What should we believe if epistemic and practical reasons for belief point in different directions? I argue that there’s no single answer, but rather a Dualism of Theoretical and Practical Reason is true: what we epistemically ought to believe and what we practically ought to believe may come apart, and both are independently authoritative. I argue in particular against recently popular views that subordinate the epistemic to the practical: it’s not the case that epistemic reasons bear on what we ‘just (...) plain ought’ to believe just to the extent we have practical reason to believe epistemically correctly. Why? Because epistemic reasons give rise to authoritative demands independently of the practical pay-off of believing accordingly. This is shown in particular by the fact that it can be fitting to epistemically ‘blame’ us just because we fail to believe as we epistemically ought, even if we don’t have sufficient practical reason to believe so. I also argue that we don’t need to come up with what we ‘just plain ought’ to believe, because contrary epistemic and practical responsibility responses can be simultaneously fitting in conflict cases, and because epistemic and practical ought judgments give rise to different enkrasia requirements, among other things. (shrink)

Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a telic (...) structure, so that practical reason, for example, constitutively aims at competently realizing valuable ends that are in harmony. According to telic perfectionism, we do well when such formal aims are realized and badly when they’re frustrated. Crucially, our subjective nature is defined not only by how we reason but also by how we feel. And valenced experience, too, has built-in directionality, according to the most plausible views about the nature of pleasure and pain. The phenomenal character of unpleasant pain is inseparable from its setting for us the end of eliminating itself. As long as we are in pain, then, the formal aim of our self-defining capacity for valenced experience is frustrated. For telic perfectionism, unpleasant pain is thus robustly bad for us, and the explanation of its badness makes essential reference to how it feels. (shrink)

A new wave of evidentialist theorizing concedes that evidentialism may be extensionally incorrect as an account of all-things-considered rational belief. Nevertheless, these _newer evidentialists_ maintain that there is an importantly distinct type of epistemic rationality about which evidentialism may be the correct account. I argue that natural ways of developing the newer evidentialist position face opposite problems. One version, due to Christensen (Philos Phenomenol Res 103:501–517, 2021), may correctly describe what rationality requires, but does not entail the existence of a (...) distinctively epistemic type of rationality. Another version, due to Maguire and Woods (Philos Rev 129:211–249, 2020), characterizes a normative concept that is both distinct and epistemic, but struggles to explain why this concept should be classified as a type of rationality. I conclude that the newer evidentialist strategy of extensional compromise may be less favorable to evidentialism than previously supposed. (shrink)

It is often taken for granted that our desires can contribute to what it is rational for us to do. This paper examines an account of desire—the ‘guise of the good’— that promises an explanation of this datum. I argue that extant guise-of-the-good accounts fail to provide an adequate explanation of how a class of desires—basic desires—contributes to practical rationality. I develop an alternative guise-of-the-good account on which basic desires attune us to our reasons for action in virtue of their (...) biological function. This account emphasises the role of desire as part of our competence to recognise and respond to normative reasons. (shrink)

This paper argues for a permissivism of personal rationality, a rationality concerning the epistemic evaluation of persons. I work from the perspective of virtue epistemology where the standards of evaluation are the intellectual character virtues. On this picture, an agent is personally rational in having a doxastic attitude when having it is the result of some exemplification of an intellectual virtue. Permissive cases arise when the emotional components of intellectual virtues conflict, making some potential conclusions both enabled and disabled for (...) the agent. The agent is left in a confusion needing resolution, but if each of these conflicting emotions are components of intellectual virtues, then she has multiple personally rational options. This grounds a potential case of a permissivism of personal rationality, but this should be interesting to epistemologists in general since opting for one of the sides of this conflict leads an agent to have different doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

Errol Lord’s The Importance of Being Rational is a beautiful presentation of how one might defend a reasons-first approach to rationality. I’m going to focus these comments on some of the larger systematic ambitions of the book. In doing so, my hope is to draw Lord out concerning the larger project of which the book is a part and to raise some more general questions about the project of defining rationality in terms of reasons. In doing so, my focus with (...) be on the relationship between the reasons-first program and a more traditional view, which we might call the reason-first program. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a brief (and more than a little potted) history of the concepts of reason, rationality, reasonableness, and reasons in modern European philosophy and consider whether this history might support the "Anscombean" conclusion that, "The concepts of rationality and reasons ought to jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of psychology and philosophy which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.".

Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for (...) explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures. (shrink)