rules of rationality. Frankfurt writes, “the ambition to provide an exhaustively rational warrant for the way in which we are to conduct our lives is misconceived. The pan-rationalist fantasy of demonstrating – from the ground up – how we have most reason to live is incoherent and must be abandoned.” (2004, 28) The rationalist approach to normativity appeals because it meets the wish of many to find impartial and universal reasons for action. But the demand for impartiality does not make sense, according to Frankfurt, when one deals with the question of what a person should care about or how he should live. “The pan-rationalist demand for self-less objectivity is in this context not a reasonable one. It makes no sense to attempt an impersonal approach, from no particular evaluative point of view, to the problem of how one should live.” (1992a, 93) Think again of the prospecting adolescent. What he needs to know is not what would be a good life or a worthwhile profession in general or for anyone. He wants to know what life, which profession would be good for him.

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 ote that Frankfurt uses the locutions ‘being important’ and ‘being of value’ interchangeably. N This is not a coincidence. For Frankfurt, value is just like importance in the respect that an object is never valuable on its own, but only in relation to a subject who values it. 172

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Furthermore, Frankfurt explains why it is not only inappropriate to try to give rational proofs with regard to what one should care about, but also impossible. Asking the question what I should love or how I should live leads us into an endless circle, according to Frankfurt: “[i]n order for a person to be able even to conceive and to initiate an inquiry into how to live, he must already have settled upon the judgments at which the inquiry aims. Identifying the question of how one should live – that is, understanding just what question it is and just how to go about answering it – requires that one specify the criteria that are to be employed in evaluating various ways of living…. But identifying the criteria to be employed in evaluating various ways of living is also tantamount to providing an answer to the question of how to live.” (2004, 24-25) The question of how people should live cannot be answered from the ground up. For the same reason, no attempt to deal systematically with the problem of what we have good reason to care about can possibly succeed. No rational proof, no inherent value in reality can tell us what we should care about. But what should people do then when they wonder whether they care about the right things? Frankfurt does not avoid the normative question. The question ‘what should I care about?’ is legitimate. But it is an illusion to think that one will find the answer somewhere other than in oneself. If someone wants to know what he should care about, he must find out what he already cares about: “[t]he most fundamental question for anyone to raise concerning importance cannot be the normative question of what he should care about. That question can be answered only on the basis of a prior answer to a question that is not normative at all, but straightforwardly factual: namely, the question of what he actually does care about.” (2006, 23) The appropriate answer to someone who doubts whether he cares about the right things is not to encourage him to look for a rational or evaluative foundation, but to encourage him to be confident: “[i]f we are to resolve our difficulties and hesitations in settling upon a way to live, what we need most fundamentally is not reasons or proofs. It is clarity and confidence. Coping with our troubled and restless uncertainty about how to live does not require us to discover what way of living can be justified by definitive argument. Rather, it requires us simply to understand what it is we ourselves really care about, and to be decisively and robustly confident in caring about it.” (2004, 28) The primordial task thus consists of getting to know what we factually care about. Fulfilling this task is harder than it seems: “[i]t is not so easy for people to know what they really care about or what they truly love. … It is hard to be sure what we can bring ourselves to do, or how we will behave when the chips are down. The will is a thing as real as any reality outside us. The truth about it does not depend upon what we think it is, or upon what we wish it were.” (2006, 49-50) Practical reason can help us to identify what it is that we love. Because love is a complex configuration of the will, understanding what one really wants may require a significant amount of investigation: “[p]eople cannot reliably discover what they love merely by introspection; nor is what they love generally unmistakable in their behaviour.” (2004, 55) Sometimes one does not know what one loves because one’s will is divided. Frankfurt gives the example of someone who cares about worldly success, but also about 173

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peace of mind. That man realizes that one tends to interfere with the other. When he asks himself what he should care about – worldly success or peace of mind – he has to try to determine which of the two he actually loves more. Reason can help him at this point: by increasing his understanding of his ideals and what they imply, it will often become clear that one ideal arouses a more substantial concern in him than another. In this way, reason plays a role in the constitution of practical reasons, not by construing or discovering objective reasons, but by examining what it is that we love. As Frankfurt explains, “Once we have learned as much as possible about the natural characteristics of the things we care about, and as much as possible about ourselves, there are no further substantive corrections that can be made. There is really nothing else to look for, so far as the normativity of final ends is concerned. There is nothing else to get right.” (2006, 50) Getting to know ourselves, our will, the things we care about is all we can do in trying to get it right. There is nothing else to look for. Once we understand ourselves, the next task is to try wholeheartedly to accept ourselves, that is, to accept the essential requirements and boundaries of our will. Frankfurt interprets this acceptance as finding a mature confidence. It is a confidence in what we cannot help loving and cannot help being. Self-confidence consists of being satisfied with oneself, in having a unified will, not disturbed by any conflict or uneasiness with regard to what one loves. According to Frankfurt, self-confidence, or, as he at one point calls it, ‘self-love’, is the highest thing we can hope for (2004, 97). By encouraging a person to be confident when he has doubts about his loves, Frankfurt concedes that there are no reasons that support our love and that could remove doubts. So far, it seems that the critics who accuse the LBR theory of ‘groundlessness’, are right. The source of reasons is love, but there are no reasons for love. Of course, every foundational project has to end at some point. But the trouble with ‘love’ as ultimate ground, in the eyes of the critics, is that it is subjective and that there are no rational principles or intrinsic values that justify love. To many critics this means that love and the whole normative system built upon it are unwarranted. However, saying that the LBR theory is grounded upon a subjective, unjustifiable fact which one just has to learn to accept conveys only part of the story. The fact that there are no reasons for love, in the sense of rational justifications or value-based reasons, does not mean that anything goes. As we have seen, Frankfurt discerns limits to what a person can love or care about. Those limits are imposed by the will. Interpreted in a certain way, the will offers the ground that is needed to rebut the groundlessness objection. Let me explain. On the LBR theory, the answer to the normative question ‘what should I care about?’ is derived from considerations that are manifestly subjective, namely the things that I already care about. But this does not mean that what a person should care about is entirely up to him. What someone should care about depends upon what he cares about. Yet what he cares about is not up to him. There are things that he cannot help caring about. There are things that he must do and there are things that are unthinkable for him. As we have seen, Frankfurt gives two kinds of examples that illustrate this point. First, he refers to Luther who is subject to a personal kind 174

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of volitional necessity. The fact that he cannot give up his faith reveals something about his individual character. But Frankfurt gives a second kind of example. Hume’s example of the man who prefers the destruction of the world to a scratch on his finger is treated by Frankfurt as an illustration of the idea that some things are unthinkable not only for one individual, but in general. Factually, what people care about varies, but there are some things that no one should care about. Those things, according to Frankfurt, are determined by our shared biological, psychological or social nature. People generally love living, being whole and healthy, being satisfied and being in touch with others (2006, 38). Caring more about a scratched finger than about the destruction of the whole world is lunatic. This characterization implies a normative judgement: nobody should care more about it. Though Frankfurt does not put it in these terms, this means that there are things that one has a reason not to care about. When one does care about those things, one is irrational. Being volitionally irrational does not rule out that it is conceivable that someone may not care in the least about those presumptively universal final ends, but it involves that it would be irrational in a crazy kind of way: “[l]oving death, or incapacity, or isolation, or continuously vacant or distressing experience involves no contradiction. If a person did love those things, however, [and pursued those things for their own sakes] we would be unable to make sense of his life.” (2006, 38) The volitionally irrational lover of death or disability or suffering possesses a will that is deformed. We would find it impossible to reason with him meaningfully about his ends. To discuss with others about practical reasons and final ends, it is not enough that their rationality is of a formal kind. They must be volitionally rational as well, building their practical reasons upon a foundation that is similar to ours (2006, 39). Interpreting some volitional necessities as universally shared, and thus setting a universal standard, makes it possible for the LBR theory to evaluate Parfit’s counterexample of the man with Future Tuesday Indifference differently from the evaluation of the saucer-of-mud style examples. I believe that, whereas Frankfurt would not deny that caring about a saucer of mud provides one with reasons, he would deny that caring about bodily integrity on any day of the week except Tuesday offers a valid reason to act accordingly. I think he would feel the same about the person with Future Tuesday Indifference as he feels about the lunatic in Hume’s example (although I would be hard pressed to give a principled account of why Frankfurt could not treat the Future Tuesday Indifference man by analogy with the Fratellini father breaking his son’s legs. Perhaps the presence of a locally shared practice makes a difference). They are both abnormal, not on account of what they believe but on account of what they are able to bring themselves to do. They should not care like they do. It is insane not to care about the pain that one will suffer merely because it is suffered on a Tuesday. Future Tuesday Indifference is irrational and does not give rise to practical reasons. So, with regard to Parfit’s example, Frankfurt could agree that, despite the person’s preference to be tortured on a Tuesday, he does not have a reason to act upon this preference. Unlike Parfit, however, Frankfurt would not explain this lack of reason by reference to a lack of intrinsic valuable features but by reference to the limits of the will. The origins 175

