Algorithm-assisted decision procedures—including some of the most high-profile ones, such as COMPAS—have been described as unfair because they compound injustice. The complaint is that in such procedures a decision disadvantaging members of a certain group is based on information reflecting the fact that the members of the group have already been unjustly disadvantaged. I assess this reasoning. First, I distinguish the anti-compounding duty from a related but distinct duty—the proportionality duty—from which at least some of the intuitive appeal of the (...) former illegitimately derives. Second, I distinguish between different versions of the anti-compounding duty, arguing that, on some versions, uses of algorithm-assisted decision procedures rarely clash with the anti-compounding duty. Third, drawing on examples of algorithm-assisted decision procedures, I present three objections to the idea that there is a reason not to compound injustice. The most important of these is that one can compound injustice in a non-disrespectful way, and that the wrongfulness of non-disrespectfully compounding injustice is fully explained by the proportionality duty. (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)

In this paper practical reasoning is understood in the Aristotelian sense as reasoning leading to action or to an intention to do something. Georg Henrik von Wright and a number of other philosophers have tried to assimilate certain forms of such reasoning to deductive reasoning. Many examples of practical reasoning, including some examples given by Aristotle, do not fit a deductive or quasi‐deductive model. It is argued that instances of good practical reasoning often resemble abductive rather than deductive or inductive (...) reasoning, and that the principles governing abduction, including the Principle of Economy, are applicable to practical reasoning. (shrink)

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine-grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse-grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if (...) the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence-based correspondence. (shrink)

What is special about successful action explanation is that it reveals what the agent saw in her action. Most contemporary philosophers assume that this amounts to explanation in terms of the reason for which the agent acted. They also assume that such explanations conform to a realist picture of explanation. What is disputed is whether the reason is a psychological state or a normative state of affairs . I argue that neither psychological states nor their contents suffice to make actions (...) intelligible in the right way , while Anti-Psychologism can’t explain acting on bad reasons . The alternative that I propose, Proceduralism, has it that explaining an action requires simulating the agent’s practical deliberation. On this view, explanation is not grounded in reasons, and thereby avoids the problems with “bad” reasons that Anti-Psychologism faces. Instead, in simulating to the same conclusion as the agent, the “explainer” comes to see what the agent saw in her action, thereby satisfying the Reasonableness Constraint. Proceduralism requires giving up on the assumption that the reason for which the agent acts explains the action and on the realist picture of action explanation. In addition, it accounts for the incomprehension that explainers experience when they encounter “alien” psychologies – psychologies that are deeply different from their own. (shrink)

Classical fitting-attitude analyses understand value in terms of its being fitting, or more generally, there being a reason to favour the bearer of value. Recently, such analyses have been interpreted as referring to two reason-notions rather than to only one. The idea is that the properties of the object provide reason not only for a certain kind of favouring(s) vis-à-vis the object, but the very same properties should also figure in the intentional content of the favouring; the agent should favour (...) the object on account of those properties that provide reason for favouring the object in the first place. While this expansion of the original proposal might seem intuitive given that favourings are discerning attitudes, it is nonetheless argued that proponents of the fitting-attitude analysis are in fact not served by such an expansion of the classical analysis. The objections raised here are relevant not only for advocates and critics of fitting-attitude analyses, but for anyone interested in the relation between normative reasons and motivation. (shrink)