The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason

Ruth Chang, Kurt Sylvan, Ruth Chang, Kurt Sylvan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000337129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Over the last several decades, questions about practical reason have come to occupy the center stage in ethics and metaethics. The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason is an outstanding reference source to this exciting and distinctive subject area and is the first volume of its kind. Comprising thirty-six chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field and is divided into five parts:

• 
  
  

• Foundational Matters
• Practical Reason in the History of Philosophy
• Philosophy of Practical Reason as Action Theory and Moral Psychology
• Philosophy of Practical Reason as Theory of Practical Normativity
• The Philosophy of Practical Reason as the Theory of Practical Rationality

The Handbook also includes two chapters by the late Derek Parfit, 'Objectivism about Reasons' and 'Normative Non-Naturalism.'

The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason is essential reading for philosophy students and researchers in metaethics, philosophy of action, action theory, ethics, and the history of philosophy.

PART 1
Foundational matters

1
Some central questions about practical reason

T. M. Scanlon

1 Introduction

The main aim of this chapter is to call attention to some questions that I believe students and others who are interested in practical rationality should attend to. I of course have my own views about the best answers to these questions, and I will indicate what these answers are. But my main aim will be just to identify the questions that seem to me important and discuss some things that need to be considered in answering them.

I am a cognitivist about normative judgments. I believe that normative judgments are capable of being true or false and that accepting such a judgment is a form of belief. The realm of normative judgments, as I understand it, includes not only moral judgments about right and wrong but also judgments about reasons for action and for beliefs and other attitudes, judgments about what individuals ought to do, and judgments about what is good. Since I believe that normative judgments of other kinds are best understood in terms of reasons, I will focus on judgments about reasons. But the main points I will make do not depend on the view that reasons are fundamental in this way. The questions I will call attention to, and my responses to them, could be stated as well in terms of other normative relations.

Some writers who, like me, are cognitivists about normative judgments distinguish their view from realism about normative facts – the ontological thesis that such facts exist – which they see as having potentially troubling ontological implications. (For example, Skorupski 2010; Parfit 2011.) Since I believe that if normative judgments can be true, then normative facts exist in the only sense of existence that is relevant to them (Scanlon 2014; Scanlon 2017), I am a normative realist as well as a cognitivist. As I will indicate in the next section, I do not believe that the existence of normative facts has implications that we should find troubling. But, as I will also say, whether this is so is one of the questions about practical reason that needs to be addressed.

2 Common objections to normative realism

Realism about normative judgments has been seen as subject to three seemingly strong objections, famously stated by John Mackie: metaphysical “queerness,” motivational impotence, and epistemological obscurity. (Mackie 1977) The first questions I will call attention to concern not only how to respond to these objections but also, more deeply, how the objections themselves should be understood and why they should be seen as challenging.

2.1 Metaphysics

Mackie famously wrote that facts about moral rightness and wrongness, insofar as they are understood to involve objective prescriptivity, would be metaphysically queer, “utterly different from anything else in the universe” (Mackie 1977: 38).¹ Contemporary anti-realists say the same about facts about reasons for action, often putting this as the claim that such facts would be incompatible with a scientific view of the world. The questions that need to be addressed here are:

1. (1) Is there a problem about how normative facts could be a part of the world? What “world” is in question?

If the world in question were the natural world of physical objects, causes, and effects (as the word ‘universe’ might suggest), then this objection would have force. Normative facts would be unlike anything else in this world. But realism about normative truth of the kind I am defending does not claim that normative facts and properties are parts of the natural world. Those of us who defend this view are non-naturalists. We are explicitly not claiming that normative truths state facts about the natural world, and it is the non-naturalist character of the view that those who raise this objection find implausible.

So what world, or universe, is it that (1) normative facts would have to be part of in order for there to be normative truths,² and (2) it is metaphysically implausible that this world should include such facts? Perhaps it is just the world of things that we are ontologically committed to. But in order for ontological commitment to certain things, such as abstract entities or normative facts, to be implausible, the idea of existence that ontological commitment commits one to has to have some content.