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of these limits lie in natural facts that are biological, social, psychological. The question of what gives these natural facts normative authority is not answered by Frankfurt. I believe that one answer he could give is constructivist and holds on to the idea that normativity is a feature of our world because we experience it that way: we feel that certain things are lunatic, and therefore they are. Another answer that also seems congenial to Frankfurt’s thoughts about the value of caring is Aristotelian in spirit and works with a conception of the good life from which normative standards are derived. On this line of thought, we use our intuitions about the good life as standards for evaluating particular actions as sensible or lunatic. Personally I find the integration of Frankfurt’s love-based theory in a constructivist approach to normativity promising, and it certainly would weaken the groundlessness objection. In a definition of Sharon Street, normative constructivists hold that “the truth of a normative claim consists in that claim’s being entailed from within the practical point of view, where the practical point of view is given a formal characterization” (Street 2009b). What the agent has reason to do is implied by the characterization of the standpoint he occupies as an agent. The best-known constructivist theories of respectively Korsgaard and Street give the practical point of view a voluntaristic and cognitive characterization: it is the point of view an agent takes up when he wants or judges. Substituting the attitude of ‘loving’ or ‘caring about’ for the attitude of ‘willing’ and ‘judging to be a reason’ amounts to a non-cognitive form of constructivism: the normative order is ‘constructed’ out of the standpoint taken up by the caring agent. This standpoint can be given a general characterization to an extent: some limits to what we can care about are universal because they are related to our human nature. The naturalistic foundation of cares seems to imply that, instead of our cares, our human nature is the ultimate ground of normativity. However, that is not the conclusion to be drawn. When we reject someone’s caring more about a scratched finger than about the destruction of the world, this rejection has normative force not because it reveals something about our human nature, but because it is based upon what we care about. The fact that someone cares about something can have many causes, for instance his upbringing, his character, his personal history, etc. and also his nature as a human being. Human nature causes human beings to care about the same things, but it does not give a reason to care about those things. The ultimate ground of normativity still remains the will, its configurations and its necessities. Frankfurt only points out that this will is given shape partly by nature and partly by a person’s particular experiences and make-up. Therefore, there are universal volitional necessities and personal volitional necessities. Frankfurt writes, “The ground of normativity is relative in part to the common nature of human beings and in part to individual experience and character.” (2006, 48) In order to hold the thesis that love is the source of practical reasons, it is not relevant for Frankfurt what love is caused by. These causes neither diminish nor enhance the normative force love has. Love remains the ultimate ground of normativity. Because the LBR theory has recourse to the concepts of volitional necessity and unthinkability, whereas the DBR theory has not, it seems that the LBR theory has 176

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something more to offer in reply to the groundlessness objection. There is no notion of something that we should all desire in the DBR theory. There are no reasons for desires in the DBR theory at all. Thanks to the concept of universal volitional necessity and unthinkability, the LBR theory can articulate the thought that there are some things that we should not care about. Does the LBR theory hereby rebut the groundlessness objection? In order to rebut the groundlessness objection as voiced by Wallace and Wolf, volitional necessities should be objective. Are volitional necessities objective? Frankfurt answers, “Well, in one sense they are obviously not objective. They derive from our attitudes; they are grounded nowhere but in the character of our own will. That evidently means that they are subjective. On the other hand, we cannot help having the dispositions that control the actions, choices, and reasons at issue. The character of our will could conceivably be different from what it is. However, its actual contingent necessities are rigorous and stable; and they are outside our direct voluntary control. This warrants regarding them as objective, despite their origin within us.” (2006, 46) The configuration of our will is not under our immediate control; we do not choose what we care about. The fact that our will is not under our voluntary control could also be expressed by the thought that the will is part of reality. Because love and care are configurations of the will and because, like any reality, our will is not under our voluntary control, the LBR theory offers some kind of non-subjective ground for normativity. This feature does not distinguish love from desire, as it is also true that we cannot help having the desires that we have. What we desire is not for us to decide, and in this sense desires are not under our immediate voluntary control either. If the fact that something is not under our immediate voluntary control suffices to call it ‘objective’, then our desires are objective as well as our cares, despite their origin in us. This would imply that, if the LBR theory succeeds in refuting the groundlessness objection on the basis of the claim that cares do offer some kind of objective ground, then the DBR theory survives the objection as well. In the passage quoted, however, Frankfurt calls the configurations of the will ‘objective’, not only because they are outside our immediate voluntary control but also because they are stable and rigorous. This is not true for desires. Thus, all things considered, the LBR theory offers a more stable and rigorous ground for normativity than the DBR theory. But most probably this difference does not matter with regard to the groundlessness objection. Critics will be as unsatisfied with the ground offered by the LBR theory as with the ground offered by the DBR theory, because it remains true that there are no truly objective, in the sense of impartial, or external reasons for loving something. The LBR theory would then be as vulnerable as the DBR theory to the groundlessness objection. Yet, even if both the LBR theory and the DBR theory are vulnerable to the groundlessness objection, love still differs in a significant way from desires, which makes it a more likely candidate to be the source of normativity. I agree with Frankfurt that love does not need to be based on an external reason in order nevertheless to be a legitimate source of normativity, and that it differs in this respect from desires. The reason for this different appreciation, as I will explain in the next 177

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section, is that love has authority of its own – even if it is a groundless authority – and that desires have not. 5.4.3 The authority of love While analysing the phenomenon of love Frankfurt writes, “It is characteristic of our experience of loving that when we love something, there are certain things that we feel we must do.” (1999a, 170) But why should we listen to the dictates of love? What makes the claims that love makes of us truly normative? The answer is that love possesses something which desires do not, namely authority. Frankfurt is very clear about this: “[h]owever imposing or intense the motivational power that the passions mobilize may be, the passions have no inherent motivational authority. In fact, the passions do not really make any claims upon us at all. Considered strictly in themselves, apart from whatever additional impetus or facilitation we ourselves may provide by acceding to them, their effectiveness in moving us is entirely a matter of sheer brute force. There is nothing in them other than the magnitude of this force that requires us, or that even encourages us, to act as they command.” (1994, 137) The question arises where the authority of love comes from. What feature, possessed by love and lacked by desires, accounts for this authority? First, there is a difference between desire and love that we should note, though it does not offer the required explanation. What we happen to desire is arbitrary, whereas it would be inappropriate to call our loves arbitrary. Neither love nor desire is supported by rational necessity. In that sense both love and desire are contingent. But though what people love is a logically contingent matter, “it would hardly be apposite to characterize it as fortuitous. Love is not a mere transient inclination or affect, which may adventitiously or frivolously come and go. Genuine love is inspired and constrained by the deepest and most essential aspects of personal character and constitution.” (2000, 272) Smith has a point when he finds it incoherent to suppose that “something completely arbitrary – the mere fact that a particular agent who is making a claim about rational justification happens to have the contingent desires that she happens to have – could in some way constitute a normative fact, a fact about rational justification.” (1997, 90) This is incoherent, Smith says, because “arbitrarity, as such, always undermines normativity.” (1997, 90) I believe it is important to add to this claim that, though arbitrarity undermines normativity, contingency does not necessarily undermine normativity. That clears the way for love as a source of reasons. What people love is contingent not only in the sense that it is not supported by rational necessity, but also in the sense that what one loves depends on one’s upbringing, character, genes and personal history. We all have different loves. But this contingency does not make it unjustified to promote what one loves despite the indifference of those to whom it does not appeal. Parents are not expected, for instance, to give up loving their children, to stop caring for them with unshaken confidence, after they discover that their children are regarded elsewhere with contempt or disdain. Many 178

