A defense of the idea that knowledge is first in the sense that there is nothing prior to knowledge that puts reasons or evidence in your possession. Includes a critical discussion of the idea that perception or perceptual experience might provide reasons and a defense of a knowledge-first approach to justified belief.

Epistemic reasons are mental states. They are not propositions or non-mental facts. The discussion proceeds as follows. Section 1 introduces the topic. Section 2 gives two concrete examples of how our topic directly affects the internalism/externalism debate in normative epistemology. Section 3 responds to an argument against the view that reasons are mental states. Section 4 presents two problems for the view that reasons are propositions. Section 5 presents two problems for the view that reasons are non-mental facts. Section 6 (...) argues that reasons are mental states. Section 7 responds to objections. (shrink)

Motivational internalism is the thesis that captures the commonplace thought that moral judgements are necessarily motivationally efficacious. But this thesis appears to be in tension with another aspect of our ordinary moral experience. Proponents of the contrast thesis, motivational externalism, cite everyday examples of amoralism to demonstrate that it is conceptually possible to be completely unmoved by what seem to be sincere first-person moral judgements. This paper argues that the challenge of amoralism gives us no reason to reject or modify (...) motivational internalism. Instead of attempting to diagnose the motivational failure of the amoral agent or restrict the internalist thesis in the face of these examples, I argue that we should critically examine the assumptions that underlie the challenge. Such an examination reveals that the examples smuggle in substantive assumptions that the internalist has no reason to accept. This argument has two important implications for the debate in moral motivation: first, it reveals that the motivational externalist needs a new argumentative strategy; and second, it shows that there is nothing especially problematic about a formulation of the thesis that captures the core internalist intuition that first-person moral judgements are necessarily accompanied by motivation. (shrink)

In our everyday lives, we confront a host of moral issues. Once we have deliberated and formed judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad, these judgments tend to have a marked hold on us. Although in the end, we do not always behave as we think we ought, our moral judgments typically motivate us, at least to some degree, to act in accordance with them. When philosophers talk about moral motivation, this is the basic phenomenon they seek (...) to understand. Moral motivation is an instance of a more general phenomenon—what we might call normative motivation—for our other normative judgments also typically have some motivating force. When we make the normative judgment that something is good for us, or that we have a reason to act in a particular way, or that a specific course of action is the rational course, we also tend to be moved. Many philosophers have regarded the motivating force of normative judgments as the key feature that marks them as normative, thereby distinguishing them from the many other judgments we make. In contrast to our normative judgments, our mathematical and empirical judgments, for example, seem to have no intrinsic connection to motivation and action. The belief that an antibiotic will cure a specific infection may move an individual to take the antibiotic, if she also believes that she has the infection, and if she either desires to be cured or judges that she ought to treat the infection for her own good. All on its own, however, an empirical belief like this one appears to carry with it no particular motivational impact; a person can judge that an antibiotic will most effectively cure a specific infection without being moved one way or another. (shrink)

Cases involving amoralists who no longer care about the institution of morality, together with cases of depression, listlessness, and exhaustion, have posed trouble in recent years for standard formulations of motivational internalism. In response, though, internalists have been willing to adopt narrower versions of the thesis which restrict it just to the motivational lives of those agents who are said to be in some way normal, practically rational, or virtuous. My goal in this paper is to offer a new set (...) of counterexamples to motivational internalism, examples which are effective both against traditional formulations of the thesis as well as against many of these more recent restricted proposals. (shrink)

Argues for a causal-psychological account of acting for reasons. This view is distinguished from a more ambitious causal theory of action, clarified as far as possible, and motivated—against non-reductive, teleological, and behaviourist alternatives—on broadly metaphysical grounds.