My view is that claims of existence that have content are all “domain specific.” That is to say, the content of such claims depends upon the subject matter in question. Existence of physical objects is one thing (a matter of having such things as spatio-temporal location, causal interaction, and so on.) Existence of numbers and sets is something different (a purely mathematical matter.) And the existence of normative facts and relations is something else altogether. There is no broader “world” which all of these things are part of insofar as they exist. In particular, physical objects and natural properties do not exist in some broader sense of this kind, in addition to being parts of the physical world. They exist only in a domain-specific sense. I have argued for this view at length elsewhere (Scanlon 2014: 16–30; Scanlon 2017). My main point here is the broader one that in order to assess the metaphysical objection to normative realism, one needs to be clear about what world, or idea of existence, is in question.

2.2 Motivation

Turning now to the motivational objection, the problem is supposed to be that a cognitivist view, according to which accepting a normative judgment is a matter of having a certain belief, would be unable to explain the connection between accepting such judgments and acting in certain ways. The questions I want to call attention to here are:

1. (2) Is there a problem about how a cognitivist view of normative judgments could explain the connection between these judgments and actions? What is the connection that needs to be explained?

The term ‘motivation’ suggests that the connection in question is a psychological one about how the presence of a belief about reasons could causally explain subsequent action in accord with the normative content of that belief. But the connection is not only causal. Even Donald Davidson, in his classic statement of the view of reasons as causes (1980), said that reasons not only cause actions, they also “rationalize them.” And the term ‘motivation’ itself has a “rationalizing” aspect. The question of what motivated an agent to do a certain thing is a question about what reason she saw for doing it, not only (or even, I would say, primarily) about what caused her to act in that way. The importance of this rational aspect of the connection between normative attitudes and action is evident also from what non-cognitivists say about the matter. R. M. Hare, for example, said that moral judgments had to involve the acceptance of an imperative because imperatives were the only kinds of utterance that were logically tied with action (1952: 20, 171–172). By this I think he meant that only an interpretation of such judgments as involving imperatives can explain the fact that the acceptance of a normative judgment can make it rational for a person to act in a certain way and even irrational not to so act.

This suggests a “two-track” account of the connection between normative judgments and action, based on the idea of a rational agent. On the one hand, as Hare seems to be saying, it is irrational not to act in accord with imperatives that one sincerely accepts. This captures the “rationalizing” aspect of the idea of motivation. But, on the other hand, rational agents (at least of the embodied kind that we are familiar with) are so constituted, physically, that they normally act in accord with the imperatives they sincerely accept. This is not to say that imperatives (or mental states of accepting imperatives) are causes but only that there is some causal story that explains the uniformities in behavior typical of a rational agent.

A two-track explanation of this kind is equally available to a cognitivist. A rational agent is a being that is capable of arriving at judgments about the reasons it has and is irrational if it fails to act in accord with these judgments. Moreover, rational agents are so constituted physically that normally, although not invariably, they act in accord with these judgments. The normative judgments that such a being accepts thus rationalize certain actions (make it rational for the being to act in certain ways and irrational for it not to do so.) And these uniformities are underwritten by some causal mechanism. An explanation of the connection between normative judgment and action along these lines seems to me extremely plausible (Scanlon 2014: 54–58).

2.3 Epistemology

Any account of normative truth needs to be compatible with some explanation of how our normative beliefs can depend on, and be responsive to, the normative facts. It would thus be a serious objection to normative realism if, as Mackie and others have maintained, it ruled out any explanation of this kind. So we need answers to the following questions:

1. (3) Is there a problem about how we could come to know normative truths if normative realism were correct? What is the problem, and what would a plausible epistemology of normative belief have to be like?