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parents realize that their love for that particular person depends on contingent factors, such as that it is their child. The same goes for friendship and also romantic love, I think. Perhaps not all, but at least many lovers nowadays would agree with the Australian stand-up comedian Tim Minchin when he sings, “If I didn’t have you… I would have somebody else.” This realization does not reduce the power of love’s call. In that sense, contingency does not undermine normativity. As long as love is not arbitrary, it can have authority. And because love is inspired by the deepest aspects of personal character and constitution, Frankfurt says, it is not arbitrary. Apart from love’s contingency, some might worry about the possibility that what people care about can be manipulated. It is in line with his dismissal of the historical approach to moral responsibility that Frankfurt would reject the idea that love’s origins affect its authority. In fact, probably all the cares that we start with are a result of our upbringing, our social environment, our education and other contingent factors. The line between education and manipulation is not always that clear. One could add the extra condition that a given love has authority only when it is endorsed by the agent, a suggestion that Frankfurt might take up, but not without raising the question: and on the basis of what does an agent endorse what he cares about? Does he not do that on the basis of other cares he has? Endorsement and coherence between one’s cares is desirable, but the authority of a certain love is not accounted for by its being coherent with or supported by another love. Its authority is due to the fact that it is expressive of the agent’s self, and we all know that that is not (solely) of the agent’s own making. Secondly, in order to explain love’s authority one could be tempted to see it as a kind of moral authority. Love demands that we support the well-being of our beloved and forbids us to neglect its interests. If we disregard these demands we feel that we are behaving badly. In this regard, the requirements of love are unlike the requirements of instrumental rationality, but like moral obligations. This similiarity has inspired some philosophers to claim that the requirements of love and morality are essentially of the same kind (Velleman (1999) for instance argues that love is a moral emotion). Frankfurt resists these claims (Frankfurt 1998a, 1999a). As we have seen, volitional necessities do not belong to a moral category: betraying what one loves is not a moral offence. It is true, Frankfurt says, that love and moral duty alike grip us in such a way that we feel we have no choice but to do what they require: “[l]ove and duty alike burden us with a kind of necessity.” (1998a, 5) However, Frankfurt points out that the authority that fuels the imperatives of love is not at all the same as the authority with which moral imperatives are imbued. If we analyse the way in which duty and love exercise their authority we see the difference. Moral imperatives are impersonal; morality requires the same from everyone. What it requires is therefore formulated in general impersonal formulas. When someone helps a needy person out of duty he acts on the principle that one ought to help a person in need (see Frankfurt 1998a, 9). Love, however, is a personal matter. It is directed at a specific other person, and takes the interests of that specific person (not as an instance of type) as reasons for action.

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Third, one could believe that love’s authority must have something to do with the fact that love’s captivity cannot be entered into or escaped from just by choosing to do so. However, there are other forces that a person may be unable to resist, which do not have authority. We cannot decide ‘to our own liking’ what we love or what love requires of us, but nor is what we desire under our voluntary control. As Frankfurt himself says, “We are vulnerable not only to being captivated by love, but also to being enslaved by jealousy or by a compulsion to take drugs.” (1994, 136) Thus, the fact that love is involuntarily imposed cannot explain why love has authority, and desires or feelings have not. To account for the difference between the necessity of love and the irresistibility of certain inclinations, one must rely on the fact that the necessities of love are self-imposed, in the sense that they are imposed by the agent’s own will. Desires as such are only brute forces of nature that do not possess any particular connection to the self, and therefore lack any authority. As explicated in chapter 2, Williams objected to the external reason theorists that they did not explain how an external fact could be relevant to what I have reason to do. It is to Frankfurt’s merit that he pointed out that desires can be external as well, not in the literal sense but in the sense that they are not truly an agent’s own. Desires are therefore not automatically or immediately relevant to what the agent has reason to do. They become relevant when the agent identifies with them. A desire that one identifies with may have authority, but for Frankfurt that is only because love transmits its authority through identification. The necessities of love define a person’s identity: “[t]hey are constituted and embedded in structures of the will through which the specific identity of the individual is most particularly defined.” (2004, 48) Loving something is not the same as desiring it, because the former is deeply related to my personal identity, whereas the latter is merely adventitious to it. Of course, we can identify with our desires, making them part of our identity. But this identification establishes a connection between the desire and the self only when it is grounded in our will. Desires are not related to our identity unless we identify with them on the basis of what we love and care about. Otherwise they are psychic raw material out of which we design the structure of our will. A person can identify with a desire, or the desire can remain an alien force outside the boundaries of a person’s volitional identity. Love is different; the fact that a person loves something does not merely present him with psychic raw material. Love is an element of a person’s volitional essence, of his identity: “[h]is readiness to serve the interests of his beloved is not just a primitive feeling or an impulse toward which his attitude may be as yet totally indeterminate. It is an element of his established volitional nature, and hence of his identity as a person.” (1994, 137) This feature of love is crucial to explaining its authority, Frankfurt believes: “the claims of love, unlike the mere pressures of emotion and desire, possess not simply power but authority. The authority for the lover of the claims that are made upon him by his love is the authority of his own essential nature as a person. It is, in other words, the authority over him of the essential nature of his own individual will.” (1994, 138) The essential nature of a person is determined by the contingent 180

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volitional necessities by which his will is constrained. By showing respect for the necessities of his will, a person shows respect for himself. In betraying his love, a person betrays himself: “[s]ince the commands of love derive from the essential nature of a person’s will, a person who voluntarily disobeys those commands is thereby acting voluntarily against the requirements of his own will. He is opposing ends and ideals that are essential to his nature as a person. In other words, he is betraying himself.” (1994, 139) Disobeying the commands of love is tantamount to betraying oneself, because the necessities of love define a person’s identity. So Frankfurt traces the authority of love back to its constitutive role in a person’s identity. There are two critical points to be made about this connection. First, one might find this explanation of love’s authority as supported by the claims of one’s personal identity to be too self-referential. Scanlon objected in this way to Frankfurt: “it seems to me that the authority of an ideal comes from my sense of its value, and the thought of betraying my beloved is devastating because it is she whom I would betray. Thoughts about my commitment to either, or my integrity as a person, seem secondary, and a little too self-referential.” (2002, 182)20 Frankfurt replies that, on the one hand, Scanlon is right to remind us that it should not be a desire to avoid harming oneself that warrants and motivates one’s loyalty towards the things one loves; but that, on the other hand, the fact that the claims of a person’s ideals and of his beloved count as reasons for him derives from the fact that he has certain attitudes towards them: “[i]f I did not love her, the interests of my beloved would not provide me with reasons for acting that possess such commanding authority…Similarly, the peculiar authority over me of my ideals does not come simply from my recognition that they are, like many things that are not among my ideals, worthy or valuable. It comes from my sense of the particular way in which my ideals are valuable to me.” (2002b, 188) If I did not love that particular ideal or that particular person, their interests would not count as reasons to me, even if I recognized their value. Things change when I come to love this ideal or this person. The necessity to which I feel subjected, from then on, must be explained by the fact that my personal identity is at stake. This does not imply, of course, that every time I act in favour of my beloved, I am motivated by the thought that it is in my own interest to do this. When I see that my beloved is in distress I feel I have to help her, because taking somebody’s interests reasons to act is what it means to love someone. The reference to the self is invoked by Frankfurt because he feels it is the only thing one could turn to in order to explain love’s authority: “[i]t is the only legitimate authority upon which, for each of us, our normative attitudes and convictions can properly and finally rely. … For normative guidance in

