Abstract
Barry Maguire has recently argued that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes like fear and admiration differs fundamentally from that of reasons. These arguments appear to raise new and serious challenges for the popular ‘reasons-first’ view according to which normative support of any kind comes from reasons. In this paper, I show how proponents of the reasons-first view can meet these challenges. They can do so, I argue, if they can successfully meet some other well-known challenges to their view: distinguishing between right and wrong kinds of reasons, distinguishing between reasons, enablers, and defeaters, and providing an account of the relation between reasons and rationality. Whether proponents of the reasons-first view can meet these other challenges remains controversial. I do not try to settle these questions here, but rather show that the debate about the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is not going to be settled in isolation from them.
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Notes
See Rowland (2017) and Schroeder (2010) for arguments that proponents of the reasons-first view can distinguish between right and wrong kinds of reasons and McHugh and Way (2016) and Howard (2019) for arguments that they cannot. For arguments that the distinction between reasons, enablers, and defeaters is problematic see Hooker (2000), Crisp (2000), and Raz (2000). Bader (2016) argues that these problems can be solved. For arguments that rational requirements can be analysed in terms of reasons see Kiesewetter (2017) and Lord (2018). See Broome (2013) for critique of this view.
Though Faraci does not address this point directly, none of his replies to Maguire’s arguments question them, so we can reasonably take this is another point of agreement.
See the literature cited in n. 1 for an overview of this debate.
If you are skeptical of this claim, see Howard (2019) for a summary of persuasive arguments that it is not easily resisted.
Faraci (2020, 228–9) similarly suggests that one can resist Maguire’s argument simply by maintaining that FMCs for disappointment are not ipso facto unfit-making considerations for pleasure. The present point is that the appeal to the right/wrong distinction allows us to not merely claim that this is so, but also to explain why it is.
There are a number of reasons one might wish to be hesitant here. First, as we have seen, our intuitions about reasons for actions can easily be misleading when applied to affective attitudes. Second, our intuitions about reasons can be equally misleading when there are enablers or defeaters involved, as I discuss below. Finally, it is not clear why critics of the reasons-first approach should accept the claim that the facts about the dragon’s sharp claws and murderous looks combine as individual reasons for fear in Dragon Revisited. After all, they will say, that is precisely the claim the original Dragon case invites us to deny.
Inspired by one of Jonathan Dancy’s (2004, 172).
One might object that the propositional component is something like credences which are gradable, but it remains plausible that these credences would have gradable content. In any case, I take it that this is another point on which the merits of the reasons-based analysis should not turn.
As one reviewer points out, the basic idea here is similar to the suggestion by Maguire (2018, 798–9) that fittingness standards for complex or ‘overall’ affective attitudes may derive from standards for their component parts. The suggestion here is that, given that affective attitudes are generally complex, fittingness standards for affective attitudes are generally derivative in this way.
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Acknowledgements
For generous discussion of earlier versions of these ideas I am grateful to Alison Hills, Roger Crisp, Stephen Darwall, and Andreas Mogensen, as well as an audience at the University of Copenhagen and two anonymous referees from this journal.
Funding
Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, grant number CF18-0791.
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Heape, A. How there Could be Reasons for Affective Attitudes. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 667–680 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10106-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10106-y