It is a truism that agents can do the right action for the right reason. To put the point in terms more familiar to ethicists, it is a truism that one’s motivating reason can be one’s normative reason. In this short note, I will argue that Jonathan Dancy’s preferred view about how this is possible faces a dilemma. Dancy has the choice between accounting for two plausible constraints while at the same time holding an outlandish philosophy of mind by his (...) own lights or giving up his view's central tenet. At the end, I will suggest a view similar to Dancy’s that avoids the dilemma. (shrink)

The virtue of honesty has been stunningly neglected in contemporary philosophy, with only two papers appearing in the last 40 years. The first half of this paper is a conceptual exploration of one aspect of the virtue, namely the honest person’s motivational profile. I argue that egoistic motives for telling the truth or not cheating are incompatible with honest motivation. At the same time, there is no one specific motive that is required for a person to be motivated in a (...) virtuously honest way. Instead I advance a pluralistic theory of honest motivation, which allows for motives of caring, fairness, and virtue, among others. The second half of the paper then turns briefly to the empirical literature in psychology and behavioral economics on cheating, to see to what extent honest motives appear to be operative. The upshot is that we have good preliminary evidence for the claim that most people are not virtuously honest. (shrink)

It is now standard in the literature on reasons and rationality to distinguish normative reasons from motivating reasons. Two issues have dominated philosophical theorising concerning the latter: (i) whether we should think of them as certain (non-factive) psychological states of the agent – the dispute over Psychologism; and (ii) whether we should say that the agent can Φ for the reason that p only if p – the dispute over Factivism. This paper first introduces a puzzle: these disputes look very (...) much like merely verbal disputes about the meaning of phrases like `S’s reason’ in motivating reasons ascriptions, and yet charity requires us to think that something substantive is afoot. But what? The second aim of the paper is to extract substantive theses from certain natural arguments for Psychologism and Anti-Factivism – theses which are versions of a controversial view of the nature and normative structure of rationality. The paper ends by arguing against these substantive theses on phenomenological and ethical grounds. The upshot is that proponents of Psychologism and Anti-Factivism are either engaged in the project of defending merely verbal theses or they’re engaged in the project of defending false substantive ones. (shrink)

I consider an underappreciated problem for proponents of the Humean theory of motivation. Namely, it is unclear whether is it to be understood as a largely psychological or largely metaphysical theory. I show that the psychological interpretation of HTM will need to be modified in order to be a tenable view and, as it will turn out, the modifications required render it virtually philosophically empty. I then argue that the largely metaphysical interpretation is the only a plausible interpretation of HTM's (...) central claim that desires are necessary conditions for motivation. This interpretation also fits better with the important roles that HTM plays in both moral psychological and metaethical debates. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the ontology of practical reasons. We draw a critical comparison between two views. According to the first, practical reasons are states of affairs; according to the second, they are propositions. We first isolate and spell out in detail certain objections to the second view that can be found only in embryonic form in the literature – in particular, in the work of Jonathan Dancy. Next, we sketch possible ways in which one might respond to (...) each one of these objections. A careful evaluation of these complaints and responses, we argue, shows that the first view is not as obviously compelling as it is thought by Dancy. Indeed, it turns out that the view that practical reasons are propositions is by no means unworkable and in fact, at least under certain assumptions, explicit considerations can be made in favour of a propositional construal of reasons. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have become convinced that the best way of trying to understand human agency is by arriving at an account of identification. My goal here is not to criticize particular views about identification, but rather to examine several assumptions which have been widely held in the literature and yet which, in my view, render implausible any account of identification that takes them on board. In particular, I argue that typically identification does not involve either reflective consideration of (...) our mental states or endorsement of those states. If it did, we would rarely be agents. (shrink)

This article critiques the much-discussed notion of alief recently introduced by Tamar Gendler. The narrow goal is to show that the notion is explanatorily unnecessary; the broader goal is to demonstrate the importance of making explicit one's explanatory framework when offering a philosophical account of the mind. After introducing the concept of alief and the examples Gendler characterizes in terms of it, the article examines the explanatory framework within which appeal to such a concept can seem necessary. This framework, it (...) argues, is a generalization of the belief-desire account of action. Although Gendler introduces the notion of alief in an attempt to move beyond the belief-desire account, it argues that she nevertheless works within a generalized version of its explanatory structure. Once the framework is made explicit, we find no explanatory need that requires introducing the notion of alief into our account of the mind. (shrink)

According to the established understanding of the Frege-Geach problem, it is a challenge exclusively for metaethical expressivism. In this paper, I argue that it is much wider in scope: The problem applies generally to views according to which moral sentences express moral judgments entailing that one is for or against something, irrespective of what mental states the judgments consist in. In particular, it applies to motivational internalism about moral judgments. Most noteworthy, it applies to cognitivist internalism according to which moral (...) judgments consist in motivating beliefs. Hence, in order for a metaethical view to evade the Frege-Geach problem, it should avoid stating that moral judgments are motivating. (shrink)

I discuss two arguments against the view that reasons are propositions. I consider responses to each argument, including recent responses due to Mark Schroeder, and suggest further responses of my own. In each case, the discussion proceeds by comparing reasons to answers and goals.