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 agel formulated a similar objection to Korsgaard. See Nagel (1996). He objects that if reasons N are explained by reference to the desires of the agent, altruism becomes impossible because the reasons for helping other people would always be connected to my desire to help them. Mark Schroeder (2007) calls this the self-regarding objection, and criticizes the objection for overlooking the difference between saying that desires are reasons and saying that desires must be cited in an explanation of why something is a reason. 181

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understanding what we should want or what we should do, there can be no authority superior to the welcome necessities of our own nature.“ (2006, 51) So the things I love are valuable to me in a particular way, namely in the sense that they constitute the self. Betraying them is betraying the self. One could wonder, though, what would be so bad about that. It is a basic assumption in Frankfurt’s philosophical psychology that “there is a quite primitive human need to establish and maintain volitional unity.” (1994, 139) A betrayal of what one loves causes a rupture in a person’s inner cohesion; it causes a division within his will. A person is naturally averse to inflicting upon himself a conflict, a rupture, a division. In this way the authority of love is closely related to the natural tendency to protect the unity of the self. However, it is plausible enough that human beings desire self-preservation, but that as such does not make self-preservation valuable. Why would they have to strive for that? Because it is an elementary form of self-respect, Frankfurt says. In the obedience to love’s requirements he discerns an expression of self-respect: “[i]t is our basic need for self-respect, which is very closely related to our need for psychic unity, that grounds the authority for us of the commands of love.” (1994, 139) Again, the line between phenomenology and normative theory becomes blurred. Is Frankfurt merely describing how it feels to be bounded by one’s need for unity, how it feels to betray one’s deepest commitments? Or is he asserting the claim that an agent really ought to do what is required to preserve his self? The feeling of self-betrayal should not always be a bad thing. In the case of a long-time maffioso in crisis, self-betrayal is a good thing, and one hopes of some people that they will betray themselves. At least, it would be outrageous to say that maffiosi should not give up on their cruel practices because they would lose their identity if they did. There are two rescue routes for Frankfurt here, and, as before, I am not sure which one he would prefer. He could point to a value underneath it all: the value of having a self. The trouble with this solution is that one value could conflict with another, and it is not clear why the value of having a self would always beat the value of kindness, justice and so on. Therefore I think that a stronger claim would be to argue that having a self is not just valuable (on a par with other values) but a fundamental condition of there being any values at all. If this transcendental argument works it would be the practical impossibility of acting for a reason while failing to respect yourself that gave authority to the requirements of love. This is a plausible line of argument, though not taken up by Frankfurt. What Frankfurt does claim is that what we love is not under our voluntary control because our will is part of reality. In this sense, normativity on the LBR theory does have a kind of objective ground. This ground is the reality of a person’s will. But because a person’s will still belongs to a person and is subjective in that sense, critics will most probably insist that the objection of groundlessness still stands. Even if love is groundless, however, it has authority, derived from the authority of the self.

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5.4.4 The objection of normative triviality When we respect ourselves, we obey the commands of love. Of course, a person can fail to respect himself. This implies that the commands of love may be disobeyed. One could be tempted to see this as a flaw in the LBR theory. However, I believe that this speaks in favour of it. It protects the LBR theory against the charge of normative triviality. This charge has been directed to DBR theories, by Korsgaard (1997) and Wallace (1999) among others. However, I believe that this criticism of the DBR theory is based on a misunderstanding of that theory. The DBR theory, or at least one that looks like Williams’ internal reason theory, can escape the objection of normative triviality, as can Frankfurt’s LBR theory. Though the objection fails, it is worth considering because it reminds us of an important feature of normativity. Frankfurt writes, “Even after we have recognized what it is that we love, … problems do of course remain. We can fail what we love, through ignorance or ineptitude; and we can betray what we love and thereby betray ourselves as well.” (2006, 51) Love’s dictates can be deliberately violated. In this respect, love’s dictates do not differ from the dictates of the moral law. It is possible to disobey the moral law as well as the dictates of love. If one obeys them, this ultimately rests on a kind of respect, as we have seen. In the one case, it is reverence for the moral law that leads a rational agent to subordinate his inclination to the requirements of morality. In the other, it is respect for one’s own identity that leads a person to do what his love requires him to do. The fact that love’s dictates can be violated does not reduce love’s normative authority. On the contrary, this possibility is required to make love’s authority significant. For, if commands are tailored to actions that will be performed anyway, those commands are not normative in any interesting way. Donald Hubin (2001) illustrates this important feature of normativity very efficiently with a story from The Little Prince. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry makes us imagine a monarch who tolerates no disobedience and makes sure he gives only orders that cannot fail to be obeyed. When the little prince asks for a sunset, the king promises that he will have it. He says, “I will command it. But, according to my science of government, I shall wait until conditions are favourable.” (Saint-Exupéry 1943, 38) The little prince wants to know when that will be. The king consults an almanac and answers: “Hum! Hum! That will be about – about – that will be this evening about twenty minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed.” (38) What are we to make of this king and his commands? To a certain extent the king is right when he justifies his way of commanding by pressing the following point: “[a]ccepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable.” (38) Indeed, for an order to be reasonable the subject must be capable of complying with it. But actually the king does not refrain from commanding actions that can not be performed. Rather, he refuses to command any action that will not be performed. As a result, he is never disobeyed. But neither does he exercise any authority at all.

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The story about the ‘absolute monarch’ reveals that exercising authority implies taking the risk of being disobeyed. The possibility of disobedience is required to avoid normative triviality. It must be possible to violate a norm for that norm to be normative in any interesting way. If someone has a reason to Φ, it must be possible for him not only to Φ but also to fail to Φ. Normativity provides counsel that agents are psychologically free either to heed or to flout. At one point, both Wallace and Korsgaard express their criticism of the DBR theory by stating that it fails to capture the platitude that normative reasons are like guides. Wallace formulates a ‘guidance condition’ which any plausible theory of normativity should meet. According to the guidance condition, acting for a reason “should be directly controlled by the agent’s own deliberative grasp of what he has reason to do.” (1999a, 49) It is possible, Wallace continues, that an agent will grasp what he has reason to do but will not govern his action accordingly. From this consideration Wallace derives the condition that “an adequate conception of rational agency must also provide the resources to make sense of such paradigmatically irrational phenomena as akrasia, accidie and the like.” (1999a, 49) A plausible theory of normativity must account for the fact that it is possible to grasp that one has a reason to Φ, and yet fail to be motivated accordingly. According to Wallace, Williams’ theory of practical reasons cannot account for this possibility. On his interpretation of Williams’ theory, when one is not motivated to do what one thinks one has a reason to do, then one does not really have a reason to do it. Failing to be motivated to Φ reveals the absence of a desire to Φ, which means that one’s subjective motivational set is not such as to give one a reason to Φ. Korsgaard writes in a similar vein about Hume’s theory and, by extension, Humean or DBR theories of practical reasons: “Hume’s view seems to exclude the possibility that we could be guided by the instrumental principle. For how can you be guided by a principle when anything you do counts as following it?” (1997, 229) The instrumental principle says that one should take the means to one’s ends. According to Korsgaard, this principle has no normative force in Hume’s theory because “Hume identifies a person’s end with what he wants most, and the criterion of what a person wants most appears to be what he actually does.” (1997, 230) If this is true, it means that it is impossible in Hume’s theory to violate the instrumental principle. If what one does reveals one’s ends, it is impossible not to serve one’s ends. Therefore, it does not make sense to say that the instrumental principle guides one’s behaviour. If a principle cannot be violated, it is not normative and it cannot provide normative reasons. Whether Hume is vulnerable to Korsgaard’s criticism or not, I believe that Williams at least can escape it. As Korsgaard herself indicates, “the problem would be solved it we could make a distinction between a person’s ends and what he actually pursues.” (1997, 230) Well, Williams makes this distinction: there is a gap between an agent’s ends and what he does. There is a distinction between the desires upon which reasons depend and the desires that motivate. Reasons are defined in terms of desires that survive sound deliberation, not in terms of the actual desires of an agent. Therefore, they do not necessarily motivate an agent. Thus, Williams distinguishes between the actions 184

