Abstract
Where does normativity come from? Or alternatively, in virtue of what do facts about what an agent has reason to do obtain? On one class of views, reason facts obtain in virtue of agents’ motivations. It might seem like a truism that at least some of our reasons depend on what we desire or care about. However, some philosophers, notably Derek Parfit, have convincingly argued that no reasons are grounded in this way. Typically, this latter, externalist view of reasons has been thought to enjoy the advantage of extensional adequacy—that is, the ability to account for all the reasons we intuitively think people have. This paper provides a novel argument against this assumption by considering a type of case wherein the relative strengths of the agent’s reasons can only be adequately explained by reference to what she cares about. Adding some further assumptions yields that there are at least some internally sourced reasons.
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Notes
For defenses and elaborations of this view, see: Dancy (2004), Hampton (1998), Raz (1999), Scanlon (1998), Schroeder (2007; 2020). Even if some other property, for example fittingness (Yetter Chappell 2012; Howard 2019), were to turn out to be the normative primitive however, the question of what grounds our reasons for acting in certain ways would remain of deep significance.
Parfit (2011) uses the terms subjectivism and objectivism about reasons. I largely stick to Chang’s terminology here so as to avoid confusion of the debate addressed in this paper with an important but separate literature that also uses ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ when discussing reasons. Subjective reasons, in the latter sense, are determined by the agent’s beliefs or evidence, whereas objective reasons are determined by the facts. In this sense, one might have sufficient subjective reason to sip the clear liquid which one reasonably believes is gin, but decisive objective reason to avoid that drink given that it is in fact petrol. See Schroeder (2018) for a recent treatment of this distinction.
For some prominent defenses of source externalism, see Enoch (2013), Parfit (2011), Scanlon (1998), and Shafer-Landau (2003). For defenses of source internalism, see Korsgaard (1996), Manne (2014), Markovits (2017), Railton (1986), Schroeder (2007), Smith (1994), Sobel (2016), Street (2009), and Williams (1981).
See Behrends (2015; 2016), Chang (2013a; 2013b), and Paul and Morton (2014).
For key treatments of the notion of ‘ground’ in the recent literature, see: Fine (2001), Rosen (2010), and Schaffer (2009).
For instance, see Smith (1994) and Schroeder (2007) on the reductionist/internalist side and Parfit (2011)and Shafer-Landau (2003)on the non-reductionist/externalist side.
For a helpful overview of the terrain here, see Behrends (2016).
Cf. Harman (1975).
Schroeder (2007, 123–45) develops an account of the weights of reasons in terms of further reasons. The analysis is recursive, and the process terminates when there is reason to place more weight on some set of reasons A than set B, but there is no reason to place more weight on set B than set A.
For recent defenses of felt sensation views of pleasure, see for example Bramble (2016) and Smuts (2010). For defenses of attitudinal theories of pleasure, see Feldman (2002) and Heathwood (2007). Lin (2020) has recently proposed a hybrid view.
See, for example, Broome (2013) and Lord (2018) for opposing perspectives on this debate.
This belief-desire pair model of motivating reasons is developed notably in Davidson (1963).
For a construal of normative reasons as essentially contrastive, see Snedegar (2014).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks especially to Philip Pettit, Gideon Rosen, Michael Smith, and referees and editors at Philosophical Studies. . A version of this paper was presented at the Kentucky Philosophical Association 2021 meeting; thanks to all the participants on that occasion.
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Joshi, H. Can we outsource all the reasons?. Philos Stud 179, 3689–3704 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01857-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01857-8