There would be no problem of this kind for an account according to which normative facts are, at the most basic level, dependent on our beliefs about them or on our other attitudes. There would be no such problem, for example, for a reductive desire theory, according to which facts about reasons for action just are facts about which actions will promote the satisfaction of our desires (Schroeder 2007). Assuming that we have access to our own desires, and can form reliable beliefs about causes and effects in the natural world, it would be not at all mysterious how we could arrive at true normative beliefs on this account.

But if the normative facts are independent of us, there may seem to be a problem about how our beliefs could be responsive to these facts. This might not be a problem if normative facts or properties had causal powers. But non-naturalists deny that this is so. Paul Benacerraf (1973) famously argued that the fact that we have no causal interaction with mathematical facts or entities represented a serious problem for realist interpretations of mathematical truth, and his argument may seem to apply to beliefs about other abstract domains, including the normative domain. But causal interaction is not the only plausible explanation of belief formation, and it seems particularly unsuited to the case of abstract beliefs.³

So some alternative explanation is needed, one that is more plausible than the idea that we can be aware of the facts about a domain through a special faculty of “intuition” that is a non-causal analog of perception. The most plausible response to this problem seems to me to lie along the following lines. We arrive at beliefs about abstract subjects by reasoning about them in the right way. Two things are required in order to explain, for a given subject matter, what this involves and how it is possible. First, we need an understanding of that subject that provides the basis for a clear idea of what “reasoning about it in the right way” involves. Second, it must be plausible to believe that we are capable of engaging in that kind of thinking.

In the case of arithmetic, for example, an understanding of the natural numbers provides the basis for explaining why counting, arithmetical calculation, and reasoning by mathematical induction are “right ways” of forming arithmetical beliefs. Given such an account, the dependence of our beliefs about a subject on the facts about it can be explained by the fact that we have the capacity to engage in the relevant forms of reasoning. Thinking about “the number line” involves a kind of mental picturing, but this is not properly understood on the model of perception, and there is nothing mysterious about it.

Here there is a sharp difference between normative truth and mathematical truth. In the case of arithmetical truth, and to an extent truth about set theory, we have an overall conception of the subject, in mathematical terms, which provides the basis for at least a provisional account of the kind of reasoning that is involved in discovering the truth about those subjects. In the case of normative beliefs, however, we do not have a comparably systematic account of the normative domain, which can provide the basis for an account of what good normative reasoning amounts to. It is this substantive incompleteness (at least in our understanding) of the normative domain, rather than an epistemological difficulty about how we could “be in touch with” normative facts, that presents a problem for a realist view of normative truth.

It has also been questioned whether, given our evolutionary history, we have the capacity to engage in the kind of reasoning about normative truth that a realist view would require. There is no problem of this kind in the case of arithmetic, since it seems clear that the ability to count and to reason about arithmetical relations would have been an important evolutionary advantage for our distant ancestors. It has been argued, however, that the capacity to discern the normative truth, on a realistic construal, would convey no such advantage. Given that our current evaluative attitudes are in large part results of our evolutionary history, there is no reason to believe that these attitudes tend to track the normative truth, as realists understand it. Thus, it is claimed, there is good reason to doubt that we actually have the ability to engage in normative thinking of kind that normative realism would require.⁴ Assessing this challenge is thus one part of answering question (3).

3 Reasons and rationality

I turn now to a set of questions about the relation between rationality and substantive practical truths about what to do or think. The first of these questions is:

1. (4) Can facts about what an individual has reason to do be based on an idea of rationality?

There are several reasons for wanting to base reasons on rationality in this way. First, an account of normative truths that based them in an idea of rationality might offer answers to the three objections I mentioned at the outset, having to do with metaphysics, motivation, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• An introduction to the philosophy of practical reason
• Part 1 Foundational matters
• Part 2 Practical reason in the history of philosophy
• Part 3 The philosophy of practical reason as action theory and moral psychology
• Part 4 The philosophy of practical reason as the theory of practical normativity
• Part 5 The philosophy of practical reason as the theory of practical rationality