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required in service of an agent’s ends (drinking a gin and tonic) and the actions that he actually pursues. An agent can be motivated to do what he has no reason to do. And, conversely, he can have a reason to do what he is not motivated to do. In so far as the possibility of disobedience is accounted for in Williams’ internal reason theory, it seems to me that Wallace’s interpretation of the internal reason theory is wrong. The possibility of disobedience is obviously also accounted for in the love-based reason theory. Frankfurt writes, “Sometimes, to be sure, we energetically resist what reason or love dictates. Their commands strike us as too burdensome… Even then, however, we ordinarily allow that they do possess a genuine and compelling authority. … Indeed, we have no doubt that it counts a great deal – even if, in the end, we prefer not to listen.” (2006, 3) Because it is possible to obey as well as to disobey love’s commands, the LBR theory avoids the objection of normative triviality. This definitely speaks in its favour. This does not distinguish it from the DBR theory, however, because a DBR theory that looks like Williams’ internal reason theory also avoids the objection. What does distinguish the LBR theory from the DBR theory is, as I explained, that love has authority, due to the value of having a self. I want to add one more thing by way of elaborating on this distinction between DBR and LBR theory. The way in which the LBR theory evades the triviality objection strikes me as more in the spirit of internalism than the solution of the DBR theory. To preserve normativity DBR theorists must allow for a divergence between the ends that an agent does pursue and the ends he should pursue. Some internalists have argued that considerations of coherence and consistency impose the necessary constraints. Alan Goldman, for example, holds the view that “the rational requirement of coherence among motivations, intentions and actions generates reasons not only for particular instrumental desires, but also for final ends desired for their own sakes.” (Goldman 2006, 470) And Hubin also appeals to coherence among desires to show why it can be rational on the Humean picture to extinguish some intrinsic desires. (2001, 456) A worry with coherence coming from the externalist standpoint is that coherence is no guarantee of rationality: the worldview of a madman can be very coherent. But also from an internalist perspective the appeal to coherence seems uncongenial: if practical rationality consists of acting on desires that exhibit the feature of coherence, then the source of normativity is that feature of ‘coherence with other subjective states’ rather than the subjective state itself. There is something notoriously anti-internalist about this appeal to coherence: it grounds reasons in an abstract, formal feature of the mind; the agent as a distinctive, substantial individual falls out of the picture. 5.4.5 The Tess case So far we have argued that, although love is not based on reasons or values, it is the source of reasons and values. Though love is in a certain sense groundless, it has authority. Love’s authority is based on the importance of self-respect. Self-respect is something we should strive for, because having a self is valuable or necessary for being 185

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an agent. Our individual identities are essentially volitional: our will and its configurations, what we love and care about, define who we are. In order to respect ourselves, we must therefore respect the dictates of our will and recognize love’s authority. Yet it is conceivable that someone fails to obey the orders of love, and fails to do what he has reason to do. Disobedience means that a person knows what he should do but refuses to do it. It is also possible on the LBR theory, however, that a person fails to do what he has reason to do because he does not know what he loves. And the in some sense independent existence of our will also makes it possible for an agent to act in conformity with her reasons without knowing it. It is this aspect of Frankfurt’s theory that gives him an advantage over the three other theories with regard to the Tess case. What Tess has reasons to do depends on what she loves, so it depends on something internal. Yet ex hypothesi what she loves is not accessible to her through deliberation. Therefore she should act intuitively. Action that is motivated through a sense of what matters can suffice to make it the case that one acts in accordance with reasons. This statement, exemplified by Tess, cannot be accounted for by theories that privilege deliberation as a constitutive part of what defines reasons. DBR theories, RBR theories and VBR theories ignore an important part of the human agent that is essentially related to his reasons, not just epistemologically speaking but also constitutively. What the Tess case shows is that rational agency does not require deliberation, and even more that deliberation could hinder rational agency. What Frankfurt’s theory incorporates is the idea that love can ground reasons and can motivate, indepedendently of deliberative intervention. In The Reasons of Love Frankfurt illustrates how love gives rise to reasons borrowing an example from Williams. Imagine a man watching two people drown, one of whom is his wife. He can save only one of them. Williams used this example to show that Kantian moral philosophy would ascribe a thought too many to the man, namely the thought that “[i]t is permissible to save the life of one’s wife in circumstances like these, so I am permitted to go for her.” According to Williams, the wife would not be happy if she knew that this was going on in her husband’s head before he jumped, and rightly so. The only thought that the man should have had is “[t]his is my wife.” In his typical laconic and provocative style, Frankfurt wonders why Williams even thinks that this one thought is appropriate (did the man perhaps not recognize her at first?). If the husband loves his wife, he just takes her interests as reasons to act, without any need to deliberate or spell out what motivates him. From this passage in Frankfurt one can draw the lesson that deliberation is not necessarily at the heart of reason-guided behaviour. But I think it goes even further, though Frankfurt does not put it that strongly: the drowning wife example is also an illustration of how the occurrence of a reason can be incompatible with deliberation. If the man has to deliberate whether to save his wife or the stranger, perhaps this means that he does not really love her. And if he loves her, he does not need to think, but acts for reasons of love. In this sense deliberation about reasons and reasons for love do not go together. The drowning wife example differs from the Tess case in that for Tess the problem is that deliberation ruins reasons that would be there if she had not deliberated, whereas 186

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for the husband of the drowning wife deliberation indicates that certain reasons (the reason to save his wife out of love) were never there in the first place. I just mention the example since it shows Frankfurt’s own sensitivity to the idea that deliberation and reason-guided behaviour can conflict. There is one last important objection to the LBR theory that I want to explain and dismiss. It is the objection that an LBR theory cannot be true because it does not consider moral imperatives to be categorical. 5.4.6 The love-based reason theory and morality Although Frankfurt is not a moral philosopher and is not particularly interested in ethics, as he says himself, his philosophy contains two interesting claims with regard to the way in which morality is generally conceived. According to Frankfurt, (i) many conceptions of morality are too rationalistic. After explaining this charge, I turn to another thought-provoking claim, namely that (ii) philosophers tend to exaggerate the importance of morality. Frankfurt resists rationalism in ethics, which he defines as the view that “moral principles and moral commands can be rigorously elicited from the requirements of rationality alone.” (2000, 259) Frankfurt believes that the appeal of ethical rationalism lies in its promise to immunize morality against scepticism. Moral sceptics suspect moral requirements to be arbitrary, with nothing to support them except personal feelings or cultural idiosyncracies. Against this scepticism, rationalism holds that “the provisions of the moral law actually possess an incontrovertible authority, that is no less legitimate and no less independent of contingencies than the universally binding authority of logical and conceptual truth.” (2000, 259) Moral principles are grounded in rationality like logically necessary truths; they are to be obeyed by rational agents under any condition, no matter what culture the agent belongs to or what desires and feelings he has.21 This way of thinking about morality is distinctively Kantian, as Frankfurt himself remarks. We have seen the Kantian approach in the philosophy of Korsgaard, as well as in Smith’s constructivist theory of normative reasons. Frankfurt quotes Nagel as a proponent of this moral rationalism, but he could just as well have quoted Korsgaard. Nagel writes in The Possibility of Altruism that “the requirements of ethics are rational requirements … the motive for submitting to them must be one which it would be contrary to reason to ignore.” (1970, 3) Frankfurt takes the defining thesis of ethical rationalism to be that a failure to accede to the requirement of morality amounts to an offence against reason (2000, 259). 21