The view to be defended in this paper is intended to be a novel and compelling model of instrumental practical reasoning, reasoning aimed at determining how to act in order to achieve a given end in a certain set of circumstances. On standard views of instrumental reasoning, the end in question is the object of a particular desire that the agent has, a desire which, when combined with the agent’s beliefs about what means are available to him or her in (...) order to satisfy that desire, can cause the formation of an independent desire or intention to engage in the relevant means. One of the main goals in what follows is to show that such views provide an inadequate understanding of instrumental practical reasoning when it comes to the practical lives of agents. We shall proceed as follows. After some background assumptions are outlined in the next section, two important and largely neglected challenges will be raised to any view of instrumental practical reasoning (hereafter IP reasoning) which only countenances the role of end-directed desires and means-end beliefs in the mental economy of agents. In my view, neither of these challenges can be met, or at least not in any straightforward way. Hence the remainder of the paper is devoted to articulating and defending a new approach to understanding the structure of instrumental practical reasoning. The heart of this positive view will involve the addition of a normative belief concerning the desirability of the agent’s end. (shrink)

If Hume is correct that the descriptive and the normative are “entirely different” matters, then it would seem to follow that endorsing a given account of action-explanation does not restrict the account of practical normativity one may simultaneously endorse. In this essay, I challenge the antecedent of this conditional by targeting its consequent. Specifically, I argue that if one endorses a Humean account of action-explanation, which many find attractive, one is thereby committed to a Humean account of practical normativity, which (...) many find unattractive. The key to this argument is showing that the justificatory base of any anti-Humean normative view is a generic representation of ideal rationality, which precludes any such view from combining coherently with a Humean account of action-explanation. If my arguments are successful, they demonstrate a way in which one’s views in action theory can both limit and be limited by the ethical views one endorses. (shrink)

Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This (...) explanationist answer comes apart from the modalist answer. For it holds that actions are responses to reasons if they are explained by those reasons even if they don’t share a modally robust relationship. Explanationism thus offers a novel way of vindicating the intuition that alternative possibilities don’t matter to responding to reasons and (consequently) free agency. The key dialectical position the thesis develops is that both modalism and explanationism constitute attempts to capture he core type of relationship encoded by the notion of a response. Responses to reasons, at core, involve a non-accidental relationship between reason and action. We can either understand non-accidentality as a modal phenomenon – as a modally robust tracking between two facts. Or we can understand non-accidentality as an explanatory phenomenon – as a special explanatory relationship between two facts. According to my rival explanationist proposal, two facts share a non-accidental relationship iff we can give a unified explanation of why both obtain. Unified explanations are explanations of why [p&q] that cannot be decomposed into two (or more) separate independent explanations of p and of q. Consequently, according to explanationism about responding to reasons, actions are responses to reasons iff those reasons offer a rational explanation of the action that cannot be decomposed into separate independent components. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the concept of a besire. I argue that distinguishing between different types and interpretations of besires is a critical tool for adequately assessing besire theories of moral judgment. I argue for this by applying the results of this conceptual analysis of a besire to David Brink’s version of the moral problem and to objections against besire theories made by Michael Smith, Simon Blackburn, and Nick Zangwill.

When someone does something for a reason, what are the reasons for which she does what she does? What is her ‘motivating reason’, as it is sometimes put? The simple answer is: it depends on what is meant by ‘motivating reason’. Non-Psychologists hold that motivating reasons are what the agent believes. I have shown that given that we understand ‘motivating reasons’ as what I term 'grounds', this is quite correct, as what we believe is what plays the role of a (...) ground. However, we have to be careful not to confuse the role of a ground and the role of an explanans. For the conflation of those two roles can occlude the truth in Non-Psychologism. What the Non-Psychologist about Grounds should say is that what plays the role of an explanans, when someone acts on a ground, is a motivation-fact. She should also say that there are two kinds of motivation-facts: those that include normative reasons and those that do not. (shrink)