I think Frankfurt understands moral rationalism unduly strictly. He makes it look as if rationalists model the moral law on the principle of non-contradiction, whereas I am not sure they need to think of the rationality of morality in such a procedural way. Note that this formal and procedural understanding also allows Frankfurt to oppose love to reason. On a broader understanding of rationality, it would seem strange to say (as Frankfurt does) that love provides reasons for action, yet falls outside the domain of rationality. 187

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Frankfurt believes that the ethical rationalist enterprise is fundamentally misconceived. He offers two reasons why the authority of reason cannot be what accounts for the authority of morality. First, he states that “to demonstrate that a principle of conduct or of volition is necessitated by reason does not in any way serve to establish that it is also morally required.” (2000, 261) Conversely, accusing someone of acting immorally is different from revealing a mistake in his reasoning. Cognitive deficiency and immorality should not be identified. To support this statement Frankfurt refers to the fact that our response to sinners is very different from our response to ‘fools’ or people who have made an error in reasoning (2006, 21). Not just our evaluation of morally bad people, but also our perception of morally good people suggests that moral rationalism cannot be right. It is common for us to believe that morally good behaviour reveals something about a person deeper and more intimate than his cognitive accuracy. This leads Frankfurt to a second argument against moral rationalism Besides the problem that ethical rationalism conflates rational and moral normativity, Frankfurt exposes another problematic implication of ethical rationalism. Contrary to what rationalists suggest, whether people adhere to the principles of morality is not supposed to be independent of the kind of people they are. Whether they act morally reveals something about their personal character, not about their rational capacities: “[i]nsofar as people can account for having adopted a belief by referring to a rationally compelling proof, this takes them personally off the hook. It means that the belief reveals nothing about them, but only something about the impersonal requirements of reasons.” (2000, 269) Assenting to rational requirements does not reveal a person’s character; it does not require any personal commitment. Because ethical rationalism designs moral behaviour as compliance with a rational requirement, it gets people off the hook. But morality is supposed to put people on the hook. Frankfurt concludes, “Construing the basis of morality rationalistically misses the whole point of moral norms.” (2006, 22) The fact that morality cannot rely on rational authority should not leave us in despair. As Frankfurt points out, it is a mistake to believe that confidence in the authority or truth of a principle is warranted only when it can be demonstrated that the principle is rationally required. In some domains, rationality offers the ultimate support for a principle. But there are other domains, “in which it would be egregiously misguided to insist that confidence is appropriate only insofar as it is commensurate with evidence that precludes reasonable hesitation or doubt.” (2000, 271) Frankfurt refers to the commitment of parents to the welfare of their children. Surely this commitment is legitimate, but not because it satisfies the conditions of rationality. This commitment is legitimate, and parents are confident of the legitimacy of being committed to their children because the commitment is made out of love for their children. Love sustains the commitment, love makes it legitimate. In the same way, Frankfurt believes that “[c]ommitment to moral principles may be made and supported out of love for the ideals of individual and social life that those principles define.” (2000, 272)

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Instead of moral rationalism, Frankfurt thus defends the view that “the most fundamental source of moral normativity is not in our rationality but in our love for the condition and style of life that moral principles envisage.” (2000, 272) Insofar as the imperatives of morality are guaranteed at all, it is because violating them injures or diminishes what we love. Because love is not a mere transient inclination and is not susceptible to immediate voluntary control, one should not fear that moral obligations, when their normative force is rooted in a love for a moral way of life, will readily become escapable. Of course, Frankfurt’s approach does entail that there are no neutral and unconditional reasons to rely on when trying to convince someone that he is mistaken in not caring about morality. Morality, as an object of love and care, in this sense loses its unconditional rational authority. But, as Frankfurt reassures us, “[t]his by no means implies, however, that it would be unjustifiably arbitrary or unreasonable for us to defend what we love against those by whom it is threatened… There is no reason for us to believe,…, that the unavailability of rigorous demonstrations of our moral principles should undermine our confidence in the vision of life that they define or that it should inhibit our readiness to resist those whose vision conflicts with ours.” (2000, 273) Even if moral sceptics do not threaten the validity of our caring about morality, what should we make of their scepticism? Do they still have a reason to be moral? Frankfurt answers this question negatively: when a person does not care about morality he has no reason to comply with its imperatives. Moral imperatives are thus not categorical. But, according to Frankfurt, this does not imply that the moral law is no longer objective. In line with the moral anti-rationalism of Railton, Foot and Brink that was mentioned in chapter 2, Frankfurt emphasizes that when a person does not care about morality, he will still have a moral obligation to do what morality requires, but it will not be reasonable for him to do what he is morally obliged to do. He writes, “My own view is that we act morally when we are moved by love for a certain kind of world or a certain kind of life. The moral law may be in a sense objective, because it is an objective matter what sorts of conduct are required in order to promote the realization of that world. However, the objectivity of the reasons that these requirements generate is grounded in nothing but the subjective necessities of love.” (2002d, 277) To Frankfurt, there is no authority for us other than the authority of what we love. If morality has authority, it has to derive from love’s authority. The thesis that moral considerations have no particular relevance unless the person cares about morality might not be too hard for moral rationalists to accept if it were followed by the claim that morality is something that we all care about. But, according to Frankfurt, morality has no independent claim to determine what to care about. He writes, “The basic concern of morality is with how to conduct ourselves in our relations with other people. Now why should that be, always and in all circumstances, the most important thing in our lives? No doubt it is important; but, so far as I am aware, there is no convincing argument that it must invariably override everything else.” (2006, 28) Philosophers who do believe that morality is the most important thing in life are accused by Frankfurt of being pan-moralistic. 189

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Pan-moralists are too concerned about morality and ignore the legitimate authority of non-moral concerns and ideals. In ‘Love and Duty’ Frankfurt writes about them: “[i]t seems to me that many philosophers, in their approach to the task of identifying and understanding the norms that most authoritatively govern human conduct, are excessively preoccupied with morality.” (1998a, 4) In their efforts to clarify the standards to which we must submit when we act, they tend to focus their attention more or less exclusively upon issues pertaining to the requirements of moral obligation. Varieties of practical normativity that appear non-moral are neglected. In Frankfurt’s opinion, “this pan-moralistic conception of practical normativity is mistaken.” (1998a, 4) Frankfurt wants to demonstrate that there are fundamentally authoritative practical norms that do not depend on the requirements of morality, but on the requirements of love. It is even more important for people to obey love’s requirements than morality’s requirements. An immoral life can still be a good life, but a life without love is a miserable life, Frankfurt says. Some philosophers doubt whether an immoral life could still be a good life. Susan Wolf, for example, believes that not only trivial things but also immoral ideals are not worth caring about, and if one does care about them they do not make one’s life meaningful. Frankfurt resists the pan-moralistic thinking that underlies Wolf ’s criticism. Immoral lives may be good to live, he insists. To think otherwise is “a will-o’-thewisp.” (2002c, 248) The immorality of a way of life does not count ipso facto against its suitability to be loved. He illustrates this claim with the provocative example that, though from a moral point of view it had been better if Hitler had cared either about nothing or about art, for Hitler himself caring about the Nazi ideal was the best thing he could do. He chose the life that was most rewarding to him: “[t]he chances are that life as an artist would not have brought Hitler benefits anything close in value to what Nazism brought him: a stimulating and enriching variety and intensity of experience, public acclaim, the gratifications of extraordinary achievement and the pride of working creatively to overcome intimidating obstacles in an effort (as he saw it) to make fundamental contributions to the progress of civilization.” (2002c, 247) The experience of believing in something deeply, sacrificing for it, devoting oneself to it in a wholehearted way is a life-enhancing experience before it is even mentioned what it is. The fact that Hitler devoted his life to an immoral ideal is not relevant in determining how good or bad it was for him to live that life. Certainly, the Nazism to which Hitler devoted his life was a dreadful evil. But the fact that something is immoral is not a reason for regarding it as unsuitable to be loved unless one already cares about morality. Immoral ideals can be loved, and even in that case love preserves its authority. Frankfurt is very clear about this: “[o]ne might well say that if a certain love is not a good thing, then it is unfortunate for it to have this authority. But nothing in the notion of authority rules out the possibility that genuine authority might be possessed by something that is unwholesome or evil and that, all things considered its authority should be defied.” (2002e, 296) Because Hitler loved an ideal, he had a purpose in life which offered him reasons to perform certain actions. Of course, these actions were immoral. Therefore, it might be necessary to interfere. The fact that somebody has 190

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a reason to do something does not mean, after all, that we should let him do it. But what we should not hope for, Frankfurt argues, is that it would be possible to change a person’s mind about what he should care about by offering him arguments and rational justifications. In the case of an utterly immoral person like Hitler, Frankfurt thinks that “[t]he only reasonable response is not to show him his error, but to kill him or suppress him in some way.” (1998b, 18) He believes that there is no solution in reason to these kinds of moral disagreement. Frankfurt warns us that we should not overestimate the impact of rationality or morality upon people’s life. That is why his LBR theory includes resistance to both pan-rationalism and pan-moralism. Frankfurt’s rejection of what he calls pan-moralism resembles Michael Slote’s rejection of the overridingness thesis (Slote 1983). According to this widely accepted thesis, in practical reasoning moral considerations should always take precedence over and override all other normative considerations. Slote argues against the overridingness thesis by means of a counter-example. He describes a case in which a “morally concerned individual might consider a given project to be of greater importance, for him, than all the harm to other people that that particular project entailed.” (Slote 1983, 78) He adopts Williams’ example of the painter Gauguin, who deserted his family and devoted his life to painting. Slote provides grounds for the view that Gauguin’s desertion of his family was morally wrong and that Gauguin believed it was so. Nevertheless, deserving emphasis is that Gauguin’s passion for art took precedence for Gauguin over his concerns for morality. Moreover, in our evaluation of Gauguin’s life we praise Gauguin for his devotion to painting rather than despise him for having abandoned his family. What is even more remarkable, according to Slote, is that the immorality of what Gauguin did adds to our admiration for his passion. Frankfurt’s remarks about morality are certainly meant to be provocative, and they are not developed into a theory. Still, what he says is in line with his theory about love’s reasons. If a person lacks the relevant cares, then he has no reason to do the morally right thing. That Frankfurt cites Hitler as an example makes things difficult. It is no coincidence that philosophers’ examples are seldom taken from real life, but rather made-up or taken from literature (where we have full access to the character’s mind). In reality we live in uncertainty, not only with regard to our own reasons but also with regard to the reasons we can ascribe to others. Whether Hitler could be ascribed reasons to do the morally right thing depends on what we imagine his psychological and motivational set-up to be. I think there is a sense in which we admit of some people that they do not have reasons to be moral, namely the category of psychopaths. These are people that we give up on, who we do not try to convince. Frankfurt would say that what these people do is still wrong (and unthinkable), but within their limited deliberative contours they do not have access to the considerations that make moral features of a situation salient, and therefore they do not have a reason to refrain from doing what is immoral. This is one way in which to make sense of Frankfurt’s rejection of the pan-moralist thesis. I also think Frankfurt is right that there are many examples of meaningful and lauded lives that are not devoted to morality, or that, like Gauguin’s, are even to a 191

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certain extent immoral. The same goes for actions: it is not obvious that moral reasons should always trump other normative reasons. Think for example of the question whether to have children. I can imagine cases in which the morally right thing to do is to refrain from having a child and rather spend time and money to helping others raise their children (or to adopt a child for example). But, holding on to that idea, I also find it plausible that reasons of happiness and personal well-being override these moral considerations. I realize that some philosophers might reply that if a moral duty can be overridden, then it was not your moral duty in the first place. But I am not convinced that we can always save morality’s authority by widening its scope. It seems more honest and acceptive of human frailty to reject the overridingness thesis and pan-moralism. So, all in all, it is true that on the LBR theory moral imperatives lose their categorical force, in the sense that they are no longer unconditionally and overridingly reason-giving. Yet, this observation does not automatically count as an argument against the LBR theory.

5.5 Conclusion Obviously the LBR theory has things in common with Williams’ DBR theory. When I started this research project, I thought about using the LBR theory to lend support to DBR theory. The internalist thesis that there is a constitutive connection between reasons and something internal to the agent’s practical point of view gains plausibility, I thought, when we focus on loves rather than desires.22 Thus initially I saw Frankfurt’s merit mainly in helping to bring out the attractions of Williams’ DBR theory. But as the LBR view developed, it became a theory deserving to stand on its own, with its own attractions (and its own problems). For those who think that I overdo the difference between the DBR theory and the LBR theory, I concede that Williams uses the term ‘desire’ as shorthand for every state that ends up motivating an agent, including loyalties, commitments, evaluations. Arguably Williams would include cares among the elements of the subjective motivational set. But even then Frankfurt has something more to offer than Williams. Frankfurt’s concept of ‘care’ articulates the relationship between motivating states and personal identity. His reason theory is embedded in a theory about self-realization and autonomous agency. This accords with the advantage that Frankfurt’s argument for love as the source of reasons does not depend on a contentious theory about action as the belief-desire theory. Frankfurt embeds the discussion about normativity and reasons in a broader framework about what it means to be a person, to lead a life and be self-conscious. This picture needs 22

I interpret Fehige (2001) along these lines. Fehige prefers to defend Instrumentalism (the view that reason can criticize means but not ends) on the basis of a concept of ‘desires in the Hearty sense’ instead of desires understood as dispositions to act. On the Hearty View desires can be thought of as the source of a person’s ends if they are understood as referring to things that are close to the agent’s heart and affect him. I think Fehige’s notion of a Hearty Desire comes close to Frankfurt’s idea of love as the source of reasons. 192

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to be completed by, among other things, a theory of mind and action, and I will say more about that in the concluding remarks. But for now I hope to have shown that Frankfurt’s original and provocative idea that love is the source of normativity deserves to be taken seriously. Before going on to the conclusion of this book, let me summarize the different positions we have dealt with. On Williams’ internal reason theory understood as a DBR theory, normativity is grounded in desires and other elements of a person’s subjective motivational set. Smith defines normative reasons in terms of what the fully rational self would desire his less-than-fully-rational self to do. On Korsgaard’s view, normative reasons are constructed through practical reasoning. According to Parfit’s VBR theory, normative reasons are provided by external facts about what is valuable. A reason theory based on Frankfurt’s notions of love and care is different from all these standard positions. Frankfurt’s philosophy addresses many questions at once: what is autonomy, what is the good life, what are reasons for actions, what is the self? I think he is right in connecting these questions. In chapter 2 I argued that Williams did not capture what is essential about the connection between rational agency and the self by focusing on desires, nor by bringing in deliberation. Frankfurt’s focus on cares goes hand in hand with a denial that desires or deliberation would suffice for agential authority. So this sets the LBR theory apart from the DBR theory and the RBR theory: deliberation is not a constitutive part of the analysis of reasons. Therefore the LBR theory passes the Tess test. What distinguishes Frankfurt from Parfit’s VBR theory has more to do with Frankfurt’s refusal to accept reasons as primitive. He thinks it makes sense to ask where reasons come from, what gives certain considerations normative force. His primitive notion is love, not reasons. About the primitivity of the concept of love I will raise questions in the concluding remarks. But what Frankfurt taught us about reasons remains valid: if one wants to avoid the idea that reason is just a primitive notion referring to ‘something’ that is out there for agents to discover, if one thinks that reasons are somehow ‘mind-dependent’, there are more faculties in the human agent to connect reasons to than the capacity to desire, and to deliberate. This is the alternative that I have defended: to think that someone has a reason to Φ is to think that Φ-ing would serve something that he cares about. The greatest merit of this theory is that it confirms and explores a common experience: that something as personal and contingent as what we love and care about can have legitimate authority, so that it makes sense to say that neither desire nor reason, nor impersonal value, but love is the ultimate ground of the normative reasons that guide us in our practical lives.

193

Concluding remarks

The topic of this book is the long-standing debate concerning the nature and source of reasons for action. The central question is whether practical reasons are generated by and essentially depend on an agent’s attitudes, or whether, on the contrary, agency is constrained by objective, agent-independent reasons. Looking back on how we processed different theories of reasons, it will transpire that intuitions about what it means to act rationally served as a test. I realize that normativity and rationality are different things. Otherwise many of today’s discussions would be nonsense from the start, for example the discussion on the normativity of instrumental rationality (see for example Kolodny 2005) The question “why is it rational to take the means to what one believes to be necessary for the ends one has?” can be distinguished from the question “why ought one to take the means to one’s ends?” Yet, I believe that dividing up these two questions does not yield the best prospects for answering them. I wonder what would be so good about rationality if it did not connect us to reasons. And also, what would reasons be if it was not part of their nature that acting for reasons constitutes rational agency? I feel I have stronger intuitions about what rational agency is than about what reasons are, and therefore feel warranted in evaluating theories of reasons by looking at the conception of rational agency that they allow for. This for me answers the Euthyphro dilemma: I think our conceptual analysis must start from rationality as a property of agents, not from reasons as entities with a mind-independent existence. Reasons depend on a rational agent’s attitudes. My guiding intuition has been that practical rationality instantiates itself in various forms, not all of them involving belief-formation. The cases of Huck Finn and Tess served to illustrate the point that practical rationality can show itself in actions that respectively are not or cannot be preceded by the belief that one has reason to perform those actions. This pushed me in the direction of an account of reasons based on a non-cognitive state, an account that does not mention belief-formation or deliberation as a constitutive condition for the existence of reasons. In these concluding remarks I want to look beyond this book, and admit that there is still a lot of work to be done, as already indicated throughout the chapter on Frankfurt. I look forward to thinking more about specifically these three open questions: how should love be conceived if we want to ground reasons in it? Can the LBR theory inspire a new type of normative constructivism? Do love and morality really make up two separate normative domains? Let me say a little more about each of these questions. First, in order to develop Frankfurt’s bold statement that love is the basis of all normativity into a full-fledged theory more needs to be said about love as a particular attitude in a self-conscious human being, different from mental states such as desires or beliefs or emotions. To bolster the claim that love can be a source of reasons, or

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perhaps even the basis of practical normativity as such, a more elaborate account of the mental state of loving is needed. Frankfurt does not give us the theory of mind or theory of action that accompanies his theory of love and love-based reasons. He embeds love in a theory of the self, but does not say much about self-knowledge and self-consciousness. This leads to a view of love as if it were a given, as if love were a fact that is ‘sitting there’ and the presence of which can be observed from a third person’s perspective in the same way as a gallstone can be observed by a doctor. Frankfurt seems to take the presence of love for granted, and lets his story about reasons take off from there. I would like to take a step back, and see how love comes about in a rational agent. I think that there is more to tell than a causal history, and that love is essentially a first-personal phenomenon which involves a great deal of self-interpretation. As I indicated in a footnote, Richard Moran seems an interesting philosopher to turn to for a nuanced view of self-constitution, self-interpretation and self-knowledge. Second, another line of thinking that remained underdeveloped in this book is the idea that love could be the basis for a constructivist theory of normativity. In their collected volume on contemporary constructivism Lenman and Shemmer look for the forerunners of the constructivist ‘wave’ in meta-ethics, and they pay tribute to Harry Frankfurt, mentioning him next to Korsgaard, as a “second and perhaps not as obvious source of the contemporary constructivist position” (2012, 4). And indeed I think it makes perfect sense to read Frankfurt’s theory about autonomy, love and the self as an inquiry into what constitutes the practical point of view from which normativity is ‘constructed’. Probably Frankfurt himself would have most sympathy for the type of Humean Constructivism as it is coined by Sharon Street (Street 2012, also Lenman 2012). Yet a LBR theory might also be compatible with a kind of constructivism that is more Kantian in nature. It depends on the conception of love that we work with: is it a mere psychological phenomenon, research subject of empirical studies, or is there something to tell a priori about the state of love which might warrant claims about universally shared reasons? I find it plausible that an investigation into the conditions that make love possible would reveal an interdependence between the human capacities to love and to reason. Note, by the way, that Frankfurt’s relationship to Kant is an ambiguous one. His emphasis on the will as central in an explanation of the feature of normativity is reminiscent of Kant. Yet he explicitly opposes himself to Kant, most importantly because he denies the practicality of pure reason. In order to conjure up reasons the will must have a substantial content, he thinks. The objects of our love and care provide the input needed to figure out what reasons an agent has. But Korsgaard (2006) is right, I think, in pointing out a tension in Frankfurt between, on the one hand, reducing love and care to desire-like states (the power of which does not transcend the momentary) and, on the other hand, describing love as having a logic, or structure that commits agents to certain actions or projects that are not the object of their immediate desires and are supposed to be constitutive of a person’s identity. Perhaps there is more wriggle room in the notion of ‘love’ than Frankfurt spells out. Perhaps love requires self-consciousness that in its turn presupposes a commitment to 196

Concluding remarks

certain norms of rationality and reason-responsiveness. If so, that would make a lovebased reason theory really diverge from a desire-based one. Third, there is a real question why Frankfurt holds on to traditional, deontological moral theory. It is possible to make the tension in Gauguin’s ‘admirable immorality’ disappear, not only by holding that Gauguin is immoral and can therefore not be admirable, but also by thinking that Gauguin is not admirable and therefore immoral. Slote (1983) takes up an uncomfortable position between deontological morality and virtue ethics. Talking about admirable character traits pushes him in the direction of virtue ethics, but he does not follow that path to the end because for his moral judgement (that Gauguin was morally wrong) he relies on deontological and consequentialist arguments, and seems to be held hostage in the classical framework of ‘the peculiar institution of morality’. The same goes for Frankfurt: he wants to hold on to a tension between love and morality – but it is a legitimate question why he does not prefer to describe morality in terms of love, that way guaranteeing the normative force of moral duties. Looking back on the impact of her article ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, Philippa Foot distantiates herself from the split relationship towards normativity exemplified in that early work of hers: she defended a subjectivism about practical reasons while holding on to an objective view of moral duties. Along this line of thinking, it made sense to say that Hitler was wrong, yet had no reason not to do what he did. The wrongness is established independently of the rationality of his actions, and vice versa. The older Foot rejects that view and asks in wonder (echoing Warren Quinn), “What would be so important about practical rationality if it could be rational to do despicable actions?” (Foot 2003, 40) I see the force of that question, and would prefer a theory of normativity that is more encompassing than Frankfurt’s, including an account of the normative authority of moral duties. Indeed I think it would be fruitful to rethink Frankfurt’s concept of love as a concept similar to virtues. This suggestion departs from Frankfurt’s original account in that it makes love reason-sensitive, but it has the advantage that it does not have to think of morality as a separate domain of normativity: moral goodness is not only a quality of actions towards others, it also says something about the agent’s will. Evaluating Gauguin we will take into account all his cares, for his painting and his family, and look at how he solved the conflict, which is not a conflict between love and morality but between differing reasons of love. What I said in the preface has proved itself to be true: this book is only the beginning.

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